Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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ut in a very different manner than prevailed across the English Channel in the 1640s and 50s, the open-ended character of the Reformation per se was apparent. Now for two examples of radical Protestant groups who flourished most when they either enjoyed relative freedom from the control and coercion characteristic of confessional regimes, or even had overt support from political authorities. Both examples come from Anabaptism. The first are the just mentioned Dutch Mennonites during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were free to develop in all their divergent, fissiparous ways, from Waterlanders at one end of the spectrum to the Hard Frisians at the other from the early years of the seventeenth century through the conflicts between Lamists and Zonists in the 1660s and beyond. 62 Along the way, some among them became extremely wealthy—in the 1630s, for example, among the speculators deeply involved in the “tulip craze” recently analyzed by Anne Goldgar were Mennonites from the extended De Clercq family, including merchants from Amsterdam, Haarlem, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. 63 The Moravian Hutterites are the second example of Anabaptists who flourished amidst relative toleration. As a result of political protection afforded by some members of the local nobility, they achieved prosperous growth and supported vigorous missionary efforts under the leadership of Leonhard Lanzenstil, Pieter Riedemann, Leonhard Dax, and Peter Walpot from the 1550s until Walpot‟s death in 62 Zijlstra, Ware gemeente, and Michael D. Driedger, Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot, U. K. and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 14-15, 27-74. 63 Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 132, 149-151, 152. On the socioeconomic assimilation of Mennonites in the Dutch Republic, see Mary Sprunger, “Hoe rijke mennisten de hemel verdienden: Een eerste verkenning van de betrokkenheid van aanzienlijke doopsgezinden bij het Amsterdamse zakenleven in de Goude Eeuw,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen, n. s., 18 (1992), 39-52; eadem, “Waterlanders and the Dutch Golden Age: A Case Study on Mennonite Involvement in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Trade and Industry as One of the Earliest Examples of Socio-Economic Assimilation,” in From Martyr to Muppy. A Historical Introduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in the Netherlands: The Mennonites, ed. Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), pp. 133-148. 30
1578, and indeed, into the early 1590s. 64 Given the disproportionate prosperity and the growth in numbers achieved by Mennonites in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona in the seventeenth century in circumstances of relative toleration—in dramatic contrast to their treatment at the hands of authorities in Zwinglian Zurich or Catholic Bavaria in the later 1520s, for example—it seems counterfactually reasonable to imagine that other Anabaptist groups as well might have become more demographically significant than in fact they were under conditions of persecution. 65 Conversely, it is not only possible but seems likely that without political protection, Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism would have been more marginal than they in fact became. As it happened, they were the great outliers among those Christians who rejected the Roman church in the sixteenth century because they were the only two traditions which, like Catholicism, enjoyed sustained political support from secular authorities. If this effort conceptually to reform the Reformation is near the mark, what difference would it make? It might—and in my view, should—change the way in which we regard the Reformation as a whole. “The Reformation” encompassed every expression of anti-Roman Western Christianity that rejected the authority of the Roman church, the large majority of which involved reformers and groups who made truth claims and engaged in practices that also rejected Lutheranism and Reformed Protestantism. Lutherans and Reformed Protestants were thus not typical in the Reformation, but unusual. Seeing this is only possible when we consider the 64 Leonard Gross, The Golden Years of the Hutterites: The Witness and Thought of the Communal Moravian Anabaptists during the Walpot Era, 1565-1578, rev. ed. (Kitchener, Ont.: Pandora Press; and Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 1998); Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology, pp. 182, 183. 65 Driedger, Obedient Heretics, esp. pp. 16-26; on Anabaptists in Bavaria and their suppression in the later 1520s, see Claus-Peter Clasen, “The Anabaptists in Bavaria,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, 39 (1965), 243-261; for documents on early Anabaptism in Zurich, including their persecution by civic authorities, see QGTS, vol. 1, ed. Muralt and Schmid. 31
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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