The Reformation Era · 1525-1650 · Swiss lands, Moravia, Netherlands
The Anabaptist Movements
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About This Movement
In January 1525 a handful of men in Zurich, impatient with how slowly their own city's reform was moving, baptised one another as adults — and were hunted for it. Anabaptists held that baptism belonged to those who could confess faith for themselves, that the church was a voluntary body rather than a whole society, and, for most of them, that a Christian could neither swear oaths nor take up the sword. Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed authorities alike treated this as sedition and executed them by the hundreds. The survivors regrouped: Hutterite communities holding goods in common in Moravia, and in the Low Countries the congregations gathered by a former priest, Menno Simons, whose name their descendants still carry.
Sources
- The confessions and leaders' corpus: Schleitheim Articles (1527) with Sattler's trial record (The Legacy of Michael Sattler, ed./trans. Yoder, 1973); Menno Simons, The Complete Writings (trans. Verduin, ed. Wenger, 1956); Dirk Philips, Enchiridion (primary) — Swiss and Dutch wings speak in their own words.
- The court testimonies: Taeuferakten series (Quellen zur Geschichte der Taeufer); Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism; Harder, Sources of Swiss Anabaptism (primary) — Hostile, coerced evidence: interrogations conducted under threat and torture, recorded by the persecuting authorities. Ordinary believers speak only through the persecutor's pen.
- Martyrs Mirror (van Braght, 1660; Eng. trans. Sohm) with the Ausbund prison hymns (from 1564) (primary) — A 1660 Dutch Mennonite compilation, not a contemporaneous archive, but it embeds authentic prison letters, including Anneken Jans's 1539 testament — a rare quantity of women's voices.
- The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, vol. 1 (trans./ed. the Hutterian Brethren, Plough, Rifton, 1987), with the Hutterite community ordinances (primary) — Inside institutional memory covering 1528-1665, including the only account of the first believers' baptism. It's a self-vindicating genre, written to defend the community's own memory.
- Roth & Stayer (eds.), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700 (Brill, 2007) (secondary) — The current standard reference on the movement's diverse, multiple origins ('polygenesis').
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 3 (McLaughlin, the radical Reformation) (reference)