WESEL, JOHANN RUCHRAT VON (d. 1481), German theologian, was born at Oberwesel early in the 15th century. He appears to have been one of the leaders of the humanist move ment in Germany, and to have had some intercourse and sym pathy with the leaders of the Hussites in Bohemia. Erfurt was in his day the headquarters of a humanism which was both devout and opposed to the realist metaphysic and the Thomist theology which prevailed in the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg. Wesel was one of the professors at Erfurt between 1445 and 1456, and was vice-rector in 1458. In 1460 he was appointed preacher at Mainz, in 1462 at Worms, and in 1479, when an old and worn-out man, he was brought before the Dominican inquisitor Gerhard Elten of Cologne. The charges against him were chiefly based on a treatise, De indulgentiis, which he had composed while at Erfurt twenty-five years before. He had also
written De potestate ecclesiastica. He died under sentence of imprisonment for life in the Augustinian convent in Mainz in 1481.