Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform [1 ed.] 9783666552588, 9783666552582, 9783525552582

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Bridget Heal / Anorthe Kremers (eds.)

Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform

Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform Edited by Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

This publication was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, Hanover.

With 22 coloured illustrations We have tried to identify the respective holders of copyrights for all illustrations. However, should there be any claims, please let us know. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-666-55258-2 You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our Website: www.v-r.de © 2017, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Theaterstraße 13, D-37073 Göttingen/ Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A. www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Typesetting by SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Project Management: Anorthe Kremers, Nina Colleen Felchner Co-Editing: Catherine Atkinson

Table of Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Bridget Heal Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Hartmut Lehmann Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 I. Radicalism and the Early Reformation Thomas Kaufmann Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Gerd Schwerhoff Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation . . . . . . 36 Kat Hill The Power of Names: Radical Identities in the Reformation Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 II. Radicalism and the Established Reformations Ethan Shagan Radical Charity in the English Reformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Susan Royal Religious Radicalism in ‘Magisterial’ England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Alec Ryrie Scripture, the Spirit and the Meaning of Radicalism in the English Revolution 100 Gary K. Waite The Drama of the Two-Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, c. 1620–1660: Preparing the Way for Baruch Spinoza? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

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III. Writing Radical Histories

Michael Driedger Against ‘the Radical Reformation’: On the Continuity between Early Modern Heresy-Making and Modern Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Mirjam van Veen Dutch Anabaptist and Reformed Historiographers on Servetus’ Death: Or How the Radical Reformation Turned Mainstream and How the Mainstream Reformation Turned Radical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Dmitri Levitin ‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale . . . . . . . . . 173 IV. Radicalism across Borders John Coffey ‘The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation’? Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Anti-Trinitarianism in the English Revolution . 201 Lionel Laborie From English Trembleurs to French Inspirés: A Transnational Perspective on the Origins of French Quakerism (1654–1789) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Ulrike Gleixner Millenarian Practices and the Pietist Empire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Jon Sensbach The Radical Reformation and the Black Atlantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 Hosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

Preface

The 500th anniversary of the onset of the Protestant Reformation is receiving global attention, both from the public and from academic researchers. However, the significance of the year 1517 has been an issue of scholarly debate for quite some time, and its importance as a caesura in European history has been questioned. The popular picture, in particular, of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenberg church doors on 31 October 1517 and thereby unleashing both the Reformation movement and the modern era has been successfully challenged by research. Our understanding of the Reformation has become more differentiated and complex, and this has been and will be documented in the context of the quincentenary in many events, publications and exhibitions around the world. The acknowledgement of plurality and dissent within early modern Protestantism is one key aspect of this differentiated picture of the Reformation. The symposium “The Protestant Reformation and its Radical Critique”, which was held at the German Historical Institute in London from September 15–17, 2016, concentrated on radical currents within the Reformation movement, most of which were inspired by a critical engagement with Luther and the other magisterial reformers. These radical groups and theologies are of particular interest because they link British, German, Dutch, French and North American experiences and historiographies. The period on which the essays in this volume focus extends from the early Reformation of the 1520s to the Pietist movement of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. This broad chronological perspective will help to shift the anniversary discussions from their predominant focus on the sixteenth century. A public lecture given at the British Museum within the framework of this symposium positioned the various strands of early-modern religious radicalism within an even wider temporal framework and linked them to those of the 20th century. The symposium itself was structured thematically around issues such as group formation, religious radicalism in politics, gender and family relations, missionary activity, radicalism across borders, and radical history writing. Most of the papers given at the symposium are contained in this book. Warm thanks go to all our excellent speakers and chairs for their contributions and thoughtful comments and to Bridget Heal and Anorthe Kremers for having taken on the task of editing this volume. It was a great pleasure to host this symposium and we hope that the book will inspire future discussions and research. Andreas Gestrich, Director, German Historical Institute, London Wilhelm Krull, Secretary General, Volkswagen Foundation, Hanover

Bridget Heal

Introduction

Radicalism was central to the Reformation story. Martin Luther was the greatest rebel of his day and preached a profoundly radical message. He appeared at the Diet of Worms on 17 April 1521 as a courageous renegade, defying the greatest monarch in Christendom and the ecclesiastical and secular estates of the Empire.1 His attacks on the authority of the papacy, his rejection of the clerical estate, his belief in a priesthood of all believers, his call to arms against Roman tyranny: all threatened the established order. He put the Bible, and the authority to interpret it, into the hands of the laity. For all his willingness to accommodate himself to political realities, for all his later compromises and conservatism, for all his intolerance and authoritarianism, there can be no denying the subversive potential of Luther’s message of spiritual equality and freedom. As two of the opening essays in this volume emphasize, Luther’s teachings, and the inflammatory rhetoric that he used to convey them, were profoundly radical.2 The radical Reformation however, as it has been defined and debated over the decades, has very particular connotations. It is associated not with Luther and with the state churches that grew from his Wittenberg movement, but with the reformers who went even further in their theological teachings and in their challenges to established political and social hierarchies. The radical reformers, as classified by George Williams in his encyclopaedic The Radical Reformation, were the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists and the Anti-Trinitarians.3 They were the evangelicals who introduced the most startling, the most unconventional, doctrinal innovations of the Reformation era: the abolition of infant baptism and its replacement by believers’ baptism; spiritualist critiques of biblical literalism, of external sacraments and of the formal structures of the church; and rationalism that speculated about questions such as the immortality of the soul and the Trinity. For Williams, these groups, despite their different points of origin and their different theological emphases, constituted a tradition that was set apart, by virtue of shared ideals, from the magisterial reformations that emanated from Wittenberg, Zurich and Geneva. 1

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London, 2016), especially chapter 8 on the Diet of Worms. 2 Thomas Kaufmann, Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era; Gerd Schwerhoff, Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation, both in this volume. 3 George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962).

Introduction9

There is no need to rehearse here, in detail, the broader historiography of Anabaptism and of the radical Reformation.4 For all the legitimate criticisms that have been aimed at Williams’ work – in particular at its assertion of an underlying ideological unity amongst the so-called radicals – it remains seminal. Hans-Jürgen Goertz’s understanding of early modern radicalism, as defined not by religious belief but by rejection of the status quo in the ecclesiastical, social and political spheres, is also of particular importance here.5 Ultimately, however, attempts to reach a fixed definition of what constituted religious radicalism, or to categorize its different manifestations, are doomed to failure. As John Coffey points out in his essay for this volume, producing taxonomies of radicalism, as Williams did, is analogous to ‘fixing butterflies on a wall rather than tracking their unpredictable movements through the air’.6 Radicalism was situational, closely dependent upon the historical context in which it emerged, and it encompassed a great diversity of religious and political opinions. The symposium that generated this volume of essays sought neither to define radicalism, nor to examine it as a distinct ecclesiastical tradition. Rather, it set out to consider, across the early modern period and across Protestant Europe, radical critiques of mainstream Reformations, of their doctrinal settlements and of the ways of life that they promoted. The symposium started from the undeniable premise that there were always ‘some Protestants who thought that the existing church was not Protestant enough’.7 This was true in Germany and in the Swiss Confederation during the 1520s; it was true in England, where the Elizabethan and Jacobean religious settlements attracted criticism and where, in the mid-seventeenth century, revolution unleashed a bewildering variety of radical views; it was true in the Netherlands, where Mennonite communities survived throughout the early modern period; and it was true in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when early revivalist movements began to emerge. There was, it seems, a pattern that repeated itself throughout the history of early modern Protestantism: wherever orthodoxies established themselves, forces of opposition gained momentum. These forces offered alternative sets of beliefs, and also, in many cases, alternative modes of family and social life and alternative senses of identity and belonging.8 4 For useful overviews see Michael Driedger, Anabaptism and Religious Radicalism, in: The European Reformations, ed. Alec Ryrie [Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations] (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 212–231; C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation [Contesting the Past] (Malden, MA, 2012), pp. 90–95. 5 See, for example, Hans-Jürgen Goertz, The Anabaptists (London, 1996). 6 John Coffey, ‘The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation?’ Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Anti-Trinitarianism in the English Revolution, in this volume. 7 C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania 1517–1740 (Chichester, West Sussex, 2010), p. 94. 8 On identity and belonging see in particular Michael Driedger, Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot, 2002); Kat Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood and Belief: The meaning and development of identity in central German Anabaptism (Oxford, 2010). On gender and family relations see, for example, the work of Mirjam de Baar and Xenia von Tippelskirch, both of whom took part in the symposium from which this volume originated.

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The notion of ‘a Reformation’ on the one hand, and its ‘radical critique’ on the other, is, however, problematic. It preserves, as a number of the contributions to this volume suggest, an artificial division between a respectable, magisterial Reformation and an unruly, radical Reformation.9 This division was originally a creation of the early decades of the German evangelical movement, of Luther and his invective against the Schwärmer or false enthusiasts, especially Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer. It was reinforced by mainstream reformers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they sought to shore up their own authority. Heresiographies and confessional histories imposed hostile categories on individuals and groups seen as threats to orthodoxy and order, controlling the narrative of the Reformation as it progressed. The division continues to shape scholarship: Michael Driedger speaks in his essay for this volume of the ‘sublimation or translation of early modern anti-­heretical literature into academically acceptable forms’ by Williams and by much more recent commentators.10 If there is one key, unifying theme to this volume, then, it is that the division between the radical and the magisterial, the marginal and the mainstream, the wild and the housetrained is artificial and unsustainable. As Alec Ryrie argues in his essay, it ‘tends to dissolve into ambiguity when examined closely’.11 In perpetuating it we, as historians, risk underestimating the extent to which radical critique was, as Ethan Shagan shows here, immanent within mainstream Protestantism. We risk elevating the ‘left wing’ of the Reformation, with its often virulent attacks on established order, above the supposedly conformist confessional churches. We must not lose sight of the radicalism of those who became the leaders of established churches, and of the ongoing desire of many of the evangelicals who were sheltered by the protection of the secular authorities to make society conform to the unrelenting demands – religious, but also political and social – of the gospel. Does the notion of a radical Reformation, of radical critique, have, therefore, any continuing interpretative relevance? The radical Reformation was certainly not a historical reality: it had no underlying unity. But then neither were the confessional churches – Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican – as settled as their progenitors would have wished. Subscription to a statement of faith did not necessarily lead to lasting uniformity of belief and practice, as recent work on Lutheranism during and beyond the age of orthodoxy in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has emphasized.12 This volume argues, therefore, that scholars should adopt an open-ended understanding of evangelical reform, and recognize that the boundaries between radicalism and its opposites (the magisterial reformations, the confessional churches, orthodoxy) were   9 See in particular Alec Ryrie, Scripture, the Spirit and the Meaning of Radicalism in the English Revolution, in this volume. 10 Michael Driedger, Against ‘the Radical Reformation’: On the Continuity between Early Modern Heresy-Making and Modern Historiography, in this volume. 11 Ryrie, Scripture, in this volume. 12 See, for example, Robert Kolb (ed.), Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675 [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 11] (Leiden and Boston, 2008).

Introduction11

not firmly drawn. In considering those boundaries we come to the core question of how we, as historians, define the Reformation. Europe’s Reformations were shaped, of course, by the national contexts within which they unfolded. But the Reformation was never, at heart, a political or legal settlement. It was, as Shagan reminds us here, an ‘ongoing project to remake Christian society from the ground up’, a project in which all reformers, both radical and moderate, played a part.13

The Essays The volume opens with an overview by Hartmut Lehmann of the long-term ramifications of the Lutheran and radical Reformations. Against the backdrop of the 500th anniversary of the Ninety-Five Theses, Lehmann reminds us of the revolutionary potential of Luther’s key messages: spiritual equality and lay access to the Bible. Ultimately, however, it was not the Wittenberg reformer but his ‘unruly offspring’ who disseminated these messages around the world. While Luther retreated behind the protection of the state and condemned those who challenged the divinely ordained order, the evangelicals whom he derided as unreliable enthusiasts succeeded in unforeseeable ways. Despite persecution, Anabaptism and Spiritualism survived, and during the seventeenth century the Reformation’s ‘left wing’, its dissenting and non-conformist groups, flourished. Into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these groups played a crucial role in the Christianisation of American society and in spreading Protestantism further afield. It is, Lehmann points out, the Baptist, Pentecostal and charismatic churches, rather than their Lutheran or Reformed counterparts, that flourish today in Europe, North America, Africa and parts of Asia. The first set of detailed case studies focus on the German-speaking lands during the early decades of the Reformation. Thomas Kaufmann explores the relationship between the Reformation and its early radical manifestations. The so-called radical Reformation was, he argues, created during this key period of upheaval through a deliberate process of theological and social differentiation on the part of Luther and his supporters. The distinction was not obvious, and should not be overstated: Luther’s 1520 tract, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, traditionally seen as one of the founding documents of the magisterial Reformation, was, for example, profoundly radical. But while Luther remained loyal to a vision of the social order based upon the three estates, which could accommodate differences and ambiguities, other evangelicals proved more prepared to instigate political change and adopted (or sought to adopt) more radical strategic measures to achieve a reform of Christian life. Luther’s own radicalism is the theme of Gerd Schwerhoff ’s essay, too, which focuses on the Wittenberg reformer’s use of invective. Schwerhoff draws our attention to the 13 Ethan Shagan, Radical Charity in the English Reformation, in this volume.

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ways in which Luther used language to achieve intellectual clarity in the presentation of his arguments and to distance himself from the corrupt Roman church and from opponents within his own camp. Lutheranism may ultimately have proved to be the middle-way faith, the conservative counterpart to Reformed Protestantism as well as to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, but there was nothing moderate about Luther’s rhetoric. He used language to mobilize emotions and establish group consciousness, to burn bridges and escalate hostilities. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and the use of language to define group identities, are also important themes of Kat Hill’s essay on naming strategies. Hill explores the significance of the Reformation tradition of naming opponents – Luther’s Schwärmer, and the Anabaptists, for example – and of the ways in which radical evangelicals named themselves, their children and the places in which they lived and worshipped. Names were not only, she argues, polemical weapons, but could also create a sense of identity and belonging. The importance of naming for understanding the so-called radical Reformation is an important theme throughout the volume. The next set of essays move away from Germany, to England and the Netherlands. All four argue, in various ways, against the notion that the Reformation and its radical critique were distinct phenomena; all argue for the adoption of an analytical framework that recognizes radical critique as part of the Reformation itself. Ethan Shagan focuses on concepts of economic radicalism articulated in England during the 1540s and 1550s. Here he challenges established paradigms that associate economic radicalism – the common ownership of goods – with figures such as Thomas Müntzer and suggest that mainstream evangelicals sought merely to reform charity and welfare provision. In England under Edward VI, however, leaders of the Reformation advocated a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth, a taming of market forces and the exclusion of capitalists from the Christian community. Such radical ideas informed, Shagan argues, the Book of Common Prayer, one of the foundational documents of the English ‘magisterial’ Reformation. Susan Royal’s article also emphasizes the radicalism inherent within England’s early evangelical movement, this time through an examination of the writings of John Bale and Thomas Becon on oath swearing and tithes. These reformers demanded, like those discussed by Shagan, a reimagining of Christian society that challenged the political and ecclesiastical regimes established by England’s Protestant rulers. Alec Ryrie’s essay moves us on to the mid-seventeenth century, to the period of the English Revolution. It focuses on the authority of Scripture and the role of the Holy Spirit in inspiring its interpreters, an issue that supposedly separated magisterial reformers from their radical brethren. Here, Ryrie challenges the artificially constructed distinction between radicals – for example, a Colchester mechanic who claimed that the Scriptures were ‘no more than a ballad’ – and orthodox Protestant bibliophiles. Ryrie points out, for example, that in their understanding of Scripture as a secondary, external confirmation of a truth that was primarily received inwardly,

Introduction13

the supposed radicals stood well within the traditions of the mainstream sixteenth-­ century Reformations. Debates about Spiritualism and the authority of Scripture also played out in the Dutch Republic, and constitute an important theme of Gary Waite’s essay on Mennonites in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Here, against a backdrop of religious pluralism, defining boundaries was very difficult. Waite shows that within liberal Mennonite communities, spiritualism flourished alongside an appreciation of Scripture and reason. His essay also points us towards key themes for some of the later contributions to the volume: the association between the radical Reformation, in its various forms, and individual freedom and liberty of thought; and radicals’ criticism of confessional enmity and conflict. Here we find points of contact with other forms of radicalism that emerged on the eve of the Enlightenment. The next three essays examine the radical-magisterial divide through the prism of history writing. Michael Driedger focuses on accounts of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, exploring the construction and maintenance of an anti-sectarian textual culture. Lurid and richly illustrated accounts of polygamy and communism and of violence and executions served, he suggests, to distinguish heretical groups from the main body of the civil, well-ordered Christian society. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these accounts provided warnings from history, shoring up orthodoxy in times of threat. Mirjam van Veen examines Dutch Anabaptist accounts of the trial of Michael Servetus, the Anti-Trinitarian burned as a heretic in Geneva in 1553. She shows the extent to which these accounts responded to changing circumstances, and drew to differing degrees on the plea for toleration that the trial had engendered from Sebastian Castellio. Dutch Anabaptists at first criticized ­Calvin’s role in the Servetus affair, but then during the seventeenth century, as ‘­Socinian’ became an increasingly dangerous label, distanced themselves from Servetus. Dmitri Levitin’s essay examines the radical re-evaluations of theological method and doctrine penned by John Beale, a clergyman and scientific writer, in England during the 1650s. In terms of deviation from the norm, Beale’s ideas, which were outlined in letters written to Samuel Hartlib, were the most radical of any discussed in this volume. Beale’s vision of early Christian history, his pantheism, and his assertion that Islam was morally and theologically superior to modern confessional Christianity, were unusual in the extreme. His ideas did not, however, constitute a serious threat. Even had they been published, they would have caused little more than a temporary shock, Levitin suggests, for what counted in the writing of Reformation (and other) history was technical skill and scholarship, which Beale lacked. Innovation in history writing was occurring within the orthodox mainstream, Levitin argues, rather than at the radical fringes. The final set of essays focuses in various ways on radicalism in a national and transnational perspective. Continuing the theme of history writing, John Coffey’s contri-

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bution opens with a discussion of heresiography in seventeenth-century England. As Protestantism splintered during the Revolutionary period, Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Anti-Trinitarians resurfaced. Like those examined by Driedger, English histories of the Anabaptists served to warn contemporaries of the dangers of heresy. They constructed genealogies, tracing the origins of seventeenth-century groups back to early sixteenth-century Germany. Coffey shows, however, that these genealogies were false, and that English ‘Anabaptism’ was, in fact, an indigenous phenomenon. English Spiritualists and Anti-Trinitarians did read European texts. But the lasting products of this period of turmoil, the Baptists and Quakers, grew not from Continental roots but from the English Puritan tradition. In his discussion of French Quakers, Lionel Laborie also investigates questions of influence and the transmission of ideas. He traces contacts between the English Quakers and the Huguenots from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, and emphasizes their importance for the development of prophetic and charismatic movements such as the Couflaïres or Swellers in eighteenth-century Languedoc. Developing further the theme of the construction of histories and genealogies, Laborie also shows the extent to which French radicalism was shaped by the memory of religious violence. As Ulrike Gleixner reminds us in her essay on Pietist missionary activity during the eighteenth century, the global expansion of Protestantism emerged from the margins of the state churches, from the radical rather than the magisterial Reformations. Gleixner focuses on millenarianism – one of the hallmarks of radical Protestantism – which she argues served as a way of articulating a Pietist reform programme both at home and abroad. August Hermann Franke and his followers sought to realize a better future on earth, starting in Halle and spreading outwards. In the early eigh­teenth century their endeavours extended as far as Tranquebar in south-east India, and they constructed a transnational and transconfessional network of supporters and donors in their efforts to establish Lutheran Christianity there. Jon Sensbach’s essay, which closes the volume, examines in a very different context the power of the Reformation’s message of spiritual equality. In eighteenth-century America and in the Caribbean, religious radicals and non-conformists – in particular Quakers and the Moravian Brethren – played an important role in debates about slavery. Here, where religion and global capitalism converged, the radical Reformation showed, once again, its potential to disrupt the status quo. Quakers and German dissenters from within the Anabaptist and Pietist traditions were amongst the most vocal critics of slavery, and Sensbach emphasizes in particular the lasting impact of the Moravian missions of the 1730s and 1740s, with their emphasis on egalitarianism. This final essay returns us, then, to the key theme of Lehmann’s opening salvo: the importance of the message of spiritual equality and freedom promulgated by Luther and perpetuated by his ‘unruly offspring’.

Hartmut Lehmann

Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique

Twenty years ago, in 1996, on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Martin Luther’s death, the doyen of German Reformation scholars, Bernd Moeller, professor at the University of Goettingen, gave a lecture with the title: Luthers Erfolge, in English: Luther’s success, or, perhaps more appropriately, Luther’s impact, or, Luther’s fabulous impact.1 Moeller described what he called Luther’s overwhelming success (‘Massen­ erfolg’); he stressed that his writings spread all over Germany like an explosion (‘explosionsartige Verbreitung’) and explained that Luther had huge numbers of followers (‘massenhafte Anhängerschaft’). Even after Luther had passed away, millions of his books and pamphlets were printed and sold. In Germany, generation after generation engaged in commemorating and celebrating Luther, beginning in 1617 and leading up to the present. For Moeller, Luther’s success, or impact, was a completely new and unique historical phenomenon. Love was a decisive factor, he argued, just as was hate. While some people adored the rebel against the pope, others, whom Moeller identified as the majority, were touched by Luther’s religious views and his theological arguments. Moeller did not fail to observe limits to Luther’s success. Germans were always closer to him than non-Germans, he remarked, and Luther had not been able to complete his main project, the reform of the whole Christian church. According to Bernd Moeller, however, within European history, when one speaks of success, or impact, no other figure even comes close to Martin Luther. As we are approaching the quincentennial commemoration of the Protestant Reformation in 2017, let me take a look at the state of Christendom five hundred years later, in the second decade of the twenty-first century. True, Protestantism, has become a major world religion, with congregations on all continents. In the course of the twentieth century, however, not all branches of the Protestant family grew at the same rate. In Europe and North America, Lutheran churches, that is the churches directly descending from the German reformer, stagnated. Some are in decline, like many other mainstream churches. In contrast, the various branches of Baptist churches blossomed and attracted many new members, and so did numerous Pentecostal churches. In Africa and some parts of Asia, in particular, congregations that can best be described as charismatic, fundamentalist, or evangelical (I am 1

Bernd Moeller, Luthers Erfolge, in: Luther-Rezeption. Kirchenhistorische Aufsätze zur Reformationsgeschichte, idem (Göttingen, 2001), pp. 270–284.

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aware that all of these terms are disputed), are strong and vibrant. While Europe’s traditional Protestant churches are afflicted by progressive secularization, the much younger Protestant churches in the southern hemisphere experience vitality, and their leaders speak of unheard blessings. In looking at what the British-American historian Philip Jenkins, in his book The Next Christendom, has called ‘The Coming of Global Christianity’,2 one may ask, what has become of Luther’s heritage and what of his theological legacy. Luther never accepted the baptism of adults and was among the fiercest opponents of the early Baptist movement. Furthermore, Luther strongly rejected any kind of charismatic or emotional religious performance. For him, those who believed that they should follow sensational inspirations, were nothing but enthusiasts who could not be trusted. However, not in the early years of the Protestant Reformation, but over the centuries, these unreliable enthusiasts have succeeded in unforeseen ways. By the twentieth century, ‘Martin Luther’s unruly offspring’ could proudly claim ‘mass’ success, or ‘Massenerfolg’, to use Bernd Moeller’s phrase. In deciphering the various stages of this most astonishing story, let me first take a look at the early years of the Protestant Reformation. By 1519, Luther’s theses had become public knowledge in many reform-minded religious circles in Central Europe, and the Wittenberg professor had become something of a celebrity beyond his local university. For many, he spoke the truth that had been suppressed far too long. For others, he behaved like a wild boar in God’s vineyard. In his Address to the German Nobility, composed in the summer of 1520, Luther argued that the three walls protecting papal power in Rome should tumble down like the walls of Jericho. No, he wrote, the spiritual power is not above the temporal, and priesthood has been given not only to the clergy but to all believers. No, he continued, the pope does not possess the exclusive right to interpret Scripture. Rather, lay Christians are also able to understand God’s word. No, Luther thundered finally, church councils cannot only be called by the pope; in a case of emergency they can be called by anyone, also by civil authorities. A year later, in 1521, the situation had completely changed. The papal bull Exsurge Domine had been published. At the Diet of Worms, the imperial court officially banned Luther. This meant the German Hercules, as some admirers called him in 1520, was excommunicated and had become an outlaw, at least within the territories loyal to the emperor. Luther would not have been able to survive this double attack, had he not been protected by Frederick the Wise, the elector of his native Saxony. Saxon noblemen had been around him during his stay in Worms, and Saxon horsemen kidnapped him on the way back from Worms to Wittenberg and brought him to the Wartburg. There can be no doubt that Luther knew how precarious his personal situation had become.

2 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom (3rd ed., Oxford, 2011).

Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique 17

During the time he spent in protective custody, Luther continued what he considered his mission, though not as aggressively as a year earlier. By translating the New Testament into German, he fulfilled the promise that every lay Christian should be able to gain direct access to the word of God. In this way, his slogan of the priesthood of all believers gained substance and credibility. However, he was shocked when he was informed that during his absence his friend and colleague Karlstadt and some of his Wittenberg followers had introduced radical reforms with what he considered disconcerting rapidity. Let me follow the description given by the great American Reformation scholar Roland H. Bainton. During Luther’s absence, Bainton remarks, priests married, monks married, nuns married. The tonsured permitted their hair to grow. During mass, wine was given to lay people. Priests celebrated mass in plain clothes. Portions of the mass were recited in German. Vigils ceased, vespers were altered, images shattered. Meat was eaten on fast days. Patrons withdrew their endowments. In other words, the consequences of what Luther had started, was deeply affecting the daily religious life of people in Wittenberg.3 As we know, after receiving this news, Luther instantly intervened in Wittenberg, and he did so effectively. From then on, his top priorities were control and discipline, not unlimited iconoclasm. After he had knocked down most of the traditional ecclesiastical walls and some theological ones as well, he now began to erect new walls himself, new walls that should secure that his initial success had not been in vain, walls that should protect what he had achieved. Luther’s Wartburg episode, therefore, was nothing less than a decisive turning point in his life and work. No wall that Luther erected was high enough, however, to prevent some of the ideas that he had formulated and propagated from spreading. The centrality of the Scriptures for all Christians, for example, captured many people’s minds, in towns and in the countryside. For Luther, this notion was closely tied to his most effective form of defense against papal arguments. As a professor of biblical studies he was convinced that he knew, and understood, God’s words at least as well, and in fact much better than anyone else. Early on, in 1518 or 1519, when being attacked, he asked his opponents to base their arguments on scriptural evidence. No doubt this method worked very well to his advantage, for example at the hearings in Worms. In keeping with this, Luther demanded that future pastors should receive a solid university education in biblical studies. As a result, what he created, together with Melanchthon, was nothing less than a new clerical elite, a professional corps of theological experts trained to explain the true meaning of God’s word to the uneducated, thus eroding the foundation of his very own slogan of the priesthood of all believers. Within just a few years he dropped the idea that anyone could simply go ahead and read and understand the message of the Bible.

3 Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A life of Martin Luther (New York & Nashville, no year [1950]), p. 198.

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Let me repeat that since the early 1520s no wall has been able to contain the dynamic expansion of some of Luther’s propositions. Just as Luther claimed direct access to the true meaning of God’s word, anyone, if one followed Luther’s trust in the priesthood of all believers, literally anyone, could do the same, that is read the Bible and draw conclusions, conclusions for his or her own personal life, but also conclusions affecting Christian communities and the secular world. This claim was, and remained, absolutely central to Luther’s unruly offspring. In interpreting God’s word, they did not hesitate to challenge the Wittenberg professor. In the course of the 1520s, several episodes demonstrate the growing difference between Luther’s position and the position of lay people who had discovered the religious and also political potential hidden in the Scriptures. In 1524, when the leaders of discontent peasants formulated their political claims in twelve articles, they explicitly underscored their arguments with biblical references. Through this, they took great pains to prove that their demands were not egoistic or arbitrary, but strictly in accordance with God’s word. Luther, whom they had nominated as one of the conciliators in the conflict, could not be convinced. For him, the argumentation of the peasants was the argumentation of dilettantes, who should mind their own business and go back to work. As the conflict escalated, Luther did not hesitate to support the princes as they rushed to restore what they considered the divine order with brutal force. Many of the demands of the peasants were closely connected with the religious ideas of those who believed in adult baptism. In the early 1520s, some concerned Christians came to the conclusion that true Christian congregations should consist only of people who understood what Christian life implied and who decided to join such communities fully aware of all duties and obligations. Belief in adult baptism, therefore, was nothing but a consequence of two of Luther’s main appeals: the priesthood of all believers and trust in God’s word as it could be found in the Scriptures. As students of the so-called left wing of the Reformation know, different groups propagated the belief in adult baptism, particularly in southern Germany. Two years after the blood of thousands of peasants had been shed, some of those who denied the validity of infant baptism met in the village Schleitheim in northern Switzerland. Under the leadership of Michael Sattler, they formulated the Schleitheim Confession of Faith, which consisted of seven articles. In brief: baptism should be given only to those who had repented and who truly believed that Christ had taken away their sins. Those who fall into error should be admonished and, if they continued sinning, excommunicated. Only faithful children of God should be allowed to take part in the Eucharist. There should be no fellowship with the wicked. Only persons of good reputation should serve as pastors. Violence must not be used; both the sword and the swearing of oaths were forbidden. As the seven articles of the Schleitheim Confession demonstrate, the belief in adult baptism was part of a much larger program of religious, social and political reform. The core idea was the withdrawal from the controversies of those considered children of

Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique 19

the world, that is, a strict attitude of non-engagement in worldly affairs.4 The contrast to Wittenberg, and later also to Geneva, could not be greater. While Luther trusted secular authorities, the early Anabaptists tried not to get involved in secular matters and attempted to lead a holy life. While Luther developed his famous theology of the two realms or two regiments, which contained no, or hardly any, element of resistance and gave a free hand to princes to pursue whatever they chose to do, early Anabaptists wanted to protect their small congregations so that their members could concentrate on sanctification, thus securing God’s mercy on the day of the Last Judgment. In the following decades, the Wittenberg group, since 1528 labeled Protestants, succeeded much better than the early Anabaptists. Princes in more and more territories, and the magistrates of more and more cities within the Empire, distanced themselves from Rome and joined the Saxon elector’s camp. But early on, the followers of Luther were involved in violence and warfare. More importantly, even in times of peace, the emerging new Lutheran communities had to follow what the political powers considered best. As a consequence, within just a few decades, the new Protes­tant churches had become part of the domestic administration of their respective territories and cities. Pastors became a kind of civil servant, with duties far beyond their ministry, for example duties concerning public order, social welfare and schools. Pastors and their congregations were supervised regularly to ensure that non-conformism did not begin to take root. As absolutism thrived in most territories, so did hierarchical thinking within the churches. For two centuries, Lutheranism survived in the form of state churches. Historians of Lutheranism have yet to comprehend the full impact of the heavy mortgage which state protection implied. By contrast, the lives of those engaged in communities celebrating adult baptism were much harder. Less than ten years after the Peasants’ War they were struck by another catastrophe, caused by the rise and fall of Anabaptist rule in the city of Münster. After Münster had fallen, most of those surviving fled to the North, where Menno Simons attempted, like a shepherd, to collect the sheep that had run away in despair in all kinds of directions. They realized, in shock, that their using the sword at Münster, had brought disaster. Menno Simons therefore taught and exercised pacifism, even if it were to lead to more hardship and more persecution. All through the sixteenth century, Catholic and Protestant propaganda accused the Anabaptists of such crimes as polygamy and communism, exemplified by lurid examples from Münster. In the decades before and after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, even though they were at odds on most other matters, Catholic and Protestant princes within the Holy Roman Empire were united in wiping out any kind of influence the Anabaptists had, or appeared to have. To be an Anabaptist meant to be on the run, therefore, it meant 4

I have borrowed the terms ‘withdrawal’ and ‘engagement’ from the Copenhagen research project SOLITUDES. See Mette Birkedal Bruun, Sven Rune Havsteen, Kristian Mejrup, Eelco Nagelsmit and Lars Noergaard, Withdrawal and Engagement in the Long Seventeenth Century: Four Case Studies, in: Journal of Early Modern Christianity 1/2 (2014), pp. 249–343.

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to go underground and look for a place of refuge; it meant to lead the life of an outcast, at once discriminated against and constantly endangered. By 1580, when most Lutherans overcame internal disputes and signed a Book of Concord, very few Anabaptists had survived in Central Europe. Luther’s unruly offspring in the tradition of Anabaptists found places of refuge in some areas of East Central Europe, on the estates of Polish and Bohemian noble families who cherished their decency and work ethic. In the following decades, as Protestants in these regions became victims of Catholic Counter-Reformation efforts, Anabaptist communities had to flee once again. By the early seventeenth century, in Central Europe and Scandinavia, the state-­ oriented, state-dominated variety of the Evangelical faith had won a complete victory over independent local groups of devout lay brothers and sisters in the tradition of early Anabaptists. But as we know, this was not the end of the story. Quite to the contrary. During what has been called the ‘Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, the children of the left wing of the Protestant Reformation experienced a remarkable revival, first in England and then on the continent. The notion of the priesthood of all believers could not be completely suppressed, neither could the belief that anyone, in particular lay persons, could read and understand God’s word. Three interrelated factors played a decisive role. First, as European ­Christendom was hit by waves of famine, disease and war, apocalyptic fantasies captured the minds of many people. They asked themselves if what they were experiencing was the real story of what they had read in the Revelation of St. John? Second, the pluralization of non-conformism and dissent possessed an irreversible quality. Scores of self-­ appointed prophets rose and explained the biblical message against all odds and even when persecuted. These lay preachers felt a divine calling and needed neither pastors nor the church hierarchy protected by state power. Third, apocalypticism and prophecy were spread not by common people ready for social and political revolt, as the British historian Christopher Hill argues,5 but rather by members of the middle class desperately searching for ways of saving their souls.6 These people were able to read and write and, more importantly, they were following the news and observing what was going on in a world turned upside down.7 Seventeenth-century dissent and non-conformism can be described as a rapidly expanding international network, energized by a widely travelled elite, and fuelled by the message contained in a vast and rapidly growing body of devotional literature. Those eager to save their souls and avoid purgatory read works by Kaspar von Schwenckfeld, Jakob Böhme, Johann Heinrich Alsted and many others, and they made 5 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York, 1972). 6 Hartmut Lehmann, Saving One’s Soul in an Age of Crises, in: Journal of Early Modern Christianity 1/2 (2014), pp. 207–217. 7 Hartmut Lehmann, The Cultural Importance of Pious Middle Classes in the Seventeenth-Century Protestant Society, in: Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 33–41.

Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique 21

sure that these texts were handed on to members of the next generation. In opposition to the state churches, multiple new traditions were created. But not all groups within radical dissent held the same beliefs. Rather, by the middle of the seventeenth century, non-conformism and dissent were characterized by an extreme degree of pluralization and fragmentation, by a plethora of voices and arguments, relaying prophetic and spiritual divinations. Adult baptism became a central issue among circles of separatist Puritans in early seventeenth-century England.8 In addition, after some initial irritation, strict pacifism distinguished the early Quakers from many others.9 What the members of all of these religiously inspired groups abhorred, however, was very similar: they disliked church officials in close connection with state power in the form of absolutist arrogance and demonstrative luxury. On this point, radical critique of established Protestantism had changed little since the sixteenth century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, obvious differences between religious developments in England and on the Continent can be observed. After what has been labeled the Glorious Revolution, radical dissent was tolerated in England. As a result, new religious movements like Methodism could be accommodated. In contrast, in Central Europe, and in particular in the German Protestant churches, emerging Pietism faced strict control. As long as Pietists agreed to limit their efforts to moderate reforms, they were accepted. But those Pietists who criticized the whole system of state churches were considered dangerous separatists. If they did not conform after they had been warned, they were persecuted. Thousands upon thousands of those who did not find a place of refuge somewhere in the Netherlands, for example, decided to emigrate to the New World. Some years ago I argued that German Protestantism has never recovered from the loss of these self-confident, committed believers.10 What evangelicals interpret as divine providence, occurred in nineteenth-century America: namely the break-through of nonconformist Protestants to national and to global importance. As immigrants of many European countries occupied the wide, open spaces beyond the Appalachian mountain ridge, Methodist and later Baptist preachers found rich opportunities to spread their message. True, as denominations, side by side with other churches, the members of European state churches, Anglicans turned into Episcopalians and even Lutherans also found a place in the rapidly expanding American society. But no one was more successful in carrying Christ’s message to the frontier than those who had been persecuted in Europe. To the American historian Jon Butler we owe the insight that the nineteenth century is the era of a thor  8 John H.Y. Biggs, Die Ursprünge des Baptismus im separatistischen Puritanismus Englands, in: Baptismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds Andrea Strübing and Martin Rothkegel (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 3–22.   9 Manfred Henke, ‘Wir haben nicht einen Bettler unter uns’: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der frühen Quäkerbewegung (Berlin-Brandenburg, 2015). 10 Hartmut Lehmann, Die langfristigen Folgen der kirchlichen Ausgrenzung des radikalen Pietismus, in: Der radikale Pietismus: Perspektiven der Forschung, eds Wolfgang Breul, Marcus Meier, Lothar Vogel (Göttingen, 2010), pp. 45–55.

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ough and complete Christianization of American society.11 Somehow, but in a most astonishing manner, the Baptist heritage of adult responsibility for one’s belief, and the Methodist legacy of hard work and rigorous ethical demands, seemed to match the aspirations of those who attempted to make a living in strange new places. From the middle of the nineteenth century, both Methodists and Baptists have devoted their lives to missionary work in all parts of the world, thus becoming world religions. On a smaller scale, Mennonites and Adventists achieved the same. Baptists did not return to Germany until the 1830s. Even then, they had to suffer discrimination, just like the Methodists attempting to build communities in nineteenth-century Germany or Adventists and other religious groups who did not belong to the territorial state churches. Nineteenth-century Protestant church leaders never considered these newcomers as equals, as legitimate children of the Reformation, as brothers and sisters in Christ, and labeled them ‘sects’, thus signalling that they were not proper churches.12 Official, state-oriented Protestants, and in particular liberal heirs of the Enlightenment, forgot that it had been their own Martin Luther who had called for the empowerment of lay people, that Luther had encouraged common people to read the Scripture for themselves and had, by translating the Bible, made sure that they could do so. In the world at large, non-denominational Protestantism was exposed to dramatic changes in the course of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.13 First, fundamentalist evangelical groups discovered that revivalism could be organized in the form of campaigns. Preachers coming from the outside shook regular congregations with their dramatic appeals for repentance and revival. Some of those congregations fell apart when the preacher who posed as a prophet moved on to the next location. With his emotional sermons in post-1945 Germany, Billy Graham was able to fill soccer stadiums with people longing for a message that they believed their own pastors were unable to give. As television began to dominate the media, some Evangelical preachers rose to become public stars. Religious sociology has yet to find out whether televised services can influence or stop the progress of secularization. Second, after modest beginnings in pre–1914 Los Angeles, Pentecostalism succeeded in becoming one of the fastest growing world religions. The last remnants of traditional belief were thrown overboard in favor of charismatic and emotional forms of religious expression. Wherever charismatic fervor triumphed, even the descendants of the first generation of nonconformist dissenters were in shock. No doubt, ­Martin Luther would have been appalled and the churches still celebrating in his tradition suffered once again.

11 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990). 12 Karl-Heinz Voigt, Freikirchen in Deutschland (19. und 20. Jahrhundert) (Leipzig, 2004). 13 Hartmut Lehmann, Das Christentum im 20. Jahrhundert: Fragen, Probleme, Perspektiven (Leipzig, 2012).

Martin Luther’s Unruly Offspring: The Protestant Reformation and Radical Critique 23

Let me conclude by talking about another Martin Luther, about the black American Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. who was one of those unruly offspring of the German reformer who was different from his namesake in important aspects.14 While the German reformer designed a theological construct, the theology of the two regiments or realms, that gave a free hand to princes in all worldly affairs, Martin Luther King Jr. did not hesitate to oppose the state when he was convinced that the laws of the state were unjust and in opposition to divine law. While the German reformer took the side of the princes against the peasants who demanded justice, the young Baptist preacher supported those who were oppressed. He marched with them, he joined their sit-ins, and he went to prison with them. While the German reformer defended his turf vehemently, especially in the last two decades of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated solidarity for oppressed people around the world longing for liberation. As we know, no one had impressed him more than Mahatma Ghandi, the great Indian philosopher, the political activist preaching non-violence. Martin Luther King Jr. never quoted any of the works of the German reformer. In pursuing his campaigns of non-violence he was aware of the century-long plight of Baptists, of the racial injustice suffered by his fellow blacks as well as of the disastrous effects of colonialism, imperialism and warfare. His belief in non-violent action set him apart from many other Afro-Americans of his time who were ready to revolt. In King’s eyes, however, non-violence was a more effective political weapon than either open rebellion or strict pacifism. Even today, almost half a century after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, his legacy of non-violent action remains alive as a most impressive political tool, even though it is hard to use. If he had lived in Hitler’s Germany, Martin Luther King Jr. writes in his Letter from the Birmingham City Jail in 1963, he ‘would have aided and comforted’ his ‘Jewish 14 According to a recent Lutheran legend, Martin Luther King Jr. was supposedly named after the German reformer. As this legend goes, his father, Martin Luther King Sr., better known as Daddy King, also a Baptist minister, had attended the Baptist World Congress in Germany in 1934 and had been so impressed by the heritage of the German reformer that he decided to name his oldest son Martin Luther. What a surprising change of religious views, one may ask, that a Southern black Baptist would want to honor the person who has a reputation as merciless persecutor of Anabaptists by naming his son after him? The true story is quite different. The brief version is as follows: In 1899, Daddy King’s father, James Albert King, a sharecropper, had given his second child the names Martin and Luther in memory of two of his brothers, who had been called Martin and Luther and who had passed away. His wife, however, gave their son the name Michael as she venerated the archangel Michael. So Daddy King grew up being called Mike. In 1929, when his first son was born, they also called him Michael, or Mike. In 1933, however, shortly before James Albert King died, he asked his son, that is Daddy King, to accept for himself and his son the names that he had always wanted, that is the names Martin and Luther. I should add that James Albert King had been a drinker but that shortly before he died he had become dry. Therefore, his last words meant a lot to his son. Daddy King granted his father his last wish. As a result, Daddy King became Martin Luther King Sr. and little Mike King became Martin Luther King Jr., even though his family and friends continued to call him Mike well into the 1950s. See Hartmut Lehmann, Martin Luther in the American Imagination (Munich, 1988), pp. 9–10.

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brothers even though it was illegal’.15 He had ‘gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist’, he continued. Was ‘Jesus not an extremist in love’, he wrote, or Amos ‘for justice’, or Paul ‘for the gospel’, or Martin Luther with his words ‘Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God’, or John Bunyan, ready to go to jail, or Abraham Lincoln with his conviction that ‘this nation cannot survive half slave and half free’, or Thomas Jefferson, who believed ‘that all men are created equal?’16 I quote these sentences because they contain one of the very few places in Martin Luther King’s writings where he mentions the name of the German reformer. Why does he do so? He does so because for him the German reformer, like Lincoln or Jefferson, is an example of courage. In that respect, but in that respect only, M ­ artin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most important among the unruly offspring of the German reformer Martin Luther, linked his own mission, and his own plight, with that of the famous Wittenberg professor.

15 James Melvin Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, 1991), p. 295. 16 Ibid., pp. 297–298.

I. Radicalism and the Early Reformation

Thomas Kaufmann

Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era1

I would like to begin by discussing the relative and contextual nature of what might be called ‘radical’ in the context of the early German Reformation.2 The reason for this approach is quite simple. I am interested in the historical connections and interactions between what is traditionally called ‘the Reformation’, and the representatives of its ‘left wing’, that is theologians such as Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Karlstadt, Ulrich Hugwald, Hans Hut, Ludwig Hätzer, Hans Denck, Hans Hergot and others.3 My approach differs both from Harold Bender’s ‘Anabaptist vision’,4 which had the tendency to interpret the Swiss Brethren as a kind of re-enactment of the early church and to isolate the Anabaptist movement from the main stream debates and attitudes of the Reformation era on one hand, and from George Huntston Williams’ ‘Radical Reformation’,5 which emphasized pre-reformatory intellectual traditions of Renaissance Platonism or mysticism as a source of the deviation and radical ideas in the 16th century on the other. Instead I want to describe the radical reformers as the result of a process of social and theological distinction and differentiation. Radical reformatory ideas and attitudes are not simply rooted in selections from multifaceted and polyvalent late-medieval Christianity. They originated in debates and conflicts beginning in the early 1520s. 1 2 3

4

5

In its written form this paper is largely that of the oral presentation. The notes are restricted to the most fundamental bibliographical references and citations. On ‘radicality’ in the Reformation, cf. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Radikalität der Reformation [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 93] (Göttingen, 2007). Cf. the chapter ‘Integrale Existenz: Lehre und Leben in der Radikalen Reformation der frühen 1520er Jahre’, in: Thomas Kaufmann, Der Anfang der Reformation. Studien zur Kontextualität der Theologie, Publizistik und Inszenierung Luthers und der reformatorischen Bewegung [Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 67] (Tübingen, 2012), pp. 464–505. Harold S. Bender, The Anabaptist Vision, in: The Mennonite Quarterly Review 18 (April 1944), pp. 67–88. On Bender, cf. Albert N. Keim, Harold S. Bender, 1897–1962 (Scottdale, PA, 1998); Theron F. Schlabach, Bender, Harold S(tauffer), in: MennLex V, http://www.mennlex.de/doku. php?id=art:bender_harold_s_tauffer. George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (3rd ed., Kirksville, 2000); with regard to the conceptional problems of ‘radicalism’ in studies of religion during the Reformation and early modernity cf. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Religiöse Bewegungen in der frühen Neuzeit [Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 20] (Munich, 1993), p. 59 f.; John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism 1521–1700 [Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 6] (Leiden, 2007).

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The starting point for all political discussions in the early German Reformation is – as I wish to emphazise – Luther’s tract To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Reformation of the Christian estate (in German: An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung) from August 15206, published when his condemnation by Pope Leo X had just been issued, but was still unknown to the German public. Following the title, many have suggested that Luther’s To the Christian Nobility is the founding document of the magisterial reformations, especially that of the princes in the German territorial states. Of course, this thesis is not simply wrong, it is also argued with the benefit of hindsight and proceeds from the predominant type of the German territorial state reformations;7 it ignores the open situation in the early 1520s, and it does not take into account the fact that Luther was pursuing various options and was looking for allies in all political contexts. To the Christian Nobility was addressed to the Emperor as well as to the princes, to the lower nobility as well as to the city magistrates, and even to every Christian man or woman in all estates. Everybody was to feel responsible for reforming the suffering church in distress. Luther was convinced that the clerics, misguided by the pope and his adherents, were no longer able to care for the church adequately. Now, after the revelation of the Antichrist, all believers were responsible for helping, wherever they stood within society. The concept of the general priesthood of all believers, pointed out by Luther for the first time in To the Christian Nobility, was a theory legitimizing the participation of everybody who was baptized – within Latin-European Christianity, this was of course everyone. With regard to its content, Luther’s most prominent Reformation programme was radical. It rejects the leading role of the clerical estate in the church. It refutes a clerical predominance in interpreting the scriptures; it condemns the jurisdictional system of canon law. Although some of the points of Luther’s reform programme were well known from medieval debates – for instance his polemics against the financial exploitation of the Holy Roman Empire, his criticisms of celibacy, indulgences and the intercession of the saints and so on – their combination, the huge range of issues and his judgement on the clergy as a whole can in no way be derived from medieval models. Luther’s remarks concerning those requested to act in favour of the Reformation – all Christian men and women in all estates – were radical as well. To the Christian Nobility was not translated in the early Reformation period, neither into Latin nor into any European vernacular; therefore it remained unknown to all the other European Reformation movements. This programmatic text was radical because it encouraged everyone to engage with the work of reform to the best of his or her ability. All of the different kinds of reformation processes that we can ­recognize in 6 Regarding all aspects of this text, see my commentary: Thomas Kaufmann, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation von des christlichen Standes Besserung [Kommentare zu Schriften Luthers 3] (Tübingen, 2014). 7 For an overview, cf. Thomas Kaufmann, Geschichte der Reformation in Deutschland (Neue Ausgabe, Berlin, 2016), p. 502 f.; also helpful for general orientation: Luther und die Fürsten, Katalog, 2 vols, (Dresden, 2015).

Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era29

the 1520s – from the urban Reformation of the citizens and the civic magistrates to the reformation of the noblemen alongside Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von ­Sickingen right down to the communal reformations in smaller towns or in the countryside, the peasants’ reformation8 and the reformation of the princes – they all had roots that could be traced back to Luther’s To the Christian Nobility or could be legitimized by it. Luther’s reform programme even legitimized practices such as the free election of a preacher by the congregation of believers. Was it less radical when Luther propagated these ideas than when the peasants or the community of Orlamünde practised them? Luther’s historical importance can only be appreciated in an appropriate manner if we consider him as a rebel or a revolutionary spirit. If one asks for the beginning of radical developments in the history of the Refor­ mation, we normally point to the Wittenberg movement in the years 1521/2. But we should not simply repeat the prejudices brought up by Luther himself. Of course, his explanation is clear: Karlstadt did not care for the weaker members of the community and had initiated rapid and dramatic changes that Luther disliked. Although this perspective on the Wittenberg movement has been repeated by Lutheran church historians nearly up to the present and a recently published study wants us to believe that the Wittenberg movement is just an invention of historians and archivists,9 I personally think that it is impossible to overestimate its significance. My reasons are the following: In the course of the reform processes taking place in Wittenberg during the time of Luther’s absence at the Wartburg, various people and groups took action. It was Luther’s strategy to make Karlstadt the leading figure of the Wittenberg Reformation and to make him responsible for everything that transpired which he disliked. But the sources tell us a quite different story. Melanchthon was actually the first to celebrate communion in both kinds together with his students; the Augustinian friars and their charismatic preacher Gabriel Zwilling were the first to expel images and statutes from their chapel and burn them. Although Karlstadt was the first professor 8 Cf. for instance: Kaufmann, Geschichte, p. 482 f.; a new perspective on the Knights’ Reformation is given in Thomas Kaufmann, Sickingen, Hutten, der Ebernburg-Kreis und die reformatorische Bewegung, in: Ebernburg-Heft 49 (2015), pp. 35–96; for the role of the knights generally cf. Wolfgang Breul (ed.), Ritter! Tod! Teufel? Franz von Sickingen und die Reformation (Regensburg, 2015). 9 This is the tendency in: Natalie Krentz, Ritualwandel und Deutungshoheit. Die frühe Reformation in der Residenzstadt Wittenberg (1500–1533) [Spätmittelalter, Humanismus, Reformation 74] (Tübingen, 2014); still indispensable are: Nikolaus Müller (ed.), Die Wittenberger Bewegung 1521 und 1522. Die Vorgänge in und um Wittenberg während Luthers Wartburgaufenthalt (Leipzig, 1911); Ulrich Bubenheimer, Luthers Stellung zum Aufruhr in Wittenberg und die frühreformatorischen Wurzeln des landesherrlichen Kirchenregiments, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 59 (1973), pp. 147–214; ditto, Scandalum und ius divinum. Theologische und rechtstheologische Probleme der ersten reformatorischen Innovationen in Wittenberg 1521/22, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 59 (1973), pp. 263–342; on my own view of the Wittenberg movement cf. Kaufmann, Geschichte, p. 379 f.

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of theology to marry, in January 1522, priests like Bartholomeus Bernhardi had done so a few months earlier, following Luther’s advice.10 The same applies to the abolition of oaths or of the mass; most of the changes that took place in Wittenberg during Luther’s absence were based on presumptions and arguments formulated by Luther himself. When laymen from Zwickau11 insisted in their spiritual experiences, there is a reason why they contacted the theological authorities in Wittenberg. Again it was Luther who had argued in favour of immediate religious inspiration, in the preface of his explanation of the Magnificat for instance, as well as in Chapter 25 of his tract To the Christian Nobility, where he dealt with the reform of education. So what does ‘radical’ mean against this background? The main aspect in which Luther differs from his colleagues at the university, who cooperated with the representatives of the Wittenberg town council to create the Wittenberg City Ordinance of January 1522, concerns the role of the princes. As early as summer 1520, when there were conflicts between craftsmen and students in Wittenberg,12 it was Luther who argued that the prince should send troops to re­­ medy the situation, while both the town council and the university were more interested in preserving and defending their own authority. Although Luther’s ideas of reform were very radical, the doctrine of the three estates was a conservative starting place he never denied.13 From his point of view the three estates were established during the Creation and they should be preserved until the Last Judgement. ‘Change’ (Veränderung),14 a central term in Müntzer’s political semantics, was a bad thing in Luther’s eyes. Reformation, for Luther, meant to re-establish the good order founded in the three estates. As I see it, the central role of this doctrine marks a striking difference between Luther and most of his fellow reformers. 10 On the campaign against celibacy cf. Stephen E. Buckwalter, Die Priesterehe in Flugschriften der frühen Reformation [Quellen und Forschungen 68] (Gütersloh, 1998), p. 79 f. (Karlstadt’s publications on clerical marriage and on the Bernhardi affair). 11 Cf. Thomas Kaufmann, Thomas Müntzer, ‘Zwickauer Propheten’ und sächsische Radikale. Eine quellen- und traditionskritische Untersuchung zu einer komplexen Konstellation [­ThomasMüntzer-Gesellschaft, Veröffentlichungen no. 12] (Mühlhausen, 2010). Formerly the most important studies on this issue were: Paul Wappler, Thomas Müntzer in Zwickau und die ‘Zwickauer Propheten’ [Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 182] (Gütersloh, 1966); Siegfried Hoyer, Die Zwickauer Storchianer – Vorläufer der Täufer? In: Täufertum und radikale Reformation im 16. Jahrhundert, eds Jean Rott and Simon Verheus [Bibliotheca Dissidentium, Scripta et Studia 3] (Baden-Baden/Bouxviller, 1987), pp. 65–83. 12 Cf. Bubenheimer, Luthers Stellung zum Aufruhr; Kaufmann, Anfang, p. 197 f. 13 The relevance of the doctrine of the three estates for Luther and Lutheranism has been empha­ zised strongly by Luise Schorn-Schütte, cf. e. g. her last book on political and theological semantics in early modernity: Gottes Wort und Menschenherrschaft (Munich, 2015), especially p. 48 f.; on Luther cf. Kaufmann, An den christlichen Adel, pp. 49 f.; 269 f.; 501 f.; passim. 14 Cf. my references regarding ‘Veränderung’ (change): Thomas Kaufmann, ‘Türckenbüchlein’. Zur christlichen Wahrnehmung ‘türkischer Religion’, in: ditto, Spätmittelalter und Reformation [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 97] (Göttingen, 2008), pp. 47; 49 f.; 54 f.; 75; 194; 201; 207; 209; ditto, Anfang, pp. 126–128; 132 f.; 136 f.; 143 f.; 282 f.

Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era31

Now I want to turn to Karlstadt. In many senses he can be recognized as a source or origin of various radical tendencies in the Reformation era. With good reason he has been called the ‘father’ of the ‘Anabaptist movement’ by Calvin Augustine Pater;15 with better reason his criticism of Luther’s doctrine concerning the Lord’s Supper is seen as the starting point of an irreversible process of inner-Protestant differentiation. As far as we can recognise, he could also be called Müntzer’s most influential teacher.16 So Karlstadt stands at the beginning of what we used to call radical developments within the Reformation movement. Although it is not absolutely clear what changes and reform measures took place in Orlamünde and the Upper Saale valley in the years 1523 and 1524,17 it seems obvious that Karlstadt, as well as Martin Reinhardt in Jena18 for example, acted together closely with the local authorities. Karlstadt had encouraged people to read and to interpret the Bible in their own way. The scene of Luther arriving in Orlamünde during his visitation campaign in summer 1524 and being confronted by laymen reading the scriptures in a quite specific manner should be recognized as one of the results of Karlstadt’s concept of a Reformation inspired and driven by laymen. In the figure of ‘Peter, layman’ in his Dialogue on the Lord’s Supper, published in late 1524, this concept was personalized in an idealistic manner.19 In contrast to Müntzer, Karlstadt had doubts about his vocation; he was not acting as a spiritual leader but had chosen for himself the role of a mediator or an advisor for his parishioners. He was ‘brother Andrew’, who tried to live as a farmer among other farmers. So radical was his behaviour that he even stopped being a cleric and gave away the privileges of his academic position. It was this mental and social con15 Calvin A. Pater, Karlstadt as the Father of the Baptist Movements. The Emergence of Lay Protestantism (Toronto, 1984); for the debate on Karlstadt’s tract on infant baptism cf. e. g. Alejandro Zorzin, Zur Wirkungsgeschichte einer Schrift aus Karlstadts Orlamünder Tätigkeit. Der 1527 in Worms gedruckte ‘Dialog vom fremden Glauben der Kirche, Taufe der Kinder’. Fortsetzung einer Diskussion, in: Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541). Ein Theologe der frühen Reformation, eds Sigrid Looß and Markus Matthias (Wittenberg, 1998), pp. 143–158; all relevant literature on Karlstadt is discussed in: Martin Keßler, Das Karlstadt-Bild in der Forschung [Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 174] (Tübingen, 2014). 16 For relations between Karlstadt and Luther cf. Ulrich Bubenheimer, Thomas Müntzer. Herkunft und Bildung [Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 46] (Leiden et al., 1989), passim; ditto, Thomas Müntzer und Wittenberg [Thomas-Müntzer-Gesellschaft Veröffentlichungen no. 20] (Mühlhausen, 2014); Siegfried Bräuer and Günter Vogler, Thomas Müntzer. Neu Ordnung machen in der Welt (Gütersloh, 2016), passim. 17 The best overview is available in Volkmar Joestel, Ostthüringen und Karlstadt. Soziale Bewegungen und Reformation im mittleren Saaletal am Vorabend des Bauernkrieges (1522–1524) (Berlin, 1996). 18 Cf. Joachim Bauer, Die Stadt Jena in vor- und frühreformatorischer Zeit, in: Vor- und Frührefor­ mation in thüringischen Städten (1470–1525/30), eds Joachim Emig, Volker Leppin and Uwe Schirmer [Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation 1] (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2013), pp. 335–349. 19 For Karlstadt’s conceptional ideas about lay people, cf. Shiniche Kotabe, Das Laienbild Andreas Bodensteins von Karlstadt in den Jahren 1516–1524 [Diss. theol.] (Munich, 2005); Alejandro Zorzin, Karlstadt als Flugschriftenautor [Göttinger Theologische Arbeiten 48] (Göttingen, 1990), p. 209 f.; Kaufmann, Anfang, p. 522 f.

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version that made him so unacceptable for Luther, because it undermined the state and structure of society. Although Karlstadt – as distinct from Luther as well as from Müntzer – never propagated social and religious change by means of physical force, his close affiliations with the local authorities and his distance from the Saxon court from 1523 onwards, brought him – at least from Luther’s perspective and the historical tradition that followed his judgement – under suspicion of being rebellious. In a different social-political setting – in Karlstadt’s case it would be the independent free Swiss cities such as Zurich and Basle – he could have played his part as an integrated and widely accepted member of a group of reformers. It is convenient to see Sickingen’s and Hutten’s activities20 in the light of Luther’s To the Christian Nobility. But of course the Knights’ Revolt can be interpreted as a rebellious political attempt to establish a territorial state at the expense of clerical institutions. While instigating change through the use of physical force does not seem to be unusual for nobles, most Reformation scholars are not inclined to call the Sickingen feud politically radical. I differ here. I think that Hutten was one of the most talented radical instigators of political change in the sixteenth century. He had propagated expelling the clergy from their positions by means of physical force and he even called on people to kill them. His ‘war against the clergy’ (Pfaffenkrieg) and his idea of a federation of knights and peasants anticipated [by means of propaganda] what would occur two or three years later in the German Peasants’ War. Ideas of similar atrocities figured in both Hutten’s and the peasants’ mindsets: they saw the territorial states of the princes and the great trading companies in the cities with their capitalistic spirit as the – so to say – natural adversaries of their own political concepts. In many respects both the knights and the peasants had political convictions that were reactionary and backward-looking. They envisioned a political world with a righteous emperor in its midst21 and brave and helpful noblemen supporting him and standing in close and trusting relations to peaceful and diligently working peasants. A world without cities, clerics, and princes, where the highest and the lowest estates confidently interact and coexist – nearly a utopian model along the lines of Eberlin von Günzburg’s Wolfaria fragments in his series of pamphlets entitled the Fifteen Confederates, published in 1521,22 five years after Thomas More’s Basle edition of Utopia. The aggressive and militant political strategy that Hutten propagated can be seen as the reverse of a utopian vision of society, in which the alienation between the ruling and working people has been overcome. I will return to radical utopian political ideas in the Reformation once more at the end of my paper.

20 Cf. Kaufmann, Sickingen. 21 Cf. on these political conceptions the material presented in: Kaufmann, Anfang, p. 128 f. 22 Edited in: Ludwig Enders, Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, Ausgewählte Schriften vol. 1 [Neudrucke deutscher Litteraturwerke des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts 139–141] (Halle, 1896), pp. 107–131 (Bundesgenosse X and 11).

Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era33

But now we turn to Thomas Müntzer, who is, for good reasons, held to be the most radical political agitator in the German Reformation. An interesting aspect of Müntzer’s political thought from its inception onwards – that is, from his Prague Manifesto23 (as it was formerly called) of the summer of 1521, the earliest source available – is the central role of the people (in German: das Volk). One of his most oft-cited quotations is the following: ‘Aber am [gemeinen] Volk zweiffel ich nicht. Ach du rechte, arme erbermelich heuffelein, wie dorstig bistu noch dem wort Gots!’24 (But I have no doubts regarding the common people. O you righteous, poor, pitiful crowd, how thirsty you are for the word of God!). Already in 1521 Müntzer drew a strict line between the ruling class (‘die herren, die nor fressen unde sauffen unde pastalen [schmausen]’)25 and its supporters, the clerics and the scribes, on the one hand, and the common people on the other hand. But in 1521 it was not really clear how the dramatic changes that Müntzer envisioned as a prophet would take place. Of course, the enemies of the true faith will be destroyed, and Müntzer himself was elected to defeat them, accompanied by the Bohemians, in the spirit of Elijah. In a short time, Müntzer declared, his enemies would come under pressure from the Turks; then the Antichrist’s reign would begin; after a short time Christ would give this world to the elect in order to build an everlasting empire. Although the political vision – the apoca­lyptical end of the known world of godlessness and injustice and the rising up of a new world of justice and peace under the guidance of God’s elect – is quite clear, the way to get there is not. As I see it, the political vision I have described represents the stable aspect of Müntzer’s political thought, while his strategic measures for getting there differ according to the historical context. A milestone in Müntzer’s political thought is, of course, the sermon on Daniel, Chapter 2, given by the pastor of Allstedt to the princes of Ernestine Saxony in 1524.26 Although Müntzer at this point was still convinced of the eschatological dignity of the common people, he addressed the ‘brave princes’ (‘theuren fursten’),27 who are obliged to counter the evil forces [in the world] as the patriarchs in the Old Testament did. The princes must fight against the evildoers and the terrible scribes (‘heyl­ losen schrifftgelerten’).28 Although God himself will change the world (‘voranderung der weldt’)29 in its last days and his spirit will reveal the coming ‘reformation’30 to the pious elect, it is necessary that the princes of Saxony take the sword and use it to 23 Günter Vogler, Anschlag oder Manifest? Überlegungen zu Thomas Müntzers Sendbrief von 1521, in: ditto, Thomas Müntzer und die Gesellschaft seiner Zeit [Thomas-Müntzer-Gesellschaft Veröffent­ lichungen no.4] (Mühlhausen, 2003), pp. 38–54; Bräuer and Vogler, Müntzer (note 16), p. 143 f. 24 Günther Franz (ed.), Thomas Müntzer. Schriften und Briefe [Quellen und Forschungen zur Re­ formationsgeschichte 33] (Gütersloh, 1968), p. 550,3 f. 25 Op. cit. p. 500,22. 26 For the historical and biographical setting cf. Bräuer and Vogler, Müntzer, p. 231 f. 27 Franz, Müntzer, Schriften, p. 247,7. 28 Op. cit. p. 247,13. 29 Op. cit. p. 255,16. 30 ‘[…] eine treffliche unuberwintliche zukünfftige reformation […]’. Op. cit. p. 255,24 f.

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expel all evildoers and to kill them. By referencing citations from the Old Testament which state that an impious person has no right to live and that those who hinder the service of God should be killed, Müntzer points out that the princes have to do their duty by following Paul in Romans, Chapter 13. If God determines in Exodus 22 that ‘you shall not let the evildoer live’,31 Müntzer then explains what the meaning of Romans 13 is: protecting the pious from evil people simply means killing the latter. Because the sword is necessary to extinguish wrongdoers, it must be used. If the princes refuse to make use of the sword, they should be aware that it will be taken from them and will be given to the common people. In this case they are no longer worthy of carrying the sword because they confess in words what they fail to realize in action. Political authorities that refuse to follow the prophet’s claim shall be murdered without any mercy. Impious people do not have any right to live: godless rulers, priests, and monks, both estates, shall be slaughtered and eliminated completely by the inspired elect – this is, in short, Müntzer’s antithesis to Luther’s version of the doctrine of the three estates established in God’s creation. In spring 1524 Müntzer was still willing to accept the prince’s authority if they used the sword to fight against all enemies of the gospel, meaning all the persons and groups Müntzer was opposed to. Some months later, during the Peasants’ War, Müntzer was willing to accept coalitions with the magistrate of Mühlhausen or federations of citizens and peasants. The worldly means changed, but his political vision of extinguishing the political and clerical estates and bringing the people into God’s everlasting kingdom remained constant. Now, in a last step, let me take a look at a post-Peasants’ War political manifesto from 1527 called Von der newen Wandlung eines christlichen Lebens (On the New Change of a Christian Life), that was printed by Michael Blum in Leipzig. This came into the possession of Hans Hergot, a printer from Nuremberg, who was captured with copies of the anonymous pamphlet and subsequently executed by the council of Leipzig due to its radical content.32 In the tradition of Joachim of Fiore, the pamphlet, written by an anonymous ‘poor man’, reveals the ‘third change’, in which all existing estates and institutions will be brought low by God himself, who will then establish a new order in which no one will again say: ‘This is mine.’ So, the community of communal goods will be the basic structure. None of the current estates will be perpetuated; between the present and the coming society there is no continuity. The organisational structure of the new society is based on a certain spatial entity called a ‘fluer’; in this there is a house of God (‘Gottes hewser’) and as many people as the ‘fluer’ can contain. They eat together from one pot and drink from the same jug; they work together as well. Even their children, the girls as well as the boys, will be brought up 31 Cf. op. cit. p. 259,13 f. 32 The text is edited in Adolf Laube and Hans Werner Seiffert (eds), Flugschriften der Reformationszeit (Berlin, 1975), pp. 547–557 (all terms mentioned above can be found here); on all r­ elevant questions about the pamphlet see: Carola Schelle-Wolff, Zwischen Erwartung und Aufruhr. Die Flugschrift ‘Von der newen wandlung eynes Christlichen lebens’ und der Nürnberger Drucker Hans Hergot [Europäische Hochschulschriften R. I, vol. 1549] (Frankfurt/Main, 1996).

Radical Political Thought in the Reformation Era35

together and educated in communal institutions and comprehensive schools; the ill and elderly are taken care of communally. Like the order of Carthusian monks, the society lives in harmony and without possessions; clothes are produced on the basis of whatever each ‘fluer’s’ land can support. The members of all ‘fluer’ elect one leader; he does not raise taxes, instead he travels around from ‘fluer’ to ‘fluer’ and acts as their supervisor. In addition to this leader, as the highest representative of the new society, but as one whose lifestyle does not differ from that of his people, twelve ‘landherrn’ are to be elected. Their purpose is, first and foremost, of a spiritual kind: they implement Jesus’s ideas and devote themselves to caring for the common welfare (‘gemeiner Nutzen’), the predominant value of the society of the ‘new change’. Although it seems obvious that monastic ideas had a strong impact on the society of the new change, monasteries were to be secularized under the new order. Everyone would be able to attend university, where the Holy Scriptures and the three ancient languages would be the main subjects. The scribes (‘Schriftgelehrte’) are portrayed negatively as they are in nearly every tract of the so-called radical reformers. The opportunity to publish on the printing press would by no means be restricted. The anonymous author of the tract is convinced that God had stood behind the Peasants’ War; every rebellion comes from him, and the tract announces that the big new change and the final judgement of the impious will come soon. Although no measures and persons are directly mentioned that will promote this ‘new change’, that the manifesto was of great political import is illustrated by the reaction of Leipzig city council, as mentioned above. What were the reasons for this harsh reaction? The text has no narrative framework like More’s Utopia and therefore cannot be read as ‘fiction’. The vision of society developed here is a total anti­thesis to the present world. The tract undermines all existing authorities and proposes a countermodel to all hierarchical powers and social distinctions. Its vision of society is strictly egalitarian and, in some respects, even democratic. To affirm positions like this publicly meant rejecting the legitimacy of the traditional order. It is clear that political ideas like that of the ‘new change’ are ‘radical’. But let me consider further what this means. Perhaps the following proposition might be helpful: politically radical positions in Reformation Germany are those that are unwilling or unable to accept differences and ambiguities – or to use an amazing German term – they are ambiguitätsintolerant. Politically ‘radical’ options are those that tend to wish to destroy opposing positions and people – the impious, for instance, the evil, the clerics, and so on – who are viewed as absolutely as Müntzer or Hutten did. ‘Radical’ includes ideas and assumptions about a monolithic structure, theoretically striving to abolish everything different from the one and only model of a homogeneous society. Additionally, some elements of utopian political imagination provided a fruitful resource for further developments. In contrast, the traditional concept of the three estates preserved a model of functional differentiation within society that proved helpful for tolerating differences and ambiguities – an idea of society that tended to conserve traditional structures and authorities.

Gerd Schwerhoff

Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’ ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation

I. ‘Radical Reformation’ – in 2016 we can hardly use this term without some reservations. It has always suffered from a certain essentialism. That is true of the classic opus magnum by George Williams from 1962, and also of his critics such as Günther Vogler and Adolf Laube, reasoning from a Marxist or social historical point of view. All these scholars were interested in mapping the religious landscape of the sixteenth century and assigning the heterogeneous Reformation movements to their rightful places in relation to those in Wittenberg or Zurich. This was particularly striking in the case of the metaphoric ‘left wing of the Reformation’, by means of which Roland Bainton and Heinold Fast linked religious movements of the sixteenth century with the twentieth century and political development.1 A turning point came with the work of Hans Jürgen Goertz, who, since the 1970s, has increasingly highlighted the multidimensionality of the concept of ‘radicalism’ and the need to define one’s perspective. At the same time, he hinted at the problems associated with the conventional typology.2 In his ‘cultural history’ interpretation, the author did not apply the label of radicalism to particular factions of the Reformation. Rather, he transformed the term into an ideal type, which would help ‘to understand the emerging and disintegrating dynamics of all Reformation movements’. Even the ‘moderate’ reformers, including Martin Luther, were measured against this ideal type, since it was possible 1 Pioneers: George H. Williams, ‘Introduction to the First Edition’, in: The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO, 1992), pp. xxix–xxxii. (1962); Günter Vogler, Gab es eine radikale Reformation? Bemerkungen zur Konzeption von G.H. Williams, in: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig, Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 14, no. 3 (1965), pp. 495–500; Heinold Fast (ed.), Der linke Flügel der Reformation. Glaubenszeugnisse der Täufer, Spiritualisten, Schwärmer und Antitrinitarier (Bremen, 1962), pp. ix–xxxv; in particular the articles by the editor and Adolf Laube in Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.), Radical Tendencies in the Reformation: Divergent Perspectives (Kirksville, MO, 1988); for the use of the term in recent research without any conceptual reflection see Ulrich A. Wien et al. (eds), Radikale Reformation. Die Unitarier in Siebenbürgen (Cologne, 2013). I would like to thank Cheryl Petreman and the team of the editors for their support with the English text. 2 Important works: Hans-Jürgen Goertz, ‘Einleitung’ in: Radikale Reformatoren. 21 biographische Skizzen von Müntzer bis Paracelsus (Munich, 1978), pp. 7–19; ditto, Religiöse Bewegungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1993) p. 660 ff.; ditto, Die Radikalität reformatorischer Bewegungen. Plädoyer für ein kulturgeschichtliches Konzept, in: Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert, eds Goertz and James M. Stayer (Berlin, 2002), pp. 29–42.

Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation37

to characterise them as radical figures during the period in which they were setting the Reformation movements into motion; i. e. striving to change the existing society. ‘Radicalism has become a characteristic of any movement which strives for social change, but has not yet achieved it. … This concept of radicalism is encapsulated in the entire spectrum of groups that broke with the Church of Rome.’3 As Goertz made unambiguously clear, such an understanding of radicalism expressly includes all factions, even the previous antipodes of the ‘left wing’ and, notably, Martin Luther – at least for the period during which he was pushing for change as part of the Reformation movement. Such an understanding of radicalism may capture the dynamics of Reformation events appropriately and also, in some respects, the self-perception of the Reformers. Nonetheless, Goertz’s concept remains an attempt at defining a quasi-­ objective criterion for classifying movements as ‘radical’: radicalism means undertaking efforts towards or even desiring societal change. So it seems to me that hitherto all attempts to analyse radicalism in the Reformation have ultimately been based on an essentialist system of coordinates. II. At this point, I wish to introduce a dimension, hitherto hardly considered, into the discussion of the radical Reformation, namely verbal radicalism. This leads us initially into the arena of present political and societal conflict. Some twenty years after the appearance of Judith Butler’s pioneering study Excitable Speech and in the year of Donald Trump’s US presidential election, it seems quite an obvious step to put insults and injuries, invectives and verbal abuses on the agenda of historical research, which has always been inspired by modern events.4 The present, it seems, can be characterised by a paradox: on the one hand the whole phenomenon of hate speech is being debated in the humanities and in the public sphere with increasing sensitivity towards any sort of linguistic disparagement and exclusion. Such discussions culminate in ‘trigger warnings’ against ‘microaggressions’. According to this concept, from minor disparagements it is only a small step to the manifestation of physical violence. Thus, each verbal insult can be classified as radicalism. On the other hand, an increase in, even a multiplication of, verbal injuries can be observed in many areas of modern life. This is true both when we focus on the political arena, where Donald Trump is merely one phenomenon among many, or on the internet, where anonymity facilitates an increasing flood of shit storms, flaming and trolling. These complex contemporary situations require equally complex analyses of injurious acts of speech within their societal contexts. This challenge is being taken up at the moment by an interdisciplinary research group in Dresden. We include all forms of disparaging and hurtful communication under the artificial term ‘invectivity’, a term that I will occasionally refer to in what follows. Our project’s interdisciplinary analysis will naturally include a strong historical dimension, which should enable us also to achieve a better 3 Goertz, Radikalität, pp. 41 and 32. 4 Judith Butler: Excitable Speech. A Politics of the performance (New York, 1997).

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understanding of the present-day universe of invective.5 The above-mentioned paradox of the present times – an increasing sensitivity in conjunction with escalating invective – makes it clear that a simple civilisation theory (as if to say: progressing from the harsh language of the pre-modern era to modern bourgeois sensitivity) can hardly be convincing. In fact, each historical era needs to be examined in its entire, often inconsistent, complexity. Also the question of whether or to what extent verbal insults can be classified as ‘radical’ should be of high interest, as much in the present day as well as for historical periods. The era in which the Reformation is embedded is undoubtedly a prime candidate for such research. III. Let us return now to the sixteenth century and to a very particular case study. Any

search for ‘verbal radicalism’ and ‘hate speech’ in the sources would not only reveal examples from both the left wing of the Reformation and supporters of the old church, but also and especially from the heart of the Lutheran Reformation. It is no secret that Martin Luther himself was a grand master of invective. Luther developed a pronounced talent for militant polemics with personal accusations and invectives inter­ lacing his confrontations with opponents. This was already apparent in connection with his meeting with Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg in 1518, but certainly by the time of his confrontation with Johann Eck at the Leipzig disputation in 1519.6 Polemics form a common thread throughout Luther’s writing, culminating in excessive outbursts in his later works. Particularly striking in this regard is Luther’s ‘last great tirade’, as Martin Brecht named the 1545 pamphlet Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil.7 This treatise was the reformer’s answer to Pope Paul III’s uncompromising call for the persecution of heretics. Luther’s treatise emphasised arguments that were very similar to those he had developed twenty-five years previously in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520). Above all, Luther turned against the doctrine of papal primacy and the pope’s exclusive right to call a general council, as well as denouncing the pope’s pretensions towards the German Empire. However, such a quick summary of this final furioso of Luther’s anti-papal works hardly does it justice. Luther filled a full quarter of the text with fireworks of invectives against the pope and the Roman Curia before he even provided a description of the contents. The character of the pamphlet as a piece of invective is underscored by the fact that the author commissioned his confidant Lucas Cranach to complete a series of corresponding images for the publication. The artwork left nothing to be desired in terms of graphic

5 Cf. Gerd Schwerhoff and Dagmar Ellerbrock, Invektivität. Ein neues Konzept auch für die Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Historische Zeitschrift (forthcoming). 6 Lyndal Roper: Martin Luther. Renegade and Prophet (London, 2016), pp. 119, 152 ff. 7 Martin Luther, Wider das Papsttum zu Rom, vom Teufel gestiftet, in: Martin Luthers Werke: Kriti­ sche Gesamtausgabe 54 (Weimar, 1928), pp. 195–299 (text and commentary) – abbreviated hereafter as WA 54; see also Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, vol. 3, Die Erhaltung der Kirche 1532–1546 (Stuttgart, 1987), p. 352 ff.

Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation39

vividness, as even the frontispiece woodcut demonstrates.8 It shows the pope seated on his throne inside the mouth of hell. This opening is surrounded by demons in the way that a beehive is surrounded by busy insects. The demons are shown to be the power behind the ceremony when the pope is crowned with the tiara. Luther repeatedly returned to this basic but eloquent theme: ‘And if the devil himself ruled in Rome, he could not make a worse job of it. Yes, if the devil himself ruled, we could cross ourselves and flee, so that he would achieve nothing. But now the pope has surrendered to him and draped God’s word as a mask around himself, so that we cannot see him. […] The Turk also deceives the world, but he does not sit in the temple of God and does not lead in the name of Christ and Saint Peter …, but rather he bombarded Christendom repeatedly and heaped glory on himself as its enemy. But this inner destroyer wants to be a friend, wants to be called ‘Father’, and is twice as bad as the Turk.’9

It is here that some fundamental principles of Luther’s rhetoric of invective become clear: employing comparisons such as this with the Turk or piling disparaging epithets on top of each other. He calls him the ‘head of the cursed church, the worst of all villains on Earth, a governor of the devil, an enemy of God, an adversary of Christians and a destroyer of the Church of Christ, a teacher of all lies, blasphemy and idolatry, a thief and robber of churches …, a murderer of kings, an agitator for the spilling of blood, a pimp of whores above all pimps and all fornication, even those who cannot be named, an anti-Christian … a true werewolf ’.10

It seems as if the reformer wanted to use all possible means of linguistic defamation and the stigmatisation of his adversaries simultaneously.11 The citizen of Wittenberg did not even shy away from sexual slurs, such as when he referred to the cardinals of the pope’s court as sodomites and hermaphrodites: ‘a parte ante viri, a parte post mulieres’. Going beyond the accusation of spiritual depravity, Luther was referring here to the contemporary reputation of Rome as a hotbed of vice, which was clearly intended to put it on a level with the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah and also implied that Rome’s inhabitants deserved to fall victim to the wrath of God and his punishments. Even if this fireworks of invectives gives the impression of spontaneity, as if erupting from out of the author, every term has its own precise meaning. From the beginning of his publishing activities, the denigration of the Roman bishop, as blasphemer for example, had belonged to Luther’s standard repertoire. He   8 For an overview of the complicated document transmission, see WA 54, pp. 346–373. Fronti­ spiece in Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett: http://kk.haum-bs.de/?id=l-cranach-werkstatt-ab3–0003 (accessed 31/11/16).   9 WA 54, p. 268 f. 10 Ibid. p. 283 f. 11 Ibid. p. 207, 215; curses: ibid. pp. 222, 226 f., 277.

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manipulated the words of Scripture, propagated false legends instead of the words of Christ (‘Lügenden’ vs ‘Legenden’) and emphasised that false relics such as the alleged Veil of Veronica were in reality nothing more than soiled rags intended to ‘mock the poor Christians as apes [or] fools’.12 From very early on, the epithet of epicurean was equally central to Luther’s characterisation of his opponents as blasphemers. The accusation that the pope and his cardinals adhered to ‘epicurean beliefs’ – making them enemies of God and the people – served Luther as a synonym for what we call atheism today. Luther claimed that these Roman epicureans were actually scorning the entire Christian doctrine, since they were of the opinion ‘that there was no God, no hell, no life after this one, but rather that one lives and dies like a cow, a pig or other cattle’.13 The word of God, in which the Germans believed, counted for nothing to the pope: Do you Germans believe, the pope is cited verbatim, ‘that we are such fools as you, and that we want to believe such jugglery and foolishness about God and your dead Christ?’ It is better to reign over the beasts than to be governed by them, and so good Christians must be grasped by their faith; thus the German beasts are ruled, as a bear is led by a nose ring.14 According to Luther, the papacy’s political program could be summarised as a cynical instrument for safeguarding power! In no way does this comprehensive repertoire of villainous images that Luther associates with the pope and the curia conceal mere interchangeable prejudices. This applies, for example, when Luther characterizes the pope as a criminal, as ‘a desperate, scheming scoundrel, murderer, traitor, liar and the primal source of evil of all the wickedest people on Earth’, and as someone who communicates with others in the criminal language of Rotwelsch.15 This criminalisation provided Luther with the chance to illustrate many scenarios of secular punishment, although he conceded that only otherworldly punishment constituted an appropriate sanction for the crimes committed. After we have taken Rome from the pope, including the whole patrimony of Peter which he had robbed from the empire, – thus runs Luther’s punishment fantasy – we should rip out the pope’s and his entourage’s tongues from the back of their throats, as is done to blasphemers, and nail them to the gallows – all in a row, in the same manner that 12 Ibid. pp. 251 f. and 255, compare with pp. 251 f. and 261, On blasphemy see Gerd Schwerhoff, Zungen wie Schwerter. Blasphemie in alteuropäischen Gesellschaften 1250–1650 (Konstanz, 2005), p. 66 ff.; on ‘Lügenden’ see Marina Münkler, Legende/Lügende. Die protestantische Polemik gegen die katholische Legende und Luthers Lügend von St. Johanne Chrysostomo in: Gottlosigkeit und Eigensinn. Religiöse Devianz im konfessionellen Zeitalter, eds Eric Piltz and Gerd Schwerhoff (Berlin, 2015), pp. 121–147. 13 WA 54, p. 220, compare with pp. 224 and 226. This reference to the Second Epistle of Peter is misleading, since we are warned here about false prophets in general. The quoted passages should instead be Ecclesiastes 3:19, see Gerd Schwerhoff, Die alltägliche Auferstehung des Fleisches. Religiöser Spott und radikaler Unglaube um 1500, in: Historische Anthropologie 12 (2004), pp. 309–337. On the stereotypical Epicure and Luther’s Epicurean enemy see Gottfried Maron, Martin Luther und Epikur. Ein Betrag zum Verständnis des alten Luther (Göttingen,1989). 14 WA 54, p. 282 f. 15 Ibid. p. 217 f.

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papal bulls are decorated with their official seals. Then, he continues, they could ‘hold council’ at the gallows.16 This church meeting at the gallows is graphically portrayed in one of Cranach’s images, which shows the secular punishment eclipsed by the fact that demons have already taken the souls of those executed. It is quite plausible that this illustration would be especially effective for contemporary viewers, because Cranach is availing himself of a specific genre of defamatory iconography here, namely the so-called ‘Schelt- und Schandbilder’. This genre of images depicts high-ranking nobles engaging in degrading acts, such as riding on a donkey or hanging from the gallows, as a punishment for their transgressions or delinquent deeds.17 Luther goes on to let his penal imagination run free in another section, where the sentence of hanging is replaced by that of drowning. In this case, though, the body of water is ironically represented as a therapeutic bath designed to cure the affliction of papal holiness.18 Using a somewhat more extraordinary and original symbolism, the allusion to the papal donkey acts as the common thread throughout the pamphlet. It even appeared in one of Cranach’s woodcuts. It can be traced back to a 1496 illustration depicting a monster with the head of a donkey appearing on the banks of the River Tiber. It was already apparent at that time that this was to be interpreted as a divine manifestation directed at Pope Alexander VI, but then the image was further exploited by Melanchthon during the early Reformation in propaganda dating back to 1523. This image provided the powerfully eloquent reformer with a range of opportunities to attack the depravity and foolishness of papal utterances, for example with allusions to the braying of a donkey (‘hee-haw, hee-haw’) or even its big, nasty ‘thunder fart’.19 Sometimes Luther ironically advised the ‘dear papal donkey’ to take care not to break his legs on the thin slippery ice when disputing sovereignty with the emperor. He intended to make readers laugh at the pope and thus commit (using his own words) ‘limen Crese maiestatis’ against the holy seat (a deliberate mangling of the Latin crimen lese maiestatis, meaning the crime of lèse-majesté or insulting a sovereign). At other times he increased the tempo to an outright staccato, with each of his short passages opening with a concise vilification of his opponent as a ‘papal donkey’ – ‘farting donkey’ – ‘donkey pope’, ‘donkey-fart pope’. This donkey figure was as specific in the interpretative horizon of the Reformation as the technique of degrading people by comparing them with animals was universal.20 One could imagine that the seemingly endless stream of denigrations would gradually fatigue the reader, despite, or perhaps because of, its directness. However, the opposite is actually true. In fact, the mastery of Luther’s rhetoric lies in the ability to 16 Ibid. p. 243. Woodcut in: Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett: http://kk.haum-bs.de/?id=l-cranachwerkstatt-ab3–0007 (accessed 31/11/16). 17 Matthias Lentz: Konflikt, Ehre, Ordnung Untersuchungen zu den Schmähbriefen und Schandbildern des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (ca. 1350 bis 1600) (Hannover, 2004). 18 Ibid. p. 283. 19 Ibid. pp. 237 and 272 f. 20 For comparisons with animals see Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann, Sprachliche Ausgrenzung im späten Mittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2013) p. 40 ff.

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hold the reader’s attention by means of stylistic variations. Inherent in his r­ hetoric was a series of contrasts made between high and low, heaven and hell, which served to expose blatantly the pope’s reversal of all values. The language of the curia was held responsible for systematically overturning everything. For example, Luther explained that when they say ‘free’, to the Germans it means ‘held captive’. When they say white, it is actually black. When they speak about the Christian church, they mean ‘the worst of all villains in Rome’. The curia’s intention is to denigrate the laudable German Nation as being composed of beasts and barbarians. Thus it is no wonder that, in the language of the curia, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost rank among the heretics and non-Christians.21 The greatest contrast exists between the anti-Christian curia, which claimed to rule over all three continents of Africa, Asia and Europe, and the behaviour of God’s son in the desert who, according to the testimony of Scripture, spurned the devil’s attempts to offer him world domination: God spoke to him: Get thee hence, Satan. ‘But what does the pope say? Come here, Satan, and do you have another world besides this one. I want to acquire them all, and not only worship you, but also kiss your backside.’22

By means of such fundamentalist rhetoric, Luther is also equally able to switch to the ironic register and make verbal bows before the wisdom of the papal art of exegesis, only to invite his reader in the next moment to ridicule this laughable assertion.23 Likewise, Luther constantly parodied the pope’s honorary title and traditional liturgy. For example, right from the beginning there would have been no need to hold councils, if the pope had just dictated these rules: ‘Hellish Father’, tell us, what we should believe and worship. ‘Thus we will sing the merry song of your holiness: Virgo ante partum, in partu, post partum …’24 One of Luther’s favourite techniques was to create fictional dialogues. These were sometimes held with the reader, at other times directly with those opponents who wanted to silence him as a heretic: ‘Silence, you heretic, what comes out of your mouth is unspeakable.’ I hear you. Which mouth do you mean? The one from which the farts come out? (You can have that one!) Or the one into which the good Corsican wine flows? (Let a dog shit in there!). ‘Hey you, most disgraceful Luther, should you be speaking to the pope in such a manner?’ Hey to you too, you blasphemous, desperate villain and coarse donkey, should you also be speaking to the emperor and the empire in that manner?’25

21 22 23 24 25

WA 54, p. 212 f. Ibid. p. 265. Ibid. p. 239. Ibid. p. 207. Ibid. p. 221. See also pp. 273 and 287 f.

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Passages like these also illustrate an element used to an inflationary degree in Luther’s pamphlets, namely the volleys of scatological fire and faecal slurs, from ‘filth’ and ‘stench’ to ‘shit’ and ‘farts’, the graphic nature of which still causes scholars – even in this day and age – difficulty in citing them without becoming embarrassed.26 Instead of numerous quotes, I will limit myself here to pointing out that this motive is evident in four of Cranach’s ten illustrations. For example, one image portrays what Luther repeatedly postulated in his writing, namely that the papacy ‘was born from the devil’s backside’.27 The woodcut not only illustrates this perverse birth, but also the rearing of the young pope by the attentive demons with heads like Medusa, who are depicted both breastfeeding and rocking the cradle. Other images in this series employ scatological disparagements even more suggestively. Positioned on a ledge above the papal coat of arms with its two crossed keys, a farmer answers a call of nature in the papal tiara. His two comrades are shown pulling up their pants after apparently having done the same thing. A stronger insult to the papal insignia, and thus to the office of the topmost church dignitary, is hardly imaginable. The accompanying text explains that the pope has done to God’s realm exactly what this man has just done to the pope’s upturned crown – the invitation to ‘pour confidently’ (‘getrost einzuschenken’) is directly attributed to Martin Luther. And in fact, in later life the reformer explained that the pope had unlawfully taken the keys of Saint Peter. Luther writes in his commentary on Cranach’s woodcut: ‘Therefore we may in good conscience bring his coat of arms, in which he carries the keys, complete with his crown to the privy and use it for our calls of nature. Afterwards we should throw it in the fire (it would be better if it were the pope himself).’28 Finally, another scatological motive dominates the illustration of the pope’s ride on a sow. The pope is shown is holding a large steaming pile of faeces in his hand. This image refers on the one hand to what Germany had to expect from the council which the pope had convened to Trent: lies and illusions, to be precise: a pile of dung. But furthermore the caricature points to a popular adage, that people are only able to ride a sow without being bitten if they tempt her with such an offering. The figure of the pope is tainted here by his association with both the unclean pig and 26 Danielle Mead Skjelver, German Hercules: The Impact of Scatology on the Definition of Martin Luther as a Man 1483–1546, in: Pittsburgh Undergraduate Review 14, no. 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 30–78, available online: (https://www.academia.edu/1016951/German_Hercules_The_Impact_ of_Scatology_on_the_Image_of_Martin_Luther_as_a_Man_1483–1546, accessed 31/11/16) 27 WA 54, pp. 260 & 288. Woodcut in: Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett: http://kk.haum-bs.de/?id=lcranach-werkstatt-ab3-0002 (accessed 31/11/16). 28 Ibid. p. 242 f. Cranach’s image ‘Belvedere’ used similar iconography. The pope is sitting on his throne holding a bull of excommunication in his hand. This is symbolised by the lightning bolts emerging from the bottom of this powerful document. The accompanying text claims, however, that the farmer was not afraid of the bull, but rather answered the pope by lowering his trousers and farting at the head of the church – an expression of the highest contempt, but also the natural embodiment of the impotence of papal excommunication, which remains as ineffectual as the farts of a commoner, perhaps even smelling the same.

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the ­faeces in his hand. Nonetheless, there is in fact an additional layer of iconography here, which attributes to the pope the same social stigma as the Jews. The portrayal resembles closely the well-known motive of the Judensau, which, for example, ‘decorated’ Frankfurt’s bridge tower until 1801. The vocabulary of the image functions similarly in both illustrations, with the unclean animal being equated with the pope and the Jews respectively. Furthermore, the task which the figures are depicted performing (carrying excrement or sucking from the teats, anus or vulva of the sow) only served to intensify this uncleanness. It would not be too daring an interpretation to say that the invective against the pope illustrated here was merged with that used against the Jews in a similar treatise that the Wittenberg reformer had completed a short time before.29 IV. The fact that Luther served up his whole arsenal of invective to his old adversary in Rome is hardly surprising. But how did things stand with the opponents in his own camp? By way of a short comparison, I will examine his antagonism towards Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt as expressed in the tract Against the Heavenly Prophets at the crucial moment in 1524/25.30 Karlstadt’s significance as perhaps Luther’s most important companion in Wittenberg and increasingly as his antagonist in the years prior to 1525 has recently been pointed out in detail by Lyndal Roper.31 Whole worlds lie between Karlstadt and the distant pope in Rome: Luther had disputed with Karlstadt in Jena some months previously and would grant temporary asylum to Karlstadt’s family half a year after he published the ‘Heavenly Prophets’. And this difference is indeed mirrored very clearly in the tone and contents of Luther’s written invective. He forgoes scatological sorties entirely here. Instead he appears at first glance to be showing respect for Karlstadt’s academic education by obstinately designating his adversary as ‘Doctor’. Admittedly this address quickly proves to be bitter irony, since he often contrasts the title with evidence of Karlstadt’s attempts at humility (‘wearing a grey robe and felt hat, not wanting to be named doctor, but rather brother Andreas and beloved neighbour’). Behind this alleged humility hid pure intellectual vanity, according to Luther’s accusation. In this manner he made fun of the vast extent of Karlstadt’s writings as well as of the three years that Karlstadt had required to write what Luther would have finished off in three weeks.32 Luther takes more frequent aim 29 Cranach’s woodcut in: Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett: http://kk.haum-bs.de/?id=l-cranach-werkstatt-ab3-0005 (accessed 31/11/16); Isaiah Shachar: The Judensau. A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and its History [Warburg Institute Surveys 5] (London, 1974); on the much discussed problem of ‘Luther and the Jews’, most recently: Thomas Kaufmann, Luthers Juden, (Stuttgart, 2014). 30 Martin Luther Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sakrament, in: Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 18 (Weimar, 1928), pp. 37–214 (text and commentary), abbreviated hereafter as WA 18; see also Johannes Schwitalla, Martin Luthers argumentative Polemik: mündlich und schriftlich, in: Formen und Formgeschichte des Streitens. Der Literaturstreit, eds Franz Josef Worstbrock and Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen, 1986), pp. 41–54. 31 Roper, Luther, e. g. pp. 217 ff., 241 ff. 32 WA 18, pp. 100, 101 f. and 213.

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at the incorrect teachings of his opponents, particularly those displaying a knowledge of Hebrew or Greek. Luther shows his command of diverse registers of rhetorical campaigns here even more so than in his later anti-papal tract.33 His primary verbal weapon is not the foil, however, but the sword. The recurrent theme is made clear right at the start: ‘Doctor Andreas Karlstadt has fallen out with us and become our arch-enemy’.34 He is, the text continues, ‘a false evil spirit’.35 This ‘spirit’ is a type of keyword in the characterisation of Karlstadt. The answer to a supposed rhetorical objection from his listeners is instructive in that it refers to the fact that Karlstadt’s congregation had distanced themselves from Thomas Müntzer: ‘Yes, you say Dr. Karlstadt will not murder. That is noticeable in the letter that the man from Orlamünde wrote to the the people from Allstedt.’ Luther’s response: ‘I do not ask any more what Dr. Karlstadt wants say or do. He files away at the truth there, and not for the first time. I am speaking about the spirit that they have, which drives them, which is not good and which has murder and rebellion in mind …’36 Luther’s convictions are clear here as in many other passages; Karlstadt’s teaching is linked to the violent iconoclasm and fundamentalist extirpation of all who believe differently, beginning with questioning the official authorities and ending in their overthrow by the cruel ‘rabble’. Additionally, it is already clear in the change from the third person singular into the plural that Karlstadt stands here pars pro toto for the community of heavenly prophets, as the pamphlet’s title states, for the so-called enthusiasts (‘Schwärmer’). Luther claims that behind these individuals stands the spirit of the preacher of Allstedt, repeatedly conjured up, who is at the same time a ‘lying spirit’, a ‘murderous spirit’, and a ‘rotting spirit’.37 As is made clear again and again with increasing intensity throughout the text, this spirit is ultimately the evil foe, the devil himself!38 Ultimately, Luther’s invective remains ambivalent with respect to Karlstadt. On the one hand, he is accused of possessing many dishonouring and offensive qualities, including criminal traits, and he is characterised as a liar, ‘scoundrel’, and ‘villain’.39 Above all, these comparisons and interlinked ideas imply a de-individualisation of Luther’s opponents. Karlstadt’s teachings are put on the same level as the entire camps of the enthusiasts and as Müntzer, despite all his efforts to distance himself. He is thus the object of collective stigmatisation. On the other hand the term ‘spirit’ that is constantly used does not imply any direct verbal identification of Karlstadt with the devil – since the former had distanced himself from the excessive expression of enthusiasm, the possibility of his reconciliation with Luther still remained and even 33 For his mockery of Karlstadt’s followers in Orlamünde by means of verbatim citations from the controversy which he had with some of them during his visit there, see WA 18, p. 83. 34 WA 18, p. 62. 35 Ibid. p. 66. 36 Ibid. p. 88. 37 WA 18, pp. 73, 96. 38 Finally, ibid. p. 213. 39 Ibid. p. 201.

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the renewal of their friendship.40 Nonetheless, locating Karlstadt in the midst of all the enemies and associating him with the diabolical spirit himself is a very far-reaching condemnation, which was taken further by comparing Karlstadt’s ‘rotting spirit’ directly with that of the pope: ‘You are both breaking with the Christian freedom and are both anti-Christian. But the pope does it through rules, Dr. Karlstadt through prohibitions’.41 Thus despite his ability to differentiate, Luther’s polemics led to his opponents being placed on a level footing. V. I shall stop exploring examples from Luther’s texts at this point to now take a brief look at historiographical aspects. His verbal sorties are hard to overlook, yet they are difficult to interpret. Earlier generations of researchers were often inclined to turn a blind eye, since they were embarrassed by utterances that were awkward and unsuitable ‘for bourgeois parlours’. Nevertheless, there is now growing awareness that Luther’s use of ‘crude speech’ to preach God’s word – as Heiko Oberman explained in 1982 – should not be suppressed, ‘and especially not because such things have become offensive today’.42 Yet a certain amount of uncertainty remains. Luther’s invectives have often been summarised under the generic term of ‘polemics’ or polemic pamphlets, which does not make the problem any easier. In fact in addition to all the uncertainty attached to the concept of polemics, there is also the idea of systematic aggressive controversy as well as Luther’s somewhat excessive, even personal invective.43 Bernhard Lohse dedicated a whole chapter to Luther’s polemics, which are characterised by strong ambivalence, if not to say by outright contradiction.44 Polemical sharpness of argument, according to Lohse, was not specific to Luther – yet he possessed the coarseness and raunchiness to eclipse the majority of his contemporaries. Lohse expresses strong criticism of Luther’s verbal intemperance, but he praises, on the other hand, ‘his tenderness of feeling and compassion.’ Thus, Lohse neither makes a case for glorifying nor damning Luther; but Luther’s speech is – like so many things – indicative of the fact that his personality blasted through customary boundaries. In fact, the author of the most extensive Luther biography, Martin Brecht, wrote a separate article entitled Luther the Blusterer.45 This work ultimately ends in an anthology of very strong disparagements, although Brecht attempts to stimulate understanding for Luther’s temperamental nature by combining such quotes with gentle criticism of the hero’s human weaknesses. 40 Ibid. pp. 18 and 90. Diagnosing an increasing identification of Karlstadt with the devil (excessive, in my opinion): Schwitalla, Polemik, p. 49 ff. 41 WA 18, p. 111. 42 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther – Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel (Munich, 1986), pp. 112 & 114. 43 H. Stauffer, Polemik, in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 6, eds Gert Ueding et al. (Tübingen, 2003), pp. 1403–1415. 44 Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther. Eine Einführung in sein Leben und Sein Werk, (Munich, 1997), p. 101 ff. 45 Martin Brecht, Der ‘Schimpfer’ Martin Luther, in: Martin Luther, vol. 1, Sein Weg zur Reformation, 1483–1521 (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 97–113.

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The anti-papal invective from 1545 under discussion above could ultimately be classified as merely a misguided late work in which Luther totally lost control of his temper.46 Heinz Schilling resorted to structural history in his historical Luther bibliography, proposing that Luther’s strong language is indicative of a change in the culture of language: away from a Catholic ‘magical’ culture of cursing and towards an ‘internalised punishment through insults’47 – an interpretation which is as incidental as it is daring. Nevertheless, given the flourishing research examining modern ‘hate speech’, evidence is growing of the need for further studies of the historical manifestations of ‘invectivity’ in general and those in the context of the Reformation in particular. Pioneering work has, unsurprisingly, been done on this topic by scholars in literary studies. Leading the way is Kai Bremer’s study of sixteenth-century confessional polemical pamphlets. Although it discusses the dispute between Luther and Emser, the role of invective is not explicitly mentioned.48 That was later done by Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann in her large panorama describing how stigmatisation and social exclusion can be accomplished through language. Unsurprisingly, Luther sporadically appears here in the role of a crown witness. Nonetheless, as indicated by her choice of title (Sprachliche Ausgrenzung: Verbal Exclusion), invective speech was only thought to perform one function, namely exclusion.49 In contrast, the theologian Constance Furey conceded that the invective used by Luther and other theologians also had an epistemological function, which I will return to shortly.50 Finally, Luther’s polemical and defamatory utterances have been given more space in the new biography by Lyndal Roper, who dedicated a whole chapter to ‘hatred’.51 VI. In the last part of my essay I will offer some preliminary reflections concerning three aspects of Luther’s invective: (1) socialisation, (2) intention and/or motivation, and (3) function and effect. The keyword ‘socialisation’ stands for an approach pursued in many of Luther’s biographies, namely searching his social environment for the reasons behind his ‘invectivity’. It naturally made sense in the century of ­Sigmund Freud to trace Luther’s scatology back to an early traumatic experiences during Luther’s childhood and identity crisis, as Erik Erikson did in his 1958 Young 46 Ibid. p. 111 f. 47 Heinz Schilling, Martin Luther. Rebell in einer Zeit des Umbruchs, (Munich, 2012), p. 533. 48 Kai Bremer, Religionsstreitigkeiten. Volkssprachliche Kontroversen zwischen altgläubigen und evangelischen Theologen im 16. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 2005). 49 Lobenstein-Reichmann, Sprachliche Ausgrenzung. 50 Constance M. Furey, Invective and Discernment in Martin Luther, D. Erasmus, and Thomas More, in: Havard Theological Review 98 (2005), pp. 469–488. 51 Roper, Martin Luther, p. 381 ff.; still important for the entire complex of topics: Mark Edwards Jr., Luther’s Polemical Controversies, in: The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (New York, 2003), pp. 192–208; Johannes Schwitalla, Brutalität und Schamverletzung in öffentlichen Polemiken des 16. Jahrhunderts, in: Gewalt in der Sprache. Rhetoriken verletztenden Sprechens, eds Sybille Krämer and Elke Koch (Munich, 2010), pp. 97–123.

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Man Luther.52 However, this restricted view of scatology achieves little, especially when the anal fixation is pushed so far that Luther is made into a prototype and principal witness for the German national character, whose flip side is seen as having a compulsive drive towards cleanliness, which in turn leads inevitably to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.53 Considering Luther’s actions in a social-historical context, it seems reasonable to explain his ‘invectivity’ as the result of popular contemporary modes of behaviour. Oberman states the plain truth when he writes that Luther’s choice of words was ‘neither remarkable nor scandalous; that is how people talked in those days […], and that was true not only in the monastery.’54 As true as this hint at contemporary conventions may be in principle, it seems to me misleading to characterize Luther’s ‘invectivity’ as a mere symptom of a universal habit of speech. Conversely, it could be said that Martin Luther’s ‘invectivity’ was trend-setting for the religious confrontations which followed. There were of course defamatory speakers and preachers of hate in all confessional camps, but no one – neither Eck nor Müntzer – could hold a candle to the man from Wittenberg. So what were his intentions and his motives? In this respect, Heiko A. Oberman’s observations are also worth considering: he highlights Luther’s apocalyptically oriented world view and lifelong battle with the devil. This struggle with Satan demanded ‘drastic means’ and his ‘speech saturated with excrement ’ was one such means, ‘the expression of a painful struggle waged with body and soul against a nemesis, who was threatening his body and soul’.55 Other works on church history have followed this track and interpreted the anti-papal treatises against the backdrop of Luther’s fundamentalism, imbued as it is with dualism. In fact, this approach corresponds to the reformer’s own view: he sees the pope as the Antichrist and declares without hesitation ‘regnum Satanae et Papae’ to be the same thing. The head of the Roman Church appears here as the true Antichrist, as the one prophesied to appear at the end of the world in the Book of Revelation. The characterisation sketched out here by Luther is nothing less than the symbol of extreme damnability, of the filth and sordidness of human excrement, by means of which he aims to promote an idea of Hell as the proverbially least clean place of all. In this way he also reflects on his own use of insults and invectives, which are still too weak to describe the pope’s depravity suitably: ‘I am immeasurably inadequate to mock the pope. He has mocked the world for over 600 years now and grazed on the destruction of its body and soul, of good and glory … I only mock with my weak mockery so that those

52 Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (London, 1962), p. 223 ff. 53 Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder. A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore (New York, 1984), especially pp. 59 ff. and 121 ff. 54 Oberman, Luther, p. 113 f. 55 Ibid. p. 114.; see also ditto, Teufelsdreck. Eschatology and Scatology in the ‘Old’ Luther, in: Sixteenth Century Journal 19/3 (1988), pp. 435–450.

Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation49

who live now and those that come after us should know what I thought of the pope, that damned Antichrist.’56 Following his own convictions, Luther turned his enemies’ filthy verbal weapons – those of the popes, the Antichrist, the devil – against themselves. This quote shows how much Luther had himself looked critically at the role of speech, invective and profanation, and how well he operated on the level that we can call meta-invective. This was pointed out recently by Carol Furey. Although Luther had not himself developed a proper theology of ‘invectivity’, he emphasised its epistemological role and saw it as a way ‘to challenge the existing order of things’.57 I would like to emphasise this point as follows: in my opinion, if Luther had not had recourse to invective, the breakthrough of his teachings would be difficult to explain. It seems too weak to say that his disparagement of opponents should be understood merely as an expression of a particular world view, above all of his dualist fundamentalism. Rather, his radical invective was one important medium through which he first put such fundamentalism into words, actually gave it true expression. His radical and profane speech underlined his distance from the old corrupt church; the reformer tore his followers and himself, quasi forcibly, out of its midst and burnt all bridges for possible compromise behind them. In this respect we could view radical speech as a vehicle by which to arrive at greater intellectual clarity. Yet at the same time the emotional plane is pivotal too; interpreting his ‘invectivity’ as a catchy instrument of didactic exchange in the confessional arena obviously falls short.58 On the contrary, Luther’s ‘invectivity’ has a great deal more to do with the fiery core of his theological convictions, since this seems to be the proper expression for his existential anguish. He directs his powerful language not only at his listeners and followers but also at himself. In that sense his ‘invectivity’ acts as a vehicle for self-radicalisation and self-enthusing. These tentative musings with their overt generalisations do not deny that Luther’s ‘invectivity’, which in any case is highly sensitive to context, could acquire completely different hues and nuances. Luther’s anti-papal engagement is certainly a glowing kernel within his polemical works. In contrast, his vilification of enemies from within his own camp appears hesitant and restrained. In the case of Karlstadt, his mood swung between cautious hope and disappointment. One notorious trend is discernible, though, in Luther’s attitude towards the Jews. Initial optimism that they might convert en masse was transformed into the radically hostile and ostracising tones of his 1543 pamphlet, which combined all known stereotypes into a cascading summary of damaging insults. Luther not only used contemporary anti-Jewish stereotypes. Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann posits that a strategic factor could have played a role: Luther 56 WA 54, p. 215; see also Brecht, Luther, vol. 3, p. 355; for Luther the only alternatives were salvation or damnation: ‘nuances, distinctions and relativisations were no longer possible’. … ‘Luther had, as he himself admitted, written about the pope’s outrageous behaviour while in a rage, and his agitation was not mollified by the experience because the atrocities were too extensive.’ 57 Furey, Invective, p. 472. 58 As Bremer, Religionsstreitigkeiten, p. 195, puts it.

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had to defend himself against his opponent Johann Eck’s strategy of denouncing him as a heretic. Together with Andreas Osiander, Eck publicly vilified the Wittenberg reformer as a friend of the Jews in his 1541 Judenbüchlein. Thus, it could be said that Eck had virtually ‘driven [Luther] to this point’ and provoked him towards radically alienating the Jews.59 This observation points at the need to investigate Luther’s ‘invectivity’ in juxtaposition to his antagonists’ treatises. However, I would like to use Lobenstein-Reichmann’s insight to shift to my third and final level of analysis, to the functions and effects of Luther’s ‘invectivity’. Although his speech patterns undoubtedly contributed to his overall success as the first ‘media star’ of the post-Gutenberg era (Thomas Kaufmann), long-utilised concepts such as ‘opinion making’ and ‘propaganda’ are certainly too weak to describe the fundamental trend towards dichotomy which gained ground in the sixteenth century.60 The ideas of Kai Bremer (building on the work of Georg Simmel) are plausible here, in that he emphasised the ‘collectivising effect of the dispute’, or its function as a means of group formation and dispersal. The type of emotional mobilisation employed by Luther led to the establishment of group consciousness, which – according to Simmel – fed on the ‘primal need for enmity’ felt by humans. It has been well established that the inner constitution of a group goes hand in hand with its segregation from others and the establishment of enemy stereotypes.61 Thus, the effect of Luther’s ‘invectivity’ with regard to the desired goal was already ambivalent. The suggestive verbal cascades used by Luther, that ‘gifted simplifier’ (Roper), certainly appeared attractive and fascinating to his followers. Yet they are not likely to have reached the sceptical or undecided.62 Thus, the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion escalated and provoked a loss of contact with those who were not confident in standing by his side. The camp of the Strasbourg reformers was perhaps initially driven to Karlstadt’s side by Luther’s rude accusations against his former comrade.63 In this sense, ‘invectivity’ is actually a moment of radicalisation – the escalation of hostility and the accompanying refusal to communicate. Of course, we can see invectivity as the mere expression of an underlying camp mentality, the ‘irreconcilability’ of the conflicting parties due to their respective claims to possess absolute authority or their mutually exclusive claims to the truth. However, these camps had not existed from the beginning, they had evolved instead over time. It is clearly evident here that irreconcilability and exclusion were actually produced by means of ‘invectivity’ and not just ‘depicted’ in it. However, the resulting social configuration was not the inevitable outcome: even 59 Lobenstein-Reichmann, Sprachliche Ausgrenzung, pp. 256–258. 60 On propaganda above all: Bob Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, (Oxford, 2004), p. 1 ff. 61 Georg Simmel, Der Streit, in: Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 284–382, 300 (‘Feindseligkeit’); Bremer, Religionsstreitigkeiten, p. 213 ff. 62 Roper, Luther, pp. 354, 422. 63 WA 18, p. 47 f.

Radicalism and ‘Invectivity’: ‘Hate Speech’ in the German Reformation51

after his unforgiving treatise against Karlstadt, Luther was surprisingly ready to offer temporary accommodation in Wittenberg to his opponent’s entire family in the aftermath of the German Peasants’ Revolt.64 VII. The limits of an analysis centred on two isolated pamphlets written by Luther are clearly evident. In the course of these reflections, opportunities for expanding the interpretative horizon have presented themselves. For example, the Reformer’s excrement-saturated speech has yet to be viewed in a comparative perspective – how did it compare with the speech of his predecessors, fellow reformers and adversaries? The invective of other Reformation era protagonists should be studied as intensively as Luther’s. Kerstin Lundström has recently untertaken this type of analysis for Melchior Hoffmann’s works.65 Nonetheless, concentration on specific authors tends to hide the fact that invectives were usually integrated into the escalating communication between two or more antagonists. Hence, future analyses will focus more strongly on polemical pamphlets in the context of specific conflicts, as Bremer and others have already begun to do. At least as important would be a closer examination of particular key invective concepts and discursive nodes such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘godlessness’.66 The challenge will be ultimately to reconstruct a compre­hensive history of Reformation communication from multiple heterogeneous media and discourses and to determine the significance of invective in that context. As limited as it may be, the test case of Luther nevertheless suggests that invective held a central position in this communication history. Over thirty years ago, Rainer Wohlfeil sketched out the contours of the ‘public sphere of the Reformation’, which he understood to be the forerunner of the modern public sphere described by Jürgen Habermas. Wohfeil saw the new quality of this public sphere in the Reformation era both in contrast to the earlier socially and spatially fragmented public spheres of the late Middle Ages and in its function of surmounting social and class barriers through the inclusion of the common people.67 The content of the reformatory message was central to this change: the proclamation of the Word of God. Disputes about fundamental aspects of salvation appealed to everyone in a similar manner, regardless of their social standing. This meant ultimately that the issue here was one of opinion 64 Roper, Luther, p. 269. 65 Kerstin Lundström, Polemik in den Schriften Melchior Hoffmans. Inszenierungen rhetorischer Streit­kultur in der Reformationszeit (Stockholm, 2015); but see earlier: Peter Matheson, The ­Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1998). 66 Cf. Eric Piltz and Gerd Schwerhoff (eds), Gottlosigkeit und Eigensinn. Religiöse Devianz im konfessionellen Zeitalter, in: Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, Beihefte 51 (Berlin, 2015); in general, Bent Jörgensen, Konfessionelle Selbst- und Fremdbezeichnungen. Zur Terminologie der Religions­ parteien im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2014). The topic of invective labelling was pervasive throughout the London 2016 symposium; for example, Ryrie’s contribution describes how the derogatory term ‘scripturians’ was used to refer to orthodox Protestants. 67 R. Wohlfeil, Reformatorische Öffentlichkeit, in: Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit, eds L. Grenzmann and K. Stackmann (Göttingen, 1984), pp. 41–52.

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building and not of information transfer. The form of this ‘opinion-building instruction’ has typically received little attention in debates about the reformatory public.68 An attempt has been made here to show that, at least in the writings of Martin Luther, ‘invectivity’ played a key role in forming opinions on multiple planes – intellectually, performatively and affectively. It was precisely through his verbal vernacular radicalism that the reformer was able to break out of the golden cage of learned debate and gain wide public resonance. Although he used the new print media more skilfully than anyone before him, he also did so in a manner which came close, in many respects, to simulating oral face-to-face communication. If nothing else, ‘invectivity’ conveyed here a strong, direct impression of immediacy. Research into Luther’s verbal radicalism has thus proved to be productive, since it has led to the heart of the Reformation. At the same time, however, this result implies that it is hardly possible to define radicalism precisely, as an aspect of, or even as a special camp within, the Reformation. If we measure Luther’s radicalism in terms of his ‘invectivity’, as demonstrated above, then Goertz’s requirement to – distinguish between the early Luther of the reforming movement and the later Luther as the founder and protector of his own established church – is not appropriate. Verbal radicalism pervades Luther’s reformatory works very much from the beginning. It also tends to increase over the years. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the context varied, depending on the object of revilement and condemnation. When employing ‘invectivity’ against the papal church, Luther created and marked the distance in relation to established orthodox positions. He burned bridges behind him and demonstrated that there could be no way back. Additionally, this ‘invectivity’ undoubtedly helped to form a kind of ‘emotional community’ among his followers.69 His verbal stigmatisation of the dissenters in his own camp can be explained by the threatening socio-political consequences born of their teaching, which were becoming visible in the climate of iconoclasm and the German Peasants’ Revolt. ‘To tear down the images in the manner of Karlstadt’, Luther once said, means ‘to make the rabble drunk and foolish and secretly get them to riot …’70 Therefore, we see that he ranted with the greatest intensity against the reformatory dissenters (almost) as much as against the old church. For Luther, radicalism and conservatism consequently stood in an ambivalent and unclear relationship: in one case his ‘invectivity’ served to renew radicalism, in another it protected the existing order from further changes. The relative character of the term of radicalism is particularly clear here – a trait which makes it, in my opinion, rather problematic and unsuitable for higher level of analysis.

68 But compare Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation. 69 For a description of the concept, see Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2006). 70 WA 18, p. 71.

Kat Hill

The Power of Names Radical Identities in the Reformation Era

In the summer of 1543 an Anabaptist was arrested and questioned by the authorities in Beyernaumburg, a village nestled in the southern Harz region on the border between Saxon-Anhalt and Thuringia. He was the ‘Anabaptist with no name’, for despite the insistence by the three pastors who questioned him to say who he was, he would not do so. He said ‘He has no name, for God, his father, also has no name.’1 This Clint Eastwood of the Anabaptist world perturbed the questioners, for as well as being stubbornly obstructive, his reasons for refusing to give his name undercut the assumptions about kinship and belonging which held together early modern communities. The man not only declined to give his name, but also said he had no profession aside from a calling from God, he would not say where he was from because he rejected the whoredom of his mother, and he declared that baptism, communion, and absolution were all meaningless garbage. The Devil, not God, had created flesh, so all such earthly ties were redundant. In the ultimate act of negation, he said he ‘cursed the hour when he was born’, attempting to denigrate his own existence. With one simple gesture, his obstinate anonymity undermined some of the most basic ideas about identity and family. Not only was it hard to identify and track down a man who would not give his name, but he was an anonymous menace for other reasons. His questioners had no choice but to refer to him as the ‘Wiedertäufer’, but without putting a name to a face, something fundamental about this individual was missing. People rely on names to interact, to label, and to recognise. Both names and processes of naming or de-naming, whether voluntary or forced, are intrinsic to ideas about belonging and human experience. During the Reformation era, at a time when notions of self and community underwent a transformation, naming strategies take us to the heart of a fundamental dimension of devotional experience, as well as revealing the way in which lines were drawn between different confessional identities. What’s in a name? One of the most famous citations from English literature, the question asked by Shakespeare’s Juliet as she tries to justify to herself her new love for Romeo and tell herself his name is of no consequence. But the name does matter, for he is not just a young man but part of a titled kinship network which entailed obligations of revenge and loyalty. Names are not just names but come with all sorts of 1

Paul Wappler, Die Täuferbewegung in Thüringen von 1526–1584 (Jena, 1913), pp. 469–71; Sächsisches Haupstaatsarchiv Dresden, Geheimes Archiv 10024, Loc. 10238, fo. 120r–122v.

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connotations about who we are.2 Scholarship has moved away from a purely semiotic model of the meaning of names to consider what names do and how they are used. Names reveal ideas about personal identity but they also relate to a range of social interactions and are intertwined with kinship, memory, geography, and gender. Names have the power to bind communities together, but if they do help to establish identities, these are neither stable nor coherent since names can change. Individuals often have more than one name which can vary depending on the social context. When married, I was ‘Mrs Katherine Gibson’, when at work ‘Dr Kat Hill’, to my father I am ‘Katty’, and in my gym where I practice martial arts just ‘Kat’, or at times I have been known by my (affectionately meant) nickname, ‘Bully’. Individuals may try to recreate themselves through naming strategies. Jacques Derrida started using the name Jacques rather than Jackie when he began to publish. The simple, French name with overtones of Christian significance was suitable for the ‘space of literary and philosophical legitimation’.3 Names can be associated with authority, and therefore just as the act of naming and de-naming has power, so the question of who has the responsibility to confer names is important.4 The Reformation forged new identities, names, and naming practices. The defining moment of Luther’s challenge to the Catholic church in 1517 was accompanied by a new title, for at around the same time that he composed the Ninety-Five Theses, he began to sign off with the Hellenized version of his name ‘Eleutherius’, meaning ‘the freed one’. He retained this form of address for several months before reverting to the more Germanic ‘Luther’, but dropping forever the family name of his father, Luder, which had associations in early modern culture with dirt and immorality. The change was inextricably intertwined with the foundational narratives of the Reformation. Scholars have vigorously debated when and where the reformer had become ‘free’ during the so-called ‘Tower Experience’, the moment at which Luther realised that he was liberated from the constraints of Catholic theology and subject to God’s justice alone.5 So Luder became Luther, but this was not the only transition the reformer 2

This particular passage of Shakespeare has been the subject of much discussion by scholars such as Derrida about signifiers, identity, and meaning; Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorisme Countertime’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London and New York, 1992), pp. 414– 433. See also Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London and New York, 2003), pp. 122–123; Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels, Negotiating Shakespeare’s Language in Romeo and Juliet: Reading Strategies from Criticism, Editing and the Theatre (Farnham, 2009), p. 29. 3 Jacques Derrida, A ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking, in: Points … Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Webe (Stanford, 1995), pp. 339–364, here pp. 343–344. 4 Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn (eds), The Anthropology of Names and Naming (Cambridge, 2006); Caroline Hough (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming (Oxford, 2016). 5 The deep associations with the name Luther and his new identity in German culture are suggested by the extent to which it has become intertwined with histories of psychoanalysis and identity. It featured in the case of the nineteenth-century German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, a paranoid schizophrenic, whom Sigmund Freud and later Thomas Lacan studied. At a moment of crisis in

The Power of Names: Radical Identities in the Reformation Era55

underwent. Brother Martin became Doctor Luther, the monk became husband and father, and later prophet.6 Luther was by no means the first or the only Reformation scholar to classicise his name. Johannes Reuchlin gave Philip Schwarzerd a Greek translation of his name to celebrate his scholarly talents, and the famous epithet of ‘Melanchthon’ stuck. The Reformation reordered hierarchies, family relationships, and professions, and in the process it opened up spaces for new naming strategies which could express different identities. Names were often deployed in the ideological and personal battles of confessional conflict. This could be positively, when people chose to conjure up new personas, as Luther did with his name, or when Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt took up the identity of Brother Andrew and lived as a peasant.7 However, naming was often negative, and a fundamental part of Reformation invective was the use of insulting titles to censure enemies and disparage opponents. Luther had a talent for names, whether it was denouncing the Pope as the Anti-Christ or duke Henry of Brunswick as Hans Wurst, whilst Luther’s Catholic opponents such as Johannes Cochlaeus lampooned him as a seven-headed monster, pointing out the reformer’s many ghastly aspects and simultaneously likening him to the beast of the Apocalypse.8 Names and nomenclature are particularly important in the history of the radical Reformation (if we choose to call it such). In many ways the whole ideological edifice of the Reformation and its variations is founded on naming strategies, which pit mainstream versus left wing, magisterial versus radical.9 Within these broad divisions, taxonomic structures categorise and label each variation of mainstream or radical thought. However, this terminology, whilst broadly accepted, remains problematic, since it creates unnatural separation between mainstream and radical. It gives the ‘radical’ reformation an ideological coherence which it never had, as if all these diverse

6

7 8

9

1894, Schreber said his ‘lower God’ Ahriman referred to him as Luder, an abusive name with implications of rottenness, but also connected with the reformer’s name change; Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, 2001), p. 53. Bernd Moeller and Karl Stackmann, Luder – Luther – Eleutherius: Erwägungen zu Luthers Namen (Göttingen, 1981); Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (London, 2016), pp. 99–100; Markus Wriedt, Luther’s Theology, trans. Katharina Gustazs, in: The Cambridge Companion to Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge, 2000), p. 86. Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: The Development of His Thought, 1517–1525 (Leiden, 1974), pp. 12–13; Carter Lindberg, The Third Reformation: Charismatic Movements and the Lutheran Tradition (Macon, 1983), pp. 64–65. Martin Luther, Wider das Babstum zu Rom vom Teüfel gestifft (Wittenberg, 1545); Luther, Wider Hans Worst (Wittenberg, 1541); Johannes Cochlaeus, Septiceps Lutherus (Leipzig, 1529). See also Gotthelf Wiedermann, Cochlaeus as a Polemicist, in: Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary 1483–1983, ed. Peter Newman Brooks (Oxford,1983), pp. 195–205. See the classic work on radical reformers by G.H. Williams. This voluminous study remains the iconic work on the ‘Radical Reformation’, and in the preface to the third edition, Williams reiterates the tripartite division between the Magisterial Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Radical Reformation; George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd edition (Kirksville, 1992), p. 1.

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streams of thought were connected, and yet it also compartmentalises the ‘radical’ movement into neat branches with a traceable lineage. Names such as Mennonite, Platonic Spiritualist, or Schwenckfelder designate belonging and genealogy, but also betray more polemical judgements about the relative worth of these movements in relation to the ‘mainstream’ Reformation, since the labels are often the inheritance of confessional conflict. The moniker ‘Anabaptist’ was, after all, an insult applied by opponents to demonstrate that those who advocated adult baptism held erroneous views. Men and women who did accept an adult baptism saw themselves as baptising properly not re-baptising because, they argued, the act performed on an infant was devoid of meaning. Consequently, in German scholarship ‘Täufer’ has been substituted for the derogatory ‘Wiedertäufer’. Whilst it is needless to repeat the ins and outs of arguments about what radical groups should be called, historians need to be sensitive to the legacy of the Reformation, which created a bitter tradition of naming opponents. Without mounting a full-scale iconoclastic attack on terms as meaningless, it is important to realise that a name did not just indicate a defined set of beliefs and ideas, but a variety of ways of acting, which were often constructed to fit polemical and confessional needs. Heresiography became an essential tool of those who attempted to defend a perceived orthodoxy, though orthodoxy itself was a fluid entity. Not everything is socially constructed. Differences between confessional groups were real and meaningful, and accusations of non-conformity carried weight, but the label Schwärmer (Enthusiast) or Wiedertäufer did not necessarily equate to an absolute reality. Merely to accept the terminology is (as Michael Driedger’s contribution in this volume elucidates) problematic because contemporary historiography can simply seem to reinforce the intellectual schemata of the early modern world. Recent work has focused on chipping away at the constructed terms and genealogies that have sometimes been equated to confessional identities by Reformation historians. Categorisations do not map neatly onto subjective realities and are an imperfect way of thinking about identity because they do not allow us to access experience. Luther and others spoke disparagingly of anyone who had been baptised more than once, yet in the early days of reform, the tag of ‘Anabaptist’ did not necessarily designate a movement or confessional belonging but rather suspect practices that might be included with all other sorts of questionable and ‘schwärmerisch’ behaviour.10 Anabaptist is a catchword for a collection of diverse realities, a name which tries to use one act to define people’s beliefs. However, it does not consider the actuality of day to day experience, as an individual’s life was not consumed entirely by being a ­Wiedertäufer. Furthermore, labels were not fixed or stable ways of denoting 10 Amy Nelson Burnett, Luther and the Schwärmer, in: The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology, eds Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel and Lubomir Batka (Oxford, 2014), pp. 511–24; John S. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers Against Anabaptists: Luther, Melanchthon and Menius and the Anabaptists of Central Germany (The Hague, 1964).

The Power of Names: Radical Identities in the Reformation Era57

certain types of unacceptable behaviour. The threat from the Wiedertäufer was not ideologically distinct from that of other enthusiasts or apparent troublemakers, and in a confessionally diverse area such as Strasbourg in the early years of the Reformation neat distinctions break down rapidly. Anabaptist was not even the only name of choice. The Swiss and Strasbourg reformers in particular favoured Catabaptist, literally anti-baptiser, not just re-baptiser. Though modern scholarship has plumped for Anabaptist, the more starkly negative Catabaptist was still in use in the 1530s. Ambrosius Blaurer wrote to Martin Bucer in November 1531 to report on his attempts to convert Catabaptists in Esslingen.11 Understanding the polemic deployment of these terms is essential, especially since the hostile names such as Wiedertäufer became common parlance. Even if many radical groups rejected the labels given to them, the classifications reinforced a sense of identity born out of a particular power dynamic. But we also need to understand how those branded radicals sought to name themselves; if and when they accepted the names given to them; and how they attempted to define themselves in relation to other groups or individuals, since naming practices apparently set radicals apart.12 Naming was important for the authorities to give structure to the threat from non-conformists who often consisted of individuals with diverse beliefs, sometimes spread across extensive distances. The search for coherence, however, by establishing connections and genealogies through naming strategies was equally as important for Anabaptists, whether they lived in separate but coherent communities, like the Hutterites, or existed in scattered groups as in central Germany. Anabaptists often rejected the conventional kinship structures, communal bonds, and naming practices of the world around them, so scholarship should seek to explain what took their place. Investigating how names and naming were used by Anabaptists, not just for people and titles, but also places and ideas, does not just indicate how they were perceived and attacked, but reveals the fundamental structures that organised their communities in the face of persecution and hostility. Such hostility allowed Anabaptists to create legacies which have continued to provide a sense of belonging to the present day. Yet we should not make too sharp a separation between the systems of naming and the individuals who used or bore these titles. Names do more than allow us to look at social structures, or the symbolic framework of culture. They provided the potential for the creation of new identities. By understanding how naming strategies functioned, historians can go beyond the notion that names represented definitive or static divisions in the religious landscape of the early modern world, and instead use them to analyse the question of confessional experience. 11 Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott (eds), Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer VII: Elsaß, I. Teil: Stadt Strasbourg 1522–1532, (Gütersloh, 1959), p. 350. See for example Ulrich Zwingli, In Catabaptistarvm Strophas (Zurich, 1527). 12 The rest of this paper will focus predominantly on Anabaptists, though of course radicalism included many other potential candidates.

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The defining feature of the Wiedertäufer was the rejection of infant baptism. For adults who had already been baptised as children, this meant accepting a new adult baptism. However, for prospective parents, newly converted, the decision not to baptise infants could be emotional and difficult, provoking debates about the very nature of children. By rejecting baptism, they also rejected the most important naming ceremony in early modern Europe, the moment when the child experienced social birth, if we speak about this in anthropological terms. Namelessness was disconcerting because it had associations with fear, chaos, and death.13 In the early modern world baptism served to introduce the child to the community, confirmed parents and lineage, and created wider kinship networks. The child’s name was made public, and the priest exorcised and cleansed the newly christened child as it moved from nothingness to somethingness. Whilst reformers dispensed with some or all of the ritual cleansing elements, baptism remained and remains fundamental as a naming ceremony at which a child’s identity and belonging are confirmed. Anabaptists rejected this altogether, as parents left their children unbaptised and severed the link between baptism and the introduction of the infant to the world.14 For an anthropologist such as Clifford Geertz, names are part of a symbolic world that reveals the processes by which people are individualised, and this is a universal constant across societies though the symbolic frameworks vary.15 Anthropology has overstated the extent to which naming and identity went hand in hand -the relationship between symbol and effect is too neat- but it is undeniable that altering naming strategies created social, psychological, and emotional cracks in the edifice which structured community and belonging. Anabaptists removed the public proclamation of a name and identity at infant baptism, and dissolved the existing association of naming with kinships, godparents, and the community. Parents had to find alternative ways of naming and marking the acceptance of the child, and the status of infants often seemed to remain ambiguous, with them sometimes being referred to as ‘midling Christi’ (halfway Christians).16 Simultaneously the power of naming shifted away from the church authorities to the parents or to the communal leaders in more organised Anabaptist communities. More than ritual, liturgy, and theology changed with the condemnation of infant baptism; new possibilities for expressing confessional identity were offered by different naming rituals and different names, as well as by the hierarchies and bonds these names established.

13 On the importance of naming at birth in relation to identity and the notion of social birth see Linda Layne, ‘Your Child Deserves a Name’: Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Memory in Pregnancy Loss, in: vom Bruck and Bodenhorn (eds), Anthropology of Names, pp. 31–50. 14 Kat Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism in Central Germany (Oxford, 2015), pp. 98–135. 15 Clifford Geertz, Person, Time and Conduct in Bali, in: Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York, 1973), pp. 360–411. 16 Wappler, Thüringen, p. 331.

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For the most part scant evidence exists about what Anabaptist parents or families did if they had decided not to baptise their children, but the potential of naming strategies is clear in other contexts. Although they accepted infant baptism, English Puritan communities in Sussex at the end of the sixteenth century offer a remark­ able example of the way naming practices associated with birth could be reordered to express new devotional realities. Puritans adopted grace names, names such as Repent, Fear-God, or Safe-on-high. Such memorable titles were of course immortalised by the unforgettable Praise-God Barebones whose name will forever be associated with the parliamentary assembly that sat for a mere five months in 1653. The Barebones Parliament is, one must concede, a much more dramatic label than the formal title, the Nominated Assembly. Whilst these titles have the air of the cast of characters for a Restoration comedy, they reflected a desire by a particular section of Protestant England to live out their religious hopes and ideals. Nicholas Tyacke’s careful analysis of the baptismal registers reveals that some names followed a cycle of repentance for sin and rejoicing at the removal of God’s wrath, whilst other names seemed to embody marital theology or express joy at contemporary events, such as the defeat of the Armada. Providence itself was to be remembered in the names of the children.17 Because Anabaptists would not have appeared on the baptismal registers, evidence for the way that they may have developed naming strategies is sketchier. In Hutterite communities, able to construct new structures from the ground up, children were not looked after by their mothers and fathers exclusively but cared for by extended relatives and members of the community, often young women, and after an initial period with the family, they attended a klein Schule.18 Named association with parents was less important on an individual level but links between infants and adults came to express a bond with a family within a family and across generations in their closed communities. Parents would often name their first child after themselves and subsequent offspring after grandparents, uncles, and aunts. The lack of diversity of family names and indeed personal names (many of which followed biblical examples) in Mennonite and Hutterite communities, which persisted beyond the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indicates how powerful names and naming practices could be.19 Hutterites living in north America today are descended from only eighteen families who fled persecution, four of whom died out, leaving fourteen surnames in use. The migrant communities split up into groups named after the leaders – the Schmiedeleut, the Dariusleut and the Lehrerleut – and most Hutterites are descended from only 400 individuals.20 The Alex17 Nicholas Tyacke, Popular Puritan Mentality in later Elizabethan England, in: Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), pp. 90–110. 18 On past and contemporary practices of child-rearing and education in Hutterite communities see John A. Hosteler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore, 1997), pp. 206–33; Tamara Berger-Prößdorf, Hutterites: An Historical Overview, in: Montana Journal 3.2 (1993). 19 Hosteler, Hutterite Society, p. 242. 20 Karl Andreas Peter, The Dynamics of Hutterite Society: An Analytical Approach (Edmonton, 1987), p. 62; Robert Friedman, John Hofer, Hans Meier and John V. Hinde. (1989). Hutterian Brethren

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anderwohl Mennonite Church, now based in Kansas, has in its possession a record of membership which was started in Prussia in the eighteenth century and continued in Russia and Kansas as the community moved. It provides an enduring written testimony of names and belonging, connecting Mennonites in Kansas to their own history.21 In these communities, given names expressed a connection with the extended Anabaptist family and a biblical past, and surnames embodied the strength and tradition of true faith, reflecting a lineage which rooted the group through nomenclature in a history stretching back many years and connected to locations where they had once lived. For one community, the infamous kingdom of Münster, an account exists which discusses the way in which the Anabaptists named children in dramatic fashion, albeit from a hostile commentator. Henry Gresbeck’s narrative of the events which overtook the city was written to justify his own role in bringing down the regime after he deserted his post on the Kreuztor and gave intelligence to the besieging armies. He describes in detail how children were brought to John of Leiden, who was dressed up in robes as king and holding court, to be given a name. The ceremony was public and collective; many children would be brought at once, and John would run through the alphabet, dubbing each child in turn with a name starting with the next letter of the alphabet. If he got to the end then he would turn to biblical names: David, Abraham, Isaac, Israel, Jacob, the patriarchs. Some children were named Adam and Eve. His own child, to whom he was only a stepfather as he had married the pregnant widow of John Mathias, was a girl, and he apparently named her Newborn. She was heralded as a prophet’s child and a queen’s child. There was no subtle imagery here. According to Gresbeck, Leiden said that no such child had been born since the birth of Christ, and no such king had reigned.22 The use of the names of biblical prophets or Adam and Eve had obvious significance, lending authority to the apocalyptic regime that had been established. The hyperbole and drama of Gresbeck’s account is obvious, and he seems to want to make Leiden seem as deranged as possible with delusions of grandeur. However, it was not complete fantasy. Leiden confessed himself that he believed he had a prophetic calling to be king, and he presented himself with the apparel of a king and (Hutterische Brüder), in: Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. From http://gameo. org/index.php?title=Hutterian_Brethren_(Hutterische_Br%C3%BCder)&oldid=121144 (accessed 29/10/16). 21 The register is entitled Die Erste Stamm Nahmen Unserer Bisher so genante Oude Vlamingen oder Groningersche Mennonisten Societaet alhier in Preusen. On the Alexanderwohl Mennonites see Arnold J. Dyck, “Hoffnungsau in Kansas”, Mennonite Life: An Illustrated Quarterly (Newton, October, 1949), 18–19; Cornelius Krahn and Glenn Penner. (March 2011). Alexanderwohl (Molotschna Mennonite Settlement, Zaporizhia Oblast, Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. From http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Alexanderwohl_(Molotschna_Mennonite_Settlement,_Zaporizhia_Oblast,_Ukraine)&oldid=132408. Digitised versions of the registers are available at https://mla.bethelks.edu/metadata/cong_15.php (accessed 15/10/19). 22 False Prophets and Preachers: Henry Gresbeck’s Account of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, ed. and trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Kirksville, 2016), pp. 210–215.

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court, celebrated in public rituals. Furthermore, the names he apparently chose for infants were entirely consistent with the scriptural naming patterns in Hutterite and Mennonite communities.23 Nor was Leiden the only Anabaptist to style himself in this way. On a much smaller scale and to much less dramatic effect, the Anabaptist Augustin Bader became convinced he was a prophet, inspired by the apocalyptic theology of Hans Hut and the Jewish Kabbalah. In a mill at Läutern near Blaubeuren, Bader gathered a handful of followers, proclaimed his infant son the new Messiah, and had robes and golden ornaments made to reflect this kingly status.24 Such theatrical displays were not the norm, but whilst Bader’s small gathering was hardly comparable in scale to Münster, it reminds us that communities might try to enact prophetic or apocalyptic theologies in lived experience. Gresbeck goes further by suggesting that the whole naming strategy was based on a control of nomenclature and a complete reordering of language and power. To provide the starting point for his naming ceremony, Leiden issued a new alphabet, posted up in the streets, with words next to each letter. These seemed to convey a loose message about a king who rules over all, the wretched becoming happy, about purification, and the saints of the kingdom of God.25 Gresbeck presented a system for providing titles that was bound up with the desire to tie together the strands of the religious vision of the city and to collapse present and past, both the biblical past and the immediate past of the reign of Mathias. Leiden, the king, now had the right to name, and in so doing he affirmed his power at the head of this divine kingdom. Gresbeck is not a reliable commentator, and it is unlikely that all the details he records reflected reality. Yet there is plausibility in his suggestion that the Münster Anabaptists reordered naming rituals and integrated these children into the community, albeit without baptism, by making them nominally part of the religious, linguistic dynamic. The peaceful Bruderhof of the Hutterites and the frenzied community of Münster were very different, but they did share something: the desire to use names, associated with the past and biblical tradition, to express a sense of religious belonging and shape the community. Beyond the question of baptism and naming infants, Anabaptist communities restructured naming practices and kinship ties in more far reaching ways, as the case of the Anabaptist with no name suggests. Confessional choices impacted naming choices, and with the advent of reform, individuals had the opportunity to recreate themselves with different names and to reorder relationships with others. Thomas Müntzer derided enemies such as Egranus as a pestilential crow gorging on carcasses but also used naming strategies in his letters to express his conviction that he had a 23 Joseph Niesert (ed.), Münstersche Urkundensammlung, Erster Band: Urkunden zur Geschichte der Münsterischen Wiedertäufer (Coesfeld, 1826), pp. 178–179. 24 Anselm Schubert, Täufertum und Kabbalah: Augustin Bader und die Grenzen der Radikalen ­Reformation, (Gütersloh, 2008). 25 False Prophets, ed. Mackay, pp. 210–211.

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prophetic and divine calling.26 With not wholly sincere humility when he wrote to Nicholas Hausmann, Müntzer referred to himself as ‘a servant elect of God’, and several correspondents mirrored this image in their replies. Hans Sommerschuh communicated with Müntzer just after the reformer’s departure from Zwickau in 1521, addressing him rather sycophantically as ‘your Reverence’ and signing off as ‘the Disciple’.27 Names and titles also served as a disarming strategy, allowing Müntzer to drive home his disapproval with force. The combination of familiarity and pseudo-reverence with criticism was pointed when he addressed fellow reformers. He wrote to Philip Melanchthon in March 1522 soon after Luther had returned from hiding in the Wartburg to comment on recent reforms. Müntzer opened the letter in seeming obsequious fashion: To the Christian man Philip Melanchthon, professor of the sacred Scriptures. Greetings, instrument of Christ. Your theology I embrace with all my heart for it has snatched many souls from the snares of the hunters.

But Müntzer quickly proceeded to express his disproval of the Wittenberg reforms. He reproved Melanchthon for worshipping a ‘dumb God’ and bemoaned his ignorance for being unable to distinguish between the elect and the wicked.28 Müntzer’s efforts to use names to express his religious ideals sometimes went awry. In one letter to an unknown recipient, Müntzer signed off as ‘filius excussionis’, literally ‘son of shaking’, a reference to King Sisera in the Book of Job. Müntzer was attempting to use a proper Hebrew name but his etymology was confused. In a list of translated proper Hebrew titles, he gave for Sisera: ‘knocking out of the rejoicing tooth’. Müntzer seemed to have confused Sisera (gaudii exclusio) with Sennaar (excussio dentium).29 Despite his questionable scholarship on this point, naming was evidently important to Müntzer; he constructed identities, negotiated friendships and rivalries, and established hierarchies. Müntzer’s evocative and expressive names have to be seen in context, as part of the way the Reformation reconfigured relationships. Fraternal idioms, for example, became fundamental to early Reformation rhetoric, and Münzter and his correspondents repeatedly drew on this language. Müntzer referred to Hausmann as ‘my sweetest brother’, and Franz Günther signed his letter ‘your little brother in Christ’.30 Titles, 26 Müntzer to Luther, 9 July 1523; The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, trans. and ed. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 56. 27 Müntzer to Nicholas Hausmann, 15 June 1521; Hans Sommerschuh to Müntzer, 31 July 1521; Müntzer, ed. Matheson, pp. 34, 39–40. 28 Müntzer to Melanchthon, 29 March 1522; Müntzer, ed. Matheson, pp. 43–44. 29 Müntzer to an unknown recipient, 14 July 1522; Müntzer, ed. Matheson, pp. 51, 431–432. 30 Müntzer to Nicholas Hausmann, 15 June 1521; Franz Günther to Müntzer, 25 January 1522; Müntzer, ed. Matheson, pp. 35, 43. On fraternal language see also Kat Hill, Brotherhood, Sisterhood, and the Language of Gender in the German Reformation, in: Reformation and Renaissance Review 17.2 (2015), pp. 181–195.

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nicknames, derogatory insults, and new names within families and friendships, all called into question existing experience and identities because they invoked notions about kinship and social bonds, gender and the body. Gender can be considered a form of knowledge that establishes meaning for bodily differences, and names are essential for creating this knowledge since they are signs, inscribing connotations on our physicality.31 Names are often, though not always, gender specific. Baptism, therefore, did not just mark acceptance in the community and bestow grace, but in part defined gender. In the late medieval ritual, after a query about the child’s name and an enquiry about whether the child had been baptised already, the third question posed to the baptised asked after the sex of the child. The question mattered because the baptism ritual was different for boys and girls, with different prayers and different spaces used in the church.32 When Anabaptists removed infant baptism, they dispensed with these ways in which gender norms and differences were enacted and written onto the body. Leiden’s stepdaughter had no name which would identify her gender, and the Puritan grace names likewise were not gendered. In both cases, religious ideals took precedence over gendered identity. Anabaptists also altered marriage and sexual relationships. The Blutfreunde in Thuringia, for example, held a form of sexual communion as a substitute for the Eucharist, engaging in sexual relations with men and women who were not their married partners. The Münster Anabaptists famously practised or enforced polygamy under the rule of John of Leiden, a fact which has led to sensationalist demonising.33 In a revealing anecdote, the scribe who recorded the numbers of wives of these Anabaptists, working off information given by two boys in the city, got fed up after a while and said he could not write anymore since there were too many.34 Being an Anabaptist could mean giving up earthly ties and normal modes of social and economic organisation, even when individuals did not necessarily subscribe to the notion of the community of goods. The authorities feared this meant holding even wives in common, and although this concern was greatly exaggerated, individual titles could become less important for Anabaptist communities as they reconfigured conceptions of identity and belonging. Novel gendered and sexual practices were part of this process. Like so many other Anabaptists, the Münster authorities referred to their marital theology of polygamy in fraternal language. Men and women were brothers and sisters in Christ, and this justified the practice because it strengthened the union between

31 Barbara Bodenhorn and Gabriele vom Bruck, ‘Entangled in Histories’: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming, in: vom Bruck and Bodenhorn (eds), Anthropology of Names, p. 23. 32 Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York, 1997), p. 44. 33 On ideas of gender and sex in Anabaptist groups see Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief, pp. 167–198. 34 False Prophets, ed. Mackay, p. 213, n. 553.

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God’s children.35 Names had a fundamental role to play in Anabaptist communities when normal modes of establishing gender norms and familial bonds were eroded. Direct reliance on biblical language could supersede other more conventional forms of address for children and adults as it expressed new realities. Under these circumstances, existing names and labels became confused. Women were conventionally referred to by their husband’s name, a feminised suffix indicating belonging and possession. However, in situations where women and men were conducting different sexual and marital arrangements, these names no longer matched the reality, and therefore a fracture developed between understanding and appearance. Different naming practices had the power both to enable new realities but also betray the conflicts caused by change. Marriage, like baptism, was partly a naming ceremony in which the wife would traditionally acquire the title of the husband, but this was not the case with the wives of the polygamous Anabaptists. The traditional marriage ceremony was apparently abandoned for a much more informal procedure, and although we must treat Gresbeck’s wild accounts about how women were grabbed with some scepticism, marriage certainly did not occur with the same transference of identity through the public declaration of names. The list of Leiden’s fifteen wives were all referred to by their existing names rather than his.36 Possession and power were undoubtedly displayed in different ways, as Leiden apparently processed through the city with his wives in tow, the queen at the front, but it was not nomenclature that designated these women as his wives.37 Names are not neutral and the rituals by which they are acquired and enacted matter; Anabaptists altered these practices, and whilst the experience of the Münster wives remains obscure, such changes had the potential to remould the reality of individual subjectivities. In some senses, individuation through naming practices became less important for Anabaptists. New names were fundamental to creating a sense of identity but de-naming could also be a positive force for the community, especially for those Anabaptists whose sense of belonging came from giving up earthly ties and normal modes of organisation. The Hutterite communities of central Europe became famous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for ceramic production. The objects were unusual not only for their unadorned yet elegant style and quality, but also because makers were not allowed to put their name to their work since this was a sign of pride. Though the name of a donor was permitted, designations of individual identity were not.38 What marked something out as Hutterite, Haban ware, was the lack of a name, as well as the simplicity of design and the techniques. The emphasis on modesty and minimalism in all areas of Hutterite life, as well as adherence to codes of behaviour 35 False Prophets, ed. Mackay, pp. 110–114. 36 Hermann von Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistic furoris: Monasterium inclitam westphaliae metropolim evertentis; historica narratio, 2 vols, ed. Heinrich Detmer (Münster, 1899–1900), vol. 2: pp. 658–9. 37 False Prophets, ed. Mackay, pp. 143–146. 38 False Prophets, ed. Mackay, pp. 143–146.

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which emphasised conformity to communal rules, has continued to the present day. These communities felt the need to abandon associations with the outside world, but this insistence also had an impact on naming practices since it stressed the absence of individuality. Indeed, the unnamed Anabaptist was not alone in using a denial of his name and identity not only to frustrate the authorities, but also to express religious ideals. An English Quaker William Dewsbury, a Yorkshireman and an ex-­soldier, appeared at the Northampton Assizes in the summer of 1655 before Edward Atkins, Justice of the Common Pleas. His trial proceeded:  I[udge] A[tkins] What is thy name? W[illiam] D[ewsberry] Unknown to the World. I. A. Let us hear what that name is that the world knows not W.D. It is known to the light, and not every man can know it, but him that hath it, but the name the world knows me by is William Dewsberry. I. A. What countryman art thou? W.D. Of the land of Canaan. I. A. That is afar off.39

Leaving off a maker’s name or eschewing connections with worldly ties both reveal the extent to which subjective experience shaped and was shaped by names. Dewsbury’s naming strategy functioned on a macro as well as micro level. At the same time as he denied his individual earthly name, he cited a biblical place name, Canaan, to evince his association with the righteous. Names have the power to link across time and space by evoking broader associations and memories. Nomenclature on this larger scale was important to ways in which Anabaptists cast themselves in the mould of apostolic communities. This served as a rebuttal to the claims of heresy or error from opponents. Place names functioned on this larger scale, providing a focal point to draw Anabaptists together. Naming or renaming locations could be simultaneously destructive and constructive as an old association was erased and a new one assigned. All Protestants appropriated and re-serviced sacred spaces from Catholics, and this often involved removing images and objects. Iconoclasm is a form of de-naming, of taking away traditional associations through scratching out a name, a face, or destroying the saint’s relics or icons connected to a shrine. But reusing spaces was also constructive as new names were chosen and locations designated for particular reasons. Especially in the early years, reforming theologies often had eschatological overtones, including those of the peasants during the revolts of 1524–5 as well as amongst some Anabaptists. Places might be designated as new Jerusalems or gathering points for the Apocalypse, and preachers made references to biblical place names to bolster 39 A true testimony what was done concerning the servants of the Lord (London, 1655), p. 1. Many thanks to Clive Holmes for providing this reference.

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their cause. Müntzer beseeched Hausmann not to be dumb before Zion, to openly speak up against those who were wrong. In Erfurt in 1527 Hans Römer chose the city as a new Jerusalem and planned a takeover, which ended in miserable failure.40 New forms of political authority often accompanied newly imagined places. When Müntzer named his council in Mühlhausen the Eternal Council, he indicated the eschatological significance of his regime. Münster too was imagined as the new kingdom of Israel. Jakob Hufschmidt confessed that one woman beseeched people to repent, for the King of Zion would come and rebuild Jerusalem.41 Here, though, renaming went further. According to Gresbeck, Leiden removed the traditional names of streets and gates and gave them new ones to reflect the ethics of his regime, perhaps most dramatically designating the cathedral square as a new Mount Zion where Last Suppers were held. His account suggests that naming inscribed the rule of the king and queen onto the city, with the creation of King’s Gate and Queen’s Gate to mirror Leiden’s authority, or the Silver and Gold Gates, which reflected the ceremonial majesty of the new kingdom.42 Whilst other accounts do not include the detail which Gresbeck records, several references indicate that the Anabaptist regime did reorder the sacred and civic space of the city. Hufschmidt recalled that the city was to be divided into three parts, according to the prophecy of Zacharias, whilst Leiden in his own confession indicated that the city was divided into twelve administrative units with twelve ‘dukes’ and twelve gates. This reflected the geography of heavenly Jerusalem.43 By assigning new names, the Anabaptists also tried to erase existing associations. Any renewed kingdom of Israel could not have names connected with Catholic saints or indeed the Jews, so it is no surprise that St Ludger’s Gate and Jew Fields Gate disappeared. The new signs for the streets and gates also reportedly bore the new alphabet. According to Gresbeck, the punishment for not using the new names was to be forced to a drink of a jar of water; the reason is not clear but possibly it was a cleansing ritual. An apocalyptic naming strategy also had the advantage of being transposable; it was topographical yet it did not tie the community to one place but mapped onto the eternal geography of God’s kingdom. The complete re-organisation of the layout of a city was an extreme naming process, and Gresbeck’s account is problematic, but the removal of traditional shrines or saint names was nothing out of the ordinary. In Calvinist Geneva, names which were too Catholic were banned at baptism, whilst Luther transformed the former Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg into his new domestic home. Protestant reformers did not always dispense with saints’ names or traditional pietistic associations, but renaming and claiming spaces anew was an important dimension to the re-configuration of confessional geography in Reformation Europe. 40 41 42 43

Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief, p. 69. Niesert (ed.), Münstersche Urkundensammlung, p. 155. False Prophets, ed. Mackay, pp. 208–210. Niesert (ed.), Münstersche Urkundensammlung, pp. 155, 180.

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Names linked groups and people across spaces but also through time, for naming and remembering are inextricably intertwined. As Bodenhorn and vom Bruck have stated, ‘In many contexts – whether those structuring ancient Roman oration form, Kwakiutl potlatch invocations, Papua New Guinea funeral feasts, or World War II memorials – the recitation of names is a crucial aspect of memory.’44 The Anabaptist martyr stories, perhaps the most famous cultural legacy of early modern Anabaptism, relied on the recollection of names to establish genealogies. In the martyrologies, naming strategies brought the dead in touch with the living. Often recollection was performative, since martyr hymns were meant to be sung, but the collections were also memory palaces of the names of all those deemed to be essential figures. The choice of who made the cut was of course not neutral; the collection could not just name anyone but only those who were considered legitimate founders and martyrs by Anabaptists. There was no mention of Münster in histories written by many Anabaptist groups. In this way, these naming strategies were fundamental to memory creation and the formation of tradition, an active and ideological process.45 The history chronicles of the Hutterites, started in the later sixteenth century, and the martyrological hymnbook the Ausbund which also dates to the later sixteenth century, named particular figures to establish a clear lineage. The Hutterite chronicle traces the beginning of the movement to the Swiss communities, a convention which has become the norm for accounts of Anabaptist origins. The chronicle cited Zwingli, Conrad Grebel, and Felix Mantz as three experienced and learned men who knew German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, though of course in the end Zwingli was to prove himself a coward and fell away from the true path. The chronicle went on to list what became an accepted cannon of martyrs – Leonhart Kaiser, Michael Sattler, and Ludwig Hätzer, and more – whose names were not just transcribed but sung again and again.46 The repetition of names drew a connecting line between past and present, establishing tradition and belonging. Names collapsed time and reflected the continuous reproduction of eras of confessional significance for these communities. The practice of recollection and naming continues to the present day in Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterite communities, who still sing the martyr hymns of the early modern world and remember the narrative of their history. One of the only decorations that is allowed in modern Amish homes is a list of family members going back several decades, providing a direct connection with the past.47 Even the names of the 44 Bodenhorn and vom Bruck, ‘Entangled in Histories’, in: vom Bruck and Bodenhorn (eds), Anthropology of Names, p. 2. 45 Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 197–249; Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: Zur Kultur des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2004). 46 The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, trans. and ed. by the Hutterian Brethren (Rifton and Robertsbridge, 1987), vol. 1: pp. 43–47. 47 See for example http://amishamerica.com/5-things-decorating-the-walls-of-amish-homes/ (accessed 20/10/16). For an account of contemporary Amish cultures see Steven M. Nolt and Thomas J. ­Meyers, Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identities (Baltimore, 2007).

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communities themselves embody this link. The label ‘Mennonite’ or ‘Hutterite’, contains within it a very clear reminder of the fact that these communities saw themselves as continuing the legacy of figures such as Jakob Hutter or Menno Simons. The names evolved in the context of the confessional conflicts of the early modern world. Communities that settled in Moravia, the followers of Jakob Hutter, did not initially refer to themselves as Hutterites. The designation came only later in the century, possibly as a hostile label, but by the 1570s it had been adopted as a positive self-description. This suggests that the right to name was not a simple process since the trajectories of power could shift when it came to labelling. Like the title of the kingdom of Israel or Jerusalem, ‘Hutterite’ was transferable. It was not tied to one place when Hutterites were expelled from Moravia, as they moved across eastern Europe, and when they settled finally in America. Genealogical terms such as ‘Dariusleut’ likewise embody these ideas. The use of a Germanic name which draws a specific connection with ancestors reminds Hutterites of where they have come from, but also that they followed these individuals as they moved to new homes. The name even alludes to scripture, a people in exile perhaps. These communities have an acute sense of their origin story of migration from Europe, but on another level names such as Hutterite also enabled this migratory identity. For me and perhaps many others who were interested in history at a young age and as immortalised by the razor sharp wit of Sellar and Yeatman, the name of the fourteenth-century Plantagenet John of Gaunt conjured up the image of an ‘emaciated peer’. Names have evocative power to create a sense of identity, and the fact that this does not necessarily correspond to reality does not always concern us. Gaunt, as we well know, refers to Ghent, but for me and many others, as much as we know the truth, the image of this man as a drawn and haggard noble still swims before my mind’s eye. Names are inescapable for human interactions and any sense of self, whether these are personal names, place names, or names given to ideas and movements. They are a fundamental part of the way people organise communities and hierarchies but they are also unstable and contingent. Names can be made and remade, altered and forgotten. The names inherited from the Reformation era, therefore, do not reflect stable social, intellectual, or cultural categories of radical and mainstream but rather provide a useful starting point for re-evaluating accounts of the so-called radical Reformation. To appreciate how Anabaptists and other non-conformists evolved and functioned and how they came to occupy the position of the ‘radicals’ of the Reformation, scholarship must deconstruct the process of naming in relation to questions of social interaction, memory, and identity, and with a wide frame of reference to the broader cultural and intellectual contexts of Reformation Europe.

II. Radicalism and the Established Reformations

Ethan Shagan

Radical Charity in the English Reformation

In a volume concerned with ‘the Protestant Reformation’ and its ‘radical critiques’ – or at least that was the title of the symposium from which this volume emerged – the most fundamental question must surely be: how can you tell the difference between them? Are the Protestant Reformation and its radical critiques in fact different things at all? After all, as Lyndal Roper has reminded us, it was Martin Luther, rather than his radical critics, who suggested to Philip of Hesse that polygamy was the Christian solution for his burning lusts.1 As Karl Gunther has noted, Luther’s English disciple William Tyndale suggested that the Sabbath ought to be observed on Tuesdays, and that women could preach and administer communion ‘if necessity required’.2 And if Protestants have come to seem more radical, at the same time Kat Hill and other scholars have re-interpreted Anabaptist positions as thoughtful solutions to fundamental Protestant problems, formed in conversation with a broad Reformation milieu.3 This is not to deny that Anabaptists were importantly distinctive, but it does suggest that ‘radical critique’ is a problematic label. We can see this particularly clearly when we leave Germany behind. In the Holy Roman Empire, where the Reformation was so often manifested as a formal legal settlement, it is particularly tempting to distinguish the Protestant Reformation on the one hand from its radical critiques on the other. But in England there was never a formal legal reformation on the German model, and attempts to create such settlements, for instance in 1549 and 1559, were widely regarded as provisional moments in the continuous unfolding of the gospel rather than as definitive endpoints. Within this open-ended evangelical framework, it is much easier to see how radical critique could be produced immanently within Protestantism itself. We are familiar, of course, 1

Lyndal Roper, ‘Sexual Utopianism in the German Reformation’, in: Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994). 2 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 1–4. For Tyndale’s argument about women, see The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith, ed. Thomas Russell, 3 vols (London, 1831), II, p. 18. 3 Kat Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525–1585 (Oxford, 2015). See also, e. g., James Stayer, The German Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods (Montreal, 1991); Werner Packull, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, 1995); Tom Scott, The Early Reformation in Germany: Between Secular Impact and Radical Vision (Burlington, 2013).

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with Puritans as the exemplars of this desire for further reformation within the Reformation, but long before the Puritan movement, English Evangelicals conjured fantastical ideas of what a godly commonwealth might look like.4 In this article, I want to explore some of these ideas, focusing particularly on economic radicalism. Our ordinary view is that magisterial reformers like Luther sought to channel the charitable impulses of fallen human beings through organized and rationalized systems of welfare provision, in the process banning begging as incompatible with Christian society. In response, radicals from Thomas Müntzer to Peter Walpot argued that this was merely making peace with the corrupt world, and that among true Christians there can be no private property and all things must be held in common.5 Perhaps because they appear to map so neatly onto liberalism and Marxism, these two alternatives have passed into our thinking as an authentically Protestant position on the one hand, and its radical critique on the other. But I want to suggest a different model. In England, well-placed magisterial reformers, often known as the ‘Commonwealth Men’, argued not for communism but for what I want to call ‘radical charity’: an alternative evangelical program for turning society into an engine of resource distribution. These writers presumed that the poverty in their society was a product of what they called ‘popery’, in which corrupt priests had conspired with greedy landlords to keep the common people in thralldom. They therefore demanded a Reformation that would produce fundamental socio-economic transformation: the large-scale redistribution of wealth, the taming of market forces, and the exclusion of capitalists from Christian communion. In the first part of this essay, I will argue that this commonwealth program was intended to be every bit as transformative as Anabaptist communism, but we have misperceived its intentions because it does not translate easily into modern assumptions about either economics or the magisterial Reformation. In the second part of this essay, I will suggest that this program of radical charity was not a critique of the Protestant Reformation in England, 4 For recent scholarship on this point, see e. g. Gunther, Reformation Unbound; Karl Gunther and Ethan Shagan, Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII, in: Past and Present 194 (February 2007): pp. 35–74; Ethan Shagan, Clement Armstrong and the Godly Commonwealth: Radical Religion in Early Tudor England, in: The Beginnings of English Protestantism, eds Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002); Thomas Freeman, Dissenters from a Dissenting Church: The Challenge of the Freewillers, 1550–1558, in: The Beginnings of English Protestantism, eds Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, (Cambridge, 2002). 5 Important works in English on Protestantism and poor relief include Lee Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge, 1990); Carter Lindberg, Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor (Minneapolis, 1993); Timothy Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (Aldershot, 1999); Thomas Safley (ed.), The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (Leiden, 2003); Marjorie McIntosh, Poor Relief in England 1350–1600 (Cambridge, 2012); Charles Parker, The Reformation of Community: Social Welfare and Calvinist Charity in Holland, 1572–1620 (Cambridge, 1998); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994).

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but rather was that Reformation for at least a brief moment, which may perhaps have interesting implications for the way we think about radicalism elsewhere in Europe. So what do I mean by radical charity? Consider first a 1553 sermon on the Lord’s Prayer by Hugh Latimer, formerly bishop of Worcester and one of the chief architects of the English Reformation. In this sermon, Latimer adopted the ancient commonplace that in the Lord’s Prayer we pray for our daily bread, rather than my daily bread, as a sign of charity. All wealth comes from God, Latimer wrote, and ‘what God giveth, I cannot say this is my own, but must say this is ours’. Therefore, he argued, nothing owned by the rich really belongs privately to them. Now, Latimer hastened to add that this did not mean that the poor have any right to take property from the rich; t‘hat would be theft. But nonetheless, the poor do have title to the goods themselves, even if they have no right to take it by force: ‘The poor man hath title to the rich man’s good … Therefore when God sendeth unto me much, it is not mine but ours.’ Latimer continued, ‘But what meaneth God by this inequality, that he giveth to some an 100 pound, unto this man 5000 pound, unto this man in a manner nothing at all? What meaneth he by this inequality? Here he meaneth that the rich ought to distribute his riches abroad amongst the poor, for the rich man is but God’s officer, God’s treasurer, he ought to distribute them according unto his Lord God’s commandment.’6 Now, of course, it is the business of preachers everywhere to convince their auditors that they have failed to live up to Christian ideals; but Latimer and his allies positively shocked their contemporaries by arguing that those ideals could and should be actualized in a reformed commonwealth. Not counsels of perfection, these were counsels of policy. In the Catholic tradition, this sort of radical charity had depended upon the ideal of virtuous poverty personified by St. Francis and his followers, while for the Anabaptists it depended upon community of goods. But not so for Hugh Latimer, who argued that the liberation of the gospel had ushered in a new era of what we would call positive-sum economics in which the more charity you give, the more God will restore to you, according to an unusually materialist interpretation of Luke 6:38, Give, and you shall receive. ‘I pray you tell me,’ Latimer asked, ‘have ye heard of any man that came to poverty, because he gave unto the poor?’ Of course not, because God promised that ‘we shall have the more by giving to the needy. Therefore, the way to get, is to scatter that that you have. Give, and you shall gain.’7 Here, the gospel injunction to give away all that you have to the poor was not spiritualized, as it so often was in the Protestant tradition, but taken very literally indeed. The goal of this economic vision was not social equality, but neither was it a rational system of welfare distribution. Latimer’s point was rather that all wealth comes from God, and there is no limit to the amount of wealth God can bestow, so the amount that you give away has literally 6 Hugh Latimer, Certayn Godly Sermons (London, 1562), fo. 37r–v. For this work, EEBO uses the alternative title: 27 sermons preached by the ryght Reuerende father in God. 7 Latimer, Certayn Godly Sermons, fo. 42r–v.

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no effect on how much you have left afterwards. According to Latimer, to save money for yourself and your heirs, rather than distributing it to others, is unfaithfulness, trusting in your own works rather than in God, and is therefore a species of popery. Another example can be found in a sermon on the gospel story of the loaves and the fishes, preached before King Edward VI in 1550 by Thomas Lever, soon to become Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and later one of the founders of English Puritanism. In an extended analogy, Lever compared the multitudes fed by Christ to the common people of England, in contrast to the sinful excesses of ‘crafty lawyers, deceitful merchants, covetous greedyguts, and ambitious prollers, which can never have enough, but always continue in their insatiable hunger’.8 Christ’s distribution of the loaves and fishes was intended to provide ‘godly governors example to provide things necessary for those people that looketh for no superfluities’: in other words, a public system of welfare provision. But the English, Lever wrote, have forgotten God’s promise that the more charity you give, the ‘more plenty’ God will give in return. By this gospel logic, the rich can give all they have to the poor, and yet the rich will not be impoverished. Hence, Lever wrote, ‘If landed men and officers by keeping of houses, and doing of their duties in their countries, do bestow among the people all that they have received of God, by the king’s gift, their father’s inheritance, or other ways, then shall God give such increase, and every man shall have enough.’9 By preaching Christ’s example directly to the king and council, Lever strongly hinted that this universal sufficiency should be enforced by authorities upon landed men who had not yet internalized the gospel for themselves. For many writers in this tradition, the problem that prevented universal sufficiency was what we would call capital accumulation: too much wealth in too few hands, sitting idle in the coffers of the rich while the poor starved. But this was not equivalent to modern attacks on riches, because the real problem with accumulation was that it was a form of unfaith, trusting in one’s own resources rather than God’s provision. Consider, for example, the writings of Robert Crowley, ex-fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, confidante of John Foxe, and later, like Thomas Lever, one of the founders of Puritanism. In his 1548 An Informacion and Peticion agaynst the Oppresours of the Pore Commons, Crowley took literally the traditional conceit that the rich were merely ‘stewards’ of their wealth, so that any accumulation was a form of theft from the rightful owners: ‘Know that your office is to distribute and not to scrape together on heaps. God hath not set you to survey his lands, but to play the stewards in his household of this world, and to see that your poor fellow servants lack not their necessaries.’10 The following year, in his The Voyce of the Laste Trumpet (1549), Crowley   8 Thomas Lever, A sermon preached ye fourth Su[n]daye in Lente before the Kynges Maiestie (London, 1550), sig. B3r.   9 Lever, A Sermon, sig. E3v–E4r. 10 Robert Crowley, An Informacion and Peticion agaynst the Oppresours of the Pore Commons (London, 1548), sig. A7v.

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argued that any wealth that remained unspent upon necessities should be dispensed as God commanded in scripture. And if thou find not written there, That thou mayest heap thy chest with gold To buy great livelihood for thine heir, How darest thou then be so bold? How darest thou be bold I say, To heap up so much gold in store: But of the due that thou shouldest pay, To them that be poor, sick, and sore?11

Crowley’s opposition to the accumulation of wealth so plainly reeked of communism that he often felt compelled to deny it – ‘Take me not here that I should go about by these words to persuade men to make all things common’, he wrote. And he was not lying: Crowley’s views were very different than those of the Anabaptists. But his point was that a godly society would not need to have things common because when the gospel had truly been recovered from popery, there would already be a widespread redistribution of resources: ‘For what needeth servants of the household to desire to have their masters’ goods common, so long as the steward ministreth unto every man the thing that is needful for him?’12 Let me give one final example. In 1549, John Hooper returned from an extended exile in Zurich to become chaplain to Protector Somerset; within two years, he would be Bishop of Gloucester. In his Declaration of the Ten Holy Commandments, printed in Zurich in either 1548 or 1549, and then republished in England, Hooper’s exposition of the commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ was a case study in the social gospel. On the issue of poaching, for instance, Hooper argued that the real thieves were the rich who hoard deer in parks rather than the poor who hunt them to survive, a point which had also been made in Germany by Thomas Müntzer.13 Likewise, he numbered among thieves those who ‘sell wares … for more than they be worth, which useth not their craft to profit many, but for their own private commodity’. Price gouging, he wrote, leads to ‘scarcity of all things, and robbeth the poor members of every commonwealth, and bringeth the greater part of such commodities as be in every realm into a few rich men’s hands, so that they cannot be sold as common goods of the civil wealth, but as the goods of one private person’. Hooper wrote, ‘How doth these men hear or read the word of God that biddeth them give their own goods to the poor, 11 Crowley, The Voyce of the Laste Trumpet (London, 1549), sig. A6v. 12 Crowley, An Informacion, sig. A4r. 13 John Hooper, A declaration of the ten holy co[m]maundementes of allmygthye God (Zurich, 1549?), p. 172. For Müntzer, see his A Highly Provoked Defense, in: The Radical Reformation, ed. Michael Baylor (Cambridge, 1991), p. 81.

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which neither giveth their own, neither suffereth them to buy at a reasonable price the thing that is not theirs?’14 For Hooper, the issue here was not simply the Aristotelian ethics of the just price, in which a transaction is equitable only if buyer and seller benefit equally; rather, the whole idea of making profit on the market was a form of unfaith, doubting that God alone makes people rich or poor. To summarize, for these leaders of the English Reformation in the reign of Edward VI, the conversion of the world to true religion, after a millennium of corruption, was supposed to overcome the greed that kept people in thralldom, for it seemed obvious that if people had true faith, they would put the common wealth ahead of their own private wealth. For these writers, the natural outcome of the liberation of the gospel was that godly Christians would give away what they did not need, trusting that God would provide for them, and the role of government was to pressure or perhaps coerce the ungodly to do what the godly did voluntarily. And this was not all talk: in 1548–49, at the behest of the Commonwealth Men, the government of Edward VI launched a huge campaign of economic reform, which included the conversion of town fee-farms into poor relief, and a series of anti-inflation bills intended to fix prices at traditional levels. Most importantly, ‘enclosure commissioners’ fanned out across England, charged by the government to redress the grievances of displaced farmers. One of those commissioners, John Hales, announced that, ‘When other people, that hate God and his Word, should perceive that we that have professed God’s word in the lips bring forth the fruit thereof, that is charity and mercy to our poor neighbors, they should no longer call us heretics, but should be forced to love and embrace God’s word with us.’15 Now, much as in Germany in 1525, this kind of rhetoric provoked from the common people of southeastern England a massive rebellion against capitalist predations, demanding ‘that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding’. The vision of liberty at the heart of the rebellion was a self-conscious appropriation of the Reformation as it was emerging from the political center: the phrase ‘precious blood shedding’, for instance, had in fact been coined in the new English communion service published in 1548 and then included in the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.16 And, like Luther in 1525, the English Commonwealth Men publicly denounced the rebellion as a perversion of their ideas and programs. But this structural similarity between the two contexts should not blind us to the fact that in England, where there was not a legally binding framework of Reformation, Luther and Müntzer were not the only options. The Commonwealth Men pushed for what we might call a radical magisterial Reformation, not rebelling against the estab14 Hooper, A declaration of the ten holy co[m]maundementes, pp. 173–175. 15 BL Lansdowne MS 238, fo. 323v. 16 For the rebels’ use of the phrase, see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch (eds), Tudor Rebellions (4th ed., London, 1997), p. 145. The first use of this phrase that I have been able to find is in: The Order of the Communion (London, 1548), sig. B2v.

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lishment but attempting to turn England’s unusually centralized and authoritarian Reformation to their advantage during the happy expediency of King Edward VI’s minority. Their failure to remake society along evangelical lines does not diminish the radicalism of the attempt. Even within the political establishment, accusations flew that the government had colluded with the rebels, allegedly agreeing that ‘the avarice of gentlemen gave occasion for the people to rise’. The Imperial ambassador reported court gossip that Protector Somerset himself ‘had declared to the Council as his opinion that the peasants’ demands were fair and just’.17 In this context, a reformer like Hugh Latimer was neither radical nor magisterial, neither proto-­Marxist nor proto-Liberal, but something else entirely. In the second half of this paper, I want to suggest that in this crucial period in the emergence of English Protestantism, the commonwealth program of radical charity was not structured as a critique of the Protestant Reformation, but rather was the Protestant Reformation. I will demonstrate this thesis by finding the radical charity of the Commonwealth Men instantiated in the most seemingly sober and judicious of all the founding documents of English Protestantism: the Book of Common Prayer. To make this seemingly perverse argument, the moment I want to point to in the Book of Common Prayer is the ‘Offertory’, or rather the replacement for it, in preparation for communion. In ancient liturgies of the Western Church, the so-called ‘Offertory’ in the Mass had combined two different types of offerings: the offering of the bread and wine to God before their consecration, and an offering of gifts by parishioners: charitable donations which paid, among other things, for the bread and wine themselves. This latter, charitable offering largely disappeared from the liturgy in the Middle Ages, a point made by Luther in a treatise on ‘The Blessed Sacrament’, where he noted that Catholics had neglected the ancient connection between giving and receiving that ought to be at the center of the communion ceremony.18 The English prayer book seems to have gone further in restoring this connection than any liturgy produced by German or Swiss Protestants, making socio-economic reciprocity central to the Eucharistic ceremony. According to the Book of Common Prayer, the brand new poor boxes now required to be possessed by each parish church were to be passed around the congregation as an obligatory preparation for communion, and ‘so many as are disposed shall offer unto the poor men’s box, every one according to his ability and charitable mind’. While the box was circulating, the minister read from a list of 20 biblical passages: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon the earth’; ‘Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have done any wrong to any man, I restore fourfold’; ‘Charge them that are rich in this world, 17 See Ethan Shagan, Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives, in: The English Historical Review 114, no. 455 (February 1999): pp. 34–63, at pp. 34–35. 18 See Lindberg, Beyond Charity, p. 103; Elsie Anne McKee, John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving (Geneva, 1984), Ch. 2; Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (New Edition, London, 2005).

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that they be ready to give and glad to distribute’; and so forth. And then receiving communion, according to the liturgy, was predicated not only upon being generally in ‘good charity’ with your neighbors, as in other contemporary churches, but upon upholding what we might call the ‘moral economy’ of Tudor England: ‘Let him make satisfaction and due restitution of all lands and goods, wrongfully taken away or withholden’, the Prayer Book says, ‘before he comes to God’s board, or at least be in full mind and purpose to do so as soon as he is able, or else let him not come to this holy table, thinking to deceive God, who seeth all men’s hearts.’19 I want to stress that, read in the context of the unprecedented outpouring of economic theology which I described above, this amounted to an explicit threat to deny communion to the landed capitalists who, according to the arguments of men like Hooper and Latimer, were in the business of withholding lands and goods from their rightful possessors. This was a novelty: it had not been present, for instance, in the 1548 Order of the Communion in which Thomas Cranmer had first introduced an English-language sacramental service.20 And I am not the first to notice that the Offertory service was unusual; in fact it was long an embarrassment for sober-minded Anglicans. In his 1915 classic The English Rite, for instance, liturgical scholar F.E. Brightman lamented that in the Book of Common Prayer the balance between Christological and economic offerings was ‘perhaps too violently redressed’.21 So where did this violent redress come from? Diarmaid MacCulloch has recently noted that the word ‘communion’ to refer to the Eucharistic ceremony was, if not entirely new, then at least introduced to widespread usage by the English liturgies of 1548–49 masterminded by Cranmer.22 But MacCulloch does not offer an explanation of why the term gained such prominence, nor does he consider what it meant that ‘communion’ was so closely related to the keyword of socio-economic thought in the period, ‘common’. We shall not consider here the meanings of ‘communion’, but rather the meanings of another, closely related and not-quite-new term of 1549: ‘common prayer’. It has been widely assumed that the word ‘common’ in the title of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer referred to prayer that was collective rather than individual, according to the well-known patristic doctrine that the prayers of multitudes were more effective than the prayers of individuals. ‘Common’ prayer also referred to prayer that was uniform across dioceses, and prayer spoken by the laity together with the clergy. But given that ‘common’ was also the mantra of the Tudor Commonwealth Men, a word with strong connotations of charity, reciprocity, and the equitable distri19 Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 19–40. 20 In the 1548 version, the pressing issue appears to have been genuine repentance rather than social obligation: see The Order of the Communion. 21 Frank Brightman, The English Rite, being a synopsis of the sources and revisions of the Book of common prayer, with an introduction and an appendix, 2 vols (London, 1915), I, Intro., p. cv. 22 Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy (Oxford, 2016), pp. 144–145. I owe this reference to Alec Ryrie.

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bution of resources, it is surprising that, to the best of my knowledge, no historian has ever explored what the phrase ‘common prayer’ actually meant in the decades before 1549, nor how the phrase was used by the architects of the Edwardian Reformation. The most obvious place to search is, of course, the Bible. The term ‘common prayer’ occurs only once in the so-called ‘Great Bible’, which bore Henry VIII’s imperious image on its frontispiece, and the context is illuminating. The text is Chapter three of 2 Maccabees, a book declared apocryphal by Protestants but nonetheless retained in many Protestant bibles of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of the chapter, Jerusalem was ‘in all peace and wealth’, preserved in that condition by ‘Onias the high priest and other godly men that were enemies to wickedness’. But there was a snake in the grass: Simon, a ‘ruler of the temple’, went to the governor Apollonius and ‘told him that the treasury in Jerusalem was full of innumerable money, and how that the common goods (which belonged not unto the offerings) were exceeding great also’. Apollonius passed this message to the king, who sent ‘Heliodorus his steward’ to Jerusalem to plunder this wealth. When he arrived, the virtuous high priest Onias confirmed that there was treasure but told Heliodorus that it had been ‘laid up for the upholding of widows and fatherless children’. Heliodorus answered coldly that ‘the king had commanded him in any wise to bring him in the money’. So the people of Jerusalem turned to God. The priests ‘fell down before the altar in their vestments and called unto heaven’, and at the same time ‘people also came out of their houses by heaps unto the common prayer’.23 Together all these ‘common people … besought almighty God, that the goods which were committed unto them might be kept whole.’24 So here, in the only use of the term in the Bible, ‘common prayer’ referred not to unified prayer but to prayer for the common good, or indeed literally prayer for the ‘common wealth’, specifically the charitable offerings made to the poor in the temple. And indeed a wide variety of texts concurred that what made common prayer common was its charity: it was prayer for the commons, often although not always in explicitly economic terms. So, for instance, the 1485 English imprint known as ‘The Royal Book’ – so called because it was first written for Philip the Fair of France – discusses common prayer within its explanation of why we say our father rather than my father in the Lord’s Prayer. The word ‘our’ teaches that ‘we be all brethren, both great and small, poor and rich, high and low’. Thus, ‘We ought to pray the one for the other … and in this our profit is much great. For when thou sayest thy prayer in common, thou hast part in all the commonalty of Holy Church.’ Praying together is ‘common’ insofar as people pray for one another in a web of interdependence. Therefore, continues the text, the word ‘our’ in the Lord’s Prayer teaches us avoid three things – pride, hate, and avarice – and in particular avarice ‘putteth a man out of com23 In the Vulgate this is: ‘alii etiam congregati de domibus confluebant publica supplicatione obsecrantes pro eo quod in contemptum locus esset venturus’: biblegateway.com (accessed 17/10/16). 24 See The Byble in Englyshe (London, 1539), 2 Maccabees 3. This passage follows verbatim from the Coverdale Bible of 1535.

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pany’ because he will not have ‘his things common with other’. Therefore, the text concludes, ‘such people have no part nay company in the holy Pater Noster’.25 Just to give one more pre-Reformation example, the English translation of Raymond of Capua’s Vita of St. Catherine of Siena offered a uniquely succinct definition of ‘common prayer’: ‘I did say to thee also what is common prayer, for I said it was prayer of good will, that is exercised of charitable business, both in thee and in thy neighbor, the which should be do[ne] with a good will.’26 These examples suggest a broad semantics of common prayer in which what made prayer common was its charity. Now, of course, ‘charity’ referred generally to the Christian virtue of caritas, rather than to any specifically economic activity. So now let me turn to how the English Commonwealth Men linked common prayer to the idea of ‘radical charity’ described above. The first text I want to discuss is Thomas Becon’s A newe pathway vnto praier, published in 1542. This text is a particularly useful link in my chain of reasoning, for two reasons: first, Becon was one of the most prominent of the Commonwealth Men, serving as Protector Somerset’s personal chaplain and then writing an important book called The Fortress of the Faithful Against the Cruel Assaults of Poverty and Hunger (1550), which was deeply concerned with the social gospel and expressed sympathy for the 1549 rebels; and second, Becon is one of a very few people besides Thomas Cranmer whom we know for a fact had a hand in writing the Book of Common Prayer. We may suppose that Cranmer hired him for the job because he had written A newe pathway vnto praier and was imagined to be something of an authority on the subject.27 The first half of A newe pathway was a defense of private and mental prayer as more significant than public and vocal prayer. ‘Prayer’, Becon wrote, glossing a patristic commonplace, ‘consisteth not in the voice of the mouth, but in the thoughts of the heart’. The outward gestures usually associated with prayer, like kneeling, are ‘mean and indifferent things, they are to be left to the judgment of devout and well-disposed people, either to be done or to be left undone’. He attacked the culture of bead-praying, and the recital of creeds and paternosters, as a mockery of God, because prayer is only genuine if it is truly understood and truly believed. But typically for the Commonwealth Men, Becon’s example of the false Christian, who only pretends to pray, was the acquisitive capitalist: ‘Thy mouth indeed spoke, but thy mind did think upon 25 Dominican Laurent, This book was compyled [and] made atte requeste of kyng Phelyp of Fraunce (Westminster, 1485), sig. I3r–v. 26 Raymond of Capua, Here begynneth the orcharde of Syon in the whiche is conteyned the reuelacyons of seynt Katheryne of Sene (London, 1519), sig. K1v. Other pre-Reformation examples in which common prayer is assumed to be charitable prayer can be found in e. g. William Caxton, The cronylces of Englond (London, 1482), sig. P4v; Henry Parker, Here endith a compendiouse treetise dyalogue of Diues [and] paup[er] (London, 1493), Ch. 54. 27 On Becon, see Jonathan Reimer’s 2016 Cambridge PhD thesis, The Life and Writings of Thomas Becon, 1512–1567. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, 1996), pp. 416–417.

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usuries. It did count the revenues of thy possessions. It did behold the descriptions and valuings of houses.’28 Becon then stressed the incompatibility of economic acquisitiveness with genuine prayer, because we cannot truly pray when we are out of charity with our neighbors. Only the man with ‘a heart faithful toward God, and charity toward his neighbor, is fit to pray in the sight of God’. Thus, the most important preparative for prayer, without which there can be no true prayer, is that ‘we should forgive so many as have offended us’. For Becon this was not just forgiveness of trespasses, to use the familiar language, it was the forgiveness of debts in the economic sense: Becon argued that Christians cannot pray while they insist upon payment from poor debtors, for ‘God loveth no uncharitable, malicious, wicked, envious, and bloody prayers’.29 This was more than a little reminiscent of the arguments of Andreas Karlstadt, who had suggested that for Christians every day is like the Jewish Jubilee, when debts were forgiven and slaves were freed.30 Thus, Becon argued, instead of demanding payment from the poor, Christians must give alms to the poor in preparation for prayer. And while, of course, Becon acknowledged that every man ought to go to Church and pray ‘when the time and public order doth require’, this public prayer meant nothing unless it was prefaced by almsgiving that demonstrated godliness rather than hypocrisy. ‘Alms and the glad distribution of worldly goods upon the poor members of Christ’, Becon wrote, ‘garnish, adorn, and make very pleasant the humble supplication of a sinner in the eyes of the divine majesty.’ And here, Becon comes to the concept of ‘common’ prayer: This is to be noted in prayer, that in as much as all that profess Christ unfeignedly have one common and heavenly father, and are brothers to one another, yea brothers to Christ and fellow heirs with him, and seeing that Christ also hath taught us in his most godly prayer not only to pray for ourselves but also for all other in common, it shall be necessary that a Christian man doth so direct his prayer unto God, that he may seem no less to seek in it the help of his Christian brothers, than of himself.31

Two pages later, Becon continues: ‘Therefore the prayer of a Christian man ought on such manner to be made that it may be common, and comprehend in it all men that are his brothers in Christ.’ Now, Becon notes, some men will ask, ‘Is it not lawful for a man to pray severally for himself, and for his own private affairs? Yes verily, so that the mind be not utterly deflected and turned away from the contemplation of the 28 Thomas Becon, A newe pathway vnto praier (London, 1542), fols. C5v, D2v. 29 Becon, A newe pathway, Ch. 21. On the importance of forgiveness of debt as a form of charity, see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998), p. 303–12; Tyler Lange, Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France: The Business of Salvation (Cambridge, 2016). 30 On Karlstadt, see Lindberg, Beyond Charity, p. 122. 31 Becon, A newe pathway, sig. M8r.

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community, but referreth all things to that.’ So, he offers as an example, a ‘governor of the common weal’ may pray for wisdom, because that wisdom benefits the common good. A minister may pray for spiritual guidance, because it benefits the common good. And, in exactly the same sense, Becon writes, ‘Art thou a rich man? Then oughtest thou for to pray unto God, that thou mayest distribute his goods, committed unto thee, according to his pleasure, upon the poor people.’32 Such was the definition of common prayer according to at least one author of the Book of Common Prayer. The second text I want to discuss is John Hooper’s 1547 defense of Protestant sacramental theology, An answer vnto my lord of wynthesters booke intytlyd a detection of the deuyls sophistrye, which I think we can read as prefiguring the replacement for the Offertory in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Hooper, like so many other Protestants, denounced the mass as ‘a wicked superstition damned by God … not a sacrament of Christ’s most holy body but a profanation of his holy supper’. More specifically, he criticized the concept of an ‘offering’ in the Catholic liturgy. His Catholic opponents, Hooper wrote, ‘cannot tell what this word “offer” meaneth’. Catholics wrongly think that ‘Christ is offered in the mass for sin’, but in reality Christ offered himself for sin, to mediate between God and man. Thus Hooper described what he thought to be the true ordering of communion according to God’s word. First, there should be ‘some godly lessons out of the scripture in a tongue known’. Then, the people should be ‘instructed with an holy sermon’. And finally ‘then should there be common prayer’.33 So what was common prayer, according to Hooper? Prayer for the whole commonwealth: ‘There is not the poorest in any realm nor most weak person but may profit the commonwealth … and help to bring it to the end and perfection that the commonwealth was and is ordained for.’34 Finally, in the culmination of the communion ceremony, ‘the words of the supper [are] rehearsed, and the sacrament distributed to as many in the Church as would receive it and demand to receive it, so with thanksgiving and distribution of such goods as God hath given to every man for the power to depart, with joy and tranquility of conscience. This is the ceremony that is a sacrament of Christ’s holy body and blood.’35 In this vision, communion is a ceremony of ‘thanksgiving and distribution’ – but instead of the clergy distributing the sacrament, the laity distribute their wealth. The phrase ‘for the power to depart’ does not translate easily into modern syntax, but it means that God has given worldly wealth to each individual to be given away, and only by disburdening yourself of private riches can you achieve ‘tranquility of conscience’. 32 Becon, A newe pathway, sigs. N1r–2v. 33 John Hooper, An answer vnto my lord of wynthesters booke (Zurich, 1547), sig. N2r. 34 This appears to be a reference to the way praying for the commonwealth was an act of public participation, no less than fighting in wars or holding office: see Natalie Mears, Public Worship and Political Participation in Elizabethan England, in: Journal of British Studies 51, no.  1 (January 2012), pp. 4–25. 35 John Hooper, An answer vnto my lord of wynthesters booke (Zurich, 1547), sig. N4r.

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My final text comes from four years after the Book of Common Prayer: Hugh ­ atimer’s 1553 sermon on ‘daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer, with which I began my L essay. In that sermon, after his discussion of why we pray for our daily bread rather than my daily bread, Latimer briefly interrupted his own train of thought: But here I must ask you rich men a question: how chanceth it you have your riches? We have them of God, you will say. But by what means have you them? By prayer, you will say, we pray for them unto God, and he giveth us the same. Very well. But I pray you tell me, what do other men which are not rich? Pray they not as well as you do? Yes, you must say, for you cannot deny it. Then it appeareth that you have your riches not through your own prayers only, but other men help you to pray for them. For they say as well Our Father, give us this day our daily bread, as you do.

Latimer’s conclusion from this reasoning was that, since the poor contribute to the wealth of the rich, therefore ‘seeing you get not your riches alone through your own prayer, but through the poor man’s prayer, it is mete that the poor man should have part of them, and you ought to relieve his necessity and his poverty.’ And so, Latimer argued: ‘Therefore you rich men, ever consider of whom you have your riches. Be it a thousand pounds, yet you fetch it out of this petition, for this petition, give us this day our daily bread, is God’s storehouse, God’s treasure house. Here lieth all his provision, and here you fetch it. But ever have in remembrance that this is a common prayer, a poor man praith as well as you, and peradventure God sendeth this riches unto thee for another man’s prayer’s sake, which prayeth for thee.’36 So to conclude, in this paper I have focused on a cluster of ideas and texts that transgress the distinction between Protestant and Anabaptist economic ideas, and more generally transgress the idea that there is an ontological gap between the Protestant Reformation and its radical critiques. My argument, in essence, is that radical critique of the Protestant Reformation was immanent within the Protestant Reformation itself, but we do not usually notice because historians have defined Protestantism around a series of legal and political settlements specific to the German context. Outside of that legal context, it is much easier to notice that the Reformation was always a project to remake Christian society from the ground up; Protestantism was, by its own lights, not a legal settlement at all, but rather the power of the gospel ramifying across time and space. That is why so magisterial and indeed statutory a document as the Book of Common Prayer could, without apparent contradiction, demand of English subjects a form of economic justice that was beyond the pale of actual Protestant practice. The ‘radical charity’ I have described today is interesting, then, not because I want to compare the Commonwealth Men to the Anabaptists on some Olympian scale of radicalism: so many points awarded for eliminating private property, so many points 36 Latimer, Certayn Godly Sermons, fols. 37r–38r.

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lost for retaining the Trinity. Rather, it shows just how unrelenting Protestants understood the demands of the gospel to be, and therefore just how much critique of Protestantism was inherent in Protestantism itself. Now, I do not agree with Catholic historians like Brad Gregory, who argue that the Reformation was merely a solvent, that it was an intrinsically destructive process; it proved to be fabulously constructive as well.37 But I do think that because no human being, no social institution, and no government could ever meet the demands of the gospel, the Protestant Reformation was necessarily its own fiercest critic.

37 Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012).

Susan Royal

Religious Radicalism in ‘Magisterial’ England

‘Radicalism’ in England before the Wars of the Three Kingdoms is a subject that has been a relatively niche affair until recently, but is now emerging as a really exciting area of study. There are reasons to revisit sixteenth-century ‘radicalism’, not merely because Anabaptist heresies were the chief bugbear of early Continental and British evangelicals, but because scholars are increasingly alive to the importance of exploring marginal figures for what they can explain about the majority.1 For instance, recently Alexandra Walsham has written, ‘Rather than see anti-popery, anti-puritanism, and anti-sectarianism as forms of irrationality or hysteria we need to consider what they can reveal about central features of the cultures that engendered them …’2 Aiming to do just that, this essay will examine the relationship between early English evangelicalism and radical religion. First, I will show that, although the phenomenon of ‘Anabaptism’ has been considered detrimental to the evangelical cause, in fact an examination of evangelical literature reveals that English reformers were savvy in combatting this threat, using the Anabaptists to polemically and doctrinally legitimize their movement. Second, I will delve into evangelical ideas about tithes and oaths that challenged the political and/or ecclesiastical status quo. Swearing oaths was a widely accepted manner of affirming personal adherence to the monarch and his/her religious policies, and ceding a tenth of one’s produce to the church ensured the maintenance of her clergy. To limit these practices was to undermine the foundations of society and church. I conclude, then, that evangelicals needed to differentiate their ideas from those of Anabaptists precisely because their own ideas were radical. The main reason that pre-Civil War radicalism has been of peripheral concern to scholars of the English Reformation concerns methodology. Radicalism has received relatively little scrutiny because it has been synonymous with ‘Anabaptism’ in the scholarly literature. Writing on the topic of ‘Anabaptism in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ in the 1930s, Duncan Heriot, for instance, had no trouble using the term to indicate a monolithic movement, or at least something coherent enough to warrant an ‘ism’, despite claiming that one of the significant problems 1

For the use of ‘evangelical’ as a religious label, see Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. xv–xvi. 2 Alexandra Walsham, Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration, in: Seventeenth Century Journal 28 (2013), pp. 115–137.

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in investigating this topic is that even the authorities in England were ‘not too clear in the way they use the term “Anabaptist”’.3 This is borne out in even a cursory look at sixteenth-century literature which employs the term ‘Anabaptist’. Studying a number of writings, one is struck by the sheer variety of beliefs attributed to ‘Anabaptists’, and the ways these beliefs are assigned: some tracts, especially those of Heinrich Bullinger, translated into English by the French Protestant exile John Véron, offered a litany of opinions concerning infant baptism, tithes, swearing oaths to magistrates, community of goods, and separatism that Bullinger considered erroneous.4 More commonly, authors advised against one particular belief related to the main subject of their work. For instance, in Henry Reginald’s translation of Christoph Hegendorph’s sermons for the household, published in 1549, the water used at baptism is exalted as significant because it is ‘mixe[d] with the word’, a response to the Anabaptists’ rhetorical question, ‘how can the water helpe our soules?’5 Similarly, others cited a rejection of Scripture in lieu of revelations from the Holy Spirit, and an unholy trinity of general ‘Libertinism’, Arianism, and Pelagianism – sometimes in combination, sometimes individually, depending on the aims of the piece. This ambiguity over what exactly an ‘Anabaptist’ was has also become a historiographical problem. For instance, when searching for signs of radical religion prior to the Civil War, scholars have identified practices and beliefs they believe to be synonymous with ‘Anabaptism’: they have studied unconventional Christologies and the Freewillers,6 or looked for evidence of separatist congregations.7 Not finding much of this, many scholars have merely concluded that England’s Reformation was not all that radical.8 It took the work of Diarmaid MacCulloch to show just how much of a rupture the early Reformation was, especially that which occurred under Edward VI.9 3 Duncan B. Heriot, Anabaptism in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, in: Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society 12 (1935), pp. 256–71, quote at p. 256. 4 These specific opinions are cited in Heinrich Bullinger, An holsome antidotus or counter-poysen, agaynst the pestylent heresye and secte of the Anabaptistes, trans. John Veron (London, 1548), RSTC 4059. For a discussion of Bullinger’s other anti-Anabaptist tracts translated into English, see Carrie Euler, Anabaptism and Anti-Anabaptism in the Early English Reformation: Defining Protestant Heresy and Orthodoxy During the Reign of Edward VI, in: Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006). 5 Christopher Hegendorph, The seconde parte of the Domesticall or housholde sermons for a godly housholder, trans. Henry Reginald (Worcester, 1549), sig. E1v–E2r. RSTC 13022. 6 Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester, 2002), pp. 68–73. 7 David Loades, Anabaptism and English Sectarianism in the Mid-Sixteenth Century, in: Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1500–c.1750, ed. Derek Baker [Studies in Church History] (Oxford, 1979), pp. 59–70. 8 See, for instance, A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd ed., University Park, PA, 1989), pp. 204–205; see a good summary of this historiographical tendency in Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Radical Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 3–4. 9 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Myth of the English Reformation, in: Journal of British Studies 30 (1991), pp. 1–19.

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And it took research by Alec Ryrie,10 Ethan Shagan11 and Karl Gunther12 to point out that (to use Gunther’s and Shagan’s phrase) ‘ideological possibilities inherent within early English Protestantism itself ’ might produce radical views, and that this would be more useful in a search for non-mainstream Protestantism than merely trying to identify English versions of Anabaptism.13 The use of the term ‘radical’ warrants explanation, considering its well-known reference to European reformers who rejected reform in line with magistrates’ approval and the establishment of state churches. These so-called ‘Anabaptists’ also denounced infant baptism in lieu of a visible church of believers who had been baptized as cognizant adults. Although traditionally historians have categorized reform movements according to the divide between ‘magisterial’ and ‘radical’ reformations, this neat terminology is proving inadequate as scholars emphasize the contingencies of political support in the Reformation;14 uncover elements of overlap and influence between various movements;15 and reject fixed, essentialist definitions of the term ‘radical’ itself, and instead understand its use as contextual and relative.16 Here, then, the term ‘radical’ will signify political ideas, cultural tendencies, and/or religious modes that contemporaries understood to undermine the status quo. This flexible definition recognizes the moving goalposts inherent in the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. English evangelicals, far away from the Kingdom of Münster and the prophecies of Thomas Müntzer, were nevertheless subject to charges of Anabaptism by religious conservatives, and they took steps, especially in the mid-sixteenth century, to distance themselves. One approach was to stress, in doctrinal or devotional literature, the differences between good Protestant beliefs and those of ‘sectaries’. Apart from Hegendorph’s household sermons discussed above, there are many examples – to choose one, a commentary on the First Epistle of St Peter, supplemented with ‘fruitful annotations’ by the English evangelical William Alley (d. 1570). The errors of Anabaptists sprin10 Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII. 11 Ethan H. Shagan, Clement Armstrong and the Godly Commonwealth: Radical Religion in Early Tudor England, in: The Beginnings of English Protestantism, eds Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 60–83. 12 Gunther, Reformation Unbound. 13 Ethan H. Shagan and Karl Gunther, Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII, in: Past and Present 194 (2007), pp. 35–74. 14 Brad S. Gregory, Reforming the Reformation: God’s Truth and the Exercise of Power, in: Reforming Reformation, ed. Thomas F. Mayer (Farnham, 2012), pp. 17–42. 15 Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan have rightly pointed out (when discussing later radicalism) that the relationship between radicalism and reform was ‘flexible and interwoven’: Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, Reappraising Early Modern Radicals and Radicalisms, in: Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early-Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism, eds Hessayon and Finnegan (Aldershot, 2011), p. 12. MacCulloch, The Myth of the English Reformation. 16 David R. Como, Radical Puritanism, c.1558–1660, in: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge, 2008), p. 242. Gunther, Reformation Unbound, pp. 3–4; Hessayon and Finnegan, Reappraising Early Modern Radicals and Radicalisms.

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kle the text, including their denial of Christ’s manhood, their reliance on personal revelation in lieu of scripture, rejection of infant baptism, separatism from the state church, and seeking of martyrdom.17 In each case, Alley imparts what he considers orthodox Protestant views on these questions, deliberately drawing a line between his own beliefs and those of the radicals; this was common practice in Edwardian England, when so much of this literature was written. So one way to defend yourself against the charge of Anabaptism was to directly compare doctrines. Another way to evade the accusation of Anabaptism was to preempt it, as the confrontational evangelical Henry Brinkelow did. Writing against the severity of the 1539 Act of Six Articles that threatened to curtail the evangelical movement, Brinkelow pointed to the Pilgrimage of Grace, charging that the church’s bishops were, in fact, ‘the very orygynall, grounde ande foundacyon of the same Insurectyon, vproare and tumulte’.18 Recognizing his audacity, he preempts the calumny: ‘I knowe the Papystes & their flocke shal sclaunderously report that … I am an anabaptist which opinions of them that are against the scriptur (as they haue diuerse) I vtterly abhorre, which opynions nead not her to be touched.’ He casts the accusations of religious radicalism as an ‘old craft’ to slander reformers, ‘saynge we be causers of insurreccyon’. ­Brinkelow here was echoing a common evangelical trope: accused by Catholics of sedition, which had been linked with heresy in England since the time of the late medieval Lollard heresy, reformers like John Bale repeatedly retorted that just as Catholics accused them of sedition, so had the Jewish authorities accused Christ – an unimpeachable pedigree.19 Brinkelow’s tactic of preempting an accusation of Anabaptism also antici­ pates the deployment of the same by the presbyterian Thomas Cartwright and the separatist John Greenwood later in the reign of Elizabeth.20 A third way to distance one’s movement from Anabaptism was to extol one’s comrades as true Protestants on the basis that they fought against the Anabaptist heresy. These soldiers of Christ included Robert Barnes, who had been accused at his trial in 1540 of preaching that the Virgin Mary was but a ‘saffron-bag’ (a position that Hugh Latimer also had to repudiate in his ‘Sermon of the Plough’).21 This phrase implied – 17 Respectively, see William Alley, Ptochomuseion, The poore mans librarie (London, 1565), fos. 28v, 129r, 167v, 191v, and fo. 89r. RSTC 374. 18 Henry Brinkelow, The lamentacyon of a Christe[n] agai[n]st the citye of London (Bonn, 1542), sig. E1v. RSTC 3764. 19 For instance, see John Bale, A brefe chronycle concernynge the examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Iohan Oldecastell (Antwerp, 1544), sig. B7v. RSTC 1276. 20 See Thomas Cartwright, The second replie of Thomas Cartwright (Heidelberg, 1575), p. xxxi. RSTC 4714; Henry Barrow, A collection of certain letters and conferences lately passed betvvixt certaine preachers & tvvo prisoners in the Fleet (Dordrecht?, 1590), p. 52. RSTC 1518.5. 21 For Barnes, see Miles Coverdale, A confutacion of that treatise, which one Iohn Standish made agaynst the protestacion of D. Barnes (Zurich, 1541), sig. C5v. RSTC 5888. Hugh Latimer, Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge, 1844), p. 60. William Alley alleged that Anabaptists believe Christ ‘passed throughe the wombe of the virgin Marie, as water dothe thorough a pipe’; see Ptochomuseion, fo. 41r.

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as did Willem de Cuper, a follower of Jan Matthijs, who referred to Mary as a ‘flourbag’ – a denial of Mary’s role as mediator between human and divine; the baking ingredient preferred by Pieter Florison, an Anabaptist in South Holland was, incidentally, cinnamon.22 Barnes did not go quietly, taking the opportunity of an audience at his execution to defend his evangelical ideals, which were promptly denounced in print by John Standish who accused him of Anabaptist beliefs. When Barnes’ co-religionist Miles Coverdale responded, he defended Barnes point by point over issues of infant baptism, rebellion, and the alleged saffron bag comment. But perhaps most importantly, Coverdale claimed that Standish was especially wrong to taint Barnes with heresy and treason because Barnes had actually openly opposed Anabaptists. He challenged, ‘Is it heresie and treason to teach no erroneous doctrine, to teach onely those thinges that scripture leadeth vnto, to manteyne no erroure, to moue no insurrection, to be falsly slaundred, to confute the false opinion of the Anabaptistes, to deteste and abhorre all such sectes, to set forth the glory of god, obedience to the hyer powers, and the true religion of Christ?’23 Among the Barnes’ virtues, Cover­dale lists that he ‘abhorreth the Anabaptiste heresie’.24 As the case of Barnes shows, evangelicals were vulnerable to this accusation, and when accused, they turned to the printing press to publish defenses of their beliefs. It is not a surprise that John Bale, one of the more radical and vituperative English evangelicals, felt the need to write a defense of himself and his co-religionists. A brife and faythfull declaration of the true fayth of Christ, made by certeyne men susspected of heresye was published in 1547 under the initials ‘I.B.’ Its prologue assures true Christians that ‘although the time be neuer so perylous, or neuer so many dampnable sectes be broughte forth’, God would provide light to his Israelites so they could detect clearly the way to salvation.25 He begins with an exegesis of the Apostles’ Creed, and moves on to cover specific issues: baptism, the Eucharist, taking up arms, and matrimony. Describing baptism as a sacramental token, he explains its role as a fountain of regeneration, a covenant of good conscience to God, and an offering of the flesh and resurrection into a new life.26 Because this token is so significant, Bale stresses that it is absolutely crucial that the person being baptized be cognizant of what he is doing: So muste he that shal be baptised belieue, or els he can not ryghtly be baptised, as we maye clearelye vnderstande in the wordes of Christ Iesu, wherwyth he hath institute this ­baptysme, and commaunded his apostles, sayinge: Go and preache the gospell to al creatures, he that beleueth and is baptysed, shalbe saued. Mar. xvi. Here wyll no sophisticall reasonynges 22 Alastair Duke, The Face of Popular Dissent in the Low Countries, 1520–30, in: The Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries, ed. Alastair Duke (London, 1990), p. 42. 23 Coverdale, A confutacion of that treatise, sig. A8r. 24 Ibid., sig. H6v. 25 John Bale, A brife and faythfull declaration of the true fayth of Christ, made by certeyne men susspected of heresye (London, 1547), sig. A1v. RSTC 1034.7. 26 Ibid., sigs. A6r–v.

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and dreames be alowed, for the Lorde wyll destroye the wysedome of the wyse, and wyll take awaye the vnderstanding of the prudent, and wyl make the wisedome of thys worlde ­folishnesse. 27

He goes on to give the example of the Apostle Philip, who refused to baptize an Ethiopian eunuch until he understood the Gospel and believed in Christ. Rather abruptly, Bale then pivots to defend infant baptism along the usual lines of magisterial reformers, comparing infant baptism to the Old Testament rite of circumcision, assuring that the faith of the parents vouches for that of the child, and that Christ himself had witnessed to children in the Gospel.28 So evangelicals were adept at positioning themselves as loyal to the king and to Christ. They carefully extricated their religious opinions from those attributed to Anabaptists at the time, portraying themselves and their co-religionists as not merely above theological reproach, but active in the fight against heresy. Given that there were so few Anabaptists in England, though, the question of why there was such a vehement rebuttal of Anabaptist ideas and an insistence on distancing evangelicals from the taint of radicalism remains. Taking cues from the work of MacCulloch, Shagan, and Gunther, this section will chart the radical terrain of early Reformation writing. Rather than looking for signs of foreign Anabaptist infiltration, I will examine the ways in which English evangelicals reimagined Christian society and the reform of the church. Specifically, I will look at evangelical opinions about two bulwarks of the Christian commonwealth: oath-swearing and tithing. The early 1540s saw two full-length tracts issued concerning oaths, which Alec Ryrie and Jonathan Gray attribute to concerns over recantation oaths in a period of increased prosecutions against evangelicals.29 Two of the more prominent and prolific first-generation English evangelicals, polemicist John Bale (d. 1563) and theologian Thomas Becon (d. 1567), turned their attention to oaths. John Bale’s A Christian exhortation unto customizable swearers and Thomas Becon’s An Invective against the most wicked and detestable vice of swearing were written in 1543, in the wake of the Acts of Six Articles’ check on the evangelical movement, with Bale’s tract printed abroad and Becon’s published under a pseudonym. While Gray and Ryrie are certainly right to point toward Bale’s concern over recantation oaths as one catalyst for this piece, readers get a sense also that Bale’s concerns were wider. In his preface to the reader, the reformer points out that other evangelicals have written against purgatory, indulgences, saints’ cults and pilgrimages, monasteries, and papal decrees, and ‘[a]ll these 27 Bale, A brife and faythfull declaration, sig. A6v. 28 Ibid., sigs. A7v–A8r. 29 Jonathan Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2013), p. 197; Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, pp. 76–79.

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thinges are Godlye, I denye it not …[b]ut these for the more parte hath parteyned, and yet styll doth parteyne, to the monstruous kyngdome of Antecrist or disgysed church of hypocrites.’30 For Bale, what is missing is a reform of speech, necessary due to the prevalence of casual blasphemy and its danger to Englishmen’s souls. He explains that God instituted a law of love between men, and that ‘added he this naturall lawe, that they shuld consydre within them selues what they wolde haue done to ther owne bodyes, chyldren, goodes, or cattell, and vpon that grounde to conceyue a rewle how to vse all other particuler personnes.’31 In this tract, then, Bale seems to consider how a reformed agenda would affect not just worship and the shape of the church, but civil society within a Christian commonwealth. In this commonwealth, Bale advocates a blanket ban on private swearing, a position that Gray argues is more extreme than that of other evangelicals.32 Oaths should be used sparingly, and only issued by judges and magistrates, a line similar to that of Becon. While Becon believes magistrates could lawfully impose oaths, he urged that this maneuver be used for grave matters pertinent to the health of the common weal.33 While Ryrie has read in Bale’s and Becon’s words a skeptical view of swearing, Gray argues that evangelicals sought to limit recourse to oaths out of reverence for their holy power.34 This reasoning, though, still effectively reduced the circumstances in which oaths should be sworn, and despite the differences between their positions on oaths and that of the Anabaptists, both Bale and Becon seem to have recognized their suggestions as radical enough to need to make those differences explicit. So Bale wrote that Anabaptists misunderstood Christ’s words as a complete ban on oaths, whereas he was really condemning oaths ‘whiche we vse one with another in oure familiar communicacion and language’, not those given before magistrates and judges.35 Likewise, far into his tract on swearing oaths, Becon condemns the Anabaptists’ belief ‘that it is not lawful for a Christian manne to sweare by no meanes.’36 Arguing that according to Scripture, ‘We are not forbydden to sweare, but vaynely, idlely, falsely & vnryghteously to sweare,’ Becon cites the first commandment, assuring readers that the key phrase is ‘in vain’. He also says that if Jews, Turks, and ‘other infidels’ desire to convert to Christianity, the only way people would believe them is if they swore ‘by the name of the Lord his God’. Also judges ‘may lawfully require an 30 John Bale, A Christen exhortacion vnto customable swearers (Antwerp, 1543), sig. A1v. RSTC 1280. 31 Ibid., sig. A5r. 32 Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, p. 39. As can be seen below, I am less sure that Becon’s position is much different from that of Bale. 33 Thomas Becon, An inuectyue agenst the moost wicked [and] detestable vyce of swearing, newly co[m]piled by Theodore Basille (London, 1543), sig. I7v. RSTC 1730.5. 34 Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, p. 77 and Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, Chapter 1; p. 176. 35 Bale, A Christen exhortacion vnto customable swearers, sig. B4r. 36 Thomas Becon, An inuectyue agenst the moost wicked & detestable vyce of swearing (1543), sig. I3v. RSTC 1730.5.

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oath’ of a witness testifying in court (and earlier he had stated that magistrates may require oaths). Last, if someone were charged with a serious crime: heresy, treason, theft, manslaughter, ‘whoredom’, or ‘some other notable vice’, a man might swear to his innocence. These are some tight parameters, and I would suggest they are even tighter than they might appear. With regard to judges accepting witnesses’ oaths, earlier in the text, Becon admonishes judges to be especially careful about hearing false witnesses and unlawful oaths.37 And even the reformer’s permission for saving oneself from punishment for a crime warrants further scrutiny. Becon’s text had previously said that oaths were essentially useless for that, because a good man who keeps to his word and lives an upright life would have no need to swear; on the other hand, no one would even believe the oath of a reprobate.38 It is also worth noting that Becon’s text is peppered with ominous warnings about the dangers of perjury, the holiness of God’s name, and the sacredness of the bonding of one’s conscience. Even before Bale and Becon set their attention to swearing, other radical ideas about swearing oaths had been printed. A tract likely edited by George Constantine and William Tyndale detailed the inquisitorial processes of two fifteenth-­century ­Lollards, one of whom was the priest William Thorpe, whose autobiographical account of his interrogation and imprisonment survived in manuscript form from the time of his incarceration in 1407.39 Thorpe took Christ’s prohibition on swearing by creatures in Matthew, Chapter 5 literally. Citing Christ’s mandate, he refused when asked by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel (d.1414) to swear on a copy of the Bible, responding, ‘Syr a boke is no thynge els but a thynge coupled together of dyuerse creatures, and to swere by any creature both gods lawe and mans lawe is agaynst.’40 Thorpe’s story is significant because it is one of the first Lollard texts printed in the Reformation era. Recognizing their own movement in this late medieval dissenter’s opinions, evangelicals published this material in a bid for historical legitimacy. Thorpe’s position on swearing is specifically referenced in the preface to the reader explaining the purpose of the book: ‘Wherfore I exhorte the good brother, who soeuer thou be that redest thys treatyse, marke hit well and consyder it seryouslye, and there thou shalt fynde not onelye what the chyrche ys, theyre doctryne of the Sacramente, the worshyppynge off ymagyes, pylgremage, confessyon, Swerynge and payinge of 37 Ibid., sigs. F8r–G2v, especially at sig. G1v. 38 Ibid., sigs. I2r–v. 39 For an extended discussion of the editors of this late medieval manuscript, including the suggestion of William Turner instead of William Tyndale, see Anne Hudson (ed.), Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor 1406, The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407 (Oxford, 1993), pp. xxxiii–xxxvii. 40 William Thorpe, The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste accused of heresye before Thomas Arundell, eds George Constantine and/or William Tyndale (Antwerp, 1530), sig. F1r. RSTC 24045. John Bale echoed these sentiments in: Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe (Antwerp, 1543), fo. 90v and A Christen exhortacion vnto customable swearers, sig. B2v. See Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, pp. 31–32.

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tythes.’41 Thorpe’s story was thus introduced into the pantheon of true Christians, and appeared not only in this text but in all four editions of Acts and Monuments printed in John Foxe’s lifetime.42 Another notable feature of Thorpe’s interrogation is his request to know what would be asked of him, should he take Arundel’s oath. Oaths of inquisition began to be used in England as soon as the government clamped down on the threat of heresy in its 1401 statute, De heretico comburendo, which enhanced the position of ordinaries and other ecclesiastical inquisitors to proceed against suspected heretics.43 Judges were allowed to interrogate suspected heretics ex officio mero (by virtue of his office), compelling suspects to swear to answer all subsequent questions truthfully. After taking the oath, the juror could not lie or refuse to answer any questions – doing either of these would be committing perjury.44 Thorpe, when presented with a Bible upon which to swear, not only refused to swear by creatures, but also refused to swear because he did not know which questions he would be obligated to answer. He asked Arundel, ‘But I pray you syr for the charite of god that ye will before that I swere as I haue here rehersed to you tell me how or whereto that I shall submytt me: & shewe me wherof that ye will correcte me: & what is the ordinaunce that ye will thus oblige me to fulfyll.’45 Just before this, Thorpe assured Arundel before his clerks that, ‘howe where, when and to whom men are bounden to swere … according with gods lawe: I will thorow gods grace be euer redy therto with all my conning & power.’ So Thorpe did not deny that oaths were valid, but was obstinate in his insistence on performing them in accordance with Scripture, which he saw as incongruent with their use by ecclesiastical authorities. Thorpe’s refusal to swear an oath to answer all subsequent questions before he understood the nature of those subsequent questions accords with what Gray has shown to be the puritans’ opposition to the ex officio oath late in Elizabeth’s reign. They contested its legality on the basis that the oath lacked judgment; because the defendant promised on his oath to answer all subsequent questions truthfully before he knew what the questions actually were, he was unable to judge whether the questions (and therefore the oath) were lawful.46 41 George Constantine and/or William Tyndale (eds), The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste … The examinacion of the honorable knight syr Jhon Oldcastell Lorde Cobham (Antwerp, 1530), sig. A2r. RSTC 24045. 42 For information about Foxe’s exemplar, see Anne Hudson, ed. Two Wycliffite Texts, pp. xxxii–xxxiii. 43 2 Henry IV cap. 15, Statutes of the Realm, vol. 2 (London, 1810–1828), pp. 125–128. 44 For a comparison of this inquisitorial method compared to procedures requiring accusations or denunciations, see Ian Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005), pp. 69–70. 45 Constantine/Tyndale (eds), The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste, sig. A2r. 46 Jonathan Gray, Conscience and the Word of God: Religious Arguments against the Ex Officio Oath, in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), pp. 494–512. See also Ethan Shagan, The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in the 1590s, in: Historical Journal 47 (2004), pp. 541–565.

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Well before the puritans’ opposition to the oath in the 1590s, others had cautioned judges against issuing oaths to those who might commit perjury in order not to incriminate themselves. Bale urged, ‘Neyther ought a iudge by the lawe, to compel a man to sweare agaynst hymself, least he inforce hym wyckedlye to synne in for swearinge hymself, and so to dispayre of the mercye of God.’47 His warning echoes William Tyndale’s prescription for how judges should adjudicate in a godly commonwealth, printed fifteen years earlier. Writing of the duties of judges, Tyndale advises, ‘lett them iudge, and condemne the trespaser vnder lawfull witnesses and not breake vp in to the consciences of men, after the ensample of Antychristes disciples, and compel them ether to forswere them selves by the allmightie God and by the holy Gospell of his mercifull promises or to testifie agenst themselves.’48 The margin reads, ‘O tyranny to compell a man to accuse him selfe.’49 Likewise, Becon seems to suggest that it is wrong to compel a person to answer future unknown questions. Toward the end of a section addressing lawful swearing in An inuectyue agenst … swearing, Becon stipulates that if a magistrate requires an oath from a subject to preserve the commonwealth, that subject should do it gladly and willingly: Pay that to Caesar what is due to Caesar. But here are they to be monyshed, which shall require the ooth of their subiectes, that it is theyr dutye before the other be sworne to declare the matter wythe manifest wordes vnto them, that they maye well perceaue, that they shall not sweare in vayne, but for weyghty and necessary matters concerning ether the glory of God or the profyt of the common weale …The cause for the whiche menne shulde sweare, ought not onely to be good, but also necessary, and so openly proued vnto them, before they be broughte vnto theyr oothe.50

While Becon’s concern here is clearly that the juror should not be drawn into perjury, John Foxe opposed this oath on moral grounds. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments detailed the interrogations of the Lollards who were examined under the ex officio oath, writing that the inquisitors ‘so violently & impudently … abused the booke of the peaceable Euangelistes, wreastyng mens consciences vpon their othe, swearing then vpon the same to detecte them selues, their fathers and mothers, and other of their kinred, 47 Bale, A Christen exhortacion vnto customable swearers, sig. A8r. 48 William Tyndale, The obedience of a Christen man (Antwerp, 1528), sig. G4r. RSTC 24446. 49 The Constantine/Tyndale edition of William Thorpe’s interrogation includes a preface that hails Thomas Hitton, a Norwich preacher executed in 1529, as a martyr. Foxe relays that when Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham attempted to administer the ex officio oath to him, ‘Hitton refused to sweare, saying, “It is against Gods lawes and good conscience for any man to sweare to shed hys owne bloud, for so he should be a murtherer of hymselfe, and become guiltie of his owne death.”’ The margin reads, ‘Tho. Hitton refuseth to sweare agaynst himselfe.’ Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011). Available from: http//www.johnfoxe.org (accessed 28/10/16). Hereafter TAMO, p. 2160 (1583 edition). 50 Becon, An inuectyue agenst … swearing, sig. I7v–I8r.

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with their frendes and neighbours, and that to death.’51 In each of the book’s editions, Foxe condemned the ex officio oath in unequivocal terms. He conflated this oath with the De heretico comburendo, and directly compared it to the state-sponsored persecution of Christians by the Roman emperors Diocletian and Maximian (conveniently cross-referenced in the text).52 These words about the ex officio oath served to undermine the traditional means by which officials proceeded against heresy. Even when evangelicals like Bale and Becon wrote that judges were allowed to require oaths generally, they qualified this by imploring judges not to compel suspects to incriminate themselves. This, alongside reluctance to swear oaths more generally, challenged the political and ecclesiastical status quo. The editors of Thorpe’s interrogation praise the Lollard’s ideas about swearing, but also his position on tithes. Thorpe believed that tithes, though, was more dogmatic and unconventional than those of later evangelicals. Thorpe’s view was that tithes were commanded by the Old Law for the Levitical priesthood, a law superseded by the New Law of Christ. He maintained that Christ and his apostles were sustained on pure alms, not tithes. His proof-text was Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews (7:12): ‘For yf the presthod be translated, then of necessitie must the lawe be translated also.’53 Thus the institution of new tithes by an act of the papacy in the high Middle Ages contravened the law as instituted by Christ: ‘But … in the thousande yeare of oure lorde Iesu Christe, two hundreth and a leuenth yere, one pope the tenth Gregory ordened new, tythes fyrst to be gyuen to priestes nowe in the newe lawe.’54 The Englishman William Barlow deployed similar reasoning in his A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and a husbandman: ‘For christe came of the lynage of Iuda, to whiche lyne was no tythes graunted and so as men suppose this entayle was not confermyd by christe & his apostles to the priestes in the newe lawe.55 Also like Thorpe, he claimed that the medieval papacy’s introduction of new tithes contradicted Christ’s mandate to live by alms. In 1536, when the Cambridge evangelical Tristram Revel translated François Lambert’s Farrago omnium fere rerum theologicarum (1525), the Englishman conveyed 51 John Foxe, TAMO (London, 1570), p. 985. 52 Foxe, TAMO (London, 1570), 646. Foxe referred to De heretico comburendo as the ‘ex officio statute’ despite its existence in canon law prior to this statute having been issued in 1401. See, for instance, TAMO (London, 1570), pp. 645, 700, 1235. 53 Great Bible, trans. Miles Coverdale (London, 1540), fo. 88r. RSTC 2071. 54 Constantine/Tyndale (eds), The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste, sig. E3v. In fact, the source Thorpe was drawing on (Ranulph Higden of Chester’s Polychronicon) names the pope responsible for this legislation as Gregory IX, not Gregory X; this error exists in all but one copy of Thorpe’s interrogation and also appears in another Lollard text. (See Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts, pp. 124–25.) It is also repeated by William Barlow in A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and a husbandman (Antwerp, 1530), sig. C2r. RSTC 1462.5. 55 Barlow, A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and a husbandman, sig. C2r.

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Lambert’s rejection of mandatory tithes and first fruits on the same grounds as William Thorpe and William Barlow had: For that cause the preesthode of Aaron is abrogate, and is translatyd into Chryste, and the faythfull, and christe is made alone the true and hye byshoppe of the faythful, as is openly declaryd in the epystle of S. Paule to the hebrues. Wherfore byshoppes, and prestes of the kyngedome of the pope … do nat succede to the lawe of tythes, fyrst frutes, and oblacyons, whiche be dewe alonly to them aforesayde, for they be not prestes, and leuites of the lawe. They be therfore execrable theues, when they requyre tithes, fyrst frutes and oblacyons.56

Lambert’s use of the Book of Revelation for reading church history had influenced John Bale, and it is possible his ideas about tithing left a mark, too.57 In Yet a course at the Romishe foxe (1543), Bale denounced the recantation in December 1541 of the evangelical William Tolwin, carefully rebutting each of the claims he made at his recantation. Among the books in Tolwin’s possession that he disavowed in his recantation was a copy of the examination of William Thorpe.58 Bale disputed that the points contained therein should be considered heretical, including Thorpe’s opinion (and possibly that of Tolwin), ‘That prestes haue no iust tytle to tythes by the gospell.’59 That tithes were instituted by man and not God comes across in many of Bale’s works. Although he wrote no full-length piece on tithing, it is clear from comments in his writings that Bale considered tithes to be part of the ceremonial accoutrement of the false church. Outlining the litany of clerical abuses in English history, Bale’s The actes of Englysh votaryes (1546), affords tithes the same status as other superfluous ceremonies – such as mass offerings, church hallowings, churching women, and bishops’ seats – that served to submit the English church to that of Rome at the time of St Augustine’s mission to England (c.600). Before that, ‘The Brytaynes in those dayes had non other Gods seruyce but the Gospell.’60 In The pageant of popes, translated from Latin in 1574, he indicates that privy tithes were instituted by Innocent III in 1215, underscoring the notion of tithes as a man-made institution, not of divine origin.61 The image of both churches (1545) depicts the world in the era of Reformation as one in which all superstitions, like images, pardons, and auricular confessions, were rejected – including tithes and trentals.62 56 François Lambert, The summe of christianitie gatheryd out almoste of al placis of scripture, trans. Tristram Revel (London, 1536), sigs. E2v–E3r. RSTC 15179. 57 Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (Eugene, OR, 1976), p. 76. 58 Alexander Seton and William Tolwin, The declaracion made at Poules Crosse (London, 1542), sig. B3v. RSTC 22249.5. 59 John Bale, Yet a course at the Romishe foxe (Antwerp, 1543), sig. F7v. RSTC 1309. Also among the books in Tolwin’s possession was the catechism of Balthasar Hubmaier, who Bale claims not to know much about (sig. G3v). See Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 337. 60 John Bale, The actes of Englysh votaryes (Antwerp, 1546), sig. D1v. RSTC 1270. 61 John Bale, The pageant of popes, trans. John Studley (London, 1574), sig. D1v. RSTC 1304. 62 John Bale, The image of both churches (Antwerp, 1545), sig. C4v. RSTC 1296.5.

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While Bale portrayed tithes as an institution of man, Thomas Becon at least admitted that they had been instituted by God. He believed, however, that they were being abused. In a posthumously published compendium of his sayings, Becon compares the titular ‘actes of Christe and of Antichriste’: Antichrist taketh awaie the corne, and the best fruites of Benefices, from the true and faithfull Pastours, wherwith thei should liue, and suche as belong to them, and bee the more able to maintaine hospitalitie, to releue the poore, to comfort the waiefaryng man, and to succour the poore afflicted Christians, and he giueth it to monstruous Monkes, to flatteryng Friers, to chatteryng Chanons, to patteryng Pristes, and to suche like vnprofitable members of the christen common weale.63

Becon’s antagonism towards tithes, then, concerned their perceived abuse, a sentiment pervasive among more radical evangelicals, and certainly more common than the position that they had no divine sanction. Bale, for instance, condemned the clergymen who ‘eate vp the labour of the poore manne that ysmore [sic] vertuose than you’; Bale’s marginal comment reads ‘The clergye hath robbed the poore’.64 This concern for the poor is echoed in A mysterye of inyquyte (1545), in which Bale lamented that ‘there is not a poore wenche that taketh wages, but ye must haue the tent part for tythes. There is not a labourer which lyueth by the sweate of his browes, but ye must haue a patche therof, though his chyldren shulde famyshe at home.’65 Likewise ­Constantine and Tyndale relayed William Thorpe’s lament that ‘the most dele of priestes nowe wasteth their pareshes goodes and spendeth them at their owne will after the worlde in theire veyne lustes, so that in fewe places poore men haue dewly (as they sholde haue) their owne sustenaunce.’66 The abuse of tithes, then, had an adverse effect on lay Christians living in poverty. The evangelical concern about tithes as a burden for the poor was steeped in the mistrust of a perceived corrupt clergy. John Knox, a fellow exile of Becon, Bale and Foxe during the regime of Mary I, had claimed in his ‘Letter to the Commonalty’ that, should ‘true preachers’ not be provided for them, the common people should withhold their tithes.67 The gulf between abusive prelates who misappropriate tithes for their private use, as opposed to ‘true preachers’ who would take a portion of the tithes but give the rest to the poor, preoccupied Robert Crowley, a friend and co-­religionist of John 63 Thomas Becon, The actes of Christe and of Antichriste concernyng bothe their life and doctrine (London, 1577), sigs. H6r–v. RSTC 1711. 64 Bale, Yet a course at the Romishe foxe, sig. I1v. 65 John Bale, A mysterye of inyquyte (Antwerp, 1545), sig. E3r. RSTC 1303. 66 Constantine/Tyndale, The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste, sig. E4v. 67 John Knox, The Letter to the Commonalty, in: John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger A. Mason (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 123–24. Thorpe had also advocated withholding tithes from amoral priests, lest parishioners enable their sinning; see Constantine/Tyndale, The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste, sig. E5r.

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Foxe. When Nicholas Shaxton recanted his evangelical beliefs in 1546, he had submitted that some priests might minister the sacraments only, and not preach. In his rebuttal published two years later, Crowley observed critically that, for prelates, ‘the chiefe poynte is to kepe well the Easter booke, and se that the tythes be not slacke lye payed. As for preachynge shall be nothynge of the curates charge.’68 A few years later, Crowley continued exposing the clergy’s self-interest at the expense of the poor: in the voice of God, the reformer admonished, ‘Ye had the tythes/of mens encrease/That shoulde haue fedde/my flocke and me/But you made your/selfes well at ease.’69 The sentiments of Crowley and Knox in the late 1540s and early 1550s reveal the longevity of evangelical concerns about the practice of tithing; in 1528, a tract written in doggerel by Jerome Barlow and William Roy asked ‘Is there eny grett differynge/Bitwene theft and tythe gaderynge/After the practyse that we se?’70 Barlow’s and Roy’s tract contributed to a tradition of advocacy for the poor (at the expense of prelates) established by Simon Fish and Henry Brinkelow, a tradition Crowley and Knox would later build upon.71 Evangelicals, of course, did not provide the only critique of tithing practices; as Ryrie has pointed out, religious conservatives likewise attempted to reform aspects of the church, including its finances.72 There are, however, reasons these evangelical critiques of tithes seem radical. First, even the claim that tithes are merely being abused and should be reformed had the potential to challenge the status quo. Take Crowley’s claim that tithes should not be gathered by priests for private spending but, rather, redistributed to the poor: This admonition would have been a powerful enough denunciation of the clergy under Henry VIII, to whom Nicholas Shaxton submitted in 1546. But to echo these sentiments in 1551, arguably near the high point of evangelical ascendancy, under the rule of a godly monarch, appears far more subversive, not least because this assertion follows Crowley’s dedicatory epistle which warns of grave consequences for the commonwealth should these abuses not be corrected urgently. He forewarns that ‘if oppression and gredye couetise cease not … so shal they also deserue the lordis Wrath & in the ende be plaged by some other that God shall styr vp to reuenge the iniurye done to the innocent sorte’. Crowley writes, then, ‘wyth the desyre to se the wealth of my contrey by the pacifiyng of gods Ire’, which can only come about through a fundamental change in society – a change in which tithing practices are reformed.73 68 Robert Crowley, The confutation of the. xiii. articles, wherunto Nicolas Shaxton, late byshop of Salilburye [sic] subscribed (London, 1548), sig. G4r. RSTC 6083. 69 Robert Crowley, Pleasure and payne, heauen and hell (London, 1551), sig. B3v. RSTC 6090. 70 Jerome Barlow and William Roy, Rede me and be nott wrothe (Strasbourg, 1528), sig. H1r. See also sigs. D3v, and D8v–E1r. RSTC 1462.7. 71 Basil Morgan, Crowley, Robert (1517x19–1588), in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6831 (accessed 01/09/16). See also Mike Rodman Jones, Radical Pastoral, 1381–1594 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 85–132. 72 Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, p. 151. 73 Crowley, Pleasure and payne, heauen and hell, sig. A2v.

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Other statements were even more incendiary. While Crowley sought the reformation of tithing, other evangelicals seemed to deny their spiritual validity, as shown above. This sentiment comes dangerously close to what Bullinger explained as the Anabaptists’ blatant repudiation of tithe payments.74 So close, in fact, that Becon confirmed the place of tithes in an orderly commonwealth, lest his ideas about the spiritual freedom of a Christian be taken to mean a temporal freedom, as it had among the Anabaptists.75 Becon’s efforts, though, should alert readers to the subversive potential of evangelical concerns regarding tithes. The radical material concerning oaths and tithes found within the writings of early evangelicals accounts for a noticeable gap in the historiography of the English Reformation. Scholars have pointed to the wealth of contemporary consternation regarding ‘Anabaptism’ in England while simultaneously showing that there were very few Anabaptists in England.76 Their conclusion has been, quite sensibly, that the bugbear of the German Peasants’ War and the specter of an English version of the Kingdom of Münster was enough to warrant alarm in England. My suggestion is that there was indeed religious radicalism in England, but it was manifest mostly in the writings of first-generation evangelicals whose vision of reform of the church also demanded a reimagining of Christian society. Their positions on oaths and tithes presented a challenge to the political and ecclesiological regimes of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I, all of which used oaths as a means to confirm personal loyalty and religious conformity, and in which temporal possessions were afforded to the spiritual lords. Precisely because these ideas were so radical, evangelicals sought, with some defensiveness, to differentiate them from those of the Anabaptists, accounting for the overwhelming polemical response to Anabaptists despite their relative paucity in England. By shifting attention from searching for evidence of Anabaptists in England to the fertile and fervent theological restlessness of early evangelicalism, one does indeed find religious radicalism in ‘magisterial’ England.

74 Bullinger, An holsome antidotus, sig. I3v. 75 Thomas Becon, A pleasaunt newe nosegaye full of many godly and swete floures (London, 1543), sigs. K5v–K6r. RSTC 1743. 76 Davies, A Religion of the Word, pp. 68–73; Euler, Anabaptism and Anti-Anabaptism, pp. 89, 132.

Alec Ryrie

Scripture, the Spirit and the Meaning of Radicalism in the English Revolution

One of the deepest assumptions of Reformation historiography is the division between ‘magisterial’ and ‘radical’ reformers. This goes back to Luther’s own distinction between himself and the Schwärmer, or fanatics. It was a label which he applied liberally, encompassing almost anyone who rejected papal authority but also dissented from his own views. The self-serving nature of that label is a warning that we are in treacherous terrain here. Yet the division has, in one form or another, persisted, perpetuated by confessional traditions in scholarship. In more recent decades, the confessionalisation thesis has served to re-inscribe the magisterial/radical divide, despite the powerful argument advanced by Michael Driedger that Anabaptist communities could, in effect, self-confessionalise. Meanwhile, the tradition that would once have been called Anabaptist historiography has embraced a broader concept of the ‘Radical Reformation’, and while this has enriched our notion of radicalism, it has retained a sense of it as a thing apart. The supposed gulf between the magisterial and radical – between the respectable and disreputable, the learned and the unlearned, the housetrained and the wild – is only now coming under sustained scrutiny: a scrutiny which is one of the major themes of this book.1 The historiography of the English Reformation has dealt with radicalism slightly differently: it has generally ignored the subject altogether. There is a tolerably good prima facie reason for doing this, which is that Anabaptism as such did not establish any significant presence in sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century England. What little scholarship there is on the subject serves only to emphasise how little real evidence there is.2 However, this argument depends on maintaining, almost wilfully, two major blind spots. One is the inescapable explosion of radicalism in mid-seventeenth century England, a subject which is generally excluded from the study of the English Reformation by the simple technique of drawing a sharp period boundary in 1640. The other is the presence even before that date of non-Anabaptist forms of Protestant Alec Ryrie, ‘Protestant’ as a historical category, in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society sixth series vol. 26 (2016), pp. 59–77. Cf. George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962); Michael D. Driedger, Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot, 2002). 2 The only sustained attempt to examine the subject, Irvin Buckwalter Horst, The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to 1558 (The Hague, 1972), is widely recognised as problematic.

1

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religiosity which, on the Continent, would be described as ‘radical’ but which, in the English context, rarely attract that label. The Family of Love, a group whose quietism did not make them moderate, play an acknowledged bit part in England’s story.3 But English Puritanism itself contains some alarmingly radical elements. The fringe of antinomians, Judaisers and others are too numerous to be dismissed as eccentrics, and recent historiography has begun to recognise that there is something of a radical tradition here.4 Ethan Shagan has teased out elements of economic and political radicalism.5 And as Patrick Collinson long since recognised, the semi-separatism implicit in most Puritan nonconformity contained elements which looked startlingly radical, chiefly but not exclusively in its contempt for the national church established by law.6 As those examples imply, and as several of the essays in this volume argue, the supposedly sharp magisterial/radical division tends to dissolve into ambiguity when examined closely, in England as everywhere else. It was a distinction drawn, not to describe a theological gulf whose existence was self-evidence, but to create an artificial firebreak in what looked like dangerously undifferentiated theological terrain. That is, it was a political project. Calvin dedicated the first edition of his Institutes to King Francis I because of the pressing need to distinguish his Reformation from the one crushed in the self-proclaimed kingdom of Münster the previous year. In 1553, with the survival of the German Reformation still in the balance and with Calvin himself still hoping that Lutherans might be persuaded to accept the Consensus Tigurinus, it was necessary for Calvin to be seen to be taking a lead in condemning Michael Servetus: the difference between the two of them was not so obvious that it did not need to be underlined in blood. For the awkward truth was that Reformed Protestantism turned out, from its first generation onwards, to have a recurrent anti-Trinitarian problem. From the Italian spirituali to the Hungarian and Polish minor churches through to Remonstrant freethinkers, the question simply would not go away. It was a Remonstrant, Gerardus Vossius, who first proved that the Athanasian Creed was not written by Athanasius. But again, it was Calvin himself who set the pattern for this, for all 3

See, supremely, Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994). 4 Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014). Amongst more specific studies, see in particular Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001). 5 See his essay in this volume, and also Karl Gunther and Ethan Shagan, Protestant Radicalism and Political Thought in the Reign of Henry VIII, in: Past and Present no. 194 (2007), pp. 35–74; Ethan Shagan, Clement Armstrong and the godly commonwealth: radical religion in early Tudor England, in: The Beginnings of English Protestantism, eds Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 60–83. 6 See his The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), esp. pp. 269–283, and Night schools, conventicles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology, in: Marshall and Ryrie, Beginnings, pp. 209–235.

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that he had the Trinity woven as deeply into his theology as any of his Protestant contemporaries. Diarmaid MacCulloch has drawn our attention to the startling incident in 1537 when Calvin tried to defend the doctrine of the Trinity without resorting to the precedents or terminology of the fourth- and fifth-century Councils, and in the process refused to sign the Athanasian Creed.7 If even he could fall into that trap, no wonder others might find their grip on ancient orthodoxy to be shaky. The same is true of most of the litmus-test issues supposedly dividing magisterial and radical reformers. As the work of Susan Royal has demonstrated in the English context, such unimpeachably ‘mainstream’ English evangelicals as John Bale, bishop of Ossory, and his disciple John Foxe, whose martyrology was eagerly embraced by the English Protestant establishment, could be found approving of some very radical views on questions such as the legitimacy of oaths, of tithes and of just wars.8 Or consider the supposedly litmus-test issue of infant baptism itself. The English Baptists’ mixture of magisterial theology and gathered polity could have been designed to make a mockery of the traditional division: their ‘orthodox’ opponents’ attempts to label them as Anabaptists could not disguise the fact that they had a quite distinct genealogy. But they were not the first. Martin Bucer had openly wondered whether infant baptism was Scriptural in 1524: before the Peasants’ War, when such thoughts were still thinkable. He concluded that it was prudent and expedient to retain infant baptism, but not, apparently, necessary.9 Bucer also flirted with separatism, and indeed the tug towards gathered polities was a recurrent theme in Reformed communities, whether under open persecution or not. It is hard to see any profound difference in social structure between, say, a Calvinist cell church of the era of the religious wars and a Mennonite community. There is similar ambiguity over magisterial authority itself. It is not only Reformed Protestants who were willing to leave the magistrate behind; that was the most important and most dangerous insight of Spener’s Pietism. Likewise, the radicals did not always reject alliance with the magistrate the way they were supposed to, albeit they rarely had the chance. Whatever else can be said about the kingdom of Münster, it was certainly magisterial. So, in aspiration at least, were the English Fifth Monarchists. And there is the tantalising example of Balthasar Hubmaier’s state Anabaptism in Nikolsburg in Moravia in 1526–7, which hinged on the conversion of the town’s nobleman and its evangelical pastors. It only lasted three months before the Habsburgs crushed it. However, Hubmaier’s expressed intention to create ‘a Christian government at whose side God hung the Sword’ sounds awfully like a magiste7 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Calvin: Fifth Latin Doctor of the Church?, in: Calvin and his Influence, 1509–2009, ed. Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (Oxford, 2011), pp. 33–45. 8 Susan Royal, John Foxe’s ‘Acts and Monuments’ and the Lollard Legacy in the Long English Reformation [Durham University PhD thesis] (2014); see also her chapter in this volume. 9 Hughes Oliphant Old, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids, MI, 1992), pp. 52, 54–56.

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rial Reformation.10 Later Anabaptists were embarrassed about it, but if they had had other opportunities to enact territorial Reformations with the aid of princes, are we really to imagine that they would have forgone them? This focus of this essay, however, is perhaps the most fundamental of the theological issues which supposedly divided ‘magisterial’ reformers from at least some of their ‘radical’ brethren: the authority of Scripture and the role of the Holy Spirit in inspiring its interpreters. It examines this subject in the place and time when the magisterial-radical division was most obviously breaking down: that is, revolutionary England in the 1640s and 1650s. For England’s Protestant establishment, trying desperately to shore up its fragmenting identity during those years, this question of Biblical authority became a shibboleth. So, for example, Michael Sparke, a godly bookseller and author of long standing, writing in 1652, lamented that colleagues in the London publishing industry were engaged in a ‘trade of … Popish, Blasphemous, Conjuring, Hereticall, impious and slanderous Books and Libels, to the dishonour of God, scandall of Religion, [and] the decay of Piety’. He declined ‘to Catalogue all, for so I should muster an Army of them, only I will name one instar onmium’. That was a formidable challenge to set himself: to choose the one line from one book which was the single most offensive remark yet to be printed in Revolutionary England. But for Sparke, the choice was plain: a passage from the ‘Ranter’ Abiezer Coppe’s 1650 book A Second Fiery Flying Roule, in which, as Sparke put it, ‘he terms the Holy Bible the Scripturian Whore’.11 That interpretation of Coppe was not entirely fair, as we shall see, but Sparke was not wrong to detect a radical attitude to the Bible abroad in England which could have been – and, indeed, was – calculated to outrage orthodox sensibilities. The Colchester mechanic Andrew Wyke claimed that the Scriptures were ‘no more than a ballad’12, and one Leicestershire Ranter said that ‘the Bible was a pack of lyes’.13 In 1654 a Bedfordshire radical defiantly ‘said she looked upon the scriptures as nothing, she trampled them under her feet’.14 In the same year, the prophet Theaurau John Tany went one better and actually burned a Bible on a London common, ‘because people say it is the Word of God, and it is not’.15 And while Quakers did not go in for Bible-burning, they too denied Biblical authority as conventionally understood. By contrast, orthodox Protestant Bibliophiles such as John Owen were going into the lists against 10 James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence, KS, 1976), pp. 141–143. 11 Michael Sparke, A second beacon fired by Scintilla (Wing S4818BA. London: for Michael Sparke, 1652), p. 7. 12 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972), p. 211. 13 Richard Farnworth, The ranters principles & deceits discovered and declared against, denied and disowned by us whom the world cals Quakers (Wing F501. London: Giles Calvert, 1655), p. 19. 14 Edward Bean Underhill (ed.), Records of the Churches of Christ, Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys and Hexham 1644–1720 (London, 1854), p. 90. 15 Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford, 2016), p. 84.

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Quakers and others to defend, not only the plenary inspiration of Scripture, but the inspiration of the vowel points and punctuation of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. It became a central ambition of anti-radical polemics from Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena onwards to unmask their targets as anti-Biblical. The authors of Walwyn’s Wiles, a broadside against the Leveller and freethinker William Walwyn, argued that rather than openly denying Scripture, Walwyn cunningly asked questions designed to destroy faith in it, paring away its authority, so that the book of Psalms can be disregarded as the self-interested work of a king, and the Song of Songs is ‘nothing else but one of Solomons … Rhetorical Songs upon one of his Whores’.16 These disingenuous questions were, the authors were clear, at best a slippery slope towards atheism, more likely a flimsy disguise for it. Let us be clear: orthodox Protestants were not wrong to detect a rift between themselves and the radicals on this point. Yet it was neither a gaping nor an unbridgeable gulf, and at some points of the theological landscape it dissipated into little more than a symbolic ditch. Neither side wished to admit it, but they shared a good deal of common ground. The radicals’ beliefs about the Bible were, in general, rather subtler than their opponents wanted to believe. The Ranters’ blunt blasphemies were rhetorical devices, not theological propositions: these were prophetic attempts to shock their way through the layers of hypocrisy and self-serving falseness that, in their view, had become encrusted onto the religion of their age. The Bible had in the radicals’ view become one of the principal barriers with which the pseudo-religious insulated themselves from any danger of real encounter with the Holy Spirit. Coppe did not actually apply the term ‘Scripturian whore’ to the Bible as such: he used it to describe his own insidious, wheedling inner voice, which quoted texts at him to try to make him ignore his own moral intuition, and to justify not giving money to a beggar.17 He was giving voice to a wider fear that the Bible could become an obstacle to true godliness, especially when it was interpreted by a self-serving caste of hireling preachers puffed up with human learning but devoid of the Spirit. In that sense, burning the Bible, as Tany did, could be a prophetic act, and as the work of Avner Shamir has shown, it is an act with a long history. Like the infamous Texas preacher Joseph Wesley Mathews, who shocked his congregation in the 1950s by tearing up a Bible during a sermon, this is an attack on conventional religion, not on the Bible as such.18 In particular, it is an attack on learned authority, the Protestant priesthood which claims to monopolise Biblical interpretation. This is itself another regular theme of the magisterial-radical division. Magisterial Protestantism was a university-led movement whose first father was a doctor of theology who was always quick to insist 16 [John Price or William Kiffin?], Walwins wiles: or The manifestators manifested (Wing P3351. London: H[enry] C[ripps] and L[odowick] L[loyd], [1649]), pp. 7–9. 17 Nigel Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century (London. 1983), p. 102. 18 Avner Shamir, ‘Bible Burning and the Desecration of Bibles in Early Modern England’ [Roskilde University PhD thesis] (2010); Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America (New York, 1998), p. 60.

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on that status and the dignity that came with it, whereas from the beginning many radicals were outsiders unable or unwilling to compete on those terms, and preferring, as Hans Hut did, to dismiss university theologians as ‘Scripture wizards’ than to engage with them.19 Again, however, we would be unwise to take this rhetoric of division literally, and not only because magisterial Protestantism had a fair share of autodidacts too. Nicholas McDowell has shown how often and how subtly the claim to unlearned-outsider status was deployed by those who knew very well how to play by the academic world’s rules.20 The point does not apply only to England. Only three leading Protestant reformers of the first generation held doctor’s degrees: Luther was one, but the other two were Andreas Karlstadt and Balthasar Hubmaier. In England, where the academy’s grip on Protestant orthodoxy was established quickly, scepticism about the spiritual value of learning was indeed kept at the margins. Christianity’s long tradition of unease about the intellect has rarely been as subdued as it was in England in the century before the Civil War. And yet it did not disappear entirely. We can catch its scent thanks to post-Reformation England’s one undeniably radical sect, the Family of Love. Like Hut calling his opponents Scripture-wizards, the English Familists called theirs the ‘Scripture-Learned’. This was not a compliment. Rather, they meant that establishment theologians were blinded by too subtle and slavish a reliance on Scripture. They themselves interpreted the Bible allegorically, according to what they called the ‘paterne of Love’, and in so doing claimed that they, not the Protestant establishment, were the true heirs of William Tyndale.21 When the scandal over the Family of Love was at its height in England in the early 1580s, ‘Scripture-Learned’ was the best term of abuse the English language had to offer, but soon a better alternative would be coined: scripturian, an ingenious term akin to the nineteenth-century squib bibliolater in its implication that while Christians followed Christ, scripturians merely worshipped the text of the Bible. It may have been coined by the playwright George Chapman, since its first attested appearance is in his play An humerous dayes myrth, performed in 1597: when a hypocrite piously quotes Scripture, Chapman’s mocking protagonist replies, ‘O rare scripturian!’22 But if it was original to Chapman, it caught on quickly. Only two years later Robert Persons was disparaging the English Anabaptist Joan Bocher as a ‘scripturian’ who owed her heresies to too much Bible-reading.23 It was quickly taken up by other authors, along 19 Walter Klaassen, Frank Friesen and Werner O. Packull (eds), Sources of South German/Austrian Anabaptism (Kitchener, Ontario, 2001), pp. 44–6. 20 Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution 1630– 1660 (Oxford, 2003). 21 Douglas FitzHenry Jones, Debating the Literal Sense in England: the Scripture-Learned and the Family of Love, in: Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 45 no. 4 (2014), p. 915. 22 George Chapman, A pleasant comedy entituled: An humerous dayes myrth (RSTC 4987. London: Valentine Syms, 1599), sig G3v. 23 Robert Persons, A temperate vvard-vvord, to the turbulent and seditious VVach-word of Sir F ­ rancis Hastinges (RSTC 19415. [Antwerp]: [A. Conincx], 1599), pp. 16–17.

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with scripturist, a near-synonym that did not quite have scripturian’s abusive edge. Early seventeenth-century English Catholics readily described Protestants as ‘hereticall Scripturians running ouer all the corps of sacred Writ’, ‘peeuish scripturist’, ‘our verse and lyne-cunning Scripturist’, ‘Scripturist, Scripturian, doctoresse’.24 ­Protestants also began to make use of the term, sometimes to mock Puritans who were guilty of over-simplistic prooftexting or who objected to appeals to learned a­ uthority: so we find scripturian paired with adjectives like ‘ignorant’, or ‘bould and busy’.25 But it was also used to skewer false and hypocritical religion. Sir John ­Harington used the term to make a distinction which would have had many later radicals nodding in approval: ‘Many great Scriptureans may be found,/That cite Saint Paul at euery bench and boord,/And haue Gods word, but haue not God the word.’26 It also began to be said that the Devil is ‘a cunning Scripturian’.27 Naturally, though, the word really found its vocation during the Revolutionary years. Coppe was one of the first to conscript it to radical purposes, but not the last. When the sermons of the radical preacher Christopher Goad were published posthumously in 1653, a prefatory poem contrasted him to the preachers of ‘a State Religion’, who set forth ‘the Word of God made so by man’. Goad, by contrast to their ‘borrowed fire’, had ‘Light not acquired, but infused … The all-inditing Spirit did him fill. … How sweetly was he ravish’d ’bove the life/Of the Scripturian and the Letter strife.’28 Goad was not quite the pseudo-Quaker that this implies, although had he lived longer he might very well have completed the journey. Certainly Quakers made the same manoeuvre when scorning the university-educated clergy whom they called ministers of the Letter, as distinct from the Word. William Penn defied his prooftex-

24 Humphrey Leech, Dutifull and respective considerations vpon foure seuerall heads of proofe and triall in matters of religion (RSTC 15362.5. Saint-Omer: English College, 1609), pp. 81, 125; William Bishop, A reproofe of M. Doct. Abbots defence, of the Catholike deformed (RSTC 3098. [England: secret press], 1608), p. 218; Sylvester Norris, The pseudo-scripturist (RSTC 18660. Saint-Omer: English College, 1623), pp. 21, 23; Anthony Hungerford, The advise of a sonne, novv professing the religion established in the present Church of England, to his deare mother, yet a Roman Catholike (RSTC 13971.5. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1616), p. 31 – in this case, the accusation ‘Scripturian’ is one which Hungerford claims Catholics regularly throw at Protestant women. 25 Andrew Willet, Loidoromastix: that is, A scourge for a rayler (RSTC 25693. Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1607), p. 58; Richard More, A true relation of the murders committed in the parish of Clunne (Wing M2685. London: T.B. for P. Stephens & C. Meredith, 1641), p. 120; cf. Jasper Fisher, The priest’s duty & dignity (RSTC 10887. London: T. Harper, 1636), p. 11; Christopher Elderfield, Of regeneration and baptism, Hebrew & Christian (Wing E329. London: Tho. Newcombe, 1653), p. 265. 26 John Harington, The most elegant and witty epigrams of Sir Iohn Harrington, Knight digested into foure bookes (RSTC 12776. London: G[eorge] P[urslowe] for John Budge, 1618), sig. M6v. 27 Bezaleel Carter, The wise King, and the learned iudge (RSTC 4693. Cambridge: C. Legge, 1618), p. 32. 28 Christopher Goad, Refreshing drops, and scorching vials (Wing G896. London: Giles Calvert, 1653), sig. a2r–v.

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ting opponents by observing, once again, that ‘the Devil [is] a Scripturian.’29 Samuel Fisher’s attack on academic theologians is worth quoting at more length: Behold O thou Academical Student in Divinity, who callest the Quakers Anti-scripturists, thou art call’d the Scripturist, the Text-man, the Opener-of that Book called the Bible, which is a Book as much sealed to thy supposed learned self, as to the unlearnedst sort of men in the World, that can but barely read it.30

As his indignation at being called an anti-scripturist makes clear, to accuse someone of being a scripturian was not to despise Scripture, but to despise a particular way of using it. Witness no less a scourge of radicalism than William Prynne, who, in 1645, characterised his radical opponents’ manner of speech thus: Come you Scripturian, you Scripturemen that must have Scripture for what you will doe; come, I will give you Scripture enough to overthrow your Religion, turne to Ezekiel etc.31

Prynne’s radicals had set off on a new, Spirit-led journey which led them to mock the stodgy theological learning of the establishment, but, like the Quakers after them, they were still brimming with Scripture. Their works were suffused with Biblical quotation and allusion, and their margins bristled with ostentatious Biblical citation. They were still using the Bible – just not in the approved way. As to how they were using it, we can take the Ranter Jacob Bauthumley as our guide. Deploring his fellow-countrymen’s readiness to ‘run so often to a great Bible’, he added: I do not speak it to condemn the practise, neither is the fault in the Book, but in mens carnall conceits of it; and seeing men make an Idoll of it, and think the reading and perusing the outward word, is enough to cure all their wounds … so that as men look upon God outwardly and carnally: so do they have recourse to an outward word, to strengthen their carnall apprehensions.32

That is an extreme view, but his distinction between the outward and carnal, and the inward and spiritual, speaks to a much wider constituency. He was not alone in calling Scripture an idol: William Erbery remembered an Army chaplain asserting that Antichrist’s two great Idols were the flesh of Christ, presumably meaning the Mass, 29 William Penn, No cross, no crown: or several sober reasons against hat-honour (Wing P1327. London: Andrew Sowle, 1669), p. 93. 30 Samuel Fisher, Rusticus ad academicos in exercitationibus expostulatoriis, apologeticis quatuor (Wing F1056. London: Robert Wilson, 1660), part II, p. 27. 31 William Prynne, A fresh discovery of some prodigious new wandring-blasing-stars (Wing P3963. London: John Macock for Michael Sparke, senior, 1645), p. 24. 32 Jacob Bauthumley, The light and dark sides of God (Wing B1165B. London: for William Learner, 1650), p. 75.

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and the letter of Scripture.33 Letter was a code-word for carnal usage, and its antonym was word. This is why George Fox preached that ‘not the letter, nor the writing of the Scripture, but the ingrafted Word is able to save your soules’.34 In other words, this is about the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of the Bible. Here the opponents of learned authority had paved the way, because in defying the academic establishment they had appealed to the judgement of the Spirit. The Baptist preacher Samuel How titled his programmatic 1640 attack on learned authority The sufficiencie of the spirits teaching, without humane-learning, and accordingly argued ‘that men taught by Gods spirit are through it sufficiently made able to know his mind in word’. Learning is not merely immaterial but positively dangerous. How grudgingly accepted that learning had some uses and that the learned could, in principle, be saved – as a camel could, by God’s will, pass through a needle’s eye – but he thought it much likelier that even Bible-translators would ‘fare as it did with those that built Noahs Arke, they made a place of safeguard for others, but were drowned themselves’.35 Perhaps we might expect that from a man like How, a cobbler with no formal education, but William Dell, the master of Caius College, Cambridge throughout the 1650s, largely agreed with him. Insisting likewise that the Spirit is indispensable to understand the text, he wrote that: False Prophets, though they speak the word of the letter exactly, and that according to the very Originall … yet speaking it without the Spirit … doe wholly mistake the mind of Christ in all, and under the outward Letter of the Word of God, doe onely bring in the Mind of Man.

And this is so even if they ‘preach … good, sound, and orthodox Doctrine’, because ‘whoever doth agree with Christ, never so exactly in the Letter, and yet differs from him in Spirit, is very Antichrist.’ For: all the true Religion of Christ is written in the Soul and Spirit of man, by the Spirit of God, and the Beleiver [sic], is the onely Book, in which God writes, his New Testament.

It bears repeating: the believer is the only book in which God writes his New Testament.36

33 William Erbery, The testimony of VVilliam Erbery (Wing E3239. London: Giles Calvert, 1658), p. 84. 34 George Fox, A declaration of the difference of the ministers of the word from the ministers of the world; who calls the writings, the word (Wing F1790. London: Giles Calvert, 1656), p. 12. 35 Samuel How, The sufficiencie of the spirits teaching, without humane-learning: or A treatise, tending to proue humane-learning to be no help to the spirituall understanding of the Word of God (RSTC 13855. Amsterdam: [Cloppenburg Press], 1640), sigs D1r, D4r. 36 William Dell, The tryal of spirits both in teachers & hearers (ESTC R207233. London: Giles ­Calvert, 1653), pp. 19–21.

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It is not much of a jump from there to Bauthumley’s position that we ought to consult that inner New Testament in preference to its print-frozen predecessor. ‘I think it not so safe,’ he wrote, ‘to go to the Bible to see what others have spoken and writ of the mind of God, as to see what God speaks within me. … The Bible without, is but a shadow of that Bible which is within.’37 That is not too far from the position which Quakers would soon take. The inner light, Richard Farnworth said, ‘is not to be found in books nor learning without, it gathers out of all books without, to reading the book of life, within; this light opens all Scriptures.’38 That notion of Scripture as a secondary, external confirmation of a truth which is primarily perceived internally recurs through the radical literature.39 And in the event that there was a tension between these two revelations, most radicals in the end ‘tried the Scriptures by the Spirit, and not the Spirit by the Scriptures’.40 So far this may not sound as if we have found much common ground between radicals and orthodox Protestants, but it is worth attending to why radicals found themselves disavowing conventional views of Biblical authority in this way. Attacks on hypocrisy and the self-serving attempt to place themselves beyond the reach of orthodoxy’s principal polemical weapon are only part of the story. A further problem, which surfaces in a series of radical authors and is particularly prevalent in Fisher’s disparagement of what he called the ‘bare external text of Scripture’, was a series of unnerving questions about the Biblical text itself. This was in part a matter of genu­ ine advances in scholarship, bringing long-hidden textual problems to light and making certain discrepancies hard to ignore, but that is not a sufficient explanation for the radicals’ troubled preoccupation with the issue. For one thing, the questions they raised were hardly novel. To take the age’s paradigmatic Biblical problem, it is not as if no previous Bible-readers had noticed that the book of Deuteronomy narrates Moses’ death, and that this appears to contradict the claim the Moses was its author. For another, the seventeenth century was not short of well-developed answers to these concerns. Even if you ruled out the fideistic Catholic answer, in which the guarantee of Scripture’s authority was the witness of the Church, there were alternatives: the no-surrender textual absolutism of hard Calvinist scholars such as John Owen or Francis Turretin, to which we shall return, or alternatively, the rationalist arguments developed by Hugo Grotius and popularised in England by William Chilling­worth, which claimed that there were sufficient mundane reasons to regard the veracity of

37 Bauthumley, Light and dark sides, p. 77. 38 Farnworth, The ranters principles, pp. 12–13. 39 For Fisher, the role of Scripture is to testify to the inner light: Travis L. Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible (London, 2006), p. 219. For Erbery, who did not live quite long enough to become a Quaker but was plainly well on the way there, ‘knowledge of God and of Christ comes not by reading, nor yet by Scripture, but by the Spirit of Revelation, though the Scripture also speaks the same.’ Erbery, Testimony, p. 106. 40 Underhill, Records of the Churches of Christ, p. 74.

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Scripture as proven beyond reasonable doubt.41 So why did some radicals find both that these longstanding problems were newly pressing, and also that the plentiful conventional solutions to them were inadequate? Very often, it seems, the answer was that they needed to make use of questions about the nature of the Biblical authority in order to advance arguments which might otherwise have foundered on Biblical opposition. The first scholar openly to doubt Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch, the eccentric Huguenot Isaac la Peyrère, did so merely as a spin-off from his highly idiosyncratic messianic theology, which involved multiple human origins: that peculiar doctrine was incompatible with the text of Genesis in several key places, so he needed to question the text’s authority. La Peyrère was beaten into print by Thomas Hobbes, whose critique of Mosaic authorship in Levia­ than was part of his general project to deny any claims to religious authority that were independent of or might be mobilised against the authority of the sovereign.42 In both cases the arguments were disturbing, and la Peyrère’s, in particular, were taken up and put to more serious use by Baruch Spinoza. But precious few readers shared these idiosyncratic authors’ preoccupations. Spinoza, however, did share one quality with many of the English radicals who preceded him: moral outrage. As the groundbreaking work of Dominic Erdozain has argued, running through Protestant history is a radical critique of the moral framework of Augustinian theology – original sin, predestination, eternal damnation, and, in particular, coercive national churches – which argues that that framework is not only morally unacceptable, but in direct contravention of the Bible’s spirit and of Jesus’ teaching.43 Unfortunately, those who wished to make such claims needed to face down orthodox critics with proof-texts. Such critics could be fought off line by line, but they could be handled much more comprehensively by redefining the nature of the Bible’s authority. Not, it should be stressed, by rejecting Biblical authority altogether, for at the heart of this entire line of argument was the claim to be acting in accordance with the Bible’s true spirit. Rather, it was once again a battle of word against letter, this time on a grander scale. To see this in practice, consider the work of Clement Writer, a Worcestershire clothier and heterodox Baptist who was denounced by orthodox Protestants from Thomas Edwards to Richard Baxter.44 The central thrust of Writer’s The Jus Divinum 41 Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (eds), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2006). On inerrancy, see Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco, 1979), esp. pp. 148–184; on the Grotian-rationalist argument, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000). 42 Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003), pp. 219– 228; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or, The matter, forme, and power of a common wealth, ecclesiasticall and civil (Wing H2246. London: for Andrew Crooke, 1651), p. 200. 43 Erdozain, Soul of Doubt. 44 Bryan W. Ball, Writer, Clement (d. 1659x62), in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004); online ed., Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30078, accessed 04/11/16].

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of presbyterie was his attack against the tyranny of clerical authority. But, as he dug in to defend this position, he found himself having to defy his opponents’ methods of Biblical interpretation. Accordingly, the second, much expanded edition of the book concludes with a manifesto for how the Bible ought to be read. The focus ought to be on human needs, not abstract doctrine – providing an independent moral yardstick against which Scripture can be judged, as John Milton argued in a different context.45 Therefore, Writer insisted, the key principle to be observed in Biblical interpretation is ‘never [to] be induced to understand any Text in such a sence as shall contradict either the Law of Nature written in our hearts, or the love and goodness of God’. Using that principle, he says, merely doctrinal questions come to be of secondary importance. For: A man may maintain an Opinion which in it self is most erronious, yet he not knowing it to be such, and being unavoidably led into it, may go to Heaven; his Opinion may burn, and he himself be saved, when all persecuting spirits (being so contrary to the precept, example and spirit of Christ and the Saints set forth in Scripture) shall … fall far short thereof.46

Doctrine was uncertain; Christian charity was not. If the certainty of charity was one reason for radicals to question Biblical authority, the uncertainty of doctrine itself was another. The more refined Owen’s absolutist or Grotius’ rationalistic arguments for Biblical authority became, certain English Protestants found it hard to suppress a concern that the Bible was no longer doing its job: that is, it was failing to provide certainty, a rock on which faith could be built.47 To cite an issue which appears genuinely to have troubled some radicals’ consciences: if plenary inspiration was limited to the original holograph manuscripts of the Bible, how can we place any confidence in what Writer refers to as ‘the Copies of the Copies’, much less in the varied and contradictory English translations? Orthodoxy’s attempts to answer such concerns had a way of making matters worse. In 1659 Robert Gell published an ‘essay’ running to over 800 duo pages crawling through the King James version of the Pentateuch and querying various details of the translation: an exercise which made it rational to conclude that there was no categorical certainty to be found in Scripture.48 Once you were inclined to tug at their threads, rationalistic justifications of Biblical authority easily started to look like comfort-blankets of soothing self-delusion which unravelled with alarming speed. Facing such problems, Writer concluded, ‘none can be justly blamed, for being unresolved in the premises’. He also raised an unnerving question which was 45 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, p. 212. 46 [Clement Writer], The Jus Divinum of presbyterie (Wing W3725. London: s.n., 1655), pp. 86–90. 47 Popkin, History of Scepticism; Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford, 2010). 48 Robert Gell, An essay toward the amendment of the last English-translation of the Bible (ESTC R21728. London: R. Norton for Andrew Crook, 1659).

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being asked with increasing frequency. Surely the only reason that most of us tend to believe the Bible to be the unerring Word of God is habit and convention; and if we had been born in Rome, or in Turkey, we would embrace those countries’ religions on the same basis?49 The point of that much-asked question was not to propagate religious indifference, but the very opposite: to find, beneath the shifting sands of opinion, some real bedrock of certainty. For some, the probabilistic arguments advanced by the rationalists served that purpose, and in during the English Revolution we find plenty of robustly orthodox Protestants – notably Richard Baxter – following that line.50 For others, however, that approach only made matters worse. Samuel How, having made his appeal to the Spirit as opposed to learned authority, asked how believers can know whether they have the Spirit. No argument or reasoned process would serve, he concluded. ‘I Answer, that the Spirit of God is a sufficient witnesse to it selfe, seeing that the Spirit is Truth.’51 The same point, essentially, was made at more length by William Walwyn. The authors of Walwyn’s Wiles characterised his views thus: I beleeve it is not the Word of God, and I beleeve again it is the Word of God; … the Scripture is so plainly and directly contradictory to it self, that makes me beleeve it is not the the Word of God; and yet again, all those passages therein that declare the nature of God, viz. his Grace and Goodness to men, I beleeve are the Word of God.52

They quoted this as they believed that it sounded both shocking and ridiculous, although it perhaps does not seem so to us. What Walwyn himself had said in print two years earlier was that: I have been most uncharitably slandered to deny the Scriptures to bee the word of God, because I have opposed insufficient arguments produced to prove them such: and because … I have refused to shew the grounds inducing me to beleeve them.

He went on to say that he had, indeed, never heard a convincing argument that the Scriptures are the Word of God, and indeed that most of the arguments he has heard weaken rather than strengthen the case. The rationalists were only digging themselves deeper into uncertainty. However, he concluded:

49 Writer, Jus Divinum (1655), sig. a1r–v, pp. 66, 71; cf. William Pinke, The Tryall of a Christians syncere loue vnto Christ (RSTC 19942. Oxford: John Lichfield for Edward Forrest, 1631), part II, pp. 10–14. 50 Richard Baxter, The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory (Wing B1383. London: Rob. White for Thomas Underhill and Francis Tyton, 1650), 167–251. 51 How, Sufficiencie of the spirits teaching, sig. E2r. 52 [Price or Kiffin?], Walwins wiles, p. 11.

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I beleeve them through an irresistible perswasive power that from within them … hath pierced my judgment and affection in such sort, that with aboundance of joy and gladnesse I beleeve, and in beleeving have that Peace which passeth all utterance or expression.

This inner power he compares to Elijah’s still, soft voice, where the arguments are the earthquake, wind and fire.53 Walwyn, in other words, knew that the Bible was the Word of God, not because he could prove it, but because he just knew. It is no surprise that his critics found this intolerable. No argument of any kind can be grounded on a conviction like this, which is essentially incommunicable. And indeed, while some believers attempted gambits of this kind to stop themselves from sliding further into doubt, and so turned into ‘radicals’ whether they liked it or not, more conservative or conventional Protestants could be forgiven for assuming that nothing was more likely to spread atheism than this very public dance with unbelief. The radicals did, however, have a defence against this accusation. For it was they, rather than those like Baxter who had embraced rationalism, who stood most clearly in the tradition of the sixteenth-century reformers. Martin Luther, famously, did not defend the inherited canon of Scripture with the rigour expected of later Protestants, speculating about expelling the books of Esther, James, Jude, Hebrews and Reve­lation from the canon. In some cases this was because he did not accept that they were of apostolic authorship – although he was also entirely happy, more than a century before la Peyrère and Hobbes, to conclude that the book of Genesis was not written by Moses. In the end, however, Luther’s truly serious problem with these books was their content, not their authorship: they did not teach the Gospel of justification by faith as he understood it, which was, for him the irreducible core of Christian preaching. When he complained that the epistle of James ‘contains not a syllable about Christ’, he meant that that central Gospel of Christ’s work was not to be found in it.54 In other words, Luther’s doctrine of Scripture was in the end a functional one: the text derived its authority from the Gospel it proclaimed. The doctrinal framework, here as in his Eucharistic theology, was the doctrine of the Incarnation. ‘The Holy Scripture,’ he wrote, ‘is God’s Word, written, and so to say “in-lettered”, just as Christ is the eternal Word of God incarnate in the garment of his humanity’. He even called the Bible ‘the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies’.55 As such its incidental content is almost insignificant. He summed this up in a much-quoted slogan: Christ is the lord and king of Scripture. 53 William Walwyn, A still and soft voice from the scriptures, vvitnessing them to be the vvord of God (Wing W692. London: s.n., 1647), pp. 11–13. 54 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works vol. 54: Table Talk, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Phila­dephia, 1967), pp. 373, 424. 55 Rogers and McKim, Authority and Interpretation of the Bible, p. 78; Brian A. Gerrish, The Word of God and the Words of Scripture: Luther and Calvin on Biblical Authority, in his: The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago, 1982), p. 55.

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This is a high doctrine of Scripture, but in no sense a rationalist one. Scott Hendrix has felicitously described Luther’s approach to the Bible thus: The authority of Scripture for Luther was not like a mathematical theorem which can be proven … by the use of self-evident axioms. … Rather … Luther approached Scripture as we would approach a great work of art.56

What was ‘self-evident’ for Luther was not the logical grounds on which the text’s authority rested, but the inherent authority of the text itself. John Calvin, as a systematic theologian, confronted these issues more rigorously and consistently than Luther, but while his style was more sober, his conclusions do not differ very much. Calvin was happy to accept that the creation story in Genesis did not fit the science even of his own day, and was written to fit what its original readers could understand. He was untroubled by textual glitches in Scripture. He did not simply call out St Luke for getting the name of a high priest wrong or St Paul for writing an almost incomprehensible sentence, but also pointed out that the New Testament writers are sometimes very sloppy in quoting the Old Testament. He explained this by stating, breezily, that ‘with respect both to words and to other things which do not bear upon the matters in discussion, [the apostles] allow themselves wide freedom’.57 So for Calvin, too, the authority of Scripture was the authority of its core message, not its incidentals. In the Institutio, when he came to make the case that the Bible is in fact the word of God, he too took his argument in a direction quite different from that of the later Grotian rationalists: that is, he refused actually to argue for the Bible’s authority at all. Rather: We ought to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit. … Scripture is indeed self-authenticating [αύτόπιστος]. … We feel [sensimus] that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, … a feeling [sensus] that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.58

56 Scott Hendrix, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Aldershot, 1996), ch. 2 p. 147. 57 John T. McNeill, The Significance of the Word of God for Calvin, in: Church History 28/2 (1959), pp. 131–146, esp. pp. 137–138, 143–144. 58 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 78–81 (my emphasis); cf. John Calvin, Institutio christianae religionis (Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1559), p. 16. ‘Self-authenticating’ is perhaps the least inadequate concise English rendering of the Greek αύτόπιστος: Calvin did not attempt to render it into Latin. As Henk van der Belt’s invaluable study of the concept in Reformed theology explains, it has connotations of trustworthiness as well as accuracy, and might be translated more expansively as ‘to be trusted because of itself ’. Henk van der Belt, The Authority of Scripture in Reformed Theology: Truth and Trust (Leiden, 2008), p. 3. Cf. his discussion of how the earlier editions of the Institutio made what is, broadly, the same point, but without this specific terminology: pp. 17–21.

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Ultimately, then, the Bible’s authority is a matter of feeling: of direct, intuitive knowledge rather than of deductive argument. As such, either you feel it or you don’t. There is not much to choose between this and William Walwyn’s dismissal of rationalistic arguments for Scripture’s authority and his appeal instead to the ‘irresistible perswasive power’ of the text’s own still small voice. I am not, I must emphasise, claiming that the seventeenth century’s radicals were somehow the true inheritors of a Reformers’ mantle which their ‘orthodox’ contemporaries had abandoned. Luther knew a fanatic when he saw one, and would have had no trouble placing Walwyn, Writer and any other English radical in that category. My point, rather, is simply that the ‘radical’ emphasis on the Spirit as an indispensable witness to Scripture was in itself squarely within the ‘mainstream’ Protestant tradition. That was true in the sixteenth century and remained so in the seventeenth. In 1659, John Owen, Revolutionary England’s doughtiest defender of Biblical orthodoxy against radical claims, had this to say on the subject of ‘the selfe evidencing Efficacy of the Scripture’: Light requires neither proofe nor Testimony for its Evidence. Let the Sun arise in the firmament, and there is no need of VVitnesses to prove and confirme unto a seeing man that it is day. … That which evidenceth not its selfe, is not Light.

Like Calvin before him, Owen was careful to explain that he was not claiming that ‘all that read it … must instantly, of necessity assent unto it’s Divine Originall’: many are too blind or befuddled by sin to see light when it is plainly before them. But for those able to see: The word then makes a sufficient Proposition of it’s selfe, wherever it is. … He that hath the witnesse of God, need not stay for the Witnesse of men, for the Witnesse of God is greater. … They who receive it not on this Ground, will never receive it on any, as they ought.

Rationalistic arguments are not denied. But they are very firmly put in their place.59 In this sense at least, the English Revolution’s biblical radicals were closer to the historic norms of magisterial Protestantism than were their respectable rationalist contemporaries. Their fundamental appeal to the witness of the Holy Spirit was in itself entirely normal Protestantism. As Geoffrey Nuttall long ago pointed out, the argument that Scripture ‘carrieth proof and evidence in itself ’ was not only common currency for seventeenth-century English Puritans, it was in fact ‘the essential Puritan emphasis’.60 What distinguished the radicals’ approach to this matter was not their embrace of the Spirit, but their distrust of rationalist arguments: the ‘orthodox’ 59 John Owen, Of the divine originall, authority, self-evidencing light, and povver of the Scriptures (Wing O784. Oxford: Henry Hall, 1659), pp. 72–3, 77–8, 80, 82. 60 Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford, 1946), p. 39.

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tradition, by contrast, had increasingly tried to hold the two together, especially in its more public and dogmatic statements. Even Calvin progressively introduced such ‘secondary’ arguments into his treatment of the subject.61 By 1561, the Belgic Confession accepted the Scriptures as authoritative: Not so much because the church receives and approves them as such but above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God, and also because they prove themselves to be from God. For even the blind themselves are able to see that the things predicted in them do happen.62

The claim of direct witness by the Spirit is ‘above all’, but it is bundled together with two supporting arguments, an appeal to the church’s collective witness, and a rationalistic argument based on the fulfilment of prophecy. By placing the Spirit’s witness in the context of these more rationalistic claims, a church could – especially in so public a document as a confession of faith – manage the dangers of enthusiasm or heterodox inspiration. By the time of the Westminster Confession of 1647, with those dangers even plainer, the balance had shifted still further. Now a small platoon of rational arguments for Scripture’s authority was put forward: The testimony of the Church, … the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies.

Only then did the Confession add that: Notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.63

The radicals’ innovation was not in making this universal appeal to the Spirit, but in stripping away the rationalistic clothes within which that appeal had been increasingly swaddled. If this deep congruence between radicalism and orthodoxy has remained obscure, it is largely because none of the parties to the argument had an interest in pointing it out. That task was left to the occasional mischievous troublemaker, such as Henry

61 Van der Belt, Authority of Scripture, pp. 38–40. 62 Van der Belt, Authority of Scripture, p. 5. 63 Van der Belt, Authority of Scripture, pp. 8–9.

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Stubbe the younger. In a tricksy half-apology for Quakerism written in 1659, Stubbe pointed out that Owen’s views were uncomfortably like those of his radical opponents: Doth not he [Owen] tell them … that the Onely, publique, authentique and infallible interpreter of the Scripture, is the Spirit that gave it? … Doth not he say, that it is from the afflatus, or inspiration of the Spirit that the Scripture hath it’s Authority, verity, and perspicuity? Doth he not say, that the spirit by internall enlightenings doth lead us into all necessary knowledg? … It will not be a very culpable tendernesse in the Quakers, if they will not hew out broken Cisterns, which Doctour Owen assures them will hold no water.64

We should perhaps not read too much into that image of cisterns, which was a fairly widespread one. Yet it is, at least, a striking coincidence that the same image was picked up by no less redoubtable and Biblically orthodox a Protestant than John Bunyan in order to describe his own approach to Scriptural interpretation, in the preface to The Holy City in 1665. Appealing for his readers to judge him solely against Scripture, and not against human authorities, Bunyan wrote: I honour the Godly, as Christians, but I prefer the BIBLE before them. …. Besides, I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.65

The point is not that Bunyan’s daring and unanswerable appeal to the Spirit’s direct witness makes him a radical. It is rather that he speaks for a broader Protestant consensus about the witness and power of the Holy Spirit which underpins orthodoxy and radicalism alike. In this sphere at least, Protestant radicalism is simply Protestant orthodoxy with the guard-rails removed.

64 Henry Stubbe, A light shining out of darknes (Wing S6057. London: s.n., 1659), pp. 83–4. 65 Sears McGee (ed.), The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. III. Christian Behaviour. The Holy City. The Resurrection of the Dead (Oxford, 1987), p. 72.

Gary K. Waite

The Drama of the Two-Word Debate among Liberal Dutch Mennonites, c. 1620–1660 Preparing the Way for Baruch Spinoza?1 In 1664 the Mennonite (Doopsgezind) physician and preacher Antonius van Dale (1638–1708) composed a satirical play, or boer-praetje, defending his good friend and fellow physician/preacher, Galenus Abrahamsz de Haan (1622–1706), against charges of extreme theological unorthodoxy. These included the ideas that Christ was not divine, merely a human whose perfect obedience to God was an example for Christians; that the godless will not burn in eternal fire; that there are no demons or ‘evil, autonomous [or self-existing] spirits’; and that there is no autonomous Holy Spirit, but that the word Holy Spirit merely signifies comprehension of the meaning of scripture.2 While van Dale’s voice in the dialogue (the character Countryman) asserts that his interlocutor will not be able to find a single place where Abrahamsz wrote such things, he does not provide any of his friend’s published statements as evidence in refutation. It seems in fact that Abrahamsz was never sufficiently incautious to put such unorthodox ideas into print, even if he had indeed subscribed to them. His opponents, however, had good reason for their suspicions, for he did emphasize the humanity of Jesus and his work as a role model rather than as a sacrifice for sin; he refused to discuss the doctrine of the Trinity; he relied on the authority of the inner Spirit or Word in the interpretation of scripture, rather than on precise analysis of the text; he castigated all confessions of faith as human creations without authority; and said virtually nothing about the Devil. Abrahamsz’s priority was not doctrinal precision and he hated the confessional wrangling that tore churches apart. He worked instead to bring about Christian unity, and for this his many opponents took his silence on controversial doctrines to imply denial or neglect; there is, for example, no mention of the Devil in an edition of the doctrinal statements that had led to a union of Mennonite factions in 1649 that Abrahamsz edited and published in 1664 in defense of that merger.3 For his part van Dale would, in 1683, write De oraculis (On Oracles), a work critiquing superstition and 1 Funding to support this research came from the University of New Brunswick and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which granted Michael Driedger and me a five-year Insight Grant in 2015. 2 Antonius van Dale, Boere-praetje, Tusschen vijf Persoonen, Een Huysman, out Vlamingh, Remonstrant, Waterlander en Collegiant. Handelende/Of Galenus te recht voor een Hypocrijt is beschuldight … (Amsterdam, 1664), p. 37. 3 Galenus Abrahamsz, Antwoort Op de Vrede-Presentatie, Gedaen Door de Waterlantsche aen de Vlaemsche, Duytsche en Vriessche Doopsgesinde Gemeentens (Amsterdam, 1664).

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belief in witchcraft that proved deeply influential for the Reformed minister Balthasar Bekker’s famed De Betoverde Weereld (The World Bewitched), which in the early 1690s disavowed belief in demons and set off a storm of controversy.4 Van Dale’s little drama was published by the Amsterdam printer Jan Rieuwertsz just six years before he helped produce the ex-Jew Baruch Spinoza’s controversial Theological-Political Treatise under a false imprint. Calling this ‘one of the most profoundly influential philosophical texts in the history of western thought’, Jonathan Israel argues that in it Spinoza sought to ‘strengthen individual freedom and widen liberty of thought in Dutch society, in particular by weakening ecclesiastical authority and lowering the status of theology’, both of which he blamed for religious conflict.5 Spinoza believed that Christians were basing their religious dogma – which was behind many of the conflicts still dividing Europe – on mistaken readings of the Christian scriptures, and indeed, on ‘profound misconceptions about the character of Scripture itself ’. He thus sought to explain what religion really was, i. e., that prophecy was not in truth a divine communication, merely the possession of a powerful imagination on the part of some individuals, or that the scriptures could be understood only through a critical-historical approach that essentially denuded them of divine authority.6 Yet, while Spinoza was characterized as an atheist for this work, Graeme Hunter has recently posited that his goal was not atheistic, but instead to promote a radical reform of Christianity. He was influenced in this by his Collegiant friends, who held non-confessional, informal religious meetings without ministers and wherein any and all could speak and pray.7 Spinoza may or may not have been a closet Protestant or Collegiant; what this article suggests is that his brilliant elucidation of the nature of religious authority and scripture was itself the culmination of decades of radical rethinking that came to a head within liberal Mennonite (Doopsgezind) circles in North Holland in the years leading up to the publication of Spinoza’s controversial book. The attitudes of the ­Doopsgezinden toward religious identity were in many respects distinct from their more conserva4 Andrew C. Fix, Fallen Angels: Balthasar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth Century Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1999); Gary K. Waite, From David Joris to Balthasar Bekker? The Radical Reformation and Scepticism towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands (1540–1700), in: Fides et Historia 28 (1996), pp. 5–26; Gary K. Waite, ‘Man is a Devil to Himself ’: David Joris and the Rise of a Sceptical Tradition towards the Devil in the Early Modern Netherlands, 1540–1600, in: Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis/Dutch Review of Church History 75 (1995), pp. 1–30; and Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 375–388. 5 Jonathan Israel, ed., Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise (Cambridge, 2007), p. viii. See also Jona­ than Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); and Leszek Kolakowski, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Anticonfessional Ideas and Rational Religion: the Mennonite, Collegiant and Spinozan Connections, trans. and intro. by James Satterwhite, in: Mennonite Quarterly Review 64 (1990), pp. 259–97 and 385–416. 6 Israel, Spinoza, p. ix. 7 Graeme Hunter, Radical Protestantism in Spinoza’s Thought (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 1–6. See also Travis L. Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible (New York, 2006); and Michiel Wielema, The March of the Libertines. Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660–1750) (Hilversum, 2004).

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Figure 1: Pieter Tanjé, Bijeenkomst van de Collegianten/Assemblée de ceux qu’on appelle c­ ollegians a Amsterdam (1736). Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. RP-P-AO–24–17. http://hdl.handle.net/10934/ RM0001.COLLECT.182662.

tive Mennonite brethren. Spinoza’s circle included leading Doopsgezind Collegiants, particularly his publisher (but not printer)8 Jan Rieuwertsz and translator Jan Hendrik Glazemaker, along with Pieter Balling, Jarig Jelles, Jacob Ostens, and Simon Joosten de Vries, all of whom belonged to the fascinating Flemish D ­ oopsgezind congregation of ‘By the Lamb’ in Amsterdam, led by Abrahamsz.9 8 Rindert Jagersma and Trude Dijkstra, Uncovering Spinoza’s Printers by Means of Bibliographical Research, in: Quaerendo 43 (2013), pp. 278–310. See also Piet Visser, ‘Blasphemous and pernicious’: the role of printers and booksellers in the spread of dissident religious and philosophical ideas in the Netherlands in the second half of the seventeenth century, in: Quaerendo 26 (1996), pp. 303–326. 9 Jonathan R. Seiling, Spinoza as Religious Philosopher: Between Radical Protestantism and Jewishness, and Michael Driedger, Response to Graeme Hunter: Spinoza and the Boundary Zones of Religious Interaction, in: The Conrad Grebel Review 25 (2007), pp. 4–8 and 21–28 resp.; Wim Klever, Mannen rond Spinoza,1650–1700: Presentatie van een emanciperende generatie (Hilversum, 1997); and Ruben Buys, “Without thy self, O man, thou hast no means to look for, by which thou maist know God”. Pieter Balling, the Radical Enlightenment, and the Legacy of Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, in: Church History and Religious Culture 93 (2013), pp. 363–83. In contrast (in: Wiep van Bunge, Spinoza Past and Present: Essays on Spinoza, Spinozism, and Spinoza Scholarship (Boston,

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Abrahamsz was also a crucial leader of the Amsterdam Collegiants, although not counted among Spinoza’s friends. His inspired vision of an open fellowship of the pious, depreciation of theological precision, and avoidance of doctrinal disputation had wide appeal. As indicated in van Dale’s satire, Abrahamsz’s approach to scripture combined a spiritualist’s belief in the ‘inner Word’ enlightening the reader and a concomitant depreciation of the authority of the letter, with a rationalist’s (­Socinian) treatment of the scripture text as a historical document. It has been suggested that Abrahamsz was reflecting the influence of major philosophical movements, such as Cartesianism. I argue instead that his ethos was shaped by debates within Doopsgezind circles, which themselves were the inheritance of the earlier spiritualists’ radical critique of the confessional enmity, division, and conflict that the Reformation inspired. Since the 1620s these disputes had focused on whether or not the written Word or scriptures were adequate to produce salvation, or whether this required direct action by the Holy Spirit – the so-called inner Word. The spiritualistic ‘two-Word’ hermeneutic (scripture and Spirit) ultimately won the day, and was adopted by Abrahamsz. It was not, as the polemics had it, in opposition to a rational/critical methodology, since it considered written scripture as authoritative only when its meaning was revealed by the inner Word.10 It was therefore possible to apply the latest critical approaches to the written text since it was not divine on its own. Discussions between ‘spiritualistic’ Doopsgezinden and ‘rationalistic’ Socinians – who denied the Trinity – were therefore not incongruous.11 We will first examine some of the polemical works arising out of the two-Word debate from c. 1626–27, focusing especially on how this in-house dispute became public, thanks to a cluster of pamphlets produced by the Doopsgezind linguist and innkeeper Jan Theunisz, as well as by the Remonstrant leader Simon Episcopius, the famed playwright Joost van den Vondel, and the unconventional mathematician and poet Robbert Robbertsz. Second, we will survey a few of the polemics directed a few decades later at Abrahamsz and consider how he responded. Finally, we will return to Spinoza. This will reveal that members of this small but progressive nonconformist community were dramatically pushing the boundaries of theo­logical discourse to reframe religious identity and promote peace and unity well before Spinoza’s treatise. 2012), pp. 51–65), van Bunge is less impressed by the evidence of ‘friendship’ and suggests that it was Spinoza’s interest in democracy that attracted him to the Collegiants rather than theology. 10 Gary K. Waite, Martyrs and Nicodemites Both? Spiritualistic Currents within the Dutch Anabaptist Tradition – From David Joris and Sebastian Castellio to Hans de Ries and Pieter Jansz Twisck 1535–1630, in: Sebastian Castellio zwischen Humanismus und Reformation, Rationalismus und Spiritualismus/Sebastian Castellio between Humanism and Reformation, Rationalism and Spiritualism, ed. Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer (Göttingen, 2017 forthcoming). 11 Piet Visser (ed.), Socinianisme in de Nederlanden, special issue, in: Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 30 (2004).

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They were not alone in this. Ruben Buys has recently revealed how urbanites of the Low Countries had long pursued a vernacular philosophical culture in discussion circles and in print, song, and drama, encouraging curiosity and innovation, as well as a strong desire for ‘enlightenment’.12 After 1570, citizens of the Dutch Republic were largely free from serious censorship and could propagate innovative ideas not only in the press, but also in poetry and drama, thanks to the impact of the Chambers of Rhetoric, amateur drama guilds in which many urbanites participated and most witnessed.13 Also encouraging individualism was the vibrant stream of mysticism and spiritualism which, at its core, identified religion as an inner matter to the detriment of dogma and ceremony. What mattered for spiritualists was the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, not the ability to interpret the scriptures through education or within orthodox strictures. The result was a growing emphasis on individual creativity to the detriment of confessional conformity.14 Spiritualism also influenced many Waterlander Doopsgezinden to avoid precise definitions of faith so as to collaborate with other pious and non-violent nonconformist groups, such as the Remonstrants, Collegiants, English Baptists, Quakers, and Socinians, to name but a few.15 For early spiritualists such as David Joris (c. 1501–56), personal spiritual development and love of one’s neighbor were the defining ethic, rather than correct dogma. Other spiritualist movements thrived in the Republic, including the Family of Love of Hendrik Niclaes (c.1501–80), while the Catholic spiritualist Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (1522–90) helped shape broader attitudes toward religion in the realm. Joris too was influential, although his unsavory reputation from his earlier prophetic pretensions when an Anabaptist leader after Münster (1535–c.1540) meant that his name was rarely mentioned in a positive way.16 12 Ruben Buys, Sparks of Reason: Vernacular Rationalism in the Low Countries, 1550–1670 (Hilversum, 2015). 13 On the Chambers of Rhetoric, see Gary K. Waite, Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556 (Toronto, 2000); and Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625, eds Elsa Strietman and Peter Happé (Turnhout, 2006), among others. 14 Mirjam van Veen, Spiritualism in the Netherlands: From David Joris to Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, in: Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002), pp. 129–50. But see also Jason Harris, The Religious Position of Abraham Ortelius, in: The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs, eds Arie Jan Gelderblom, Jan L. de Jong, and Marc Van Vaeck (Leiden, 2004), pp. 89–140. 15 On spiritualism and Waterlanders, see Piet Visser, Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535–1700, in: A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700, eds John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (Leiden, 2007), pp. 299–345. The number of members in all of these groups was never terribly large, yet they were significant minorities in certain regions: Samme Zijlstra, Om de Ware Gemeente en de Oude Gronden: Geschiedenis van de Dopersen in de Nederlanden 1531–1675 (Hilversum, 2000), pp. 430–432. 16 Samme Zijlstra, Charisma und Toleranz: David Joris’ Briefwechsel mit verschiedenen Autoritäten (1534–1544), in: Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 98 (1998), pp. 5–34, here p. 33. This ignoring of Joris still marks current scholarship; when recounting spiritualism as a critical agent in the Dutch Reformation, Freya Sierhuis discusses Franck, Schwenckfeld, Niclaes,

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The most vigorous opponent of the two-Word approach was the Amsterdam Doopsgezind Jan Theunisz (c.1569–1637). He portrayed the ‘two-Word’ advocates led by Hans de Ries (1580–1638) as fanatics reviving the ecstatic frenzy of Anabaptist Münster. In his rebuttals, De Ries attacked Theunisz’s side for following Socinian rationalism.17 Yet, reading these polemics carefully, we see spiritualistic and rationalistic elements on both sides. This argument within a small religious minority became a matter of widespread interest thanks to the unusual religious climate of the Dutch Republic. As Judith Pollmann has recently commented, ‘one of the key characteristics of Netherlandish religious life was its confessional fluidity’, and it was perfectly possible to move from one faith community to another, or to be a member of one and a sympathizer (liefhebber) of another, or even to have no formal confessional affiliation whatsoever.18 Participating in the internal doctrinal disputes of other confessions was therefore commonplace, as what transpired in one minority group had potential ramifications for others. And the urban vernacular culture provided literate urbanites of all confessions with the interest and skills to engage in debates, often utilizing genres of poetry or dialogue to do so.

The Two-Word Debate While conservative Mennonites, like strict Calvinists, followed a scriptural hermeneutic emphasizing the authority and plain meaning of the biblical text,19 Waterlander Doopsgezinden such as De Ries and Pieter Pietersz (1574–1651) stressed the inner Word, light, or voice in their popular works encouraging spiritual development.20 Pietersz’s very popular The Way to the City of Peace of 1625 hoped to restore personal spiritual devotion, as growing wealth among Mennonites led to fears of materialism.

17 18 19 20

Coornhert, and even the South German Hans Denck, as formative, but barely mentions Joris: Freya Sierhuis, The Literature of the Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics, and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford, 2015), pp. 18–20. On Theunisz, see Keith L. Sprunger, Jan Theunisz of Amsterdam (1569–1638): Mennonite Printer, Pamphleteer, Renaissance Man, in: Mennonite Quarterly Review 68 (1994), pp. 437–460. Judith Pollmann, Vondel’s Religion, in: Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679): Dutch Playwright in the Golden Age, eds Jan Bloemendal and Frans-Willem Korsten (Leiden, 2012), pp. 85–100, here p. 88. Cornelius J. Dyck, The Place of Tradition in Dutch Anabaptism, in: Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 43 (1974), pp. 34–49. Sjouke Voolstra, The Path to Conversion: The Controversy between Hans de Ries and Nittert Obbesz, in: Anabaptism Revisited, ed. Walter Klaassen (Scottdale, PA, 1992), pp. 98–114; Elisabeth J. De Lange-Hoekstra, Mennonite (Doopsgezinde) Women and Prophetic Leadership in the Early Seventeenth Century [MA Thesis, University of New Brunswick] (2014), esp. pp. 40–47; and Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente, pp. 280–282.

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A builder of windmills, Pietersz emphasized a spiritual detachment from the things of this world and reliance upon God to provide.21 Some of his ‘City of Peace’ followers took such admonitions quite literally, as Theunisz recounted stories of visionaries commanding the rich to share their goods with the poor.22 Despite Pietersz’s spiritualism, a Reformed minister Abdius Witmarius accused him of Socinianism.23 Contradictory perhaps, but the spiritualist heremeneutic did indeed make possible a critical approach to the written Word. The Doopsgezind dispute was carried out shortly after the Arminian controversy within the public church had led to near civil war. The Arminians were led by their representative at the Synod of Dort, Simon Episcopius (1583–1643) who, along with other leaders, had fled the Republic after the Synod’s conclusion in favor of Calvinist orthodoxy in 1619. They were able to return only after the death of Prince Maurice in 1625. Many Mennonites such as Vondel publicly supported the Arminians, but as an informally tolerated minority, the Mennonites needed to keep their own affairs private. Theunisz’s strategy of publicly airing dirty Mennonite laundry was therefore risky.24 The dispute began when De Ries – a friend of Coornhert25 – accused a fellow elder, Nittert Obbesz, of being secretly captivated by Socinian rationalism.26 Obbesz then charged De Ries with a form of spiritualist fanaticism, whose ‘inner Word’ devalued the written scriptures. In response, De Ries affirmed his spiritualist credentials, citing the Silesian spiritualist Caspar Schwenckfeld as an authority.27 The most infamous of Theunisz’s anti-De Ries pamphlets, The History of Hanssian Spirit – Fanatic Mennonites, reveals that Theunisz’s real fear was of a spiritualism 21 Pieter Pietersz, De Weg na Vreden-stadt, in: ditto, Opera, dat is: Alles wat van dien rechtsinnigen Leeraar. Inder eenvoudigheydt beschreven is: … (Amsterdam, 1698), pp. 3–42, here pp. 9–11. On Pietersz, see Tom Harder, The Way to the City of Peace: The Anabaptist Utopia of Pieter Pietersz, in: Mennonite Quarterly Review 78 (2004), pp. 525–542. 22 Pietersz later clarified that they should not interpret his spiritual message so literally: Pieter Pietersz, De Hemelsche Bruyloft, Handelende van’t noodigen, ‘tweygeren, ‘tbewilligen, heerlijck­heydt der selver, en hoe men zich daer toe bereyden moet (Wormer-Veer, 1650), in: Pietersz, Opera, p. 162. 23 Harder, The Anabaptist Utopia, p. 529. 24 Voolstra, The Path to Conversion, p. 102. 25 In a 1582 dedicatory foreword, Coornhert calls De Ries ‘the God-loving Hans de Rycke, most worthy friend’ and describes their frequent ‘friendly’ conversations about the possibility that believers could keep God’s commandments perfectly, a key teaching of Coornhert: Dirck Volckertsz Coorn­ hert, Uut-roedinge van des verderfs plantinghe, dragende die verderffelijcke vrucht (Amsterdam, 1630), http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/coor001uutr02_01/colofon.php (accessed 01/06/16). See also Gerrit Voogt, ‘Anyone who can Read may be a Preacher’: Sixteenth-century Roots of the Collegiants, in: Dutch Review of Church History 85 (2005), pp. 409–424, here p. 419. 26 He claimed never to have read any of Faustus Socinus’s works, since he was ignorant of Latin. Voolstra, The Path to Conversion, p. 98. 27 Voolstra, The Path to Conversion, p. 106. Theunisz was no conservative, but he was a self-taught linguist with skills in Hebrew and Arabic; in 1610 he befriended a Muslim Moroccan who lived with Theunisz for several months and taught him Arabic. Gary K. Waite, Reimagining Islam: The Moor in Dutch and English Pamphlets, 1550–1620, in: Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013), pp. 1250–1295.

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Figure 2: [s.n.], Hans de Ries oud LXVI (1553–1638) (1st half of the 18th century). University of Amsterdam, Special Collections. Prent K 661.

unbound from learning that would permit uneducated women to interpret scripture based on visions.28 He relays scandalous incidents of ecstatic ­Doopsgezinden demanding that their prosperous coreligionists share their wealth, or of women offering a spiritual rebirthing service in which a sister lay on a bed screaming and simulating the contractions of childbirth until her customer finally admitted to feeling the rebirth.29 Another Waterlander woman interpreted a vision to mean that her daily activity of cleaning pots and pans was a sign of the nearing apocalypse.30 A male Waterlander adopted a dog that he thought was an angel, and so on. Theunisz also accused De Ries of Socinianism,31 as well as of learning to depreciate scripture from Johan­ nes Tauler, Sebastian Franck, Joris, Schwenckfeld, and Matthew Wier.32 The lack of any negative reference aligning De Ries with Coornhert is striking, suggesting that Theunisz himself found value in Coornhert’s works. It was, moreover, Theunisz who was best

28 Jan Theunisz, Der Hanssijtische Menniste Gheest-drijveren Historie, Ofte kort Verhael van de ghepretendeerde Ghesichten, Inspraken, Openbaringen, ende haer Acten, by onse tijden. Voortkomende uyt de leeringe ende drijven van een inwendigh, ofte onbeschreven Woordt, van Hans de Rys (Amsterdam, 1627). See also Gary K. Waite, Demonic affliction or divine chastisement? Conceptions of illness and healing amongst Spiritualists and Mennonites in Holland, c.1530–c.1630, in: Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, eds Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt (London and New York, 1997), pp. 59–79. 29 Theunisz, Der Hansijtsche Menniste, p. 30. According to Theunisz, one of De Ries’s friends, Lubbert Gerritsz (1534–1612), interpreted the event as a by-product of melancholy – the same diagnosis provided by Johan Wier in his defence of accused witches – while another, Gerrit Lambertsz (a shoemaker-deacon), defended it as a miracle. 30 Theunisz, Der Hansijtsche Menniste, pp. 28–29. 31 Jan Theunisz, Der Hanssijtsch Mennisten Socinianismvs: Ofte Clare vertooninge der Leer-Puncten ende Articulen des Gheloofs/waer in de Hanssijtsche Mennisten vande Groote Spijcker ­tAmsterdam met den Sociniaenen (soo mense noemt) in’t ghevoelen eens zijn ([Amsterdam]: for Jan Theunisz, 1627). 32 Theunisz, Der Hanssijtsch Mennisten Socinianismvs, p. A3r–v; Theunisz, Der Hansijtsche Menniste, p. 9.

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acquainted with Socinian, not to mention Jewish and Muslim, biblical criticism. He was also much more inclined to spiritualistic ways of thought than he was letting on, for example working collaboratively with Jews, Muslims, and other Christian nonconformists in ways suggesting that confessional distinctions mattered little to him. For his part De Ries was no anti-Trinitarian, as his confessions of faith reveal.33 In the end Theunisz lost the battle, as Obbesz apologized and acknowledged the ‘twoWord’ exegetical methodology.34 Theunisz was shunned until he too apologized, but not until 1634. This dispute reveals that spiritualistic and rationalistic hermeneutics were not intrinsically at odds; the argument was merely over degree. Simon Episcopius Obviously the labels of ‘spiritualist fanatic’ and ‘Socinian’ cannot be used accurately to identify the beliefs of any of the participants, and many polemicists conflated denial of the Trinity with spiritualism, based on the assumption that spiritualistic individualism would lead ultimately to atheism, passing through the half-way house of Socinian denial of the divinity of Christ.35 This is clear from Episcopius’s treatise of 1626. For him, the Doopsgezind dispute had far-reaching significance since it reflected arguments swirling within the public church.36 The question is essentially epistemological: how can Christians know their status before God with any certainty? Seeking a middle path between Calvin’s predestinarian fatalism and a conscience freed from externally verifiable sources of religious authority, Episcopius argued that since God had made the meaning of scripture straightforward, the ‘preached or written word of God’ is the divine instrument producing the rebirth. Episcopius continues that there is no need to posit any direct intervention of the Holy Spirit for the inner enlightenment required for repentance.37 For him, De Ries was inspired by earlier ­spiritualists 33 See Hans de Ries, ‘Waterlander Confession’ of 1577 and the ‘Short Confession of Faith and the Essential Elements of Christian Doctrine’ of 1610, in: Confessions of Faith in the Anabaptist Tradition, 1527–1660, ed. Karl Koop (Kitchener, 2006), pp. 123–156. In 1672 an editor of De Ries’s works asserted that De Ries had been no Socinian, for he had earlier met with some of the Polish Brethren exiled from their homeland for their anti-Trinitarian ideas, but had refused to allow them to join the Waterlanders because of their denial of the divinity of Jesus: Hans de Ries, Klaer Bewys van de Eeuwigheydt ende Godheydt Jesus Christi, Door Hans de Rijs, In sijn leven Leeraer der Waterlandtsche Doops-gesinde Christenen (Haarlem, 1672), pp. 4–5. 34 See ‘The Thirteen Articles’ of 1626, which Obbesz was compelled to sign, in: Koop, Confessions of Faith, pp. 157–163. 35 See, for example, Caspar Grevinchoven, Vande vryheydt der Secten/Hoe schadelijck deselve zij: Tot naedeel der algemeyne warachtige kercke ofte Gemeynte Godes/ … (Dordrecht, 1611). 36 Simon Episcopius, Oordeel Over het Verschil Van ’t Ordinaris middle van ’sMenschen Bekeeringhe, Onlanghs voorghevallen tot Amsterdam inde groote Spijcker der ghener/die ghemeenlijck Waterlandtsche Mennisten ghenoemt worden/Tusschen Nittert Obbes aen d’eene sijde/en Hans de ries, Reynier Wybrantsz. Pieter Andriessz. Cornelis Claessz. Aen d’ander sijde. Geschreven door een onpartijdigh Liefhebber der waerheydt (Hoorn, 1626), p. 3. 37 Episcopius, Oordeel Over het Verschil, p. 4.

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to turn the written gospels into a mere guidebook, undercutting the standard for discerning true faith from false and bringing ruin to all Religion.38 Many people pray for enlightenment, Episcopius concludes, but that merely signifies the ability to understand the scriptures correctly, not some ontological change within the person that makes one ‘godded or christed’, as, he asserts, De Ries and his spiritualist predecessors had sought.39 Although Episcopius makes a caricature of De Ries’s position, he notes correctly that this debate revolved around the central question for all Protestants: Did religious authority come from an external, readily verifiable source, i. e., the written scriptures, or from a personal enlightenment in the soul or mind? The latter had the benefit of greatly diminishing doctrinal discord, but opened the door to extreme religious individualism. Episcopius’s contribution also reveals a widespread desire for ‘enlightenment’, although he sought to steer seekers away from a supernatural inner light and toward the reading and especially hearing of the scriptures. Joost van den Vondel Another intervener in the two-Word debate was the playwright Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679). Known as the Dutch Shakespeare, Vondel is most famed for his Lucifer of 1654. Typically identified as a Catholic, Vondel did not convert to this faith until after 1635. Until then he was an Amsterdam Doopsgezind, serving between 1616 and 1620 as deacon.40 In 1626 he jumped into the two-Word fray with a single-page broadsheet poem entitled Antidote against the Poison of the Spiritualist Fanatics [and] in Defence of the Written Word of God. In this the Mennonite Vondel was less restrained that the Remonstrant Episcopius, and since he was a friend of Theunisz, it is no surprise that he should take his side. Vondel extols the great virtues of both scripture and reason for Christians in weathering storms such as the ‘damaging pest of spirit-fanatics’, of ‘dreamers and prophets, of seers possessed by the spirit of errors’, who sow doubt, lies, and replace the written word with ‘an impulse of an inner spirit’. To drink from this beaker is to become drunk with errors and tumult, to allow the Devil and madness to break loose, to turn Christ into a farce (klucht – a genre of satirical drama), so that people believe whatever pops into their ‘brainless heads’. He laments that ‘the Temples stand empty, and none of the lay people listen to the Bible but regard the Sunday sermons as mere letter work … [believing] the wonderful Spirit born in the mind is wiser than all those who came before in God’s name’. God’s commands are not spread by a ‘haunting [spoock] of the Spirit, but by the written laws/and out of the priest’s mouth’. Left to their own devices, 38 Episcopius, Oordeel Over het Verschil, p. 7. 39 Episcopius, Oordeel Over het Verschil, p. 22, pp. 28–30. It was the Familists who pursued being ‘godded with god’. 40 Mieke B. Smits-Veldt and Marijke Spies, Vondel’s Life, in: Joost van den Vondel, eds Korsten and Bloemendal, pp. 51–83, here p. 57.

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this ‘foolish folk’ is filled with pride, judging tomfoolery [poppe-dinghen] as the true worship, God’s words [to be] without power, [as] letters without soul, a dark, hellish canal [gracht], the throne of Lucifer, … leading to a thousand ravings [rasernyen]. He blames Schwenckfeld for this devaluation of ‘the holy book, or dear God’s meaning expressed through letters’, by saying that they are not God’s words. ‘Behold Schwenckfeld’s spirit, which boasts of his dreams’ but which leads only to uncertainty, like ‘fog in the air’.41 Vondel may be harsh in his language, but his purview is national, not localized to the Doopsgezind community, seeking Figure 3: Philip de Koninck, Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) (1665), Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer Op to encourage a higher level of attentiveSolder (formerly Amstelkring Museum), in keepness to sermons and scripture-reading ing for the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. in all confessions. Vondel is clearly passionate about the value of scriptures, which he utilized in his historical dramas. Pollmann suggests too that Vondel feared disorder, and certainly many Dutch at the time were anxious to avoid religious warfare. Elsewhere, however, Vondel opposed any efforts to impose limits on freedom of conscience and condemned strict Calvinism;42 like Episcopius he wanted neither complete religious subjectivity nor state-mandated confessionalism. It is noteworthy that Vondel names only one spiritualist, Schwenckfeld, even though he undoubtedly knew the others. The lack of a reference to Coornhert is again puzzling, since his influence in Dutch affairs and among the Doopsgezinden was profound and since he was, like Vondel, a playwright and poet.43 Regardless, it is difficult to imagine how Vondel’s Antidote played out in the Doopsgezind community; unlike Theunisz and Obbesz he was not shunned, but the broadsheet suggests Vondel was already moving away from a Waterlander identity, although its defense of scripture and sermons is more Remonstrant than Catholic. Vondel’s Antidote seeks to depict its author as a levelheaded intervener, whose rational, poetical voice will calm the waters of religious dispute.

41 Joost van den Vondel, Antidotum: Tegen het vergift der Geestdryvers: Tot verdedigingh van ’t beschreven word Gods (Amsterdam, 1626); see also Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente, pp. 280–281. 42 Pollmann, Vondel’s Religion, pp. 90–91. 43 I could find no reference to Coornhert in Korsten and Bloemendal, Joost van den Vondel.

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Robbert Robbertsz A further participant in this dispute was the amateur poet Robbert Robbertsz le Canu (1563–1630), whose profession was teaching mathematics and navigation. A friend of the Latin school rector Reinier Telle (1559–1618) – who translated the works of spiritualist humanists Sebastian Castellio and Michael Servetus – Robbertsz had been a member of various Mennonite and Doopsgezind congregations, but found each in turn too restrictive. His own spiritualistic congregation, the Robbert-Robberts-volk, quickly dissolved, and he finally abandoned formal adherence to any denomination, becoming a fierce critic of all confessions. In 1615 he condemned ‘all high-learned’ theologians and preachers for bringing Christendom into dispute.44 Robbertsz’s most infamous work was the poem Northern Rumbling Pot in which he criticized Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists, and Mennonites.45 As a ‘Neutralist’, Robbertsz believed ‘the church of Christ is a majestic cathedral with many doors, all leading to the center’.46 For the Doopsgezind two-Word debate, he composed a play Disputation between two countrymen, which has Theunisz appearing as a third character. This work has been interpreted as pro-Theunisz, but a closer analysis reveals that this pamphlet was instead a satirical critique of both sides. We catch a hint of Robbertsz’s negative reputation in the 1620 Chronicle of ­Tyranny by the conservative Mennonite Pieter Jansz Twisck, who describes the response to Robbertsz’s ‘strange and rare [seltsame] writings’. Some writers, Twisck reveals, call Robbertsz ‘the miracle man’, a ‘fool of the Heretics’, and an associate of Melchior Hoffman, David Joris, Hendrik Niclaes ‘and similar mad-spirits [dool-gheesten]’. This last inflamed Robbertsz to compose a series of songs, with text and music, against Twisck.47 Yet Twisck made it clear that he was recounting the opinions of others, citing extensive passages from Robbertsz so that the readers could ‘decide for themselves if the writers had judged badly’.48 Twisck also retells intriguing stories of the behaviour of some of Robbertsz’s supporters. For example, in Warder, a village near 44 Robbert Robbertsz, Rechte aen-wijsinghe tot die ware Sichtbare Kercke Gods/ende totten waren Godsdienst/ende wat het Merck-teycken is daer aen men de ware Sichtbare Kercke Godts sal bekennen/… door een onpartijdigh Neutralist/… Waer in hy protesteert tegen alle hoogh-geleerde Doctoren/Theologanten/Leeraers/ende Predicanten/die haer in de Christenheyt te same rotten/ Secten/twisft/tweedracht/scheuringe/deplinge/ende erghernissen aen-richten (Statum: for Arent Sjoerssz [ca.1646]). 45 Robbert Robbertsz, De Noortsche Rommel pot, Jerem. 1. vers. 13. Op de wijse: Dick heb ick mijn lief ghebeden (n.p., [1608]). 46 On Robberstz see http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Robbertsz,_Robbert_(1563–1627) (accessed 15/05/16) and Sierhuis, The Literature, pp. 78–82. 47 Robbert Robbertsz, Seven liedekens, van Robbert Robbertsz. Gemaeckt tegen Pieter Iansz. Twisck, cronijck-schrijver tot Hoorn: … te vermanen/te leeren/te stichten/ende in den Geest vrolijck te vermaecken ([Hoorn?], 1626?), fo. B1v–B3r. 48 Pieter Jansz Twisck, Chronijck vanden onderganc der tijrannen ofte Jaerlycklche Geschiedenissen in Werltlycke ende Kercklijke saecken (Hoorn, c. 1620), vol. 2: p. 1439.

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Hoorn – where both Twisck and Robbertsz now lived – some members of a fellowship believed that at a particular time every day the Devil was cast out and, at another hour, the Holy Spirit tangibly received so that residents could sense, feel, and taste it (like honey), and they would be able to perform miracles of healing, gain preternatural insight, and drive out demons from the afflicted.49 Whether there is any truth to these stories or not, they are very similar to the ones we noted were told a few years later by Theunisz about the ‘City of Peace’ folk. In his anti-Twisck songs, Robbertsz complains about Twisck calling him a ‘mad spirit’ and for using the word of Calvinist and Catholic ‘lying writers’ against him, but he does not refer at all to these anecdotes, leading one to suspect that there was some veracity in them.50 If so, then ­Robbertsz was surely a natural ally of the spiritualism of De Ries and Pieter Pietersz, not a supporter of Theunisz. Robbertsz’s pamphlet is a klucht, a short, humorous play or dialogue that uses ordinary people in lead roles to bring laughter to an audience. In the Disputation between two Countrymen, the players speak in their own dialect as a means of bringing the subject down to earth; that is why this genre was called boer-praetje, since they were conversations between simple farmers;51 Robbertsz composed other such comedies as well.52 Here Robbertsz has Theunisz performing an unusual role: he is sitting at his Amsterdam inn when two country fellows arrive, Cees (Cornelius) and Pieter, who have travelled from the Doopsgezind community of De Rijp with news of a dispute that had arisen there between Pieter Pietersz and the physician elder Jan Willemsz, one of Theunisz’s allies.53 It began with Willemsz’s ugly (leelijcken) response to ­Pietersz’s Way to the City of Peace, which had resulted in rumours, although none are explicitly addressed in the Disputation, except that some of Pietersz’s readers were comparing his pious booklet to the child Jesus (whatever that might mean). The resulting criticism forced Pietersz to move to Zaardam and caused a rift in the Doopsgez49 Twisck, Chronijck, vol. 2: pp. 1440–1442. 50 Robbertsz, Seven liedekens, p. A1v. 51 On Kluchten, see Ben Parsons and Bas Jongenelen, eds, Comic Drama in the Low Countries, c. 1450–1560: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, 2012). I would like to thank Hans de Waardt for identifying the dialects in Robbertsz’s pamphlet and pointing me in the direction of Kluchten. 52 Robbert Robbertsz, Disputatie tusschen twie huysluyden ghevallen tot Jan Thuenessen, in de OudeBruch-Steech, over het wech-trecken met der wuen, van Pieter Pietersen Kistemaker, en vermaen­ der in de Rijp e weest, nu met der wuen e togen op Serdam (Alkmaar?, [1627]), p. A1r. Another satirical boer-praetje by Robbertsz is Sommighe Buer-praetgens/van de Resolutie der Ed. Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-vrieslandt/ende de Magistraten der stadt Hoorn: Alles dienende tot opbouwinghe van de ware Ghereformeerde Kercke/ende tot rust ende vrede van de vrye vereenichde Nederlanden t’samen gheset (Hoorn, 1614). The term boer-praetje was also used by Theunisz: Jan Willemsz. raegh-stock voor Nittert Obbesz. raegh-beesem. Ofte eenighe Spreucken oft redenen ghetoghen uyt het Boeck van Jan W. Medecijn ende Bisschop over de Komen-Jannen op de Rijp teghens den Gheestdrift ofte Geestdriverye, … (Amsterdam: for Jan Thuenisz, 1627), p. 1, ‘Hier na volght Het Boere-praatje van Ian Willemsz en P.P.’ 53 On De Rijp, see Piet Visser, Dat Rijp is moet eens door eygen Rijpheydt vallen. Doopsgezinden en de Gouden Eeuw van De Rijp (Wormerveer, 1992).

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ind community. Furthermore, the character of Pieter then suggests to Theunisz that the spiritualist Pietersz had insulted him. In response, Cees seeks to calm the waters by reassuring Theunisz that Pietersz was also a friend of Obbesz. Pieter replies that this friendly manner by Pietersz toward Obbesz was merely a cover, for the former had covertly accused the latter of the sin against the Holy Spirit. Robbertsz’s characterization of Theunisz and our knowledge of the real innkeeper diverge enormously, for the Disputation’s Theunisz says in effect, ‘wait a minute, I thought there was peace on the island’ (De Rijp). Theunisz thus plays an un­­ familiar role as a disengaged interrogator shocked at the news of discord. The reality, as Robbertsz knew, was that Theunisz was the producer of the nasty polemics and rumour-mongering. The Disputation is therefore not pro-Theunisz, but a satire of both sides. Robbertsz’s spiritualism would have led him to side with the ‘inner Word’ folk, while his reference to rumours is reminiscent of those stories which had hounded him. As a religious neutralist he criticized both parties, and by having simple countrymen inform the sophisticated Theunisz, readers would have known who in fact was to be the satirical target. Similarly, if Theunisz’s publishing activity is anything to go by, his criticism of spiritualism did not run deep, for he printed works by Coornhert – which may reveal why he does not mention the spiritualist in his polemics – and the ‘Libertine’ Reformed minister Caspar Coolhaes, including the latter’s alchemical treatise advertising and promoting his distilled medical concoctions, an ironical action given Theunisz’s sarcasm of De Ries’s alchemical medical practice in his two-Word polemics.54 Within the Doopsgezind communities of the 1620s, spiritualism flowed alongside an appreciation for the scriptures and reason. People could be both ‘filled with the Spirit’ and careful interpreters of scripture. I suspect that all parties involved in the two-Word dispute had their feet planted in both sides of the spiritualist-biblicist divide to some degree or another. Galenus Abrahamsz After the two-Word dispute settled down, De Ries continued pushing to unite the Mennonite fellowships, helping produce, on 27 September 1627, a new confession called the Olive Branch, which distilled the essence of the true church down to a few shared beliefs; unsurprisingly, it made no explicit reference to the two-Word doctrine.55 This led to the union of the Frisian, Flemish, and High German Mennonites into the United Mennonite Church. In the meantime, spiritualism thrived 54 Casper Coolhaas, Water-boecxken: het welcke aenwijst, hoemen zeeckere edele ende seer goede spiritus, aquae vitae compositae, wateren, cracht-wateren ende gedistilleerde olien, tot een yeder cranckheyt ende ghebreken des menschen lichaems, … (Amsterdam, 1604). On Theunisz’s critique of De Ries’s medicine, see Waite, Demonic affliction or divine chastisement?, p. 69. See also: http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Theunisz,_Jan_(ca._1569–1637%3F) (accessed 07/05/16). 55 http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Olive_Branch_Confession_of_Faith_(1627) (accessed 07/05/16).

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amongst the Waterlanders with the ongoing publishing of Pietersz’s and De Ries’s pietistic works, joined by the poetical and emblematical works of Jan Philipsz Schabaelje, all emphasizing an internalized piety and a renunciation of doctrinal strife.56 The torch of unity was next taken up by Abrahamsz, who had learned to think differently about confessional identities growing up in the unusual Mennonite fellowship of Zierikzee, Zeeland, which had been banned by both the Flemish and the Frisian branches for not taking sides in their earlier disputes.57 After completing his medical decree in Leiden, Figure 4: [Jan Stolker?], Portrait of Galenus Abrain 1648 Abrahamsz moved to Amsterhamsz de Haan (1622–1706) (1st half of the 18th dam, became an elder in the ‘By the century). University of Amsterdam, Special Collections. Prent K 460. Lamb’ United Mennonite Church, and practised medicine. His zeal for unity was enhanced by contacts with the authors of the Olive Branch, and hence by the legacy of De Ries. So, while not himself a Waterlander, Abrahamsz imbibed their spirit of inclusiveness and spiritualist tolerance, finally uniting with them in 1668. In between, he became a leader of the Collegiants in 1650, confronted accusations of Socinianism in 1655, and become the centre of the so-called Lamb’s War (Lammerenkrijgh), another in-house dispute that led to some of his congregants setting up their own fellowship known as ‘de Zon’ in 1664 because they feared his extreme ecumenical efforts. Abrahamsz sought to pare down theology to the essentials necessary for pious living, thereby ignoring the contentious doctrine of the Trinity. He emphasized Christ’s function as role model and teacher, rather than as a redeemer whose death satisfied divine justice. He believed that the New Testament was more important than the Old and the sayings of Jesus more valuable than other passages. He believed that confessions

56 Piet Visser, Broeders in de Geest: De Doopsgezinde Bijdragen van Dierick en Jan Philipsz. S­ chabaelje tot de Nederlandse stichtelijke literatuur in de zeventiende eeuw, 2 vols (Deventer, 1988). 57 Hendrik W. Meihuizen, Galenus Abrahamsz 1622–1706: Strijder voor een onbeperkte verdraazaamheid en verdediger van het Doperse Spiritualisme (Haarlem, 1954). On Galenus’s alchemy, see Ruud Lambour, De alchemistische wereld van Galenus Abrahamsz (1622–1706), in: Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 31 (2005), pp. 93–168.

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and doctrinal statements were human creations without divine authority.58 Charges of Socinianism came in response to a doctrinal statement that Abrahamsz and his colleague David Spruyt presented to their fellow ministers on 11 January 1657. Known as the 19 Articles, it argued that since there was only one true spiritual church, no particular denomination could claim to be the true church of God. Human confessions of faith, ecclesiastical ordinances, and ceremonies were not binding on the ‘consciences of people’, who have the freedom to read the scriptures for themselves.59 The Bible was a guide for faith, but interpretive disagreements should not divide the true church. In response, the Reformed preacher Petrus Wynstok composed a 276-page rebuttal intended to discredit ‘the wolves’ prowling among the Waterlanders.60 In these Last Days, Wynstok warns, false prophets, inspired by the Devil, will spread his Socinian errors utilizing ‘double-meaning’ words to obscure the truth; the Doopsgezind twoWord doctrine is nothing less than a diabolical ploy hiding Socinian heresy.61 He condemns Abrahamsz’s weak Christology, depreciation of the Old Testament, and spiritual church concept. This ‘Socinianism’, Wynstok rages, will lead to the death of the whole Christian body.62 He further condemns Abrahamsz’s teaching that true understanding of the scriptures comes via the Holy Spirit working within individuals to lead them to live ‘holy and unblameworthy lives’.63 For Wynstok certainty comes only via the ‘truth of doctrine’ and not, as Abrahamsz claims, ‘through the powerful, inward enlightenment and working of the Holy Spirit’.64 As we noted at the beginning, Antonius van Dale came to Abrahamsz’s defence with his own boer-praetje, a sophisticated version with five characters: a countryman, an Old Fleming, a Remonstrant, a Waterlander, and a Collegiant. In the Introduction, Van Dale refers back to the booklets produced in 1655 that had accused Abrahamsz of Socinianism, recounting the sad history of such allegations from the early seventeenth century on, and blaming excessive confessional zeal for the ongoing 58 In a catechism for youth Abrahamsz produced in 1682, he affirmed that Jesus was the ‘only begotten Son of God’, but then clarifies that he was named Christ because ‘God had blessed him with the Holy Spirit and with power’, an oblique description that, combined with the lack of reference to the Trinity, would not quell suspicion of Socinianism. Galenus Abrahamsz, Kort Begryp Van de Anleyding Tot de Kennis van de Christelyke Godsdienst, By wijze van Vragen, en Antwoorden, tot Onderwijs der Jeugt (Amsterdam, 1682), p. 13. 59 Galenus Abrahamsz and David Spruyt, Nader verklaringe Van de XIX. Artikelen, Voor desen Door G. Abrahamsz ende D. Spruyt aen hare Mede-dienaren over-ghegeven, Diendende tot Wederlegginge van’t Gheschrift, genaemt: Antwoorde by forme van aenmerckingen, vragen, ende redenen, etc. (Amsterdam: Thomas Fonteyn for Jan Rieuwertsz, 1659), pp. a1r–b1r. This version is a response to critics, but contains the original articles. 60 Petrus Wynstok Sr., Aen-merckinge ende wederlegginge van het Sociniaensche Schrift, begrepen in 19 artijckelen, met een Byvoeghsel van Galenus Abrahamsz. ende David Spruyt, … (Amsterdam, 1659), p. *2r. 61 Wynstok, Aen-merckinge, p. **2r. 62 Wynstok, Aen-merckinge, pp. 9–10. 63 Wynstok, Aen-merckinge, pp. 117–118. 64 Wynstok, Aen-merckinge, p. 128.

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conflict and misunderstanding.65 In the play, the Flemish Mennonite, who is one of Abrahamsz’s in-house opponents, invites the other characters inside, ‘for what we are doing is no secret’, to which the Remonstrant concurs, for ‘all of Holland is full of this’, meaning that the Abrahamsz’s experiment to create a Christian fellowship of all the pious had become national news.66 His avoidance of the Trinity leads Flemish to suspect him of creating a new Socinian sect.67 Countryman, however, challenges Flemish to prove his doctrine by scripture, finally comparing the current argument to the Arminian dispute which had divided the public church in 1618, while Waterlander suggests that, by letting in any and all, Abrahamsz was experimenting a bit too much like the ‘new spirits’ of Rotterdam, i. e., the Collegiants. Countryman counters that Waterlander sounds too much like a Catholic inquisitor.68 When Waterlander asks Countryman if he’s suggesting that Papists, Reformed, Arminians, Lutherans, and Mennonites should get together in one church to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, Countryman replies that he never said that, but the yearning for religious unity is palpable here.69 Then follow the specific accusations made against Abrahamsz’s theology that we began with: the denial of a real hell and Devil and the equation of the Holy Spirit with reason applied to scripture. Instead of offering proof against these slurs, Van Dale turns to the worse error of sectarianism, of saying ‘I am Flemish, I am Frisian’, a divisive approach to religious identity that is bringing disrepute to religion as a whole.70 Countryman concludes that Abrahamsz’s obvious piety and good works show him to have a sincere heart, and that is what really matters.

Spinoza and Abrahamsz What does all this have to do with Spinoza? In the Theological-Political Treatise, ­Spinoza argues that the Word of God ‘is not contained in a certain number of books’.71 What makes the Bible sacred is its ability to inspire ‘people to devotion towards God. Should it become completely neglected, as it once was by the Jews, it is thereby rendered nothing but ink and paper and becomes absolutely devoid of sanctity and subject to corruption.’72 The original writers of the Bible taught what they did ‘not by the common natural light of reason, but by a light peculiar to themselves, and portrayed God as saying them. Although there is much besides in Scripture which is merely historical and to be understood by the natural light, its designation as God’s word is taken 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Van Dale, Boere-praetje, p. A2r–v. Van Dale, Boere-praetje, p. 5. Van Dale, Boere-praetje, pp. 11–13. Van Dale, Boere-praetje, pp. 20–21. Van Dale, Boere-praetje, pp. 33–34. Van Dale, Boere-praetje, pp. 37–38. Israel, Spinoza, p. 164 Israel, Spinoza, p. 166.

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from its most important feature.’73 The purpose of the Bible is to lead people to obedience to God, Spinoza continues, which ‘consists solely in love of our neighbour’.74 When defining whether someone is faithful or not, S­ pinoza writes, ‘if his works are good, he is one of the “faithful”, even if he differs from the other “faithful” in matters of belief ’. The ‘true antichrists’ are ‘those who persecute honest men and lovers of justice because they differ from them in doctrine and do not adhere to the same tenets of belief as themselves’.75 While Spinoza criticizes those who maintain belief in personal, divine inspiration76 and notes that scripture itself someFigure 5: Portrait of Baruch de Spinoza (1632– 1677), ca. 1665. Gemäldesammlung der Herzog times defined the ‘spirit of God’ as the ­August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. human mind,77 he has merely turned the spiritualist’s inner voice into human reason, something that Abrahamsz’s opponents had earlier accused him of doing. What else could it have been? All of these notions were natural developments from the spiritualistic ethic, kept vibrantly alive amongst Holland’s Doopsgezinden. Abrahamsz promoted his version in Collegiant circles and in his congregation, which included Spinoza’s closest friends. Andrew Fix has emphasized the influence of other Collegiants such as Adam Boreel on Abrahamsz,78 but I suggest that, on the subject of the scriptures and spiritual enlightenment, there was a long, uninterrupted in-house path from the sixteenth-century spiritualists through De Ries, Pietersz, to Abrahamsz, whose remarkably ecumenical attitudes were developed within his own religious/intellectual tradition. Van Dale’s play alone reveals that the ideas that Spinoza would publish in 1670 were within the public sphere already. The direction of intellectual influence has so often been perceived as moving from elite philosophers down through urban culture; in this case the influence also worked the other way, especially through the various groups of religious nonconformists. 73 74 75 76 77 78

Israel, Spinoza, p. 167. Israel, Spinoza, p. 173. Israel, Spinoza, p. 181. Calling prophets individuals with an intense imagination, Israel, Spinoza, pp. 23–42. Israel, Spinoza, p. 23. Andrew C. Fix, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, 1991), p. 45, where Fix writes that when Abrahamsz met Boreel, ‘the impact of Boreelist and Rijnsburger ideas on the young Mennonite was decisive.’

III. Writing Radical Histories

Michael Driedger

Against ‘the Radical Reformation’ On the Continuity between Early Modern Heresy-Making and Modern Historiography

Introduction: Historiographical ‘cages’ In the 1560s and 1570s, Hermann von Kerssenbrock composed a long Latin work entitled Anabaptistici furoris Monasterium inclitam Westphaliae metropolim evertentis historica narratio (The Historical Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Münster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia, hereafter referred to as The Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness). It begins with a short poem written in the voice of Jan Bockelson van Leiden’s corpse: The King of the Anabaptists on himself when hanging in an iron cage by the tower of St. Lambert’s I once bore the loft sceptre of the rebaptized. Now the bitter tower holds me aloft. Having refused to nourish my subjects with blackbread, Now with my own flesh I nourish the wild birds. With murder I seized the throne and with sexual acts unspeakable, I was not a basileus but a basilisk. Omnipotent Father, please forgive my sins, Lest the Infernal Beast devour me! Forgive my sin and remove my heinous crimes, Lest your creature should reach the threshold of Hell.1

Kerssenbrock saw himself as a patriot of Catholic Münster who decried both the early phase of Münster’s Protestant reforms and their Anabaptist turn, starting in late 1533 and early 1534. The long text that follows the poem is a year-by-year account starting in 1524 but focusing on 1532 through early 1536, when Jan was executed. It portrays Jan as a lustful monster instead of a noble monarch, who, together with other false, 1

Hermann von Kerssenbrock, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, translated, with introduction and notes, by Christopher S. Mackay [Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, ed. Robert J. Bast, vol. 132] (Leiden and Boston, 2007), p. 80.

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apocalyptic prophets from the Low Countries, convinced Münster’s unwary citizens to adopt the sinful, criminal practice of Anabaptism. The basic details of the period of Anabaptist rule in Münster, minus polemical embellishment, are quite straightforward. Relations between Münster’s burgher elite and the prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck had been deteriorating for many months before the rise of an Anabaptist reforming faction in the city in late 1533, but the election of an Anabaptist council in February 1534 marked a significant escalation. This is partly because anti-Anabaptist Imperial laws of the late 1520s had declared the practice of adult baptism a capital crime, and opponents of burgher-led reforms used these laws as a powerful weapon. Immediately after the election, the prince-bishop organized a coalition of Protestant and Catholic armies to lay siege to the city. The siege lasted for a remarkably long sixteen months. In a very early phase of the siege, before it was well-established, the city’s native defenders were joined by immigrants from the surrounding countryside and even as far away as the Low Countries. They had been attracted to Münster as a New Jerusalem, a haven in the Last Days. Others left the city in fear of the prince-bishop’s forces or because of opposition to the new council. During the siege, the defenders began to see their worsening plight in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Lay prophecies as well as official apocalyptic literature coloured the reputation of Anabaptist rule among contemporaries and later generations alike, as did the community of goods, polygamy and the kingship of Jan van Leiden. When the city was defeated in June 1535, Catholic ecclesiastical order and the authority of the prince-bishop were imposed once again. As a warning to potential rebels, the corpses of Jan van Leiden and two of his fellow leaders (Bernd Knipper­dollink and Bernd Krechtink) were displayed in cages high above St. Lambert’s Square after their public torture and execution in January 1536. The original cages, now long empty, still hang there today!2 Kerssenbrock’s Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness was one of many early modern histories that, like the cages, served as a warning against the dangers of Anabaptism. This essay will focus on the representation of Anabaptist Münster both in early modern and modern literature, and it offers a contribution to book history as well as a critique of some important aspects of Reformation historiography. Anti-Anabaptist literature was a sub-genre of anti-sectarian writing, which was integral to the processes of what David Loewenstein calls ‘heresy-making’.3 This literature had an enduring and broad, cross-confessional appeal, especially amid the schisms and conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay has two main parts. The first examines three books that contributed in significant ways 2

For histories of Protestant reforms in Münster that strive to avoid a dependence on polemical tropes and sources, see Willem de Bakker, James Stayer and Michael Driedger, Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster, 1530–35 (Kitchener, 2009); and Ralf Klötzer, Die Täuferherrschaft von Münster: Stadtreformation und Welterneuerung (Münster, 1992). 3 David Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Oxford and New York, 2013).

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to this anti-Anabaptist literature: in addition to Kerssenbrock’s Narrative, these are Lambertus Hortensius’s Tumult of the Anabaptists (1548) and the anonymous Pantheon of Anabaptists and Enthusiasts (1701–1702). One main purpose of the section is to highlight these texts’ complex histories. It does this by analysing the role that people associated with book production (that is, people other than the original authors) had in the maintenance of an anti-sectarian textual culture in the early modern era. Non-authorial contributions were made by translators, editors, publishers, printers, engravers, colourists, book binders, and other members of the book trades. Attention to the work of these people (particularly the engravers) provides clues that show that book production teams were aware of, and built upon, previous contributions to the sub-genre. They were part of what we might call a ‘republic of hateful letters’ that thrived throughout the early modern era. The second part of the essay argues that early modern heresy-making continues to influence the ways that scholars today write about early modern religious nonconformists. In effect, narrative mindsets, established long ago but reproduced again and again over the intervening generations, still constrain or ‘cage’ the interpretative choices that historians make.

The role of the book trades in the reproduction of anti-Anabaptist literature Among the examples of sixteenth-century literature that helped establish the literary and artistic image of Anabaptist Münster, one of the most influential and important is Tumultuum anabaptistarum liber unus (The Tumult of the Anabaptists) by the Dutch Catholic humanist Lambertus Hortensius (†1574).4 Hortensius’s story of Anabaptist misrule was not focused solely on Münster. He drew a direct line between Thomas Müntzer’s insurrection in southern Germany in 1525 and Anabaptist misrule in Münster in the 1530s. And he also devoted significant attention to Anabaptist actions in the Netherlands between 1534 and 1535. These included a case of several men running through the streets of Amsterdam with swords held high, crying for revenge on those who would not repent; another case of naked men and women running through Amsterdam’s streets, again calling for repentance; and an attack by Anabaptists on Amsterdam’s city hall in May 1535, just a few weeks before the end of the siege of Münster. For Hortensius the root of these criminal actions and of the heretical reforms in Münster was the false belief that men could establish the kingdom of Christ on earth. Prophets had carried this false message from Dutch territories and tempted hundreds of simple men and women to travel to Münster, because they claimed it was a New Jerusalem, where all material goods were held in common. After one of the prophets, Jan Matthys, was killed by soldiers, a new prophet named 4

Lambertus Hortensius, Tumultuum anabaptistarum liber unus (Basle: Johannes Oporin, 1548).

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Jan of Leiden rose in his place. This lust-filled man named himself king and he began the practice of polygamy. In addition to having many wives himself, King Jan lived an extravagant life while his subjects suffered. Recurring themes of the Tumult of the Anabaptists are not only the violence that the Anabaptists used in their disorderly actions but also the punishments that civil authorities imposed on them in return. Again and again, Hortensius noted when legitimate rulers executed Anabaptists, and he paid special attention to the torture of Jan van Leiden, Bernd Knipperdollink and Bernd Krechtink in 1536. This story of Anabaptist tumult is particularly significant because of the history of its creation and reproduction. According to new research, the text’s authorship is complex. Large portions of the accounts of events in the Low Countries found in The Tumult are in fact close translations into Latin from a Dutch manuscript that circulated in several versions in the years immediately after 1535. This anonymous manuscript was probably written by the Amsterdam magistrate Joost Sijbrandszoon Buyck.5 In effect, Hortensius was as much a translator as an author. The Latin original was printed only once in the sixteenth century. While the publisher of the first edition, Johannes Oporin of Basle, is noteworthy in his own right,6 and while the 1548 printing certainly deserves more attention, I will focus here on the energy that the Dutch book trades devoted to the little volume during the seventeenth century. Between 1614 and 1702 The Tumult was published more than a dozen times in the Dutch Republic. Most of these editions were in Dutch, and the original work of translation was done anonymously. Publishers who reissued this work included Jacob Lenaertsz Meyn (1614 and 1624), Gillis Claesz Coster (1624), Jan Bramsz (1643), Jan Jacobsz Schipper (1659), Samuel Imbrechts (1660 and 1667), Adriaan Schoonebeek (1694), and Pieter Wittebol (1699). The Latin original was also reprinted in 1636 and 1650, and a French translation appeared at least four times (1695, 1699, 1700, and 1702).7 In other words, multiple generations of bookmen worked to make The Tumult of the Anabaptists available.

5 This is the conclusion of a University of Amsterdam research project: Nieuwe maren – Amsterdam 1534–1535. Een ooggetuigenverslag van de opkomst en ondergang van de wederdopers te Amsterdam 1534–1535, ed. J.W.J. Burgers, introduction by J.W.J. Burgers and P. Knevel [Manuscripta Mennonitica 7] (Hilversum, 2016), esp. pp. 56–64. 6 See, for example, the references to Oporin in Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven and London, 2010). 7 Most of the details about publishers are taken from Nieuwe maren, p. 60, note 152. The note is the work of Adriaan Plak of the Special Collections at the University of Amsterdam Library. I have added a few details about the 1667 Imbrechts edition, which is to be found at the University of Ghent.

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A further indication of the energy that people invested in the work are the illustrations that accompany it. While the Latin versions have artistic embellishments only on the title pages, the Dutch and French editions include a series of copper etchings. In the early Dutch editions there are nine page-sized etchings. These were probably based on paintings by Barend Dircksz (also known as Doove Barend) that were on display in Amsterdam’s city hall from the late 1530s until they were destroyed in a fire in the middle of the seventeenth century.8 The reproduction of these images required each new publisher to arrange for an artist to re-etch them, which accounts for the subtle differences between them. Other differences in the images were added to some copies by colourists. The University of Amsterdam Library has at least two coloured specimens, both printed in 1624.9 The colouring work was almost certainly done by two different artists, one for each copy. For example, a scene of executions from the first specimen (see Figure 1) is portrayed in dark tones, but in the second specimen (see Figure 2) the artist used lighter tones and added more details, such as the blood on the tortured corpses.

8 Gary Waite, Naked Harlots or Devout Maidens? Images of Anabaptist Women in the Context of the Iconography of Witches in Europe, 1525–1650, in: Mirjam van Veen, Piet Visser, and Gary K. Waite (eds), Sisters: Myth and Reality of Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Doopsgezind Women ca. 1525–1900 (Leiden, 2014), pp. 17–51, esp. pp. 24–38; and Stephanie S. Dickey, Mennonite Martyrdom in Amsterdam and the Art of Rembrandt and His Contemporaries, in: Contemporary Explorations in the Culture of the Low Countries, eds William Z. Shetter and Inge van der Cruysse [Publications of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies 9] (Lanham, 1996), pp. 81–103, esp. pp. 86 and 91–94. 9 Colour reproductions of eight of these images from the best of these two specimens are in Nieuwe maren, pp. 65–72. Figure 2 is among these.

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Figure 1: [s.n.] Coloured illustration from Lambertus Hortensius, Van den oproer der Weder-­ dooperen (1624) p. 24r. University of Amsterdam, Special Collections.

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Figure 2: [s.n.] Another coloured illustration from Lambertus Hortensius, Van den oproer der Weder-­dooperen (1624). University of Amsterdam, Special Collections.

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A likely candidate for the colourist of Figure 2 is Dirk Jansz van Santen (1637–1708), which would mean that the colouring work was done some time after 1660.10 The work of two separate colourists on the two copies of the 1624 printing suggests that it was valued enough to deserve the attention of artists. Several new images were added in later printings. By the time the Imbrechts edition was published in 1660 (but maybe earlier), the original nine illustrations had increased to sixteen.11 The 1694 Schoonebeek edition of The Tumult also included a new, allegorical frontispiece (­Figure 3), plus two additional etchings.12 The frontispiece depicts an Anabaptist monster with a human body, animal legs and giant talons instead of feet. This creature is standing beside a large baptismal fountain. On one side of the fountain lie eviscerated victims; in front of it there is a victim receiving baptism prior to his death. In the distant background, a gallows with a row of bodies hanging from it hints at the fate of those rebels who might dare to join the Anabaptist monster. The new frontispiece was included in all subsequent printings of The Tumult in Dutch and probably also in French. Together with translators, printers, and publishers, the etchers and colourists were members of an intergenerational textual community that reproduced a literary myth of Anabaptist violence. A further measure of the influence of The Tumult of the Anabaptists is the reproduction of images from it in the frontispiece of another anti-sectarian book from central Germany. This volume – entitled Anabaptisticum et Enthusiasticum Pantheon (The Pantheon of Anabaptists and Enthusiasts) (1701–1702) – was larger in format than the Latin, Dutch, and French printings of Hortensius’s book. This allowed the artist or artists who worked with its publishers to add a three-panelled frontispiece. All three of the panels include mirror-image adaptations of illustrations that were added to later editions of The Tumult. The top panel depicts an Anabaptist murdering a woman in a secluded forest, while the bottom panel shows the execution of Anabaptist leaders in Münster. The middle panel (Figure 4) is slightly larger than the other two and is highlighted by an ornamental border. This panel is an expanded version of the frontispiece of the Anabaptist monster that first appeared in 1694.

10 The identification of Dirk Jansz van Santen as the colourist is taken from Nieuwe maren, p. 64. 11 The University of Amsterdam Library has an online collection of these images (http://dpc.uba.uva. nl/doopsgezindeprenten). The collection does not include coloured versions. 12 My own suspicion is that Schoonebeek is a likely candidate for the creator of the frontispiece. For background on him, see Frans A. Janssen, et al., Adriaan Schoonebeek’s Etching Manual (1698): Edition, Translation, Comments, in: Quaerendo 40: 2 (2010), pp. 87–165.

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Figure 3: Pieter Wittebol, Frontispiece from Lambertus Hortensius, Verhaal van de oproeren der wederdoopers (Amsterdam, 1699); the image was first included in the 1694 ­edition. University of Amsterdam, Special Collections. Prent K 876.

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Figure 4: Detail from the frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Corivinus’ Anabaptisticum Et Enthusiasticum Pantheon, Und Geistliches Rüst-Hauß: Wider die Alten Quacker, Und Neuen Frey-Geister, Welche die Kirche Gottes zeithero verunruhiget, und bestürmet, auch treue Lehrer und Prediger Gött­ lichen Worts, verachtet, verleumbdet, gelästert und verfolget haben, mit vielen zur Sache dienlichen und nützlichen Kupffern, bloß zu Gottes Ehre und Erhaltung seiner Christlichen Kirchen, Auch Den Geistlichen, Weltlichen und Hausstande zur Nachricht, Nutz und besten zusammen getragen und ­auffgerichtet (1701–1702). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München. 11738843 2 H.ref. 42.

The Pantheon of Anabaptists and Enthusiasts is not an original text by any means, and for this reason it is a very good example of the role that workers in the book trades (as distinct from authors) played in the perpetuation of anti-Anabaptist myths. The Pantheon is a large compendium of Latin, German and English edicts and pamphlets from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all translated into German. In total, The Pantheon comprised approximately 1,300 pages, but each volume seems slightly different.13 In all likelihood, the production of this massive book required the coordination of multiple print shops. An indication of this is the title page of one of the newer works included in the compendium, a polemical investigation by Heinrich Georg Neuss (1654–1716) of the theology of the Pietist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673–1734). The title page of the specimen in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek includes details about its printer in Halberstadt and its booksellers in Frankfurt and Leipzig. This title page is printed in red and black ink and is dated 1701. By contrast, the title page of Neuss’s work in the British Library’s specimen of The Pantheon is only in black ink, is dated 1702, and includes no details about the people who produced or sold it. The Neuss 13 I have consulted the copies at Goshen College in Indiana, the British Library, the Library of the Friends House in London, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

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polemic is one of well over a dozen different texts gathered together in the volume. These include anti-Anabaptist edicts from the Corpus Constitutionum Imperialium, several German anti-Anabaptist pamphlets, and a series of anti-Quaker pamphlets translated from English, attacks on philosophers such as Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, and warnings against prophets such as Oliger Pauli and Sabbatai Zevi. There was even a reprinting of a Mennonite confession of faith from 1660.14 In addition to these texts, the production team included approximately fifty full-page images to make the compendium a more attractive product. Assembling this wild collection would have required enormous skill and concentration on the part of its bookbinders. Since there is no continuous page numbering system for the vast collection, it is no surprise that each surviving compendium is organized in a slightly different order. It is also not surprising that it was not reproduced after 1702. The compilation’s anonymous organizers were very likely central German Lutheran clergymen who objected to the publications of Johann Konrad Dippel and other recent expressions of beliefs they thought were theologically and socially deviant.15 The purpose behind gathering together these kinds of newer sources with older ones in a single volume seems to have been to provide an encyclopaedic reference work to help devout Protestant leaders identify the proliferating enemies of orthodox belief. The subtitle of The Pantheon announces that it is A Spiritual Fortress against the Old Quakers and New Free Spirits (Geistliches Rüst-Haus, Wider die Alten Quaker Und Neuen Frey-Geister). Other texts in the collection include variations on these enemies. In addition to the categories of enthusiasts, Quakers, or free spirits, these enemies are further identified as ‘fanatics’ (Schwärmer), ‘blasphemers’, ‘atheists’, ‘dreamers’, ‘false prophets’, ‘chiliasts’, among many other kinds of dangerous people. A prayer from the title page of one of the pamphlets in the compendium entitled Erschröck­ liche Brüderschaft (The Frightening Brotherhood) reads: Keep us by your Word, O Lord, and deflect the murderous intentions of the Quakers, Jews, and Turks, who desire to dethrone your Son, Jesus Christ. Also defend us against all gangs, sects, and scandals. Hear our prayers, dear Lord God!16 14 A partial description of this compendium’s many parts is found in Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.), Bibliographie des Täufertums 1520–1630 [Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer, 10] (Gütersloh, 1962), pp. 110–111, no. 2469. 15 Another possible reason for the timing of the compendium may have been to respond to Gott­ fried Arnold’s revisionist Impartial History of Churches and Heretics (Unparteyische Kirchen- und ­Ketzer-Historie, Franckfurt am Mayn 1699–1700). 16 Erschröckliche Brüderschaft der Alten und Neuen Wiedertäufer/Quäcker/Schwärmer und FreyGeister/mit Denen Heil- und Gottlosen Juden (N.p., 1702): ‘Erhalt uns HErr bey deinem Wort/ Und steure doch der {Quäcker Juden Türcken} Mord/Die JEsum Christum deinen Sohn/Stürtzen wollen von seinem Trohn./Auch Allen Rotten, Secten und Aergernissen wehren:/Erhör Uns lieber HErre GOtt.’

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Of course, prominent among the ‘gangs, sects, and scandals’ in this view of the world were Anabaptists. On the title page of one of the older pamphlets in the compendium – Widertaufferischer Geist (The Anabaptist Spirit) by Zacharias Theobald (originally from 1623) – is the following poem: ‘Thomas Müntzer, Jan van Leiden and Knipperdollink are dead, it is true,/but their spirit and inheritance have not yet been exterminated.’17 While the compilers of The Pantheon did not anthologize The Tumult of the Anabaptists, they did see their work as part of the same project (as indicated by the frontispiece), and the eighteenth-century Pantheon proposed a broad framework of anti-sectarianism that many early modern Catholics and Protestants were likely to have shared. Compared with The Tumult or The Pantheon, Hermann von Kerssenbrock’s Latin Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness has a much more limited scope, despite its great length. Although Kerssenbrock included a short chapter near the beginning of his history in which he placed Münster in the context of other great biblical and classical cities – Sodom, Gomorrah, Babylon, Nineveh, Carthage, and Troy – that had fallen into ruin because of the sins of their inhabitants, the author’s attention was focused primarily on Münster. In his account of how false prophets from Holland had deceived hapless Christians in Westphalia, Kerssenbrock was making a very similar argument to that of Hortensius. Nonetheless, it appears that Kerssenbrock was not aware of the 1548 Latin version of Hortensius’s Tumult. One of the many differences between the two works is that Kerssenbrock did not make much of the popular polemical connection between the Peasants’ War preacher and urban reformer Thomas Müntzer (who was executed in 1525) and the rebel heretics of Münster. Kerssenbrock provided a more vivid and much fuller account of Anabaptist rule than Hortensius or any of the texts dependent on that little book. For historians who are concerned with modern standards of source-based scholarship, Kerssenbrock also has the allure of an ‘eyewitness’ (though a problematic one), since he was fifteen years old when he was forced to leave the city at the beginning of the siege in February 1534, only to return later once the city had been re-Catholicized. Furthermore, his Narrative includes frequent and extensive quotations from other primary sources from local territorial and ecclesiastical authorities, some of which have not survived in any other form. Another notable difference between works such as The Tumult or The Pantheon on the one hand and Kerssenbrock’s Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness on the other is that the latter had a very limited audience for the first two hundred years of its existence. Although Kerssenbrock finished composing his history of Münster’s reformation in the 1570s, the first printed edition did not appear until 1771.18 By then, the conflicts 17 ‘Thomas Müntzer/Johann von Leyden und Knipperdolling sind zwar todt/Aber ihr Geist und Nachlaß ist noch nicht ausgerott.’ 18 Hermann von Kerssenbroick, Geschichte der Wiedertäufer zu Münster in Westphalen. Nebst einer Beschreibung der Hauptstadt dieses Landes ([Münster,] 1771). Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff indicates that the translator may have been a man named Laner, although his actual identity is not clear. See Kirchhoff, Die ‘Wiedertäufer-Käfige’ zu Münster: Zur Geschichte der drei Eisenkörbe am Turm von Sankt Lamberti (Münster, 1996), p. 22.

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of the wars of religion and other confessional conflicts had grown to be more of a distant memory than they had been for the compilers of The Pantheon of Anabaptists and Enthusiasts. The stimulus for translating Kerssenbrock’s Narrative into German was not a desire to contribute to the anti-sectarian campaigns of past polemicists but rather the curiosity of a visitor to Münster, who happened to attend the city’s cathedral during the annual celebration of the extermination of the Anabaptist threat. After eventually getting access to a manuscript of the Latin original, the anonymous translator was finally able to create a German version. He acknowledged that his was not always a close or true translation. Nonetheless, he thought that the story’s many fascinating anecdotes deserved wider attention, so in the interests of the common good he made his German rendering of Kerssenbrock’s Narrative available to a broad public.19 He announced on the title page that he had paid the costs of the publication himself. One of the costs the translator presumably bore would have been the fee for an artist to create a new set of etchings.20 Among these was a fold-out illustration of the torture and execution of King Jan van Leiden and his two associates included toward the end of the volume. It depicts a platform with the three men and their executioners in front of the prince-bishop of Münster and a large audience of citizens and soldiers dressed in an eighteenth-century style. A single cage is just in front of the prince-bishop, ready to receive the bodies of the soon-to-be-dead criminals. Another illustration was the book’s frontispiece. This was a large cameo of Jan Bockelson van Leiden dressed as a king. At the bottom of the cameo’s frame is an inset image of the king’s royal insignia: an orb with a crucifix attached, two crossed swords behind it and a crown above it. The artist almost certainly used the cameo of Jan van Leiden in The Pantheon of Anabaptists and Enthusiasts as his model, since the similarities are striking (Figures 5 and 6). Of the other illustrations in the 1771 book, at least three were copies of etchings that were added to later editions of Hortensius’s Tumult. These included two images depicting the myth of King Jan dancing around the corpse of Elizabeth Wantscherer.21 The artist working on the 1771 edition of Kerssenbrock, and very likely also the translator of the book, drew inspiration from editions of both The Tumult and The Pantheon.

19 See the ‘Vorrede des Uebersetzers’ in Kerssenbroick, Geschichte der Wiedertäufer. 20 Bernd Thier indicates that the illustrator is likely to have been Hieronymus Strübel, who was working for the Aschendorff publishing house around the time of the book’s creation. See Thier, ‘gantz warhafftig abkonterfeyt’: Die münsterischen Täufer in der bildlichen Darstellung und künsterlerischen Auseinandersetzung, in: Barbara Rommé (ed), Das Königreich der Täufer, volume 2: Die münsterischen Täufer im Spiegel der Nachwelt (Münster, 2000), pp. 118–133, and the article’s associated exhibit entries on pp. 134–211, esp. pp. 121, 144–145, and 174–183. 21 On this myth and its sources, see Ralf Klötzer, Missachtete Vorfahren: Über die Last alter Geschichtsbilder und Ansätze neuer Wahrnehmung der Täuferherrschft in Münster, in: Barbara Rommé (ed), Das Königreich der Täufer in Münster – Neue Perspektiven (Münster, 2003), pp. 41–63.

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Figure 5: Frontispiece from Hermann von Kerssenbroick, Geschichte der Wiedertäufer zu Münster in Westfalen Nebst einer Beschreibung der Hauptstadt dieses Landes (1771). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich. Creative Commons https://archive.org/ details/bub_gb_oORBAAAAcAAJ

Figure 6: Iohann Boeckels, from Johann Fried­ rich Corivinus’ Anabaptisticum Et Enthusiasticum Pantheon […] (1701–1702). Located in the text just after p. 24 in the first text (page numbers vary by part of the text). Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München 11738843 2 H.ref. 42.

Visual citations such as these are examples of the awareness, on the part of book production teams, of the broader literature of anti-sectarianism, even though that literature is not cited in the texts of the books. In short, the reproduction of the myth of Anabaptist and sectarian violence had many dimensions, both literary and artistic. Despite all the differences between the texts of The Tumult, The Pantheon, and The Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, these works shared and promoted a common message: a view of heresy either as a contagion or as a monster that attacked the corpus Christianum. According to this widely held view, clear thinkers needed to distinguish the heretical groups from the main body of civil, well-ordered Christian society. ‘Sectaries’ were a group of people that were distinct from members of God’s ‘true church’.

Early modern polemics translated into modern scholarship The Tumult and The Pantheon were not reprinted after the beginning of the eighteenth century, but they, together with a large body of early modern polemical, heresy-­making literature that remained available in Latin and in all European vernaculars, created a powerful discursive system for distinguishing between insiders and o ­ utsiders in

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Europe’s ecclesiastical worlds.22 This discursive system remained a force long after its creators were dead. This is because new generations repeated its basic tropes. Both among scholars and educated members of the public, it was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to make a clear distinction between respectable churches and unruly sects. Early German sociologists such as Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch tried to make this inherited distinction into a scholarly one by defining it systematically, while also removing the negative connotations of terms like ‘sect’. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Weber and Troeltsch did not accept the polemicists’ descriptions of heretics, enthusiasts or fanatics, and they were in fact much more aware of, and even sympathetic to, the early modern genre of apologetic, confessional literature that portrayed Mennonites, Quakers, and other Protestant minorities in a positive light.23 In the new sociologically defined view, the basic distinction was that ‘sects’ were voluntary organizations, while ‘churches’ were made up of members that were born into them. What is more, rather than threatening the very fabric of European civilization, this new sociological view of sects proposed that they had had an important and formative role in the emergence of modernity. In other words, they were ‘progressive’. It is perhaps noteworthy that in the literature of the sociology of sects there is little discussion of Münster’s Anabaptists, probably because it was easier to see progressive historical features in peaceful Mennonite groups rather than in their unruly Anabaptist forebears. What is worth highlighting, however, is that while the early twentieth-century German sociological typologies of sects were largely ‘neutral’, even positive, in their treatment of ‘sectarians’, these typologies preserved the basic distinction between established ecclesiastical institutions and breakaway, voluntary upstart communities of believers – a distinction that was central to the polemicists of the early modern period. At the same time that a new sociology of sects was in development, other factors kept the discussion of Anabaptist rule at Münster alive within academic circles. One of these was the fate that Kerssenbrock’s Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness experienced in terms of book history. In addition to the first translation of 1771, additional German-language editions appeared in 1881 and 1929. All three of these were produced by the same press, Aschendorff, a Westphalian media enterprise that exists to this day. In addition to these, the Münster librarian Heinrich Detmer (1852–1904) published a scholarly edition of Kerssenbrock’s Latin original manuscript in 1899– 1900. And much more recently, the classicist Christopher Mackay published an English translation of the Detmer edition, complete with a detailed introduction and scholarly annotation throughout. 22 Gerd Schwerhoff ’s essay in this volume highlights other dimensions of this vast literature of hate. 23 For examples from the work of these two scholars, see Max Weber, The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism, in: From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1958 [1946]); and Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. W. Montgomery (Boston, 1958).

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As this publication history suggests, participants in scholarly debates on the significance of Anabaptist rule at Münster – and more broadly on prophetic or rebellious groups in early modern European history – have tended to be drawn to Kerssen­brock’s Narrative. Among those who re-examined that work’s place in the historiographical imagination of Münster’s and Europe’s history were Carl A. Cornelius (1819–1903) and Karl Kautsky (1854–1938). Cornelius was a delegate from Westphalia in the short-lived democratic Frankfurt parliament of 1848–49, and he was also a local historian who gained a university education under the famous historian Leopold van Ranke. In the spirit of Ranke, Cornelius worked as a local historian, collecting and publishing all eyewitness accounts that he could find in archives from the period of Münster’s Anabaptist-inflected Protestant reformation of the early 1530s.24 One of his main purposes was to counteract the narrative distortions that were created by a reliance on Kerssenbrock in almost all popular, and in many scholarly, portrayals of Münster’s reformation. Kautsky, like Cornelius, had cultural and political reasons to have a critical attitude toward Kerssenbrock’s Narrative. As a Marxist philosopher and historian, Kautsky was influenced by Friedrich Engels’s positive portrayal of Thomas Müntzer’s Peasants’ War activism. In Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation (1897), Kautsky addressed the most common charges of Anabaptist excesses at Münster (particularly their alleged reign of terror, communism, and sexual deviances). While he did acknowledge that the Anabaptists’ actions were difficult to comprehend at first glance, his careful attention to the state of war with the princebishop Franz von Waldeck and to the Anabaptists’ own statements led him to a more sympathetic view of their actions. Throughout his long consideration of Anabaptist rule in Münster, Kautsky engaged with and usually rejected Kerssenbrock’s authority.25 In summary, not only the development of the new typological distinctions between churches and sects, but also the rise of new, professionalized methods of social and historical research and a much-changed political climate in the nineteenth century encouraged a critical re-evaluation of polemically value-laden sources like Kerssenbrock’s Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness. While nineteenth-century writing by intellectuals such as Cornelius and Kautsky offered alternatives to the early modern interpretations of violent, ‘mad’ Anabaptists, other developments in European political and scholarly history encouraged the re-animation of those older, negative views. Chief among these was the Cold War of the latter half of the twentieth century. A very influential work in this context is Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium (three editions: 1957, 1961, 1970). A central argument of Cohn’s book is that charismatic, apocalyptic prophets posed a danger24 In particular, see Carl Adolf Cornelius (ed.), Berichte der Augenzeugen über das münsterische Wiedertäuferreich (reprint of the 1853 edition, Münster, 1965). Also see Cornelius, Geschichte des münsterischen Aufruhrs, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1855 and 1860). 25 Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation (London, 1897). This is a translation of part of a longer book by Kautsky: Die Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1895).

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ous threat to medieval society. This was because many generations of these prophets were able to build popular movements by using utopian promises to manipulate socially vulnerable populations into joining them in the persecution of others. Cohn further claimed that while his focus was on medieval case studies, the study of the dangers of charismatic, utopian leaders held lessons for the present. The subtitle of the 1961 edition – Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements – makes this point clearly, as does the last sentence of the third, 1970 edition: ‘For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.’26 Cohn was shocked by the atrocities of Nazism and Stalinism, and because of this moral view he was averse to the Marxist interpretation of men like Thomas Müntzer as heroic preachers of an ‘early bourgeois revolution’. The Peasants’ War career of Thomas Müntzer in 1524–25 and the ‘ruthless terror’ of the megalomaniacal reign of Jan van Leiden in 1534–35 were the subjects of Cohn’s two final case studies in The Pursuit of the Millennium. In Kerssenbrock’s Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, Cohn found clear evidence for his central thesis about the dangers of revolutionary messianism, so it should be of little surprise that he cited Kerssenbrock more than any other source. Cohn’s book quickly became an international bestseller. Evidence for its great impact is not only its three editions, each with new research and significant changes (especially to the introductory and concluding passages), but also the selection of the book by the Times Literary Supplement for inclusion in its 1995 list of the top 100 books published since the Second World War.27 Since its first publication in 1957, The Pursuit has been cited repeatedly by journalists and scholars in such fields as history, economics, terrorism studies, and political philosophy.28 These citations are problematic because they repeat polemical narratives without sufficient awareness of their distorting power.29 In short, Cohn’s Pursuit is a very clear example of the translation of early modern polemics into a modern scholarly key. The ‘spirit and inheritance’ of polemicists like Kerssenbrock also live on today in other perhaps more surprising forms – particularly in the history of ‘the Radical Ref26 Last sentence of Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists in the Middle Ages (3rd ed., London, 1970), p. 286. 27 Reprinted in: The Hundred Most Influential Books since the War, in: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49:8 (1996), pp. 12–18. 28 For more details about this and other modern literature that repeats the myth or meme of Anabaptist madness, see Michael Driedger, Münster, Monster, Modernity: Tracing and Challenging the Meme of Anabaptist Madness, in: European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity over Five Centuries: Contributors, Detractors, and Adapters, eds Mark Jantzen, Mary S. Sprunger and John D. Thiesen [Cornelius H. Wedel Historical Series, vol. 18] (North Newton, KS, 2016), pp. 27–49. 29 Cohn himself was guilty of this weakness. In his later scholarship, he highlighted (and by implication rejected) ‘the demonization of medieval heretics’. See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (London, 1975). Cohn did not acknowledge any tensions between the basic arguments in Pursuit of the Millennium and Europe’s Inner Demons. But they are profound!

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ormation’. The most important historian of this subject is George Huntston Williams (1914–2000).30 In addition to his role as a Harvard professor of church history, Williams was also a life-long Unitarian. This identity made him acutely sensitive to the suffering of small religious groups in the past – and also attentive to their deeper moral and social aspirations. While Williams did not celebrate Münster’s Anabaptists as a positive model of Protestant reform in The Radical Reformation (three editions: 1962, 1983, 1992), he did see them as legitimate representatives of one of three typological branches of his ‘Radical Reformation’, which included Anabaptists, spiritualists and evangelical rationalists. Despite the great diversity in these branches, Williams argued that their shared concern for a return to the ‘roots’ of early Christian practice and their willingness to separate themselves from the established mainstream of Europe’s Christians allow historians to distinguish them from the Catholic Reformation and the Magisterial Reformation. Williams claimed the Radical Reformation was a continental phenomenon that lasted from the 1520s through the 1570s, and although its legacy might at some levels seem short-lived, he thought that it did lay the early foundations for modern principles such as freedom of conscience and objection to capital punishment and war. In contrast to Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium, the more than 1,000 pages of Williams’s Radical Reformation provide a rich, carefully documented scholarly account of a tradition of ‘outsiders’, while not adopting the negative judgments of early modern polemicists. At first glance, then, The Radical Reformation would seem an unlikely example of the transmogrification of early modern heresy-making literature into modern scholarship. Yet it is one of the best. In fact, while Williams translated Mennonite and Free Church historiography into his grand, ‘progressive’ interpretative framework and therefore raised its positive profile, he acknowledged a debt to polemical interpretative traditions in two regards. The first was indirect. In his distinction between Magisterial and Radical Reformations, Williams adapted the early twentieth-century sociology of sects. This sociology had claimed to give a value-neutral account of religious organizational forms, but in effect its typological distinction between established institutions and voluntary communities of believers accepted the divide between churches and sects – a divide that polemicists had first articulated. The second debt that Williams owed was to early modern polemicists such as Heinrich Bullinger, whom he credited with first recognising the underlying unity of all branches of an international reform movement that was distinct from Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism. In the concluding chapter to The Radical Reformation Williams wrote: Even though Bullinger was inadequate in his classification and typology [because he saw a demonic motivation behind ‘the sects’], and wrong also about the genesis and the interrelationship among the main groupings, he was right in sensing that however great the variety, there was something at work among all the radicals that set them apart.31 30 George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (3rd ed., Kirksville, MO, 1992). 31 Williams, Radical Reformation (3rd ed.), p. 1294.

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Thus, together with the sociological traditions of Weber and Troeltsch, Williams’s positive re-valuation has resulted in the sublimation or translation of early modern anti-heretical categories into academically acceptable forms. And this re-valuation has given further scholarly authority to a familiar, inherited, conventional, typological distinction between those inside and outside of ‘proper’ churches.32 While experts in Reformation history today generally avoid repeating the worst distortions found in early modern confessional sources, the language and imagery of that older literature remains attractive to many writers. A basic reason for this attraction is that many scholars today accept the basic typological distinctions underlying those distortions: ‘the true church’ (however defined) versus deviant believers (again, however defined). A testament to the enduring power of anti-sectarian discourse is its frequent rehearsal in textbooks aimed at North American university students. A very clear example is from the chapter on the Renaissance and Reformation in Marvin Perry’s popular Western Civilization: A Brief History. In the six-paragraph section of that chapter on ‘The Radical Reformation’ students learn the following: In 1534, Anabaptists captured the city of Münster in Westphalia, near the western border of Germany. They seized the property of nonbelievers, burned all books except the Bible, and, in a mood of jubilation and sexual excess, openly practiced polygamy. All the while, the Anabaptists proclaimed that the Day of Judgment was close at hand. Provoked by their actions, Lutheran Prince Philip of Hesse and his army crushed the Anabaptists. In early modern Europe, Münster became a byword for dangerous revolution. Determined to prevent these wild enthusiasts from gaining strength in their own territories, princes attacked them with ferocity. In Münster today, the cages still hang from the church steeple where the Anabaptist leaders were tortured and left to die as a warning to all would-be imitators.33

The most noteworthy feature of these two paragraphs is not their factual distortions, though these are significant. The paragraphs stand out because of the bold and clear way they reproduce the foundational assumptions of the early modern polemical view of Anabaptists. In the other parts of this section there is no mention of the Mennonites as an Anabaptist group that survived anti-heretic campaigns to create their own lasting, peaceful set of confessionalized communities. While the six-paragraph section ends with a claim that the failed radical reformers of seventeenth-century England established ‘a legacy of democratic ideas’, the overall impression left by the section is that the Radical Reformation was characterized mainly by apocalyptically inspired 32 Examples of other scholarship that reinforces the clear, typological divide between ‘proper’ and ‘deviant’ religious groups are: Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991); and Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, 2016). There are many more examples. 33 Quoted from Marvin Perry, Western Civilization: A Brief History; Volume I: To 1789 (6th ed., Boston and New York, 2008), p. 192. The textbook is now in its 10th edition.

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violence and disorder. Although he does not cite Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium in his bibliography, Perry repeats the basic Kerssenbrockian narrative popularized by Cohn under a heading (‘The Radical Reformation’) that Williams had proposed to counteract that kind of interpretation.34

Conclusion: Is it possible to escape from the ‘cages’? Throughout the early modern era propagandists retold the story of Anabaptist violence in words and images. They were against what many historians today call ‘the Radical Reformation’ in part because sensational stories sold books but also because they reinforced warnings to maintain the social and ecclesiastical status quo. Some modern historians like Norman Cohn treated this propaganda as a trustworthy source because it suited their own moralising, anti-totalitarian messages. Others like George Williams rejected the hateful characterizations of ‘heretics’ but nonetheless accepted the ‘us-them’ distinction that heresy-makers had emphasized. It is easy enough to understand why: Historians regularly build upon inherited stories and interpretations. The choice to make a clear distinction between the ‘radical’ and the ‘mainstream’ may still have some interpretative value, especially when applied in new ways.35 Overall, however, in the case of Reformation history the effects have led to a conceptual trap. Long after executioners put Anabaptist corpses on display in Münster’s cages, the reproduction of anti-sectarian tropes, categories and assumptions perpetuates the metaphorical caging of historical writing even today. ‘Caged’ thinking about Anabaptist history is one example of a broader historiographical challenge. In a recent essay Alexandra Walsham poses the question: ‘How do we conceptualize and explain religious change in medieval and early modern Europe 34 Perry’s Western Civilization: A Brief History is not an isolated example. Most textbook that cover the early modern era include a short section on ‘the radical sects’ or related categories that harken back to early modern images and language about deviant groups. Here again we have a case where the modern (text-)book industry plays its role in the reproduction of old-style polemics. For a further example, see Morimer Chambers, Barbara Hanawalt, Theodore K. Rabb, Isser Woloch, and Lisa Tiersten, The Western Experience: Volume I: To the Eighteenth Century (10th ed., New York, 2010), p. 371. 35 Here I am thinking of John Coffey’s creative, unconventional, thought-provoking extension of ‘the Radical Reformation’ as an analytical framework for the investigation of English religious diversity in the mid-seventeenth century. See his essay in this volume. For alternatives to Williams’s definition of ‘radical’, see the work of Hans-Jürgen Goertz. One of many relevant essays is ‘Die Radikalität reformatorischer Bewegungen: Plädoyer für ein kulturgeschichtliches Konzept’ in: Hans-Jürgen Goertz and James M. Stayer (eds), Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert/Radicalism and Dissent in the Sixteenth Century (Berlin, 2002), pp. 29–41. Also see Glenn Burgess’s introduction in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge and New York, 2007), pp. 1–16. Burgess makes a useful distinction between substantivist, functionalist and linguistic approaches to the study of ‘radicalism’. Williams is an example of a substantivist, while Goertz is an example of a functionalist.

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without perpetuating distorting paradigms inherited from the very era of the past that is the subject of our study?’36 She provides many examples, mostly from the history of the British Isles, of how scholars have tried to deal with the challenge. A scholar she highlights for successfully avoiding ‘perpetuating distorting paradigms’ is Diarmaid MacCulloch. His work also deserves attention on a subject that Walsham does not address: Anabaptist history. On the one hand, MacCulloch’s writing provides an example of how easy it is to perpetuate distinctions inherited from the tradition of heresy-making literature, even if this is not one’s conscious intent. In Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490– 1700 (2003) MacCulloch lists the index term ‘radical Christianity’. This main term includes the following sub-terms: ‘Amish; Anabaptists; anti-Trinitarians; Family of Love; Friends; Hutterites; Libertines; Melchiorites; Mennonites; Münsterites; Ranters; separatism; Socinians; Spirituals; Unitarians’.37 It is striking how similar this list is to the index in Ephraim Pagitt’s 1654 edition of Heresiography, which is a very prominent example of early modern English anti-sectarian literature (which, incidentally, builds upon the work of propagandists such as Hortensius and Bullinger). With the exception of ‘Amish’, MacCulloch’s work of modern scholarship clumps together exactly the same cluster of individual groups that Pagitt’s seventeenth-­century anti-heretic manual did. Whether intentional or not (and here it is almost certainly not), this is an example of early modern heresy-making translated into modern scholarship. ‘Mainstream’ Christians are distinguished from ‘radical’ ones, and the groups placed in each category have remained largely unchanged. An old polemical mindset is reproduced yet again. In a more recent work MacCulloch provides a very different conceptual approach to the artificially clear typological divide between ‘radical’ and ‘magisterial’ reforming groups. In his chapter on Calvin in All Things Made New (2016), MacCulloch makes the following surprising comparison between John Calvin’s Geneva and Jan van Leiden’s Münster: 38 In 1536 Calvin was not to know that he could claw his way to a position in an alien European city in a fashion which had reminiscences of the rise of John of Leiden, similarly with a certain amount of bloodshed in the process, although more assured and long-term in its outcome. It is instructive to consider the similarities between Anabaptist Münster and the Geneva which Calvin helped to remould. In both cases, a prominent European city repudiated its traditional overlord, a territorial bishop, and in the confused aftermath of that rebellion, both cities invited in prominent foreigners to help create a religious Reformation, violently

36 Alexandra Walsham, Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, in: Journal of Medieval & Early Modern Studies 44 (2014), pp. 241–280, 241. 37 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), p. 821. 38 Diarmaid MacCulloch, All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy (Oxford and New York, 2016), ch. 4; cited from the ebook edition.

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destroying much from the past in the process. In the wake of the charismatic foreign leaders, there streamed from regions far from the city a host of ideologically motivated immigrants. Apart from the crowds of ordinary laypeople who arrived in Geneva, all the ministers in the city were immigrants, mostly French; in fact, astonishingly, between the 1540s and 1594, the Genevan ministry did not include a single native Genevan. Both in Münster and Geneva, this exceptional situation triggered constitutional revolutions, both of whose outlines were to haunt European imaginations for centuries to come. Moreover, when Anabaptists talked of the Church, what they said was not that different from some of the things which John Calvin was inclined to say about it. His assertions that discipline and suffering were characteristic of the true Church were also Anabaptist themes.

For those who are familiar with early Reformed and Calvinist Protestantism in both its continental and English variations, its ‘radical’ potential should be no surprise, and nor should the close association between Calvinism and Anabaptism. They were linked in intimate, cross-pollinating ways from the very beginning.39 Therefore, ­MacCulloch’s recent comparison should be a routine one. Yet it is anything but routine. The power of the comparison lies in its conscious divergence from conventional thinking, a divergence that sheds new light on well-known sources and events and interpretations. The conventional view of a categorical divide between (‘Magisterial’) Calvinism and (‘Radical’) Anabaptism is, of course, one that has been rehearsed and reinforced again and again in historiography that is sometimes strongly and sometimes accidentally confessional. Walsham expresses this point well: ‘What we have seen, then, is not so much the death of confessional historiography as its reconfiguration.’40 While in Europe’s House Divided MacCulloch simply repackaged older anti-sectarian conceptualizations, in his newer work on Geneva and Münster he escapes the trap of reconfiguring confessional categories. Geneva experienced an existentially threatening and group-defining military conflict at the same time as Münster did. The difference between Geneva and Münster is not in the very essence of the groups that were threatened, but rather in the outcomes and the narrative portrayals of them in the generations that followed. Because Geneva’s Protestants survived, they were able to establish a counter-tradition to the literary attacks against them. Their own counter-tradition also included enthusiastic contributions to the literature of anti-Anabaptism. In retrospect, the literary results exaggerate the differences in a fundamental way.

39 A key conclusion of de Bakker, Stayer and Driedger, Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster (p. 219) is that: ‘… Reformed Protestantism and Anabaptism were not in inception two different movements, but were respectively the institutional and the underground expressions of a similar reforming orientation.’ 40 Walsham, Migrations of the Holy, p. 256.

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The way to escape the alluring ‘cages’ of confessional categories is to pay close attention to the opinion-making power of anti-Anabaptist and anti-sectarian claims in the ‘republic of hateful letters’. In other words, ‘the Radical Reformation’ and similar categories are not a historical reality but a framework borrowed from the early modern heresy-making literature – that is, they are a discursive choice characteristic of a long-past cultural moment. Because this kind of choice is one that constrains or ‘cages’ historical interpretation, I am against ‘the Radical Reformation’ and related frameworks for organizing our research about groups that heresy-makers defined as ‘heretics’. We should shift our attention when dealing with the literature of ­heresy-making. While we can learn very little about heretics from it, we can learn a great deal about the imaginative worlds of heresy-makers.

Mirjam van Veen

Dutch Anabaptist and Reformed Historiographers on Servetus’ Death Or How the Radical Reformation Turned Mainstream and How the Mainstream Reformation Turned Radical Giving an overview of how the ‘Radical Reformation’ wrote history comes close to being a mission impossible.1 The problematic question of how to define the Radical Reformation is far from resolved, for it still remains unclear who belonged to it and who did not.2 This question is closely related to the early modern historiography of the Radical Reformation. Later Anabaptists (i. e., Mennonites and Doopsgezinden) and spiritualists had good reasons to distance themselves from the earlier radical revolutionaries such as the Münsterites and the peasants of 1524/5. The same goes to some extent for the reputation of ‘radicals’ such as Melchior Hoffman, Caspar Schwenckfeld, David Joris and so many others: identifying oneself with these people came close to defaming oneself.3 ‘Schwenckfeldian’ or ‘Jorist’ had in fact become invectives. Associating oneself with the Radical Reformation was on many occasions a recipe for intolerance and persecution, and at the very least a way of excluding oneself from a reasonable debate. By the early seventeenth century the need for Protestants to distance themselves from the Radical Reformation was reinforced by their wish to become normal members of society. Especially in the Dutch Republic, 1 Gary Waite read a first version of this article and made suggestions for its improvement. I am greatly indebted to him. 2 In his ground-breaking study of the Radical Reformation (first published in 1962) George H. Williams mentioned several characteristics of the Radical Reformation: a specific view of history, a specific use of the early church, revolutionary zeal, and a new social awareness. His book provoked a still lasting discussion of the very nature of the Radical Reformation. Attempts to define the boundaries of this movement are to some extent superseded by a growing awareness of the early modern ambiguities within the different ecclesiastical movements. More and more historians have become aware of the remarkable flexibility of early modern believers and of early modern belief-systems. This new approach certainly helps to understand the sixteenth-century religious landscape, but also makes a proper analytical description of it more complicated. George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (3rd ed., Kirksville, 1992)), p. 1289; John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (eds), A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden, 2007), see especially the introduction written by Stayer; Andreas Pietsch and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Konfessionelle Ambiguität. Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2013). 3 Engel Arentsoon van Dooregeest, Brief aan den Heer Fridericus Spanhemius, waar in de leere der doopsgezinden nader uytgeleyt en verdedigt, en van veele swaare beschuldigingen gesuyvert wordt (Amsterdam, 1693), p. 22.

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Anabaptists or Mennonites did their utmost to present themselves as respectable citizens. Part of this endeavour was accommodating oneself to Reformed culture.4 To be sure, such accommodation caused contradiction and dispute. In 1661 for example, more orthodox-minded Anabaptists accused the more ‘liberal’-minded Waterlanders of compromising too easily with the Reformed.5 In the long run, however, Anabaptist communities to a large extent adopted Reformed thought as well as ecclesiastical structures. Moreover, Anabaptists showed themselves ready to qualify their initially negative ideas on secular authority. Engel Arentsoon Dooregeest (1645–1706), for example, went as far as to deny a fundamental difference between Anabaptists and the Reformed. He belonged to the so-called ‘Zonnisten’, a group that distanced itself from the doctrinal liberty of the Collegiants. In his polemic with the reformed minister Fridericus Spanheim (1632–1701), however, he used a moderate tone, emphasizing their common ground. After all, they were all Protestants who abhorred papal superstitions and shared the sola scriptura principle.6 The question of how to define early modern historiography is as complicated as the question of how to define the Radical Reformation. When did someone actually write history? Should we include the martyrologies in this genre as well?7 And what about polemical treatises that referred so often to historical events to show that one’s own side was right and the other’s wrong? These methodological questions make it nearly impossible to address in general terms the question of how the Radical Refor­ mation wrote history.8 There is another, more practical problem: the variety of contexts in which Anabaptism, Spiritualism and other forms of dissenting beliefs emerged. These contexts 4 Hendrik W. Meihuizen, Galenus Abrahamsz, 1622–1706: Strijder voor een onbeperkte verdraag­ zaamheid en verdediger van het Doperse spiritualisme, Haarlem 1954, p. 23. Piet Visser, Mennonites and Doopsgezinden in the Netherlands, 1535–1700, in: Roth and Stayer (eds), Companion, pp. 340–343. An in-depth study of the history of Anabaptism in the Dutch Republic and on this process of reformulating Anabaptist identity is still a strong desideratum. See also: Piet Visser, Keurige ketters; de Nederlandse doopsgezinden in de eeuw van de Verlichting. Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Geschiedenis van het Doperdom en aanverwante stromingen aan de faculteit der Godgeleerdheid aan de Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, 2004). 5 Anomynous, Verhaal van’t gene verhandelt ende besloten is, in de by-eenkomste tot Leyden: door eenige doops-gezinde leeraren en diaconen, die men Vlamingen noemt, tot dien eynde uyt verscheyde plaatsen vergadert (Amsterdam, 1661). 6 Dooregeest, Brief, p. 15. On the Collegiants see: Andrew Cooper Fix, Prophecy and Reason. The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton, 1991). On Dooregeest see: Nieuw Neder­ landsch Biografisch Woordenboek, sv. On his role among the Zonnisten see: S. Zijlstra, Om de ware gemeente en de oude gronden. Geschiedenis van de dopersen in de Nederlanden 1531–1675 (Hilversum, 2000), p. 428. 7 On this genre see especially Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2001). 8 On these methodological questions see for example: Matthias Pohlig, Zwischen Gelehrsamkeit und konfessioneller Identitätsstiftung. Lutherische Kirchen- und Universalgeschichtsschreibung 1546–1617 (Tübingen, 2007). Pohlig deals with the Lutheran writing of history, but his insights are also useful for an analysis of the Anabaptist writing of history.

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were very important and had a serious impact on how believers understood their own histories. To avoid methodological traps, I propose to focus on a specific case-study, notably that of the Spanish spiritualist and anti-Trinitarian Miguel Servetus and his death at the stake on the grounds of heresy in Calvin’s Geneva in 1553.9 This case is of course well-known. Viewed with hindsight, the Servetus case was indeed a turning point in the history of religious toleration.10 My aim here is to describe how especially Sebastian Castellio described this heresy trial, thereby creating a specific image of John Calvin and Servetus, and how subsequent generations of Reformed and Anabaptist writers in particular described the Servetus affair and used Castellio’s descriptions. I will focus primarily on the Dutch reception of the Servetus trial.11 This case study provides a striking example of how Dutch Anabaptists accommodated themselves to the mainstream Reformed church. Within a very short time Anabaptists decided to distance themselves from Servetus and play down their critical stance with respect to Servetus’s death penalty. The analysis of the reception of Castellio’s work within Reformed historiography shows the growing sense of unease within the Reformed movement with respect to the Servetus trial. This case is indeed a striking example of how the Radical Reformation influenced other Protestant confessions, for in the course of time Castellio’s portrayal became the Lutheran and Reformed image as well. Miguel Servetus’s heresy trial and death provoked the indignation and even anger of Basle’s dissenters.12 Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) became well known for his ardent plea for religious toleration.13 His anger was probably provoked not only by reasons of principle, but also by more personal issues. By the time Servetus was sentenced to death, Castellio had already a long history with Calvin. Castellio had at first sided with the Genevan reformation, but as soon as the Genevan reformation established itself, pinpointing a specific doctrine and a specific ecclesiastical organization, the two men fell out with each other. After he had left Geneva and gone to   9 Zuber provides an excellent overview of the 19th- and 20th-century debates on Servetus and toleration. Zuber describes the memory culture and the attempts to establish monuments to commemorate Servetus as well as the debates on religious toleration linked with memory culture. Valentine Zuber, Les Conflits de la tolérance. Michel Servet entre mémoire et histoire (Paris, 2004). 10 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration came to the West (Princeton, 2003). See also: Hans Rudolf Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio 1515–1563. Humanist und Verteidiger der religiösen Toleranz im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Göttingen, 1997). 11 On the Dutch reception of Castellio’s writings see also: Mirjam van Veen, Vermaninghe ende raet voro de Nederlanden. De receptie van Sebastian Castellio’s geschriften in de Lage Landen tot 1618 (Amsterdam, 2012). On Reformed-Anabaptist polemics see Johannes H. Wessel, De leerstellige strijd tusschen Nederlandsche Gereformeerden en Doopsgezinden in de zestiende eeuw (Assen, 1945). Studies of Anabaptist-Reformed relationships and debates tend to focus on the 16th century. A study of how these debates changed in the 17th and 18th century is a desideratum. 12 Uwe Plath, Der Fall Servet und die Kontroverse um die Freiheit des Glaubens und Gewissens. Castellio, Calvin und Basel 1552–1556 (Essen, 2014). 13 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, 2003).

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Basle, C ­ astellio became a member of a circle of religious dissenters in which David Joris played a leading role; medical practitioners and humanists such as Jean Bauhin, Jean de la Vau and Hieronimus Bolsec belonged to this network as well. These men may very well have met Servetus, for they had studied medicine in Paris at the very same time that Servetus did.14 While this link cannot be proven, it is very probable, given the relatively small size of the medical faculty, that the four men had indeed met during their time in Paris. In the case of Jean de la Vau there is, moreover, some further evidence, although this too is not conclusive: he lived in Poitiers and was certainly in touch with both Sebastian Castellio and David Joris.15 The older historiography mentions an extensive correspondence between Miguel Servetus and de la Vau’s father. However, I have not been able to trace this correspondence and it might very well be lost.16 If I am correct in seeing more personal motives behind Castellio’s decision to speak out against this heresy trial, it would also explain why Castellio remained silent during the trial against Gruet, but spoke out after the trial against Servetus.17 Castellio’s De haereticis an sint persequendi of 1554 and his contribution to the ensuing polemic have primarily attracted attention because of his plea for religious toleration.18 Meanwhile, however, Castellio also created a specific image of Calvin and Geneva and provided his readers with detailed information on the heresy trial. According to Castellio, Calvin had played a crucial role in this trial. He pictured the Reformer as a man who had betrayed his own principles. In Castellio’s eyes Calvin had become a tyrant, establishing a form of rule that came uncomfortably close to that of the papal inquisition. Calvin, moreover, was not able to bear any contradiction and wished to be honored like a saint. His alliance with the mighty and the powerful revealed his hypocrisy: as long as he had belonged to the oppressed minority Calvin had asked for toleration, but as soon as he came to power he revealed his readiness to use the sword just as the papists had done.19 Castellio cited Calvin’s reliance on Guillaume du Trie to strengthen his argument. After Servetus had been apprehended in Vienne, the Genevan refugee du Trie sent letters to his cousin in Vienne to inform him of Servetus’s presence in the town. Du Trie also sent information on Servetus 14 Mirjam van Veen, De kunst van het twijfelen. Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563): humanist, calvinist, vrijdenker, (Zoetermeer, 2012), p. 79. 15 Mirjam van Veen, Ontallijcke brieven van eenderley materie, in: Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 32 (2006), pp. 39–74, 68. 16 Antonius van der Linde, Michael Servet, een brandoffer der Gereformeerde Inquisitie (Groningen, 1891), p. 98. 17 François Berriot, Un procès d’atheisme à Genève: l’affaire Gruet (1547–1550), in: Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français 125 (1979), pp. 577–592. 18 For an analysis of Castellio’s contribution to this debate see above all: Hans Rudolf Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio 1515–1563. Humanist und Verteidiger der religiösen Toleranz im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Göttingen, 1997). 19 Mirjam van Veen, ‘… la cause des puissans …’ Sebastian Castellio’s picture of John Calvin, in: Reformed Majorities in Early Modern Europe, eds Herman J. Selderhuis and J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay (Göttingen, 2015), pp. 287–294.

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to Vienne’s inquisitor Matthieu Ory. He must have obtained this information from John Calvin. In other words, John Calvin used du Trie and his network to inform the inquisition of Servetus’s presence and to urge it to proceed against him. This episode was of course extremely useful to blacken John Calvin, for it underscored his immoderate hatred, and his readiness to cooperate with the inquisition and to use weapons of violence against his opponents.20 Castellio’s image of Calvin and his description of the specific details of the Servetus trial had a lasting impact on the writing of history, especially on its Reformed variants. In the late-sixteenth century Anabaptist and dissenting writers repeated, more or less, Castellio’s point of view. They interpreted the trial as a clear sign of how close the reformation of the Reformed movement had become aligned to the papal church. After a promising start the Reformed had reverted to the old papal policy of using the methods of the mighty and the powerful. To dissenting believers the Servetus affair became a clear sign symbol of how the mainstream reformation had betrayed its initial ideas.21 During this period the Servetus affair continued to be a dividing line between the Anabaptists and the Reformed. Whereas the Anabaptists referred to this affair to warn the Reformed against the devastating consequences of using the sword in matters of faith, the Reformed showed themselves ready to defend Calvin’s actions against Servetus. In the early seventeenth century (1601), Reformed ministers translated Theodore Beza’s treatise on the persecution of heretics, thereby defending the Genevan point of view that heretics should indeed be killed.22 A lively debate between Anabaptists and Reformed ensued. Anabaptists accused the Reformed of putting the spiritual freedom, which had only recently been acquired, at risk. In this polemic, more libertine reformed theologians such as Caspar Coolhaes took sides with the Anabaptists.23 Part of this polemic was a Dutch translation of Castellio’s plea

20 Van Veen, Kunst van het twijfelen, pp. 74–75. See also: Frans P. van Stam, Een reddingsactie die mislukte en Calvijns handen bond, in: De onbekende Calvijn, eds, Erik A. de Boer and Pieter van de Breevaart (Kampen, 2010), pp. 29–51. 21 Sebastian Castellio, Corte ende duydelijcke wederlegginghe, van ’t ghene door Mr. Johan Calvijn, tot beweringe van de macht der overheyt, int straffen der ketteren, by gevracht wert …, [1613], preface, p. 3. 22 On this polemic see especially Samme Zijlstra, Het ‘scherpe plakkaat’ van Groningen uit 1601, in: Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 15 (1989), pp. 65–68. 23 Caspar Coolhaes (1536–1615) was one of the ‘enfants terribles’ within the reformed church. Whereas orthodox theologians aimed at the introduction of a confession in the church, Coolhaes aimed at a broad-encompassing church that left room to different thoughts. Beside that he probably leaned towards the Lutherans, accepting Lutheran rituals within the church. On top of that Coolhaes turned out to be an Erastian minded minister, accepting a strong state influence on the church. These differences between Coolhaes and reformed orthodoxy provoked a long lasting battle within the church, only ending with Coolhaes’s excommunication. On Coolhaes see: Mirjam van Veen, “… your praise worthy town Deventer …” Caspar Coolhaes on Unity and Religious Tolerance, in: A. den Hollander and others, Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch Republic. Studies Presented to Piet Visser on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday

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for religious toleration in order to warn against the Reformed point of view.24 To some extent, Anabaptists and dissenters continued to repeat Castellio’s arguments. In 1684 the Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum, for example, published an account of Servetus’s death, largely following Castellio’s narrative.25 Within a short time, however, Anabaptists started to modify their criticism. Their critique of the use of the sword against heretics remained very much the same, but they started to combine this criticism with the assurance that they did not applaud Servetus’ errors. This fitted into a more general trend. One of the chief concerns of Dutch Anabaptists became to depreciate the differences between the Reformed and the Anabaptists. Now, in their historical writings, Anabaptists emphasized the huge gap between themselves and radical Anabaptism. They distanced themselves from the peasants of 1524/5 and the Münsterites, presenting themselves as reliable and obedient citizens. Very much like the Reformed, Anabaptist authors portrayed themselves as the heirs of the Waldensians, describing these medieval dissidents as the ancestors of the Reformation.26 Part of this accommodation to the primarily Reformed culture of the Dutch Republic was a belittling of doctrinal distinctions.27 This depreciation of doctrinal distinctions was stimulated not only by early Enlightenment ideas but also by ‘Pietism’. Reformed Pietists valued the Anabaptist orthopraxis, and believers Protestants from different confessions read the same devotional literature. By the eighteenth century at the latest, pious believers from different confessional backgrounds were happily meeting each other in informal meetings, reading the Bible and discussing their faith.28 The tendency to blur doctrinal distinctions was not a typically Anabaptist characteristic, but fitted well with other contemporary attempts to overcome

24 25

26 27 28

(­ Leiden/Boston 2014), pp. 111–123; Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion. Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden 2000), pp. 1–101. Sebastian Castellio, Raet aan dat verwoeste Vranckrijck (Hoorn, 1603). This treatise was re-edited in 1613 to warn against the re-introduction of ‘der Conscientien dwanck’. Raet aen dat verwoeste Vrackryc, (Haerlem, 1613), fol. a1v. Christopher Sandius, Bibliotheca Antitrinitariorum (Freistadt, 1684; re-edited in 1967 by Lech Szczucki), pp. 7–8. Sandius (1644–1680) published unorthodox writings with antitrinitarian and Socinian leanings. His Bibliotheca antitrinitariorum was only published after his death. On this account see: Uwe Plath, Calvin und Basel in den Jahren 1552–1556 (Zurich, 1974), pp. 86–87. Hermannus Schyn, Geschiedenis der Protestantsche Christenen in ’t Vereenigd Nederland genaamd Mennoniten, vertaald door Matthys van Maurik (Amsterdam/Utrecht, [Kornelis de Wit en Willem Kroon], 1738), fol. **4r. See also: Galenus Abrahamsz, Verdediging, p. 24 Dooregeest, Brief, p. 15. See also Kornelius van Huyzen, Historische verhandeling van de Opkomst en Voortgang, mitsgaders de God-geleertheyd der doopsgezinde christenen (Hoorn, 1734), fol. *6v. Willem J. op’t Hof, ‘Lusthof des Gemoets’ in comparison and competition with ‘De Practycke ofte oeffeninghe der godtzaligheydt’: Vredestad and Reformed Piety in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture, in: August den Hollander et al. (eds), Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity, pp. 133–149; Piet Visser, Dopers zaaigoed op gereformeerde akkers-of omgekeerd? De doopsgezinde kruisbestuiving van uitgever en vertaler Marten Schagen met Engelse ‘zielstigters’ als James Hervey, Thomas Green en Benjamin Bennet, in: Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 42 (2016), pp. 181–213. On meetings of pious believers see: Fred van Lieburg, Mennonite Preachers on the Dutch Pastoral Market, 1650–1865, in: den Hollander et al. (eds), Religious minorities, p. 232.

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protestant disunities. Many Anabaptists supported these attempts: believers were asked not to dwell on inner-Protestant differences but to look for things in common and to strive to live truly Christian lives.29 These tendencies transformed the Anabaptist writing of history. Whereas early Anabaptists tended to describe the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century as the prelude to the final decay of Christianity, Kornelius van Huyzen (1667–1721), Anabaptist minister in Emden, readily acknowledged the advantages this conversion had brought to Christianity.30 Like mainstream Protestants, van Huyzen dated the start of the collapse of Christianity to around 600. This reevaluation of church history had of course a serious bearing on how van Huyzen appreciated early church doctrine. He distanced himself from any critical judgment of the Trinity, testifying instead to the Anabaptist adherence to this doctrine. The same went for Christology: if one were to believe van Huyzen, the Melchiorite doctrine of the incarnation of Christ – which held that Jesus had brought his humanity from heaven, hence had inherited nothing from Mary – had always been alien to Anabaptism.31 This description of the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the Trinity marked a significant shift in emphasis. During the sixteenth century, these topics had been important themes in the disputes between the Reformed and the Anabaptists. At that time Anabaptist thought on these doctrines had been relatively straightforward: they were unbiblical.32 To be sure: a man such as Galenus Abrahamsz (1622–1706) largely adhered to the old view, describing Constantine’s conversion as the first step towards the complete decay of Christianity.33 There was probably another reason why Anabaptists became more inclined than before to accept the doctrine of the Trinity: the emergence of Socinianism. Not entirely without reason, Reformed authors suspected the Anabaptists in particular of yielding to Socinianism. Calling someone a Socinian was, however, a useful weapon to defame them. Identification with Socinianism indeed closed the door to the possi29 Schyn, Geschiedenis der Protestantsche Christenen, fol. ***2v, ***3v. 30 Williams described the negative evaluation of Constantine’s conversion along with the rejection of the doctrinal decisions taken under his leadership as an important tenet of the Radical Reformation. Williams, Radical Reformation, p. 1285. 31 Sjouke Voolstra, Het woord is vlees geworden. De melchioritisch-menniste incarnatieleer (Kampen, 1982). 32 Protocol. Dat is de gansche handelinge des gesprecks (te Franckenthal, 1571), fol. **iir-**iiiv; Protocol. Dat is alle handelinge des gesprecks tot Embden (Emden [Goossen Goevens], 1579), fol. 1v–2r; Protocol. Dat is de gantsche handelinge des gesprecx ghehouden tot Leeuwarden (Franeker [Gillis vanden Rade], 1597), fol. *******3r–v. On these debates see Mirjam van Veen, Religieus schermvechten. Doperse-gereformeerde disputaties in de zestiende eeuw, in: Religie, hervorming en controverse in de zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanden, eds, Violet Soen and Paul Knevel (Herzogenrath, 2013), pp. 83–96. 33 Galenus Abrahamsz, Verdediging der Christenen die Doopsgezinde genaamd worden (Amsterdam [Wed. P. Arentsz and C. vander Sys], 1699), p. 19. Galenus Abrahamsz, Anabaptist minister in Amsterdam, made a plea for toleration within the Anabaptist church. His sympathies for the Collegiants brought him into trouble.

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bility of being a respectable burgher. Hence, Anabaptists had to distance themselves from Socinianism, that is to say from anti-Trinitarianism.34 The Anabaptist emphasis on the distance between their own thought and that of Servetus was thus motivated by pragmatic necessity, by the wish to qualify differences between the Reformed and the Anabaptists and by the development of a new view of history. Anabaptists indeed started agreeing with the Reformed judgement on Servetus: he was a scatterbrain who was unable to explain his thoughts properly and who greatly confused Christian doctrine. During the late seventeenth century, other dissenting groups in the Dutch Republic, such as the Remonstrants, were probably more outspoken in their criticism of Calvin’s proceedings against Servetus. The Remonstrant professor of Church History Johan Jakob Wettstein, for example, adopted Castellio’s portrayal, mixed it with Bolsec’s polemic against the Genevan Reformer, and described Calvin as a tyrant.35 These shifts in the Anabaptist view of history brought them close to the Reformed perspective. In the first decades after Servetus’ heresy trial, Reformed followers had indeed defended his death penalty as well as Calvin’s actions during the whole trial. But within a few decades the Reformed perception had changed. Jacobus ­Trigland, a defender of reformed orthodoxy against the Remonstrants, presents a striking example. In his history, first published in 1650, he refrained from defending Calvin’s action. Thus his book marks a notable shift in emphasis. This shift reflected a change in the way in which the Reformed understood their own history. Dutch Reformed leaders became more and more inclined to identify their church as a sort of liberating movement. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Reformed history writing, the Reformation appeared as a movement that had always embraced free speech, liberty and a more reasonable approach to religion. This is similar to how, for example, Protestant German and Dutch Reformed authors started qualifying doctrinal differences. Reformed ministers began describing an inclusive reformation movement that included Lutheran and Anabaptist believers.36 These trends were of course incompatible with the persecution of heretics. Hence Reformed authors had to rework the Servetus story to make it compatible with the current nature of the Reformed movement. Reformed writers therefore sought to downplay Calvin’s role in the whole Servetus 34 Joris van Eijnatten, Vijf vertogen over ketterij: waarheid, dwaling en de historiografie van het antitrinitarisme, 1650–1800, in: Doopsgezinde bijdragen 30 (2004), pp. 153–164. See also: Piet Visser, De haat-liefde verhouding tussen doperdom en socinianisme in de doperse historiografie, in: Doopsgezinde bijdragen 30 (2004), pp. 249–264. 35 Mirjam van Veen, Johan Jakob Wettstein’s (1693–1754) use of Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563), submitted. Jerome Bolsec, a former ally of John Calvin, felt out with the reformer because of his opinion on predestination. Bolsec wrote a life of John Calvin in which a tried to ruin Calvin’s reputation. Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe. Lives of reformers by friends, disciples and foes (Aldershot 2008). 36 Mirjam van Veen, Tegen ‘papery en slaverny’. Gereformeerde geschiedschrijvers over de Nederlandse reformatie, in: Pietas Reformata. Religieuze vernieuwing onder gereformeerden in de vroegmoderne tijd, eds J. van de Kamp et al, (Zoetermeer, 2015), pp. 37–46.

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affair, emphasizing that it was the secular authorities and not the ecclesiastical authorities that had decided to sentence Servetus to death. They also began mentioning how Calvin had tried to moderate the death penalty by asking the Genevan government to kill Servetus by the sword, rather than by burning. The internationally renowned defender of reformed orthodoxy Fridericus Spanheim (1632–1701) explained to his readers that Servetus had been sentenced to death because of his undermining of the normal order. By doing so Spanheim shifted the emphasis from doctrinal errors as the reason for the death penalty to Servetus’ alleged crime of causing civil unrest.37 The Huguenot refugee Pierre Jurieu (1637–1713) emphasized that Calvin had been born and raised within the papal church. This background explained why he had still been struggling to distance himself from the methods of the papal inquisition.38 The reformed writer Abraham van de Corput (1599–1670) circumscribed Servetus’ sentence as ‘based on the bloody laws of the Roman antichrist’. If we are to believe van de Corput, the majority of the Reformed congregation in fact shared Castellio’s point of view. He wanted his readers to believe that the Reformed were upset to learn that somebody had been killed just because of his opinion regarding religion.39 Later generations have sometimes labeled these explanations as cheap subterfuges. These ‘subterfuges’ nevertheless reveal a growing sense of unease. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Reformed writers continued to distance themselves from Servetus’ errors while at the same time condemning the legal proceedings used against him. Nineteenth-century Reformed authors became even more outspoken in their criticism of Calvin’s actions against Servetus and started defending the latter’s ideas. This re-appraisal of Servetus was probably stimulated at least in part by the growing awareness of his scientific achievements in the field of medicine. Van de Corput had already described Servetus as a man who had been deceived when it came to Christian doctrine, but as a genius when it came to medicine. These remarks on his contribution to medicine modified the image of Servetus as one who was little more than a heretic and who disseminated nothing but dangerous nonsense.40 Writers started to identify the Reformation with a more reasonable approach to religious faith, describing belief in the Trinity as an unreasonable annex to the Christian system of beliefs. Nobody could explain how 1+1+1 still added up to 1. Besides that, they pointed to the lack of biblical evidence, for the Bible did not teach the Trinity. They concluded that Servetus’ questioning of the Trinity meshed nicely with reform endeavours, as his critical approach towards the Trinitarian doctrine was the logical outcome of the 37 Fridericus Spanheim: Michael Servetus, gente Hispanus, Genevae non ob errores solum … sed praecipue ob seditiosa molimina, pertinaces blasphemias, et flagitia alia, ultimo supplicio affectus …, Controversiarum de Religione cum Dissidentibus hodie Christianis, prolixe et cum Judaeis, Elenchus Historico-Theologicus (Basle [J.H. Brandmüller], 1719), p. 105. 38 Frederik R.J. Knetsch, Pierre Jurieu, theoloog en politikus der refuge (Kampen, 1962), p. 169. 39 Abraham van de Corput, Het leven, ende dood, van den seer beroemden D. Philips Melanchthon (Amsterdam [Abraham Wolfganck] 1662), p. 582. 40 Van de Corput, Melanchthon, p. 579.

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Reformation. Servetus’ point of view was reasonable and it was perfectly compatible with a careful reading of the Bible.41 This rather critical approach to the Servetus affair was at least in part inspired by Castellio’s publications. Writers such as Johann Jakob Wettstein, the famous Lutheran historian Mosheim and the Dutch Antonius van der Linde (1833–1897), drew on Castellio’s accounts of the affair to evaluate Calvin’s actions. Information on Calvin’s use of du Trie, for example, was sourced from Castellio. This material on du Trie was often a crucial element in the whole picture of the events: it brought Calvin’s actions close to sheer betrayal. In many accounts Castellio’s plea for toleration became the counterpoint to Calvin’s insistence on Servetus’ heresy: Castellio was described as the forerunner of liberal Protestantism, Calvin as the man of the Genevan inquisition.42 Remarkably enough however, this critical approach to the Servetus affair was primarily fostered by mainstream Reformation authors and not chiefly by Anabaptist history writers. To conclude: Dutch Anabaptist history writing shows a remarkable development that reflects the movement’s history. After the sixteenth century, the Anabaptists were driven by the desire to become respectable burghers. Hence they accommodated themselves to a large extent to the Reformed nature of the Republic. In their historical works the Anabaptists presented themselves as obedient citizens who fostered more or less the same beliefs as the Reformed. Their handling of the Servetus affair reveals this tendency. Although Anabaptists continued to criticize the application of the death penalty for heretics, they held themselves aloof from anti-Trinitarian tendencies or from a critical discussion of early church doctrines. Reformed history writing demonstrates the opposite development. The Reformed became increasingly critical toward what had happened during the Servetus affair. This critical reflection was to a noticeable extent based on sources provided by the Radical Reformation. In particular, Castellio’s information on Calvin’s use of du Trie was a piece of evidence that became absolutely crucial. All in all, this analysis of how Anabaptist and Reformed authors described the Servetus affair adds to our difficulties in defining the Radical Reformation and in describing the historiography of the Radical Reformation. In short: on the one hand the Radical Reformation ceased to be radical; on the other hand, the mainstream Reforma­tion became radical. To a large extent, the inheritors of the Radical Refor­ mation accommodated themselves to their environment, taking over important characteristics of the mainstream Reformation. Anabaptists in the Dutch Republic were indeed willing to compromise with reformed ideas on the incarnation and on the 41 Van der Linde, Michael Servet. See also Bernhard Spiess (translation), Michael Servetus, Wiederherstellung des Christentums (Wiesbaden, 1892–1896), vol. 1, preface. 42 See also: Zuber, Conflits de la tolerance, pp. 459–538. For an overview of how Castellio has been portrayed see especially Max Engammare (ed), Ferdinand Buisson, Sébastien Castellion. Sa vie et son oeuvre (1515–1563) (Genève 2010) preface.

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Trinity and to modify sixteenth-century thought. It would be rewarding to study this development in depth and to analyze the development of Anabaptist thought on, for example, the role of the magistrate. At the same time the Public Church adopted the ideas of the Radical Reformation. Implicitly or explicitly, Reformed writers distanced themselves from Calvin’s ideas on the persecution of heretics. Gradually, they even started to re-evaluate Servetus’ thought. In the image of Servetus disseminated among Reformed followers, Servetus moved from a dangerous heretic through a scatterbrain to a reasonable Protestant.

Dmitri Levitin

‘Radical’ History Writing in 1650s England: The Case of John Beale*

I was asked to contribute to this interesting and timely volume on the radical Reformation and its legacy by discussing the subject of ‘radical history writing’. In what follows, I will examine a previously more or less unknown, and – at least to my eyes – fascinating example of just this. But before I dive in, a small methodological caveat is in order. I am in agreement with those who consider ‘radical’ a concept of limited usefulness in explaining early modern religious, political, and intellectual history. This is not because it is anachronistic per se (history writing would be impossible without the use of anachronistic terms). Rather, it is because it carries with it far too much conceptual baggage, most of which is derived from the post-French Revolutionary period. In particular, it carries some of the same associations as the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, and the moniker of the ‘intellectual’ – that is to say, the idea that critical or innovative thought is intrinsically linked to political dissent or nonconformity. These conceptual fields did not exist in early modern Europe, when everyone sought to present themselves as a ‘moderate’, or a restorer of a ‘true’, ‘original’, or ‘primitive’ order of things (I do not use ‘everyone’ hyperbolically here).1 Indeed, the empirical findings of this essay offer a case study in this very phenomenon: the historical claims of my main protagonist were certainly very deviant from established cultural norms, but they did not go hand-in-hand with a political (where ‘political’ can be understood both widely and narrowly) position that could be described as ‘radical’ in any meaningful sense (let alone as ‘left wing’). Consequently, when I use the term ‘radical’, I limit its meaning drastically, to mean solely something like ‘very unusual by contemporary standards’. In this respect, the historical vision developed by John Beale in 1650s England was very radical indeed. *

1

I am deeply grateful to the participants of the Radical Reformation symposium held at the German Historical Institute in September 2016 for valuable questions and comments. The written paper has been much improved on the basis of suggestions made by Sir Noel Malcolm. Abbreviations: HP = Hartlib Papers, University of Sheffield; BL = British Library. In MS transcriptions, insertions are signaled by , and contractions are expanded with italics (with the exception of yt, wch, and wn). See above all Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Chippenham, 1994), pp. 140–68; id., Radicalism Revisited, in: British Radicalism, 1550–1850, eds, Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 311–37. Also Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011).

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John Beale Before outlining the details of that vision, we must briefly chart Beale’s biography.2 He was born in 1608, and educated at Worcester Cathedral School and Eton. As was standard for alumni of the latter, he proceeded to matriculate at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1629. Despite being accused of holding deviant opinions, he stayed on as a fellow until 1640.3 By this point, he had spent two years travelling in Europe (1636–38). The civil war and Interregnum years he spent first in a tenancy at Cobwall in Herefordshire, then, after further itinerancy, as master of St Catherine’s Hospital, Ledbury (1649–early 1650s), and from 1656 as vicar of Stretton Grandison (he may have been functioning in a ministerial capacity there unofficially from the early 1650s). Throughout this period, he cultivated numerous scientific interests, especially in horticulture and astronomical optics. At the Restoration, he became a vicar of Yeovil and rector at nearby Sock Denis; in 1663 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1665 he was appointed chaplain extraordinary to Charles II. Beale’s radical vision of religious history was outlined primarily in letters written in the 1650s, to Samuel Hartlib and, through him, to Lady Ranelagh and John Evelyn (Beale had become an active participant in Hartlib’s correspondence network from 1656, initially on the basis of his horticultural expertise).4 We shall imminently turn to reconstructing that vision, and the sources that lay behind it. For the time being, we should note that Beale’s own impression of his intellectual development was shaped above all by a sense that he had been saved from the snares of a scholasticism that had dominated his youth, but from which he was converted partially through the 2

The fullest account is Mayling Stubbs, John Beale, Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: part I, Prelude to the Royal Society (1608–1663), in: Annals of Science 39 (1982), pp. 463–89; id., John Beale, Philosophical Gardener of Herefordshire: part II, The improvement of agriculture and trade in the Royal Society (1663–1683), in: Annals of Science 46 (1989), pp. 323–63. They are now supplemented by Michael Leslie, The Spiritual Husbandry of John Beale, in: Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England, eds, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester, 1992), pp. 151–72; Rhodri Lewis, ‘The Best Mnemonicall Expedient’. John Beale’s art of memory and its uses, in: The Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), pp. 113–44; and William Poole, Two Early Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill, in: Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), pp. 76–99, at pp. 77–88 (where much new manuscript evidence is collected). 3 Beale to Hartlib, 23 February 1657, HP 62/22/1r–2v. But there is no evidence for the claims that the ‘charge of heresy … likely … contributed to Beale’s eventual departure from Cambridge’ (Stubbs, Beale I, p. 473); Beale himself later told Evelyn he left for a sinecure (29 May 1660, BL MS Add. 78683, fol. 41v). 4 For recent work on Lady Ranelagh’s religious attitudes, see Ruth Connelly, A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, in: The Seventeenth Century, 23 (2008), pp. 244–264; id., ‘A Wise and Godly Sybilla’: Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism, in: Women, Gender and Radical Religion, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden, 2007), pp. 285–306. For Evelyn, see John Spurr, ‘A sublime and noble service’: John Evelyn and the Church of England, in: John Evelyn and his Milieu, eds, Frances ­Harris and Michael Hunter (London, 2003), pp. 145–163.

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influence of the two Eton heavyweights, Sir Henry Wotton (provost from 1624), and John Hales.5 Partly, Beale meant this in respect of natural philosophy, where he contrasted the ‘systematicall’ philosophy of the scholastics with the new methods being proposed by Francis Bacon and others.6 But above all, he meant it about theology. Beale had engaged in a programme of serious theological reading at a very young age, while still a schoolboy. This had involved reading works of Reformed scholasticism, leading to a doctrinaire Calvinism: This I will attest, That bout 32 yeares agoe [i. e. 1627] I was perfect in the way of Calvine. At that time my Spirite was first awakened to look into ye abysse of Eternity. I studied with all diligence to make my election sure, & my zeale was so fervent yt to strengthen my dependence vpon infallible Praedestination, I learn’d Bradwardine Memeratively. From him I betooke to the reste of the Schoolemen …7

But during his days at Eton and at Cambridge, Beale came to a radical re-evaluation of both theological method and doctrine. Scholastic theology was the midwife of all doctrinal division.8 The debates on the Eucharist between Lutheran and Reformed were simply ‘Logicall Scruples’.9 Even worse was the doctrine of predestination, the divisions about which all stemmed from scholastic logomachy. Instead, Beale insisted, theology should be taught with no scholastic content, and even without the disputations that were the staple of a university divinity course. Rather, the focus should be on the teaching of law – natural, Mosaic, and civil, and how they could all ‘bee best attempred by the equity & Mercy of the Christian lawe’ – and of the philological skills required to understand scripture and the writings of the earliest Christians.10 Such comments may sound like staple anti-scholastic and ‘irenic’ commonplaces, but it is important to place them in their local context, for doing so will help us later to understand the precise relationship between Beale’s ‘radicalism’ and contemporary ‘orthodoxy’. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, English theological pedagogy had indeed been dominated by continental Reformed divinity, much of which could loosely be labelled as ‘Reformed scholastic’.11 Trainee theologians began their reading with the systematic treatises of continental Reformers, especially Jerome   5 E.g. Beale to Hartlib, 17 August 1657, HP 31/1/50 v.   6 E.g. Beale to [William Brereton?], 18 January 1659, HP 51/62r.   7 Beale to?, 28 November 1659, HP 60/1/1v. Thomas Bradwardine’s De causa Dei had been published in London in 1618, co-edited by Henry Savile and William Twisse – it was intended as a semi-­ official anti-Arminian salvo.   8 Beale to Hartlib, 28 January 1659, HP 51/66 v.   9 Beale to Lady Ranelagh [undated, c. 1659], HP 27/17/10 v. 10 Beale, Memo on a College, undated, HP 31/1/77v–78r. There is one illegible deleted word before ‘equity’. 11 There is a mountain of revisionist work on this topic; see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (4 vols, Grand Rapids, 2003–6) for a systematic overview.

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Zanchi, Johannes Piscator, and Amandus Polanus.12 But a series of high-profile theological disputes in the period c. 1590–1620, in particular in Cambridge, and above all on the questions of Christ’s descent into Hell and predestination, led some theologians to question the value of modern Reformed divinity, which they characterised as overly logical and speculative. Instead, they suggested, divines would be better served by basing their interpretation of scripture not on modern Reformed compendia, but on ancient sources, above all the church fathers. It is vital to recognise that this rhetorical stance was adopted by two different religio-ideological groups, which, although they shared both connections and aims, ultimately pursued very different goals. One was the so-called ‘avant garde conformists’ who coalesced around William Laud. For them, a more historical, non-scholastic theology was part of a programme of sacerdotalism and ceremonialism in which an episcopal church structure and strict ritual observance were considered the essential elements of a new, anti-Calvinist English Church. The most outspoken ideological figurehead of this group was Richard Montagu. The second group was no less anti-Calvinist than the first. But for them, the rejection of Reformed methods and conclusions and theology was intended to lead to a broader conception of orthodoxy, in which the early church supposedly offered a model of a minimal, tolerant Christianity. Hales was perhaps the key figure in this grouping, which coalesced in the 1630s at the estate of Lord Falkland at Great Tew.13 It is thus important to recognise that two ‘historicist’ anti-Calvinisms emerged: one which thought that patristic scholarship would serve to define a particularly English confessional identity, and a second which believed that the early church offered a model only of minimal, irenic Christianity. It is clear that Beale can, at least partially, be seen as a product of the second group, not least because of Hales’s influence upon him. Nonetheless, we shall also find that his relationship with the first group, and with contemporary ‘orthodoxy’ more generally, was more complex than such a simple description might lead one to assume.

12 See Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), pp. 159–170, and the literature cited there; and now also Dmitri Levitin and Scott Mandelbrote, Confessionalisation and the Historicisation of Cambridge Divinity; or, how Isaac Newton became a heretic, in: Faith and History: Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, eds, Dmitri Levitin and Nicholas Hardy (Oxford, forthcoming, 2017). 13 Quantin, Antiquity, pp. 155–202, 209–28; and more generally W. Robert Godfrey, John Hales’ GoodNight to John Calvin, in: Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in reassessment, eds, Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark (Carlisle, 1999), pp. 165–80, which overplays Hales’s continued ‘Calvinism’.

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Patristics and minimal Christianity The base on which Beale’s religio-historical views were built can be simply summarised. The first three centuries of Christianity saw very little in the way of doctrinal orthodoxy. The true primitive faith was even more doctrinally minimal than the Apostles’ Creed. According to Beale, ‘when men dare reade the Historyes & chiefe writings of the Ages of first Martyrdomes impartially’, they will find that ‘twas best, when Symboles & Confessions were as short, or shorter, than the Apostles Creede, as it is called’.14 That Creed was in fact a late document, ‘not finished as now we have it, till Austins dayes’; in any case, if one was to assess modern Christianity by its standards, one would find that ‘Rome will get much ground against vs … Our Apostles Creede in our sense is as young as our Reformation; & more defective, than the Romane Apostles Creede; & indeede not a symbole of faith, but a symbole of Heresie’.15 The idea of deriving a patristically-grounded ‘orthodoxy’ was thus a nonsense: And for those primitiue Fathers whose authority is soe much claymed & boasted, this I have many yeares agoe undertaken & demonstrated, that all our authenticall confessions as well of Protestants as of Papists, are spun of such a fine thread of new distinctions as will utterly exclude all these old fathers, soe that if they must be called fathers, the fathers & children are very much unlike each other.16

Beale’s researches had shown him that, in the first ages of the church, there was no consensus on issues central to modern orthodoxy, such as the trinity, infant baptism, predestination, Christ’s descent into Hell, and the state of the post-mortem soul.17 Apart from a small debate about the date of Easter, the Christians of the first three centuries lived in peace, despite their differences on such doctrinal issues.18 It was

14 Beale to Hartlib, 26 March 1659, HP 51/102r. On the ‘liberty’ of the apostolic age, see also Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/16/6r (‘& surely the same variety of liberty which the Apostles used in the first propagation of the Gospell may yet be used in our dayes, since tis apparent the rule is the same, & the occasions may be the same’). Beale claimed that he had been taught ‘the difference of the Apostles preaching from ours’ by a sermon by the puritan antiquary Richard James (1591–1638), which we can identify as that printed as A sermon … concerning the Apostles preaching and ours (London, 1630) (Beale to Hartlib, 14 Aug 1658[?], HP 31/1/ 27r). 15 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, 6 September 1660, HP 66/29/1r; also Beale to Hartlib, 23 November 1658, HP 51/37v. The antiquity of the Apostles’ Creed had long been questioned: Desiderius Erasmus, Explanatio symboli apostolorum, in: Opera omnia, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1977), pp. 196–199. 16 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/17/11v. 17 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/17/1r–14 v; Beale to Lady Ranelagh, 6 September 1660, HP 66/29/1r–2v. 18 Beale to Hartlib, 23 November 1658, HP 51/37v–38r. On the date of Easter, Beale was no doubt thinking of the Quartodeciman controversy of c. 190, for which the locus classicus is Eusebius, Hist. eccles., v.23–4.

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only in the fourth century, when Christians got ‘ye secular sword on their side’, that ‘they began to divide excommunicate & murder one another as we now doe’.19 Such a vision of early church history – while radical in the extent of its list of doctrines considered non-essential – was structurally very similar to that proposed by many other irenic thinkers of the time. Unsurprisingly, it was similar to the patristic arguments that had emanated in the 1630s from writers associated with Great Tew; later, Beale would himself compare his conclusions to those of Jeremy Taylor’s famous Liberty of prophesying (1646).20 More generally, Beale had clearly read widely in, and admitted the influence of, a broad range of irenic or non-orthodox literature, both English and continental. On the non-necessity of water baptism, for example, he admitted to drawing on the recent works of William Dell.21 More generally, although he differentiated himself from the Socinians doctrinally, he was enthused by Socinian books on church unity, especially Samuel Przypkovius’s De pace et concordia ecclesiae (1628).22 But here Beale seems to have happily amalgamated the ideas of whatever irenical works he could get his hands on, also citing the rather different Europae speculum by Sir Edwin Sandys, from which he took the idea that Catholic Europe was united in a way that Protestants should emulate.23 19 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/17/11v. 20 Beale to Evelyn, undated, [1664], BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 20r, specifically on the idea ‘yt whoever does wth an honest, candid, & ingenous hearte read the Fathers & holy writers (in order, & in unquestionable publications or MSS) wch were before Nicene Counsell, Hee will hardly find in them a Catholic concurrence in ye Athanasian expressions of ye Creede, or wth ye Westerne notion of Original sin, or of the state of soules departed, imediatly …’ 21 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [1659?], HP 27/16/3v–4 r. Beale only talks of ‘Mr. Dells doctrine of Babtismes’, but he must be referring to William Dell, Βαπτισμῶν Διδαχή, or, the doctrine of baptisms, reduced from its ancient and modern corruptions (London, 1648). Dell’s argument was that the distinction between John’s baptism by water and Christ’s (by fire, or by the spirit) at Matt. 3:11– 12 was between a non-binding Jewish ritual, and the true spiritual baptism. 22 See Beale to Hartlib, 14 Dec 1658, HP 51/41v, where Beale ascribes it to ‘John Graserus’, probably because of a prefatory quotation from a biblical commentary by Conrad Graserus (De pace, sigs. A5r-v). For the identity of the author, see Philip Knijff et al., Bibliographia Sociniana (Amsterdam, 2004), p. 89. The book was readily available in England: in December 1654, Parliament called in two men found selling the book, committed one to the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms, and referred the book to the a committee considering the antitrinitarian works of John Biddle (The journal of Guibon Goddard, Esq. M.P. [21 Dec 1654], in: The diary of Thomas Burton, Esq. ed. J.T. Rutt (4 vols, London, 1828), I, pp. xcciii-cxxv). It was erroneously ascribed to John Hales by Anthony Wood (Athenae Oxonienses, ed. P. Bliss (4 vols, Oxford, 1813–20), III, col. 413). For Beale and Socinianism, see also Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 60–62. 23 Beale to Hartlib, 14 December 1658, HP 51/41v (‘I aske, Why Protestants may not knit together as Papists, doe; Our Severall Sects bein soe far allowed or borne by each other, as they allow their severall orders … And the Mysticall Art of knitting all thiese together was pretty well disclosed long agoe in the Eloquent Treatise of Sir Edward Sands Europae Speculum’). The reference is to Edward Sandys’s A relation of the state of religion (1605), republished as: Europae speculum (1629). See Theodore K. Rabb, Jacobean gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629 (Princeton, 1998), pp. 20–46.

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But to these well-known discussions, and to the standard idea that early Christianity offered a model of tolerance and unity, Beale’s letters added a level of idiosyncratic historical detail usually not present in such works (it was certainly missing, for example, from Taylor’s Liberty and other Great Tew texts). A particular obsession of Beale’s was the survival of paganism in Christianity, a phenomenon that he believed could explain much of the shape of early church history. According to Beale, Christianity had first succeeded because it accommodated itself to contemporary paganism, and thus received many pagan converts, especially from among the philosophers: ‘in the first plantacion of the gospell Christianity took some alloy & was sullied partly by the intrusion of halfe converted Philosophers & partly by the compliance of christians to Gentile lawes & Customes’.24 This meant that there was as wide a range of doctrinal opinion in the early church as there were pagan philosophical sects; most importantly, all these widely different opinions were joyfully tolerated: yea for 300 yeares together, wch are undoubtedly the purest times of the Gospell that have yet appeared, we find them [to] differ very much at least very far from all nationall confessions, in the high points of the holy trinity, of the state of the Soul after death, of Prædestination, Freewill & (to omit from particulers) from the maine body of our positive Theologie. Some were wholy for inspiracions as Tertullian & Origen, some were for Platonicall Ideas & raptures as Sinesius, & other semi-christian Philosophers, some soared aloft in the high straines of eloquence as Chrisostome & Nazianzene, some stood more strictly to close reasonings as Iustine ye Martyr, & Clemens of Alexandria, yet in their severall wayes & severall opinions they held firmer to ye bonds of unity & to the substance of Sanctitie then wee doe.25

Unfortunately, the same accommodation to paganism that brought in many believers in the first place also led to the pernicious foundation of ‘orthodoxy’. For when the church became allied with the state in the fourth century, Christianity witnessed not only an influx of new, semi-pagan believers, but also the means for the enforcement of uniform belief: I will not enlarge to shewe in what traduct of time these Elements of water (yea & in many places of fire also wth equall pretence of Authority) of bread & wine, were by all writers extolld in such high straines, & soe applyed to altars & Sacrifices as if it were the stratagem thereby to entice all Gentiles by parcells of their owne rites & Customes to professe Christianity … Some will think it more plaine dealinge to acknowledge that when Emperours, Kings & Princes, all their Armyes & dominions professed Christianity, as a matter in fashion, then their chiefe Comanders & Favourites being made Bishops & Presbiters, brought in a souldi24 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [1659?], HP 27/16/12r-v. 25 Ibid., HP 27/16/11v–12r.

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erlike, & Gentile Theologie consisting either of Platonicall & other Philosophicall raptures or of disputable Creeds carried by faction canvesse Sophistry & vote, rather then fitted for simple faith & true Sanctitie.26

Beale was thus not only looking for ‘the simplified piety which he so admired in the early Fathers’.27 His historical vision was somewhat more sophisticated than that; he did not simply write of a ‘pure’ scriptural anti-Nicene Christianity being corrupted by a corrupt, pagan, post-Nicene ‘orthodoxy’. Rather, he accepted that from an early stage Christians had held a huge variety of conflicting philosophical views, and celebrated that that they had been allowed to do so before the civil power usurped Christian liberty. At the same time, this usurpation brought in more pagans, so that ‘the Government was partly gentile, partly christian’, with the political consequence that ‘Collonells & Captains were Bishops & Presbyters, And the whole lawe of Westerne christians was a mixeture betweene Roman called Civile & christian’, ultimately leading – ‘for shame’ – to the foundation of Canon Law.28 The history of doctrine could be mapped on to this history. Both baptism and the eucharist, for example, were not uniformly practised in the first centuries.29 Only ‘when Magistrates began to professe Christianity, & undertook to erect nationall Churches’, did ‘babtisme of Infants become to be uniuersally or at least generally received’, a political state of affairs that was theologically enshrined in the works of Augustine, whom Beale described (rather unfairly, but conveniently for his own reading of theological history) as ‘ye Oracle of all the schoolmen’.30

Divine illumination These elaborations notwithstanding, it might be thought that Beale’s historical vision fits into a standard pattern familiar to modern historians, and which is usually labelled ‘Erasmian’. Certainly this is the way Beale’s best modern biographer has read him, writing that Beale could be compared to his Eton mentor Hales: ‘By his espousal of a rational, tolerant and simplified Christianity in emulation of the early Fathers, Hales

26 27 28 29

Ibid., HP 27/16/9v–10r. Stubbs, Beale I, p. 477. Beale to Hartlib, undated (c. 1659), HP 62/7/1r–3v. Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated [c. 1659], HP 27/16/8r: ‘Tis not in holy text or in other History found, that any of our Saviours Apostles were ever babtised. & Tertullian who is one of the first Christian writers; & might well be informed in such matters … presumed, that they were not babtised, & giveth this Excuse, that the prerogatiue of their first choice & close familiarity might be an abridgment of the plunging’. The reference is to Tertullian’s De baptismo, xviii, the locus classicus for all historical debate about infant baptism. 30 Ibid., HP 27/16/9r.

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reaffirmed the Erasmian tradition of Christian humanism which Beale had studied at Worcester’.31 On first glance, there is much to commend such a reading, not least the fact that Beale explicitly identified with an ‘Erasmianism’ roughly conforming to such an image.32 However, there are also grounds for caution. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, ‘Erasmian’ was – like ‘moderate’ – a label that could be appropriated by anyone, not least those with a very clear confessional agenda.33 More or less everyone claimed to be restoring the primitive unity of the early church; what is important is not that they said they were doing this, but what they actually meant by it. Beale turns out to be a perfect case study in such complexity. On the one hand, the details of his history were more ‘radical’ than anything developed by virtually any other person in seventeenth-century England, if not Europe. On the other, the broader religio-political vision that informed this historical vision was far more complex than the ‘Erasmian’ label usually signifies. We have already seen that Beale was particularly fascinated by the interaction between Christianity and paganism during the earliest growth of the new faith, and that this led him to posit that the earliest church fathers were already wrong about many matters of doctrine. What is even more astonishing, and what renders his history very ‘radical’ indeed, is that he thought that contemporary pagans had been right about many of these matters. Moreover, this belief was underpinned by a theology, and a view of religious experience more generally, that can certainly be described as ‘illuminationist’, and at points even appears to verge on pantheism. At the most abstract level, this quasi-pantheist metaphysics derived in part from Beale’s natural philosophical interests and reading, especially his engagement with the tradition of Paracelsian iatrochymistry, and the works of Robert Fludd.34 But, more significantly, it tied in directly with Beale’s doctrinal minimalism in a very interesting way, which he again elaborated historically. The Jews, being God’s chosen people, had received direct positive laws, especially concerning rituals. But, upon Christ’s announcement of his dispensation, those laws were no longer binding on believers:

31 Stubbs, Beale I, p. 468; also p. 477. 32 See Beale to Evelyn, undated (1664), BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 16r, reporting that ‘Mr John Coventry … allwayes called mee His Erasmus’. 33 E.g., in a very different context, see Michael Andrew Screech, ‘Erasmus and the Concordia of Cornelius Jansenius, Bishop of Ghent: Christian folly and Catholic orthodoxy’, in: Colloque Érasmien de Liège, ed. Jean-Pierre Massaut (Paris, 1986), pp. 297–307. 34 See e. g. Beale to Hartlib, 27 September 1658, HP 51/23r–24 r; Beale to Hartlib, 28 January 1659, HP 51/65r–66 r; also Stubbs, Beale I, pp. 473, 482. But Beale found traces of pantheism (or at least animism) in almost all philosophies, even including Cartesianism: Beale to Hartlib, 7 October 1659 BL MS Add. 15948, fol. 80r.

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The most Judicious & most Learned, that I have read, of Papists, Prelates & Zealous Protestants, (such as are called Sectaries) doe affirme & undertake that our Saviour gave noe expresse command concerning water-babtisme nor brought in any other rituall precept concerning the breaking of bread the Cup or Supper of ye Lord or any other elementary point of dissipline.35

As Beale’s words suggest, this was not in itself a particularly radical view of sacred history (the specific points about water baptism and the eucharist notwithstanding). But it did lead Beale to another question: if Christians did not possess the special assistance granted to the Jews, was it not the case that Christians had ‘less help, or less light … than the Jews when they had their standing Oracles’?36 Of course, the standard Christian answer to this was ‘no’: Christians had the New Testament, in combination with (for Reformed thinkers) the internal testimony of the spirit, or (for Roman Catholics) the external testimony of the spirit operating through the Church. Beale also answered this question in the negative, but for an entirely different reason. As he put it, he had ‘diligently enquird into the Wisedome of the Easte’, which he associated in particular with some of the biblical patriarchs, but also with the pagan ‘gymnosophisticall philosophers, wch were most mighty in deedes, most perfect in operative philosophy, adorned by all poeticall inspirations carried into these quarters of the world by Druides & Bardes’. Consequently, he announced, he had ‘stupendious things to say of Dreames, Apparitions, Angelicall Admonitions & Advertisements, & Enthusiasmes’.37 These things were indeed stupendous. According to Beale, his studies had shown him that some kind of direct revelation was constantly possible; moreover, that revelation was impossible to separate from natural forms of knowledge. As he put it, ‘whether all be natural … or all divine revelations … I take all this to bee a logomachy, a verball controversy’. ‘For to mee’, he continued, ‘the Visit of Angells, the information by dreames, & possessions or obsessession, when the natural constitution is by vicious habits & corrupt diet made a fit receptacle for impure spirits; To mee, I say (In case of a sortable praedisposition,) the visite of Angells, or the possession of Satan is as natural, as the gusts of Winde’. This meant that God was ‘as constant in Conferences wth the spirit of Man, as in causing the winds to blow & the clouds to drop. And his anointing Spirite is as clearly resident & president in his holy people, That are his in Christ Iesus, as ever in Vrim & Thummim or the breaste plate of Aaron’ (that is to say, as it had been among the Jews).38 Christians thus had just as much of a ‘direct’ dispensation from God as the Jews. Again and again, Beale insisted on God’s continued intervention in the world, denying that such intervention had ceased after apostolic times, and connecting it to the 35 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, undated (c. 1659), HP 27/16/3r. See also Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 62/7/1v. 36 Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 62/7/1v. 37 Ibid., 1v–2r. 38 Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 62/7/1v–2r.

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practice of non-dogmatic irenicism: ‘prophesy, Prognostiques, & Angelicall assistances, & gracious intimations, as of old they were frequently conferd upon good men & beleevers; Soe nowe (upon fit occasions) at least upon Christians; & then especially when they doe not divert thiese guifts to beare Testimony to partyes & factions & fruitlesse disputations’.39 This showed that it was not the case ‘That the Iewes were governed by a more immediate hand of God, than wee nowe’.40 Beale thought that this kind of access to the divine explained a host of phenomena, including astrology as it had been practised by both ancients and moderns. Above all, it explained prophetic dreams, and other illuminationist and supernatural experiences. He claimed to have had such experiences for most of his life. He had his first prophetic dream at plague-stricken Eton (it concerned his brother coming to fetch him, and falling off his horse). Later, another dream led him fortuitously to decline the advances of Archbishop Laud and Charles I – ‘& therein I declined my utter ruine’.41 Nor were his experiences limited to dreams: he had also come across ‘Satanic apparitions’ (including a Satanic dog encountered when he had gone to urinate out of a window at Eton),42 which, he insisted, were likewise ‘not pecular to the Iewes, or to the age in wch Christe came in the Flesh; but have beene … in all foregoing & succeeding ages, & amongst all nations’.43 Most importantly, in the early 1640s, Beale had an intense spiritual experience. Retiring to Backbury Hill in Herefordshire, he spent there ‘the whole day & much of the night’. There, the Lord shewed mee, That there were in thiese dayes such as might justly bee called Holy (yea & prophetiqve) Inspirations. I may as iustly deny God, as deny it; My sight wch never was cleere, but fit for endlesse reading, was disenabled to hold out a full periode: My hand used to perpetuall scribling, was unable to write 3 lines. Whilest I offerd to write pimples would visibly arise on the backe of my hand, & if I ceasd not presently, become a very sore teter. Beeing disenabled for a yeare to reade, or write, I betooke wholy to prayers, meditations fasting retirement. Then I observd my dreames more solemnely & devoutly & had qvite another viewe of all former Providences. I sawe ye things that then seemed too hard for a mortall man to beleeve till their issue proved the truth of the premonishment. It [is?] fit to say what enlargement I had (without industry or inquisition by free grace) caste upon my understanding. The dis[ability] of reading or writing any usuall portion continued 7 yeares.44

39 40 41 42 43 44

Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 25/5/25r–v. Beale, Memorandum on Laws, 24 February 1658, HP 31/1/20 v. Beale to Hartlib, 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/5r–v. Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 25/5/26 r–v. Beale to Hartlib, 8 June 1657, HP 25/5/17v. Beale to?, 28 November 1659, HP 60/1/2v–3r. My insertions are given where the MS is torn.

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This remarkable account of a spiritual transformation is not the only notice Beale gives of his experiences on the hill – elsewhere, he notes that he encountered there, and was influenced by, a hermit and mystic named Henry Hereford, whom we shall meet again.45 But for all this emphasis on personal experience, Beale also, at points, offered a quite precise vision of the mechanisms by which such illuminationism occurred, especially during dreams. The 1650s had seen high-profile publications about ‘enthusiasm’ by Henry More and Meric Casaubon, which condemned claims to direct inspiration, divination, and other ‘ecstatic’ phenomena as the product of melancholy, illness, straight-out madness, or the influence of evil spirits.46 On the basis of a passage from Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum, both had accepted the possibility of true natural divination, where deviations from normal mental behaviour open one up to the possibility of receiving outside influences. Both had treated it negatively, as a symptom of the weakness of reason, and a prelude to the dangers of full-blown enthusiasm.47 But Beale placed this process at the heart of ‘good’ religious experience. Quoting More’s rather loose paraphrase of Aristotle, he asserted that ‘An alienation of mind and rest from our owne motion fits us for a reception of impressions from something else, & so by a quic sense & touch, wee may bee advertised through a communication of motion from the spirit of the world what is done at a distance, or what cause is conspiring to bring this or that to passe’.48 According to Beale, this meant that what he was describing was not ‘enthusiasm’, but a natural phenomenon, albeit one in which ‘natural’ was virtually collapsed into ‘divine’. Moreover, Beale claimed that his reading was compatible with Casaubon’s medical-pathological explanations for ‘enthusiasm’ (Beale had been sent the work by Hartlib).49 Casaubon would have been horrified to find his work being used in this way. His whole book had rested on the precise distinction between ‘supernatural’ and ‘natural’ enthusiasm, in which the later was equivalent to real divine revelation and the former to a ‘natural fervency … apt to be mistaken for supernaturall’.50 But as we have seen, Beale dismissed such distinctions between natural and divine as ‘logomachy’. In this, 45 [Beale] to [Hartlib], undated, HP 25/5/30 v. 46 The best overview remains Michael Heyd, “Be sober and reasonable”: the critique of enthusiasm in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Leiden, 1995), pp. 72–108. 47 Philophilus Parresiastes [Henry More], Enthusiasmus triumphatus (London, 1656), pp. 56–57; Meric Casaubon, A treatise concerning enthusisame … second edition, revised and enlarged (London, 1656 [1st edn=1655]), 58; Heyd, Enthusiasm, pp. 77–79. 48 Beale to Hartlib, 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/10 v–11r. He is quoting Enthusiasmus triumphatus, 56, which is in turn paraphrasing Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, 464 a21–5 (‘ἡ γὰρ διάνοια τῶν τοιούτων οὐ φροντιστική, ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ ἔρημος καὶ κενὴ πάντων, καὶ κινηθεῖσα κατὰ τὸ κινοῦν ἄγεται’). 49 Beale to Hartlib, undated, HP 62/7/1r–2v. See also the praise for Casaubon’s work (i. e. A treatise concerning enthusiasme … (1655)) in [Beale] to [Hartlib], 8 June 1657, HP 25/5/18v–19v; 6 August 1658, HP 51/4 r–v; 14 Aug [1658?], HP 31/1/29r, 34 r. 50 Casaubon, A treatise, p. 22.

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Beale shared some similarities with earlier Renaissance discussions of the issue.51 But Beale went further than any of his predecessors, not only in the centrality that this kind of spiritual experience had in his religious worldview, but also because of its place in his historical-philosophical vision. This sometimes went beyond the insistence on continued possibility of prophecy and divination, and seemed to border on a full-out pantheism. As we have seen, Beale believed he had discovered the true content of the ancient ‘Wisedome of the Easte’. The putative content of this wisdom was a quasi-pantheism that Beale compared to the ideas of Fludd: ‘God is substantially present in all the operations of every creature wth a speciall or essentiall residence in man. And by the same inference, wee may apply the Vnction or reall & presentiall operation of Christs spirite in Christians’.52 Most importantly, those in possession of this philosophy were able, through feats of asceticism and self-discipline, to prepare themselves consciously for spiritual illumination, in the same way that dreams and extreme circumstances could facilitate the process happening unconsciously. Dreams, according to Beale, were only the most ‘easy & pleasant’ way ‘by wch God declares futures’. However, the process did not need to be entirely unconscious, or stimulated by ‘horrid ecstasyes … desperate diseases … [or] alienation of the minde or at the point of death’.53 The history of the ‘eastern wisdom’ had shown that one could condition oneself both to receive such revelations, and to interpret them, through a ‘certaine preparation of the minde & spirite, by humiliation of the flesh, & serene attention, & humble reguard, & many other meanes & methods wch may bee layd downe … to obtaine this intercourse of Heaven’.54 There was biblical warrant for this practice; indeed, there even used to be a ‘colledge of young Prophets’ at Gilgal (which Beale extrapolated from 2 Kings 4:38).55 But the skill was far from limited to the Jews, for it was also available to various pagan wisemen. Here Beale drew above all on one interesting source: a book of ancient dream interpretation attributed to an ‘Arab’ named Achmet.56 This text had recently been used in a high-profile work 51 Heyd, Enthusiasm, pp. 51–59, and more generally Michael A. Screech, ‘Good madness in Christendom’, in: The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, eds, William F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (3 vols, London, 1985), I, pp. 24–39. 52 Beale to Hartlib, 28 January 1659, HP 51/65v. 53 Beale to Hartlib, 17 August 1657, HP 31/1/48v. 54 Beale to Hartlib, 8 June 1658, HP 25/5/16 v. This letter consists primarily of a set of hermeneutical rules for dream interpretation. 55 Biblical warrant: [Beale] to [Hartlib], 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/2r, 7r; college of prophets: Beale to Hartlib, 17 August 1657, HP 31/1/43r-v. 56 Beale to Hartlib, 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/3r–v. The text is the Oneirocriticon – for the probable true authorship and context, that of a tenth-century ‘Christian adaptation of Islamic dream interpretation, probably based on more than one Arabic dreambook’, see Maria V. Mavroudi, A Byzantine Book on Dream Interpretation: The Oneirocriticon of Achmet and its Arabic Sources (Leiden, 2002) (quotation from p. 392); for a modern edition (shown to be defective by Mavroudi’s scholarship), see that of Franz Drexl (Leipzig, 1925). It had been translated into Latin early, in 1176, generating several vernacular translations, some of them subsequently printed (see François Berriot, Exposicions et significacions des songes (Geneva, 1989), pp. 36–42); a Latin translation

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of apocalyptic interpretation by Joseph Mede, who was a Cambridge contemporary of Beale’s.57 Mede believed that Achmet offered a compendium of ‘oriental’ (Egyptian, Persian, and Indian) dream interpretation. But he made no claims to the veracity of the pagan tradition; for him, ‘Achmet was helpful … not necessarily because he reported the actual psychic experiences of ancient Near Easterners, but because his manual offered a highly efficient way of decoding images that came in the form of words’.58 But for Beale it proved something far more spectacular: that not only the biblical patriarchs and the Jews, but also the ancient pagans, had discovered a way of correctly interpreting prophetic dreams, and that this in turn meant that such a skill was readily attainable in the present. ‘I well know’, he wrote, ‘that this discourse will seeme to some ridiculous, to others odious. But I could never yet heare a holy reasone why the interpretation of dreames should bee a considerable art in the ye dayes of ye Patriarches, & amongst the wise men of the East, & nowe bee iustely contemptible’.59 The reason that the pagans could achieve this skill was because they, no less than Jews or Christians, could accomplish partial deiformity. This deiformity could be obtained by a programme of asceticism and contemplation, ‘a Holy discipline, by wch the guift of Prophesy, & of interpreting prophesyes, prodigyes, & dreames, & other branches of divine Wisedome, may bee excited, advanced & improved’.60 History revealed that this had been undertaken by the pagans of the east: ‘If it bee said That this may signify other guifts of the spirite, & not the guifte or prophesy, I answere, That then at least it serves my turne in some good sense. for my discourse describes a larger circle than the guift of prophesy. For it undertakes the whole compasse of the ancient wisdom of the Easte’.61 But what is most astonishing about Beale’s theory is that history seemed to demonstrate that pagans had been able to achieve such deiformity, and the understanding that came with it, better than the Jews or Christians. This is already evident from Beale’s discussion of the immortality of the soul. Having read, and been impressed by, denials of the possibility of proving the soul’s natural immorality on the part of both Socinians and Pietro Pomponazzi, Beale announced that he had ‘thought myself bound to examine the first Christian writers’ on the subject. Once again, he found them disappointing: ‘I found such a general swerving from our received opinion’; some believing in a Platonic purgatory, others in ‘Elysian

57

58 59 60 61

of the Greek text was published by Johann Loewenklau in 1577 – Loewenklau mis-attributed the text to Abū Ma‘shar. The Greek editio princeps was that of Nicolas Rigault, in a compendium of dreambooks (Paris, 1603): he denied the attribution to Abū Ma‘shar (Mavroudi, Dream Interpretation, pp. 6–10). In Mede’s In sancti Ioannis Apocalypsin commentarius (Cambridge, 1632), a commentary on his own Clavis apocalyptica (Cambridge, 1627). See now the excellent discussion in Kristine L. Haugen, Apocalypse (A User’s Manual): Joseph Mede, the Interpretation of Prophecy, and the Dream Book of Achmet, in: The Seventeenth Century 25 (2010), pp. 215–239. Haugen, Mede, p. 222. Beale to Hartlib, 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/6 r. Beale to Hartlib, 17 August 1657, HP 31/1/40 v. Ibid., 41r.

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groves … according to the principles, wch they received in the time of their Heathenisme’, and others in other pagan opinions. All in all, it was clear that it was impossible to prove ‘That the Immortality of the Soul was in those first ages received for an article of faith’. However, ‘wee of the Western World, before wee became Christian, did from Druides and Bards and other such Priests, Poets, & philosophers more incline to the subsistence of separated Soules, then the Inhabitants of the East’. This explained why ‘nowe become Christian, we to this day outrun many of the Eastern and Greek churches in understanding the Bible and true philosophy to import the immortality of the soul, according as wee have received it from our Auncestors in an over-spreading Tradition’.62 In other words, it was the Western inheritance from paganism that allowed a correct understanding of the Bible – one unavailable to the most famous early Christians. Had this argument been published, it would have been controversial enough. But it would have paled into insignificance compared to another one that seemed to place pagans above the earliest Christians in the historical search for deiformity. As his discussion of the immortality of the soul showed, Beale believed that the earliest Christians did not have much, if any, knowledge of the traditions of ‘eastern wisdom’; this was hardly surprising, he argued – after all, they did not even know Hebrew, never mind other eastern languages and traditions.63 However, according to Beale, one other figure in the first century AD did understand and use this wisdom. That figure was none other than Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius had of course been famously evoked by anti-Christian pagan writers such as Hierocles as a wonder-worker no less special than Jesus; consequently, even the most sympathetic early modern reading was one which dismissed him as a charlatan and impostor (rather than a true practitioner of Satanic magic). Even Gabriel Naudé, in his Apologie pour tous les grands homes soupçonnez de magie (1625), did less to salvage Apollonius’s reputation than to present him either as an impostor or as a fable of his main biographer and propagandist, Philostratus, who – he claimed – simply plagiarised the New Testament account of Jesus’s life, but applied it to Apollonius.64 But according to Beale, Apollonius had in fact inherited the true deiforming wisdom of the east in a way that the early Christians had not, and had practised this ‘lawfull art’. It was indeed possible that Philostratus had exaggerated his account somewhat, but, Beale countered against Naudé, ‘might not this preacher of Vertues by the profundityes of lawefull & holy philosophy obtaine the hand of the Lord to rayse him into some resemblance & similitude unto Christ’?65 62 Beale to Hartlib, 27 September 1658, HP 51/21r–22r. 63 Beale to Hartlib, 21 June 1657, HP 25/5/24 v. Beale’s stated source is Petrus Cunaeus, but this was a commonplace. 64 Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie [1625] (The Hague, 1653), pp. 292–303 (= The history of magick (London, 1657), pp. 137–142). 65 John Beale, ‘Tract on Eleutheropolis’, 14 December 1658, HP 51/47r-v. For Apollonius’s moral probity, which, Beale claims, even the church fathers had to admit, see also 45r–46 r, relying esp. on Ps.-Justin, Questions and Answers for the Orthodox, q. 24.

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The reason Apollonius could do this was because he had inherited the moral-ascetic and quasi-pantheist philosophy of the eastern sages, which had first been brought into Greece by Pythagoras. Here again, Beale deviated from contemporary scholarly trends. The impulse of seventeenth-century scholarship was to deconstruct the fantastic stories of Pythagoras’s miracle-working reported by Iamblichus and others.66 But Beale’s reading was the exact opposite: he even accepted the story of Pythagoras being able to be in two places at once, roundly laughed off by Naudé, among others. ‘In all ages throughout the whole worlde’, Beale countered, ‘there have been passed strong & credible reports of such transportations’ – witness the story of Habakkuk’s transportation from Palestine to Babylon and back again (a reference to the deuterocanonical additions to Daniel 14:33–9). But again, this ability was just as available to pagans who had undertaken the correct spiritual exercises. Hence Apollonius was only the culmination of a tradition of the ‘Pythagoricall philosophy wherein hee excelld’; it just so happened that contemporary Christians were unaware of this deiforming philosophy.67

Islam For Beale, then, the figure who everyone else would have agreed was the greatest enemy of early Christianity turned out to be a better communicant with God than the early Christians themselves. It is difficult to imagine an equally ‘radical’ historical claim in seventeenth-century Europe.68 And yet, Beale managed to provide one, in his comments about Islam. The first notice of his attitude appears in an anonymous 1658 letter, perhaps to John Evelyn, which Beale signed ‘Christianus Cosmopolitanus’, and in which he announced that he ‘wish[ed] that wee had either more or lesse of Mahometanisme’. What Beale meant by this was that while Islam was certainly not ideal (and Muh.ammad was indeed an impostor, as centuries of Christian polemic had painted him), it was nonetheless morally and theologically superior to modern, confessionalised Christianity: ‘I confesse their Doctrine more rationable, & their lives generally more righteous, than many of the succeeding sects, that have rolld over one another 66 Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1650–1700 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 221–228; Kristine L. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 18–24, 31–34, 41. 67 Beale, ‘Tract on Eleutheropolis’, 14 December 1658, HP 51/48r–49v. For Naudé’s dismissal of Pythagorean transportation, see Apologie, pp. 216–17 (= History, p. 103). The classic sources are Porphyry, Vit. Pyth., 27; Iamblichus, Vit. Pyth., 134. 68 Even the deist Charles Blount only republished Philostratus’s life of Apollonius to offer a contextual challenge to accounts of Christian miracles (denying even that aim), rather than to claim than Apollonius had actually performed miracles comparable to Christ’s (The two first books, of Philostratus … (London, 1680)).

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in pretence of confounding idoll Priests’.69 These ideas were elaborated – this time not anonymously – in a letter to Hartlib discussing the recently-published millenarian work of John Tillinghast. In his Generation work (1653–4), Tillinghast, the most systematical exegete among the Fifth Monarchists, interpreted the sixth vial of Revelation 16 as predicting the imminent fall of the Ottoman Empire.70 Beale was unimpressed, but not just because he was ‘old enough to knowe, That no small number of confident men have beene deluded in their presumptions upon this kind of positive calculations’. More importantly, he thought that Islam bore a striking resemblance to his ideal of early, pre-doctrinal Christianity – a resemblance which may have been providential, for it would facilitate the process by which the Turk would be converted, and such a Christianity restored. It was perhaps by the ‘depths of Gods Wisedome, & speciall Providence’ that ‘the Socinians & many other sorts of Anti-Trinitarians are scattered in the confines of Turkes & Christians to initiate them, Tanquam per Crepuscula, To embrace the Light of the Gospell’.71 Moreover, such a process would more likely occur not through conquest of the Ottomans, but the other way round: ‘I doe really expect, that wee shall bee renderd vnder the feete of Turkes, both for our juste chastisement & trial, & for their instruction & conversion’.72 This was certainly not a typical view among seventeenth-century millenarians, who assumed that the Ottoman Empire would fall without further expansion. Much earlier, the German Franciscan Johann Hilten (1425–1500) had – in the wake of Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople – interpreted Daniel 7 and the Apocalypse to signify the Ottoman conquest of all of Europe, in turn presaging a mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity.73 As for positive statements about the morality and devotion of Muslims, these were relatively widespread, not least among those associated with the Hartlib circle.74 But Beale’s position stemmed from a different, and certainly more ‘radical’, vision than either of these. First of all, it stemmed from his conception of the profound difference between modern and primitive Christianity. Were ‘the Apostles of the circumcision, & their succesors’ to return to the world, he wrote to Hartlib just after the Restoration, they would rather ‘yield to some grains of 69 Beale to [Evelyn?], 18 November 1658, HP 39/2/68v–69r. 70 John Tillinghast, Generation work (London, 1653–4), ii, pp. 53–93; see also Bernard S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London, 1972), pp. 192–3. Another target of Beale’s was James Windet’s Romae ruina finalis, anno Dom. 1666 (London, 1655), an interesting work of scholarly, Latin millenarianism which has, as far as I can tell, gone entirely unstudied, but which was well-known enough to be placed on the Roman Index (Index librorum prohibitorum, 1600–1966, ed. Jesús M. De Bujanda (Geneva, 2002), p. 781). 71 Beale to Hartlib, 26 March 1659, HP 51/106 r-v. 72 [Beale] to [Evelyn?], 18 November 1658, HP 39/2/68v. 73 Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in sixteenth-century Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden, 2007), pp. 22–3. I owe this reference to Noel Malcolm. 74 See Noel Malcolm, Comenius, The Conversion of the Turks, and the Muslim-Christian Debate on the Corruption of Scripture, in: Church History and Religious Culture, 87 (2007), pp. 477–508, esp. pp. 488–490.

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Mahometanisme than to our Gentile Ceremonyes’.75 What exactly Beale meant by all this is not quite clear. His rhetoric bears some similarities with that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Islamophile antritrinitarians such as Adam Neuser (who ultimately converted to Islam) and Henry Stubbe.76 But although he certainly rejected the ‘Athanasian’ version of orthodoxy (and subscription to the Athanasian Creed formed a central pillar of English theological conformity), it is not clear that Beale agreed with the Socinians that the doctrine of the trinity was definitely unbiblical; elsewhere he is quite critical of them.77 Rather, he may have believed that the trinity was a scriptural mystery, but one that could not be discussed without slipping into the errors of scholasticism (such a view was popular among both irenic Anglicans and mid-century Arminians such as Etienne de Courcelles). Whatever the case, the most radical underpinning for his beliefs about Islam stemmed from his historical ideas not not just about the early Church, but about the history of religion in the much longer term. Muslims, Beale contended, were to be considered ‘Abrahamites’, who had understandably revolted from Christianity, given the idolatry that had infected it by the end of the sixth century, but who nonetheless ‘had yet more of light by our Lord Christ concerning the resurrection & future state of felicity & hell, than was comon to all Abrahamites of old’. There was thus a direct continuity between Islam and the ancient patriarchs whom Beale so venerated. This idea, he told Hartlib, had been instilled in him by Henry Hereford, the hermit of Buckberry Hill.78 Although Beale only mentioned this idea briefly, I think it is well worth noting, for I am not familiar with any other seventeenth-century thinker drawing such a direct (and positive) relationship between the religion of the patriarchs and Islam.

Beale, ‘radicalism’, and ‘orthodoxy’ It is difficult to imagine a more ‘radical’ historical position in mid-seventeenth century Western Europe than one which suggests that Apollonius of Tyana had a better communion with the divine than most early Christians, and that Muslims had par75 Beale to Hartlib, 28 September 1661, HP 31/1/73v. 76 See Christopher J. Burchill, The Heidelberg Antitrinitarians (Baden-Baden, 1989), pp. 107–56; Dietrich Klein, Muslimischer Antitrinitarismus im lutherischen Rostock. Zacharias Grapius der Jüngere und die Epistola theologica des Ahmed ibn Abdallāh, in: Wahrnehmung des Islam zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung, eds, Dietrich Klein and Birte Platow (Munich, 2008), pp. 41–60; Justin Champion, “I remember a Mahometan story of Ahmed ben Edris”: freethinking uses of Islam from Stubbe to Toland, in: Al-Qantara, 31 (2010), pp. 443–480; Martin Mulsow, Socinianism, Islam and the radical uses of Arabic scholarship, in: Al-Qantara, 31 (2010), pp. 549–586. 77 Athanasian Creed: Beale to Evelyn, 1664, BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 20r. Criticism of Socinians: [Beale] to [Hartlib], 8 June 1657, HP 25/5/13v–14 r; Beale to Hartlib, 26 March, HP 51/106 v (speaking of their ‘narrowe & many peremptory presumptions, & grosse erroours’). 78 [Beale] to [Hartlib], undated, 25/5/30 v.

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tially inherited true patriarchal religion and that their conquest of European Christendom was both imminent and, ultimately, positive. At this point, one might think that Beale fits nicely into a standard definition of ‘radical’ Protestant: illuminationist, individualist, tolerationist, and anti-clerical. Certainly, had his opinions been known, many contemporaries would have unthinkingly lumped him together with those they labeled ‘enthusiasts’. But a closer inspection serves to modulate this impression. Beale himself cultivated the image that his ideas were derived not from mundane, worldly activity, but from personal illumination: ‘I found the beste points of knowledge not to bee obtained by reading multitudes of bookes, but by wayting upon God, observing his workes newe & old’.79 But this commonplace disavowal of book learning in favour of direct divine illumination, although accepted at face value by Beale’s best modern biographer,80 should not go unquestioned. In the very next sentence after the one just quoted, Beale (describing his spiritual conversion to Hartlib) went on to contradict himself spectacularly: ‘Thence I collected a Treatise out of all historyes holy & of best accompt amongst the Prophane of all religions, Concerning Divine prognostiques of publique or Private iudgements’.81 In fact, his whole autobiographical account of his conversion from Reformed scholasticism to irenical spiritualism is dominated by reference to books and libraries. At Eton, he’d been entrusted with access to Hales’s library.82 At Cambridge, he gained access to the library of the recently deceased Master of Trinity, Samuel Brooke – it was there that he ‘first met with sharpe disputations against the schoole notions of [the] Trinity, & other points, yt seeme to affront reasone, & the simplicity of Christianity’. During his European travels, not being able to find the books he wanted, his most important prophetic dream led him to a bookseller in Geneva, who sold him for £4 ‘a parcell of bookes, for wch I should willingly [have] given … [£]200’, an episode to which he attached the utmost spiritual importance.83 Even his illuminationist experiences on Buckburry Hill were shaped by books (or rather lack of them), for he only went there because he ‘was destitute of a Library, wch to mee by long custome became more necessary to my Spirite than foode, sliepe, & rayment’.84 Nor was the ascetic hermit whom he met there, Henry Hereford, as distant from mainstream intellectual culture as one might think: he was from a gentry family, and had been a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford; Beale seems to have married his step-sister.85 79 [Beale] to [Hartlib], 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/1v–12r. 80 Stubbs, Beale I, p. 477 (‘Beale’s own second conversion, stemming from revealed grace rather than from book-learning …’). 81 [Beale] to [Hartlib], 28 May 1657, HP 25/5/1v–12r. 82 Beale to Evelyn, 1 December 1669, BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 115r. 83 Beale to?, 28 November 1659, HP 60/1/1v–2v; also [Beale] to [Hartlib], 8 June 1657, HP 25/5/13v–14r. 84 Beale to?, 28 November 1659, HP 60/1/2v. 85 See Peter H. Goodchild, ‘No phantasticall utopia, but a reall Place’. John Evelyn, John Beale and Backbury Hill, Herefordshire, in: Garden history 19 (1991), pp. 105–27; for full details of Hereford’s time at St. John’s (Founder’s Kin Fellow, 1608, BA 1612, MA 1616, ordained deacon 1617,

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And so for all the radicalness of Beale’s historical vision, it still stemmed from a learned, and even elitist, form of book learning. We are some way here from the still prevalent historiographical view of a stale, bookish ‘orthodoxy’ being confronted with an autodidactic, individualistic-spiritualist ‘radicalism’. Nor is this just a narrowly intellectual point about Beale’s sources; rather, it takes us to the heart of some of his religio-political opinions. Beale’s overt illuminationism might lead a modern historian operating with traditional definitions of ‘radicalism’ to suspect him of sympathy for the illuminationist sects that sprang up during the Interregnum, above all the Quakers. But the reality could not be more different. For all Beale’s irenicism and praise for the tolerance of the early church, he himself was fiercely intolerant of such sectarianism. When, in late 1656, he heard about the well-known trial of the Quaker James Nayler by the recently elected second protectorate parliament, Beale responded in the harshest terms: I am much troubled to heare yt ye Parliament spent 5 dayes about a simple Quaker. I was much ashamed of five houres, wch I spent upon them in a greate Rendevous of them. I have seene some of them in a Trance, and am confident, it was a Satanicall obsession, as the seditious, & poisonous reproach of all Ministers of church & state, did shewe[?] … they are dangerous savages, but I should not adiudge them to death, because I conceive many drunken companions to bee more guilty of yt blasphemy, wch in the Mosaicall Iudgements is declared Capitall, than thiese; Who as they affront gouernemenent, & weaken propriety, are fit to bee devested of propriety, & bee allowed the shelter of a Prison, a house of Correction, or a Bedlam.86

In the cause of the Quakers, then, Beale’s ‘irenicism’ stretched, just about, to not condemning them to death. Although, according to Beale, they continued to court him, his view did not change in the following years. In 1658, he claimed to have ‘lately very diligently enquired into the depth of their wayes’, and found them ‘to bee the depths of Satan … more given to rayling & reviling, & chiefely against such as stand strongest against the loose ways of wickedness, then the worst of the common sorte of prophane’. After the Restoration, he expressed a wish that ‘flagrant enthusiasts’ like them, who had grown ‘too innumerous for our Bethlems & goales’, should suffer ‘a kind of phantasticall punishment’: since they would not ‘vayle bonnet to Magistracy’, they should be forced to wear turbans, so that ‘their meetings & growth might be more visible, to direct the necessary seasone of providing a foreigne plantation for such Moores, & Gypsyes’.87 priest 1617, resigned fellowship 14 June 1620), see Andrew Heggarty, A Biographical Register of St. John’s College, Oxford, 1555–1660 (Oxford, 2011), p. 66. 86 Beale to Hartlib, 23 December 1656, HP31/1/7r. For the Nayler case, see Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996). 87 Beale to Hartlib, 6 August 1658, HP 51/4 v–5r; Beale to Evelyn, undated, [1664], BL MS Add. 78312, fols. 18r-v. See also Beale to Hartlib, 17 August 1657, HP 31/1/42v; Beale to Hartlib, 11 February 1659, HP 51/72r-v.

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Such an insistence on humiliating branding as a preparative for deportation was vitriolic even by the standards of early modern anti-enthusiast polemic. How can we explain the fact that it emanated from the pen of the supposedly ‘Erasmian’ Beale? The answer, it seems to me, is that, like so many who proclaimed their own moderation or irenicism, what Beale really meant by this was a kind of elitist quietism. This comes out well from the justification for his political quiescence during the 1640s and 1650s that he offered to Evelyn on the day Charles II entered London, 29 May 1660: Some hard dealings did here put mee to hard shift; But (beeing able to read to my pupills in Cambridge Grotius De Jure Belli et pacis, as soone as it sawe Light,) I will not aske any pardone for my syncere submission to ye issues of War. To retaine propriety I must thanke him yt keepes the fence though hee were a Centurion & I as freely borne as our Saviour was. I did kisse the rod, but I disdeignd their importunityes of gold.88

The date, and the theoretical self-justification via Grotius, may incline the reader to dismiss this as naked self-protection. But Beale’s views appear to have been relatively consistent. In early 1659, for example, he dismissed the programme of James Harrington’s Oceana on the basis that the common people were unqualified to exercise political power: I know you [Hartlib] are wiser then to take al the vagaryes of oceana talke soe much of balance That they forget Ballaste. For if they had theire owne vote I dare undertake to prophesy them a speedy Gibbet. If they will show mee a People that is not inclinable to revolts, or yt is prepared to governe well at short warning or that is not like the Windes of late changeable & stormy, then I will ymagine as great things for Englands Comonalty as they doe. I meane as they speake and write, for theire doeings are of another rate.89

As these words suggest, Beale’s distaste for political egalitarianism stemmed less from purely political-theoretical considerations, and more from an elitist belief in the inherently superior nature of the ‘honourable’ classes. As he put it in a letter to Hartlib composed immediately after the accession of Richard Cromwell to the Lord Protectorate, ‘for them that pretend devotion to exclude all reguard of Civile honour, I wish they did knowe, That they put their fingers to blot out a part of the Decalogue; & attempt to make voyde the Apostolicall precept of giving honour to whom honour is due’. It was ‘as unlawfull to interrupt the inheritance of as of : And honour may bee degraded, & depreciated by vulgarity’.90 88 Beale to Evelyn, 29 May 1660, BL MS Add. 78683, fol. 42v. This subject is already well discussed in Poole, Two Early Readers, pp. 84–88, where this quotation was first brought forward (with ‘disobeyed’ for ‘disdeignd’). 89 Beale to Hartlib, 28 January 1659, HP 51/70r-v. 90 Beale to Hartlib, 10 September 1658, HP 51/15v–16 r.

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An analogous elitism also manifests itself in Beale’s post-Restoration views on the subjects that most obsessed him: religious toleration, the importance of a historical awareness for Christians, and the true nature of piety. The Socinians, he told Evelyn, should be tolerated not just because their views would have been tolerated in the early church, but also because their reverence for antiquity (as long as they were ‘scholars & studious’) led to a very different, more ‘authentic’, claim for ‘liberty’ than that desired by the radical Calvinists: And this I have generally found, that such as are touch’d with a dose of Socinianisme, (if scholars & studious) doe soone become serious students & admirers of the first, & best Monuments of Antiquity, I meane Christian. And since some Liberty must be indulged, tis much safer yt wee take a relish of yt more authenticall Liberty, than addict to ye wildnesse of novel phansy. And in this wee may wth more reputation keepe a safe distance from Rome … then by bowing to Calvine, who hath subverted the wholy body of old Religion, & utterly defaced the purity & simplicity of Christianity. For hee it is, who hath corrupted all ye power of Evangelicall precepts, polluted & interrupted all ye streames of divine Love, weakened all the promises, & disturbed all ye reasonableness of fayth.91

The legalistic corollary of this was that Beale wished to see latitude in the interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles, but only enough to offer ‘compliance or condescension modest & humble non-conformists’.92 ‘Liberty’ here is clearly circumscribed to those who have reached their heretical conclusions on the basis of a process of scholarly ratiocination, rather than a full, value-free liberty of conscience. Additionally, there was yet another way in which Beale’s post-Restoration religious attitudes differed from the traditional view of Protestant ‘radical’ illuminationism. He believed that it was not Protestantism, but rather Roman Catholicism, that offered the best tools towards his ascetic-moral ideal of true religion. The Reformation, however useful it was in stripping away idolatry and wrong doctrine, had gone far too far in removing the spiritual exercises that inculcated morality and religiosity. ‘Have wee not wth our Reformes … swept out many precious branches of Christian truth, & many necessary aydes of holy discipline? … To exemplify, when was single life, & vowed chastity in ye Christian church adiudged a sin before our dayes? And howe come Monasteryes & Cloysters unlawfull?’ ‘Some Reformers’, so as to ‘playster up this … breach’, had introduced Reformed scholasticism, but this was nothing more than ‘λογομαχία in scolding words of noe importance … concerning Justification, Merit, Satisfaction’. As a consequence, they ‘disclaime[d] Merite to ye very reproach & contempt of all good Workes: & to curtayle ye Sacraments … Repentance, Confession, & all Mortifications by watching & fasting are turned into perpetual night revels, wantonesse, & drunkenesse … our Penances should be more frequent, & more 91 Beale to Evelyn, undated [1664], BL MS Add. 78312, fol. 20r. 92 Ibid., fol. 18v.

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apparent. And this is ye other halfe of The true Religion’.93 Like many so-called ‘radical Reformers’ with whom he shared a broad rhetoric and outlook, Beale believed in a dangerous corruption of both morality and religion. But for him, the solution lay not in a fully tolerationist sectarianism, but in something more akin to a doctrinally-minimalist monasticism. Accordingly, he wanted young English divines to read Roman Catholic works on ‘contemplations [and] devotionalls’, to ‘wch wee owe much more … than to professed Reformers’.94 Much of the literature on early modern ‘radicalism’ continues to treat its subjects as ‘intellectuals’, and the early modern republic of letters as a utopian space in which intellectual innovation was deployed towards the end of total political liberty. But early moderns were not ‘intellectuals’ – they were ‘men of letters’. The ‘republic’ in which they operated was not utopian, but elitist, concerned above all not with activism but with peace in which to conduct scholarly activity.95 Indeed, the issue of elitism brings us nicely to the wider topic of innovation in early modern historical scholarship. There is a prevalent historiographical tendency to associate ‘radicalism’ with innovation: radicals produce new ideas; the confessionalised mainstream repeats tired orthodoxies; gradually, the radical views triumph. But does such a model explain how change actually happened? A good way of thinking about this question is to ask another, counterfactual, one: what would have happened if Beale had synthesised and published his historical ideas? Certainly, his views would have elicited some shock. But I think the more interesting and surprising answer is: not a lot. Or, more precisely, he would have been considered not dangerous, but – for the most part – ridiculous. This would have particularly been the case with Beale’s idiosyncratic claims about what he called ‘eastern wisdom’. For on this subject, Beale simply lacked the basic technical skills that were being developed by those who had remained in the universities, or who operated in the mainstream republic of letters. We have already seen how Beale bastardised Mede’s use of Achmet’s Oneirocriticon to suit his own purposes; it is worth pointing out that serious clerical scholars did not even accept Mede’s use of this dubious text,96 so one can hardly think that they would have been particularly troubled by Beale’s appropriation of it. Beale’s deficiencies as an oriental scholar (by contemporary standards) further come out in a correspondence that he conducted with John Worthington (via Hartlib) in 1661. In this correspondence, Beale admitted his almost total ignorance of oriental languages and the resources for learning them, asking for Worthington’s advice on

93 Ibid., fols. 16 v–17r. 94 Ibid., 18v. 95 Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven and London, 1995); Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), pp. 539–545. For the confessional dimension, key will be Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters (forthcoming, Oxford, 2017). 96 As well demonstrated in Haugen, Mede.

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how to obtain the requisite knowledge as quickly as possible.97 Worthington replied with the most basic advice, as well as corrections to Beale’s misapprehensions about recently printed oriental scholarship and lexica.98 Worthington, of course, was an established university scholar, with extensive access to oriental materials, and expert contacts across England and the continent.99 Beale, meanwhile, however brilliant a student he had been at Eton and in 1630s Cambridge, was based well away from the key centres of erudition when he developed his own historical views. What would have worried the orthodox mainstream about those views (had they ever been made public), was Beale’s contention that no orthodoxy could be extracted from the patristic evidence. But the reason that such a conclusion would have been so worrying is not because it rested on any particularly brilliant insight on Beale’s part, but because it came dangerously close to ideas emanating from the orthodox mainstream itself. In the early seventeenth century, French Catholic scholars like Cardinal Jacques-Davy Du Perron had developed a new form of confessionalised patristics, which treated the early church more historically than had previously been the case. For Du Perron and his allies, this was a way of defeating Protestantism: if the ante-Nicene could be shown to have held no strict orthodoxy on a set of important doctrinal issues (not least the divinity of Christ), one could argue that Catholic tradition was requisite for establishing such an orthodoxy. But this approach could be turned against itself. Continental Reformed theologians like Jean Daillé and André Rivet used it to argue that since even the earliest fathers could not be used as a source of consensual authority, it only proved the necessity of the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. In England, this argument – and a concomitant emphasis on a minimal doctrinal base – was picked up by the Great Tew group. At the same time, aggressively anti-Calvinist divines like Overall, Richard Montagu, and Henry Hammond used the approach to insist that good historical scholarship could establish patristic orthodoxy, which – they claimed – proved the early Christian credentials of the English church.100 So while the different sides all disagreed with each other, they all shared some basic historical assumptions about the need to understand the ante-Nicene Christians in context, and about the consequent difficulty of finding some kind of orthodoxy among them. It is clear that Beale drew on these ideas, both directly and indirectly. We have already seen his connections to Great Tew in this regard. But more interestingly, he also happily drew on representatives of the other confessional positions, even if he did not share their politics. Like his Great Tew colleagues, he acknowledged that Roman ­  97 Hartlib to Worthington, 5 September 1661, in: The diary and correspondence of John Worthington, ed. James Crossley (2 vols, Manchester, 1901), ii, pp. 17–20.  98 Worthington to Hartlib, 9 September 1661, ibid., pp. 20–38.  99 For some details, see Gerald J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996), pp. 251, 260, 262–263; David S. Katz, The Abendana Brothers and the Christian Hebraists of Seventeenth-Century England, in: Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), pp. 28–52, at pp. 38–39. 100 For all this, see Quantin, Antiquity.

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Catholic scholarship had proved apostolic orthodoxy to be very different to contemporary Protestant confessions.101 From the Reformed scholar Rivet he took the idea that the earliest fathers were mortalists, believing in the sleep of the soul between death and the Resurrection.102 But most interesting is Beale’s relationship to orthodox English scholarship. As we have seen, the historical turn in English theology took two forms: one was the irenicism of Great Tew, insisting on the impossibility of deriving a patristic orthodoxy; the second was the more ‘dogmatic’ patristics of John Overall and later the Laudians. Beale’s affinities for the former were natural, but he also had no problem highly praising, and drawing on, the latter. The best kind of divinity, he suggested, was that practised by Overall, Montagu, Richard Thomson, Lancelot Andrewes, Henry Hammond, and their continental counterpart Hugo Grotius; it was they who should be taught at the universities, where the teachers should be the best ‘students of Antiquity’, and where the key tools should be the translated texts of the fathers of the first three centuries.103 This advice would not have been out of place in the stoutly ‘orthodox’ university curriculum of the Restoration theology faculties.104 But for Beale, such an approach only confirmed him in his own heterodox theological position. For example, Overall and Montagu’s anti-Calvinist stance on Christ’s descent into hell was just further evidence of the deviations between patristic and modern orthodoxy.105 Astonishingly, Beale had the highest praise for Montagu – a dogmatic and intolerant Laudian if ever there was one – although he did admit that the ‘voluminuous bitternes of his apparatus did almost quench my thirst’. But what Montagu’s scholarship taught Beale – entirely contrary to the intentions behind it – was ‘That if wee refer to ye taste of times, & of those fathers of ye Greeke, & Romane churches, wee must keepe aloofe from many points of our reformation’.106

Conclusion All this leads us to three generalisable conclusions, which I think are somewhat different from the traditional vision of innovative, radical historiography fighting against a stale, propagandist orthodoxy. Having little space left, I will summarise them systematically: 101 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, 6 September 1660, HP 66/29/1r. 102 Ibid., 2r. Beale does not give a reference, but must be referring to Rivet’s Critici sacri specimen. Hoc est censurae doctorum tam ex orthodoxis quam ex pontificiis, in scripta quae Patribus plerisque priscorum & puriorum seculorum … collectae ([Heidelberg, 1612]), p. 50. This compendium of patristic errors was popular, with five editions published between 1612 and 1652: see further Quantin, Antiquity, pp. 65–66, 70. 103 Beale to Evelyn, undated [1664], BL MS Add. 78312, fols. 17r-v, 18r. 104 For which see Levitin and Mandelbrote, Historicisation of Theology. 105 Beale to Lady Ranelagh, 6 September 1660, HP 66/29/2r. 106 Beale to Hartlib, 28 September 1661, HP31/1/73v.

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(1) Radical historical writing did not have to go hand in hand with a recognisably ‘radical’ politico-religious position, and we should be very careful about reifying putative radical ‘traditions’, whether we label them the ‘radical Reformation’, ‘Erasmianism’, or anything else. (2) Radical historical writing was only really threatening to the orthodox when it drew on mainstream, orthodox scholarship. The conclusions it built on top of that were usually fanciful (by contemporary scholarly standards), and could be easily dismissed.107 (3) Orthodox scholarship planted the seeds for its own undermining, not because the orthodox were fools who did not realise the consequences of their actions; and not because historicism is in some sense inherently destructive; but because of the way history functioned in the confessional age: historical arguments that worked well in one confessional context often proved dangerous in another.108 The most important developments in the writing of religious history in the seventeenth century occurred in the orthodox mainstream, not at the ‘radical’ fringes.

107 For analogous examples of this from the great English trinitarian debates of the 1690s, see Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 523–531. 108 For the orthodox investment in historical approaches to theology, see Dmitri Levitin, ‘From sacred history to the history of religion: paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European historiography from Reformation to “Enlightenment”, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), pp. 1117–1160; for the investment in the tools required, see id., ‘Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: a comparative overview’, in: Confessionalisation and Erudition, eds, id. and Hardy; and the works cited in both.

IV. Radicalism across Borders

John Coffey

‘The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation’? Anabaptism, Spiritualism, and Anti-Trinitarianism in the English Revolution1 According to the historian Jonathan Scott, ‘the English Revolution unleashed in the 1640s became the last and greatest triumph of the European radical reformation’. In the English Civil War, unlike the German Peasants’ War, ‘the radical army was on the winning side’.2 Scott was neither the first nor the last historian to see the English revolutionaries as carrying on (and perhaps completing) the work begun by the radical Reformers of sixteenth-century Europe. Over a century ago, Rufus Jones connected the early Reformation to the English Revolution in his book Spiritual Reformers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1914), tracing a more or less straight line from Spiritualists like Hans Denck and Caspar Schwenckfeld to the mystical theology of radical Puritans, Cambridge Platonists, and Quakers.3 Various scholars have insisted on the genetic link between continental Anabaptists and the English Baptists of the seventeenth century.4 Similarly bold claims have been made about the debt of English anti-Trinitarians to the Polish Socinians.5 The doyen of Radical Reformation historiography, George Williams, pinpointed ‘the restructuring of English Christendom in the age of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth’ as the moment when Radical Reformers ‘were to become once again involved in general history’.6 Most recently, Brad Gregory has described the English Revolution as a case of ‘Reformation Radicalism renewed’, an era of political unrest ‘in which the Reformation’s character became visible in a manner analogous to that it displayed in Germany in the 1520s’.7 In revolutionary England, as in sixteenth century Europe, Protestantism splintered. Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and anti-Trinitarians resurfaced. Invoking Scripture, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I am grateful to Dr Ariel Hessayon for comment on an earlier version of this essay. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), p. 253. Rufus M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London, 1928). William Estep, The Anabaptist Story, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, 1975); Meic Pearse, The Great Restoration: The Religious Radicals of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Carlisle, 1997). See the classic account of H.J. McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1951). George Huntson Williams, The Radical Reformation (London, 1962), p. xxxi. A third edition was published in 1992. Brad Gregory, The Radical Reformation, in: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, ed. Peter Marshall (Oxford, 2015), pp. 146–151, quotation at p. 146.

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the Spirit, the primitive Church, and the coming millennium, radicals attacked infant baptism, clerical authority, tithes, confessions of faith, and external forms. Some suspended the sacraments, awaiting apostles to restore the true church, while others rejected sacraments altogether. Some claimed mystical absorption in the Godhead, others denounced the letter of Scripture as a ‘paper pope’. Lay preachers and prophets proliferated, and the revolutionary decades witnessed a wave of women visionaries invoking the prophet Joel (‘your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’). Tolerationists advanced arguments once made by Balthasar Hubmaier and Sebastian Castellio, denying Christian magistrates coercive power in matters of religion. ‘Levellers’ preached ‘practical Christianity’, an egalitarian social Gospel that resembled Anabaptist visions of an ideal Christian community. ‘Diggers’ (inspired by the former Baptist Gerrard Winstanley) instituted the community of goods, a Hutterite-style experiment in primitive Christian communism. ‘Ranters’ were accused of practicing community of wives. ‘Fifth Monarchy Men’ were charged with reviving the apocalyptic theocracy of Münster. In reaction to the failed rising of Thomas Venner, ‘Quakers’ adopted a ‘peace principle’ that paralleled the pacifism of the Mennonites.8 Although the affinities between the European Radical Reformation and English religious radicalism are plain to see, there has been considerable resistance to the claim that the latter had its roots in the former.9 It is tempting to put this down to the insularity of English historians, but one of those to take issue with Rufus Jones was Geoffrey Nuttall, a historian thoroughly versed in German-language scholarship. Nuttall argued was that while the Spiritualisten may have ‘in some cases anticipated radical Puritan convictions’, ‘any direct influence is far to seek’. The Quakers, for example, were not attempting to connect themselves to a Spiritualist tradition, but repudiating tradition in favour of an unprecedented restoration of primitive Christianity.10

  8 For overviews of religious radicalism in the English Revolution see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (London, 1972); J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984); Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT, 1984); Frances Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1985); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992); Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006); Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in the Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth (London, 2011); John Coffey, Religion, in: The Oxford Handbook of Literature of the English Revolution, ed. Laura L. Knoppers (Oxford, 2012), pp. 98–117; John Coffey, Religious Thought, in: The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael Braddick (Oxford, 2015), pp. 447–465.   9 There has also been vigorous dispute over the application of the anachronistic term ‘radicalism’ to seventeenth-century England. See Glenn Burgess, Introduction, in: English Radicalism, 1550–1850, ed Glenn Burgess (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 1–16; Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan, Introduction, in: Varieties of Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century Radicalism in Context, eds Hessayon and Finnegan (Farnham, 2011), pp. 1–29. 10 Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience ([1946], Chicago, 1992), pp. 15–16.

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In this paper, I wish to reopen the case using the familiar categories of George Williams. His distinction between ‘magisterial’ and ‘radical’ Reformation has stood the test of time, as has his identification of three major divisions of radical Reformers – Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and anti-Trinitarians (those he called ‘Evangelical Rationalists’).11 Like all taxonomies, it is a heuristic device, and can be interpreted too rigidly. There were Spiritualist Anabaptists, and Anabaptist anti-Trinitarians, and Williams’ subcategories can give a false impression of precision, fixing butterflies on a wall rather than tracking their unpredictable movements through the air. Yet subsequent scholarship has refined his typology rather than dispensing with it altogether; as Carlos Eire observes, Williams ‘devised a classification system for the Radicals that still stands largely unchallenged after half a century’.12 In doing so, he helpfully focussed attention on three of the most startling innovations of the radical Reformation – the attack on infant baptism and its replacement by believers’ baptism; the Spiritualist critique of textual literalism, external sacraments, and formal church structures; and the Evangelical Rationalist rejection of Trinitarian orthodoxy. The Puritan Revolution was to witness these assaults renewed – infant baptism; Scripture, clergy, and sacrament; and the doctrine of the Trinity would come under fresh attack by what looked like a new wave of Anabaptists, Spiritualists, Arians and Socinians. Williams understood that while these groups differed sharply, they were each driven by the same ‘radical’ impulse to return to the roots of primitive Christianity (and to reform apostate Christendom ‘root and branch’). It is this etymologically precise (and contemporary) definition of the term that points us towards the historical and eschatological vision that defined the Radical Reformation. ‘The magisterial Reformers’, Williams noted, ‘worked with the idea of reformatio; the Anabaptists, the Spiritualists, and the Rationalists laboured under the more radical notion of restitutio’.13 In their minds, the ‘fall of the Church’ after the apostolic period had been more precipitous and catastrophic than the magisterial Reformers liked to think. Mainstream Protestants (such as Lancelot Andrewes) could appeal reverentially to ‘one Canon, two Testaments, three Creeds, four general Councils, and five centuries’; radical Reformers were inclined to pit the first century against the fourth and fifth, the one Canon and two Testaments against Creeds and Councils.14 In the latter days, they believed, there would be a restitution of primitive Christianity, not merely a reformation of the late medieval church. Anabaptists sought to restore the apostolic community as defined by believer’s baptism before infant baptism had become the norm. 11 Williams, The Radical Reformation. 12 See Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, 2016), ch. 11, quotation at p. 253. For further modifications to the received typology see John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, eds, A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism (Leiden, 2006). 13 Williams, The Radical Reformation, p. xxvi. 14 On Andrewes’ formula as a statement of conventional Protestantism see Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), pp. 155–156.

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Spiritualists sought to recover the charismatic character of early Christianity before it had been corrupted by clerical obsession with ecclesiastical forms and the letter of Scripture. Anti-Trinitarians saw themselves as retrieving the primitive Christology of the New Testament and the ante-Nicene (or anti-Nicene) Fathers. Jonathan Scott’s account of England’s ‘radical reformation’ had little to say about Anabaptists, Spiritualists, or Socinians. Instead, as a political historian, his analysis concentrated on the socio-political radicalism of Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, and Quakers. Moreover, he did not address the problem of influence and had little to say about the transmission of ideas or the English reception of European texts.15 This chapter takes a different approach. The first section will examine the depiction of the European Radical Reformation during the English Revolution. We will find that its story was told by its enemies, even though a few isolated voices raised questions about the received narrative of the heresiographers. In the second section, we will turn to the reception of Radical Reformation writings in England, examining Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and anti-Trinitarians. Here we shall summarise the findings of more specialist studies, highlighting the uneven transmission of the three main radical traditions. The concluding section will reflect on whether the English Revolution did witness ‘the last and greatest triumph of the European radical reformation’.

Heresiography and ‘the History of the Anabaptists’ Contemporaries were not slow to connect the fragmentation of English Protestantism with the sects and heresies that afflicted the Protestant Reformers. As early as 1642, as the country stood on the brink of civil war, pamphlets rehearsed the history of the German Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster. A Short History of the Anabaptists of High and Low Germany (1642) told the story of ‘the insurrection of [Thomas] Muncer’, ‘the tragical disorders committed at Munster’, and ‘the tumults of the Anabaptists’ in the Netherlands and elsewhere. It drew on the historical writings of the Lutheran Johann Sleidan, the Calvinist Konrad Heresbach (‘Heresbachius’), the Roman Catholic Lambert van den Hove (‘Lambertus Hortensius’), the Swiss Reformer John Gastio, and the Walloon Reformed divine Guy de Brès. The author was not opposed to further reformation of the Church of England, and insisted that the Reformed religion bore no responsibility for spawning the Anabaptists, but he wished to point out the danger of sectarian anarchy and the absolute necessity of a lawful and orderly reformation carried out by godly magistrates.16 Another pamphlet entitled A Warning for England, especially for London in the Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists (1642) drew an explicitly monarchist moral from the story of

15 Scott, England’s Troubles, chs. 11–12. 16 Anon., A Short History of the Anabaptists of High and Low Germany (London, 1642).

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Münster’s rise and fall: ‘So let all the factious and seditious enemies of Church and State perish, but upon the head of King CHARLES let the Crowne flourish. Amen.’17 A Warning was published anonymously, but its author was eventually revealed to be Daniel Featley, the only leading episcopal divine to attend Parliament’s clerical Assembly at Westminster in 1643. Featley was suspected of being less than sound in his Puritanism and his Parliamentarianism; accused of being a royalist spy he was removed from the Assembly and imprisoned in the house of Lord Petre in Aldersgate Street. It was here that he wrote his final and most popular work, The Dippers Dipt.18 A frontispiece by William Marshall illustrated the fourteen varieties of Anabaptist enumerated by the German Reformed intellectual Johannes Alsted, as well as a uniquely Swiss variety documented by Gastio – the Hemerobaptists, who were allegedly ‘christened every day’ ‘in the Summer time’ (see figure 1).19 The erudite Scottish Covenanter Robert Baillie expanded the case against the Baptists in Anabaptisme: the Fount of Independencie, Brownisme, Anti[nomianism], Familisme, and most of the other Errours which for the Time doe Trouble the Church of England (1647). Baillie traced ‘the originall and progresse of the Anabaptists’, and documented his account with a set of endnotes referring readers to Sleidan, Heresbach, Hortensius, Guy de Brès, and Heinrich Bullinger. He described the tenets of ‘the old Anabaptists’ in ways that would have created a powerful sense of déjà vu in any observer of Civil War England. First they ‘gathered new Churches’ out of the Reformed churches; then they began a programme of ‘rebaptization’; they established lay preaching, and ­women’s preaching, ordaining ‘their own Prophets’ with ‘no secular learning’, and requiring their ‘illiterate Pastors’ to earn a living through manual labour; they cried down tithes; some became ‘Seekers, they would serve God single and alone, without the society of any Church’; having denied the authority of the Church, they went on to deny ‘the power of the Magistrate in matters of Religion alone’; finally, they began to proclaim ‘their right’ to take away the sword of tyrannical magistrates and establish ‘the dream of Christs visible and outward Kingdome’.20 Writing after the regicide in 1649, Richard Baxter was able to provide further evidence that England’s Anabaptists were the kith and kin of Europe’s Anabaptists. Anabaptism was the doorway to ‘the most horrid Opinions’, both in religion and in politics. The General Baptist Henry Denne had been a ringleader in the recent Lev17 Anon., A Warning for England especially for London in the Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists their Wild Preachings & Practises in Germany (London,1642), 18 Arnold Hunt, Featley, Daniel (1582–1645), in: ODNB. 19 Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt: or The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d over Head and Ears, at a Disputation in Southwark … The Seventh Edition, Augmented with … The Famous History of the Frantick Anabaptists (London, 1660), pp. 27–28. A Warning for England was published as an appendage (pp. 216–258). 20 Baillie, Anabaptisme the True Fountaine of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme (London, 1647), pp. 1–28, 29–32.

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Figure 1: William Marshall, Frontispiece to Daniel Featley, Katabaptistai kataptysoi. The Dippers Dipt, or, The Anabaptists Duck’d and Plung’d over Head and Eares (London, Nicholas Bourne, 1645). © The British Museum. 1896,1230.126.

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eller rebellion; the Particular Baptists were in cahoots with the regicidal regime. The Anabaptists of Munster, said Baxter, had only tried to take over a single town; the Anabaptists of England had set their sights on the capture of an entire nation.21 While heresiographers concentrated much of their fire on Anabaptists and their offspring, works focused on Spiritualists and anti-Trinitarians also constructed a genealogy of heresy going back to the radical Reformation. The learned Covenanter divine, Samuel Rutherford, wrote A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist (1648) with chapters on the Theologica Germanica, Johannes Agricola, Caspar Schwenckfeld, David George, and Hendrik Niclaes and the Familists. Rutherford drew heavily on Bullinger and other heresiographers, and sought to reclaim Luther from the antinomians. He purported to show that the heresies of sixteenth-century Spiritualists had reappeared in the writings of New Model Army preachers such as John Saltmarsh and William Dell, and other antinomians such as John Eaton and Tobias Crisp. Oliver Cromwell, he alleged, had openly denigrated external order in favour of the spirit within.22 Whereas Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists had cracked down on antinomianism, the English Independents were in alliance with the sects, and increasingly isolated from mainstream, magisterial Protestantism. Political agendas were equally prominent in an earlier work by the Presbyterian Francis Cheynell, who purported to reveal The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643). At a time when Royalists were charging Parliamentarians of nursing heresy and schism, Cheynell alleged that it was the Laudians (and the Great Tew circle) who had been flirting with doctrinal systems associated with those whom Williams dubbed ‘Evangelical Rationalists’. The title page asserted that ‘the Religion which hath been so violently contended for (by the Archbishop of Canterbury and his adherents) is not the true pure Protestant Religion, but an Hotchpotch of Arminianisme, Socinianisme and Popery’. It was the Laudians’ disruptive break with Reformed orthodoxy that had opened the door to heresy.23 Alongside English heresiographies there appeared translations of European works: a new history of the Anabaptists by the Leiden theologian Friedrich Spanheim appeared in 1646 under the title, England’s Warning by Germanies Woe, or An Historicall Narration of the Originall, Progresse, Tenets, Names, and Several Sects of the Anabaptists (1646) (figure 2).

21 Richard Baxter, Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-Membership and Baptism (London, 1651), pp. 147–49, 151–52, 269. 22 On Cromwell, see Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of Spiritual Antichrist (London, 1648), pp. 250– 251, 260. 23 On Laudianism and Arminianism see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987); on Laudians and Socinianism see Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010).

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Figure 2: Title page of Friedrich Spanheim’s Diatribe Historica de Origine, Progressu, Sectis et Nominibus Anabaptistarum (1645), translated as England’s Warning by Germanies Woe (1646). © British Library Board. General Reference Collection E.362.(28.).

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Henrick van Haestens’ biographical studies of radical Reformation leaders, first printed in Leiden in 1608, were Englished by the professional translator John Davies in Apocalypsis, or The Revelation of Certain Notorious Advancers of Heresie (second edn, 1658). Davies noted that ‘our own gyrations of Religion … would have ­out-vy’d the extravagance’ of ‘what happened in High and Low Germany’.24 In 1659 Guy de Brès’ treatment of the Münster episode, La Racine, Source et Fondement des Anabaptistes (1565), was republished under the title Johannes Becoldus Redivivus, or The English Quaker, the German Enthusiast Revived, translated by Joshua Scotton (1659). ‘Let it be considered’ added Scotton in a translator’s note, ‘whether in this small history, though printed neer a hundred years since, the spirits, countenance, language, garb, gestures and practice of those which pass under the name of Q ­ uakers, do not lively appear’.25 Works of heresiography enjoyed significant success. A Short History of the Anabaptists went into a second edition in 1642, and was republished in 1643 and 1647. The Dippers Dipt was in its seventh edition by 1660, and the sixth edition of Pagitt’s Heresiography appeared posthumously in 1662. Heresiographers exploited moments of political tension, deploying the history of the Anabaptists for factional purposes at key junctures of the Revolution. Anabaptists loomed large at the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, during the rise of the Independents from 1645 to 1648, and in 1659–60 when republican sectaries re-emerged in a series of coups. The critics of sects and heresies mastered the popular pamphlet form, and attracted an audience with sensationalist tales and rhetorical force.26 Visual illustrations added to the appeal. The frontispiece of Featley’s major work featured a vomiting demon, half-naked maidens being baptised by lascivious Anabaptists, and insets featuring elfin figures representing fifteen different sects (see F ­ igure 1). In two other books, readers were brought face to face with famous heretics. The sixth edition of Pagitt’s Heresiography interspersed portraits of Anabaptists with pictures of early church heretics such as Arius and contemporary fanatics such as the Quaker James Nayler and the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner, tracing a heretical lineage from antiquity to the present (see figure 3).

24 [Henrick van Haestens?], Apocalypsis, or, The Revelation of Certain Notorious Advancers of Heresie (London, 1658), ‘Epistle Dedicatory’. The original edition was entitled Apocalypsis Insignium Aliquot Haeresiarcharum (Leiden, 1608). 25 Guy du Brez [Guy de Brès], Johannes Becoldus Redivivus, or, The English Quaker, the German Enthusiast Revived (London, 1659) sig. A3v. 26 See Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); David Loewenstein, Treacherous Faith: The Spectre of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2013), ch. 5.

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Figure 3: Illustration from Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography or, A description of the hereticks and sectaries of these latter times (London, 1660). The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The edition of van Haestens’ biographical sketches contained portraits by Christoffel van Sichem taken from the original Dutch edition – among them were Thomas Müntzer, Jan Matthias and John Becold (Jan van Leiden) of Münster, David George, Michael Servetus, Balthasar Hubmaier, Hans Hut, Melchoir Hoffman, Hendrik Niclaes, and other assorted heresiarchs, including Arius and Muhammad (see ­figure 4).27 There can be little doubt that the heresiographers controlled the narrative of Europe’s Radical Reformation. Only on rare occasions did radical Puritans take the trouble to defend sixteenth-century Anabaptists. The tolerationist William Walwyn claimed that the recently published History of the Anabaptists in High and Low Germany was designed to deter Parliament from reforming the church’s episcopal hierarchy, ‘affrighting the Reformers by airy and imaginary consequences’. Walwyn approached such histories with a hermeneutic of suspicion. They proceeded by ‘fastning odious errours and feigned mutinies upon the Anabaptists’, but ‘who wrote those Bookes’? 27 [van Haestens?], Apocalypsis. On van Sichem’s portraits, see Alberto Saviello, Printed Depictions of the Prophet in Western Europe, in: Constructing the Image of Muhammad in Europe, ed. ­Avinoam Shalem (Berlin, 2013), p. 111 n. 67.

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Figure 4: Illustration from Adriaen van Haestens, Apocalypsis (1658). Courtesy Sugden Heritage Collections. Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Royalists had already made the absurd claim that ‘the Parliament are Brownists & Anabaptists’; if the Parliamentarians lost the Civil War, the ‘Court Histories’ that followed would brand them Anabaptists to all posterity, ‘enemies to Government’.28 As the General Baptist Richard Overton (another future Leveller) put it a year later: ‘who writ the Histories of the Anabaptists but their Enemies?’29 In 1660, when histories of the Anabaptists enjoyed a new vogue amidst fears of Quakers and sectarian anarchy, other writers expressed scepticism. An anonymous tract entitled The Gorgon’s Head or The Monster of Munster, was disdainful of the official narratives:

28 [William Walwyn], The Compassionate Samaritan (1644), in: The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens, GA, 1989), pp. 121–122. 29 [Richard Overton], The Arraignement of Mr Persecution (1645), p. 20.

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Oh Monster: Oh Monstrous Monster: The Monster of Monsters: The Monster of Munster? Woe to you Anabaptists, when the Monster of Munster appears. He is a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing; He left NOT ONE Anabaptist alive to tell their own story: much less to contradict the Others so largely written in their Innocent Blood.30

The author suggested that ‘the story of Munster (as they relate it) seems to all sober men a Romance, like Don quirote [sic] & Sanca Panca’. The Anabaptists ‘(so called)’ of Münster ‘were all of them Slain, Killed, Murthered, or Massacrd’, so that none ‘did ever answer for themselves’. It was well known that contemporary Anabaptists in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Bohemia and the Low Countries were pacifists. Anabaptists in England, Scotland and Ireland professed none of the ‘unjust, foolish, or ridiculous Principles as are mentioned in that story of Munster’. Besides, ‘who can tell what Oppression might force the rude multitude to in Munster, as that of Massagnello in Naples?’31 Another author, ‘S.T.’, also questioned ‘the reputed German Anabaptists and Munster Tragedy’, which is ‘so much and often in all places (by Prints, and otherwise) laid to their charge’. ‘S.T.’ pointed out that Joshua Scotton, the translator of Guy de Brès, had acknowledged the existence of ‘Orthodox and peaceable’ Anabaptists.32 He raised questions about the reliability of the standard narratives:  … we find the stories of a company of people in Germany, who are long since dead and buried, under the greatest reproach and infamy that can be, of whom none can be left to answer for themselves, their reported Extirpation and Extinction being about 130 years past, their rise and fall, lives and deaths wrote by their adversaries, no aggravating circumstances, either for opinion or practice seems to be omitted, no extenuating passages confessedly inferred; now that upon the whole, there might be such a people and such persons bearing the appellation of Anabaptists…is a matter much undoubted, but that every aggravating passage is true, or that any one Historian (admitting him just otherwise) was an ear witness of all their opinions, and an ocular witness of all their tragical actions is reasonably to be doubted, and consequently their testimony in every puncto not so much to be regarded; because false reports of contrary minded men touching both such and other persons and things are so abounding and notorious, in our own Nation and Age …33

S.T. hoped that someone would rewrite the history of the Anabaptists, and laid down eight rules for writing an objective account.34 Such a history remained unwritten. There was little or no attempt during the English Revolution to reclaim a radical Reforma30 Anon, The Gorgon’s Head (London?, 1660), p. 1. 31 Anon, The Gorgon’s Head, p. 10. 32 S.T., Moderation … Together with a Brief Touch of the Reputed German Anabaptists and Munster Tragedy (London, 1660), pp. 13, 17. 33 S.T., Moderation, pp. 18–19. 34 S.T., Moderation, p. 20.

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tion heritage. It would be many generations before English Baptists were willing to write sympathetic histories of the continental Anabaptists.35

The English reception of Radical Reformation texts While the story of the Radical Reformation was told by its enemies in revolutionary England, there was a more positive reception of texts produced by Radical Reformers. Although documenting this may have served their case, heresiographers displayed little interest in what we now call reception history. It is true that they insisted on the intimate connection between sixteenth-century heretics and seventeenth-century English ones. Featley explored ‘the originall’ of the Anabaptists and Baillie showed how they were the ‘fountaine’ of other heresies; Rutherford claimed to reveal ‘the rise and spring’ of Spiritualist and antinomian ideas; Cheynell followed ‘the rise and progress’ of Socinianism. As doctrinal topographers, they traced the contaminated river to its poisoned source in the high foothills of the Radical Reformation. However, their case rested on the striking parallels between old Anabaptists and English sectaries, and their concept of influence was not literary but supernatural. The frontispiece of the Dippers Dipt portrayed Anabaptists as the spawn of the devil; Baillie insisted that ‘the author of Anabaptisme’ in both Germany and England was ‘Satan’, masquerading as ‘an Angel of light’; the translator of Guy de Brès’ history described German enthusiasts and English Quakers as ‘the first and second brood’ of ‘the old wily serpent’; Rutherford’s title page cited biblical texts on ‘the spirit of the Antichrist’ that inspired false prophets.36 Thus while heresiographers created taxonomies and genealogies, their enterprise stands in stark contrast to the modern historiography of the Radical Reformation. Modern schemes of categorisation may owe something to heresiographers, who pioneered the systematic study of deviant styles of reformation. Yet their categories relied on conflation (guilt by association), spurious precision (lists of sects and errors), and phantom sects like the Adamites (depicted on the frontispiece of The Dipper Dipt). Modern scholars, for example the Unitarian Williams, have had little sympathy with the hostile caricatures of the heresiographers, and have sought to revise and purge ear35 The earliest Baptist work to appropriate sixteenth-century Anabaptists as heroic forebears appears to be Richard Heath, Anabaptism, 1521–36 (1895). See John Briggs, Richard Heath, 1831–1912: From Suburban Baptist to Radical Discipleship by Way of Anabaptism, in: Freedom and the Powers: Perspectives from Baptist History, eds Anthony R. Cross and John H. Y Briggs (Didcot, 2014), pp. 67–82. A relatively sympathetic treatment of the Mennonites and other non-violent Anabaptists was provided in the Methodist John Wesley’s edition of J. L. Mosheim’s Concise Ecclesiastical History, 4 vols (London, 1781), III, ch. 3, which asserted that ‘the sect in England derive their origin from the German and Dutch Mennonites’ (p. 281). 36 Featley, Dippers Dipt; Baillie, Anabaptisme, p. 47; Johannes Becoldus Redivivus, sigs. A3r–A4; Rutherford, Survey of Spiritual Antichrist.

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lier taxonomies, offering a relatively dispassionate analysis that plots a course between heresiography and hagiography.37 In constructing genealogies, the gulf between modern historiography and Reformation historiography gapes even larger. Instead of seeing exact parallels between heretical movements in the early church, sixteenth-century Europe and seventeenth-century England, parallels explained by common satanic influence, modern historiography has tracked the transmission and reception of texts and set religious movements within their local contexts. In the case of the English Revolution, this research programme has highlighted indebtedness to Radical Reformation sources, but it has also underlined the peculiarities of the English. And it reveals that the reception of Anabaptist texts does not compare to the readership of Spiritualist and anti-Trinitarian works. Anabaptists The leading Anabaptist writers of the sixteenth century went unread in revolutionary England. No one translated Michael Sattler, or Balthasar Hubmiaer, or David Joris, or Menno Simons, or Dirk Philips, or Pilgram Marpeck; nor, it seems, were their writings ever cited. In reply to Richard Baxter, the Baptist John Tombes observed that ‘Menno Simonis detested [Thomas] Muncer, & Becold’, adding that the Dutch Mennonites were ‘commendable for their innocency of life’. But Tombes knew this from the tomes of Reformed divines such as Konrad Heresbach, Johannes Cloppenburg, and Christian Beckman, not from reading Menno himself.38 The first English translation of Menno’s writings was published by a Mennonite in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1863.39 Not until American Mennonites produced translations of Anabaptist classics in the later twentieth century would these writers begin to win a hearing within English-speaking Protestantism.40 In seventeenth-century England, the voices of sixteenth-century Anabaptists went unheard. There was, however, some direct contact between English separatists and contemporary Dutch Mennonites, and this has led to lively debate among historians of the English Baptists. Two schools of thought have wrestled over English Baptist origins, with one asserting Anabaptist influence, and the other insisting on Puritan and separatist roots.41 The strongest evidence for the Anabaptist case comes from the first Eng37 For an alternative perspective on this problem, see Michael Driedger’s chapter in this volume. 38 John Tombes, Praecursor, or, A Forerunner to a Large Review of the Dispute concerning Infant-­ Baptism (London, 1652), p. 62. 39 Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, trans. L. Verduin, ed. J.C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA, 1956), p. v. 40 Classics of the Radical Reformation Series, 12 vols (Waterloo, Ontario, 1973–2010): https://www. ambs.edu/publishing/Classics-of-the-Radical-Reformation-Series.cfm (accessed 19/10/16). 41 For recent assessments see James R. Coggins, John Smyth and his Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence, and the Elect Nation (Waterloo, Ontario, 1991); B.R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century (Didcot, 1996); Jason K. Lee, The Theology of John Smyth: Puritan, Separatist, Baptist, Mennonite (Macon, GA, 2003); Stephen Wright, The Early English

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lish Baptist congregation, founded in Dutch exile by John Smyth, who later joined the Mennonites. Yet Smyth was an English separatist who lost his faith in infant baptism and decided to inaugurate a New Testament congregation by baptising himself and then his followers in late 1608 or early 1609. Smyth recalled that ‘ther was no church to whom wee could Joyne with a Good conscience to have baptisme from them’, a clear indication that (at this stage) they did not regard the Mennonite Waterlanders as a true church. Moreover, when Smyth began to have doubts about his self-baptism and opened talks with the Mennonites, the congregation split, with a minority following Thomas Helwys, who denounced the Mennonite belief that ‘the Church and ministry must come by succession’, and returned to England in 1611/12, establishing London’s first Baptist church in Spitalfields. Although the anti-Calvinism of the General Baptists may owe something to the Mennonites, most historians of the Baptists now agree that their ecclesiology was driven by the primitivist and biblicist logic of English separatism. If this was true of Smyth’s congregation in 1609 and Helwys’ in 1612, it was even more so for the new wave of Baptist congregations that arose in the late 1630s and 1640s. The ‘General Baptists’ of the English Revolution appear to be a new growth, not necessarily the continuation of the early seventeenth-century congregations, and initially at least, some of their key leaders (like Thomas Lambe) held onto a Calvinist concept of ‘particular election’ while teaching ‘general redemption’. It is possible that the General Baptist, Richard Overton, had once applied for membership in a Dutch Mennonite congregation, but this is a murky episode. Another figure, Richard Blunt, was sent as a messenger to congregations in the Netherlands, and some historians have asserted that he received baptism by immersion from the Collegiants, a Spiritualist and baptistic sect that may have adopted immersion following the example of the Socinians. Yet recent analysis has thrown serious doubt on this theory, and it seems clear that the new wave of English Baptists baptised each other rather than receiving baptism from the Collegiants.42 English ‘Anabaptism’ was an indigenous growth, and bore the stamp of its Reformed and Puritan origins. Indeed, in their confessions of the faith, both the ‘Particular’ and the ‘General’ Baptists complained that they were ‘falsely called Anabaptists’. This was not simply a denial of being ‘re-baptisers’, it was a self-conscious distancing from the errors long associated (whether rightly or wrongly) with continental Anabaptism.43 Samuel Richardson, one of the signatories of the 1644 Particular Baptist Confession of Faith, Baptists, 1603–1649 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 4–11, 13–44; Anthony R. Cross, The Adoption of Believer’s Baptism and Baptist Beginnings, in: Exploring Baptist Origins, eds Cross and Nicholas J. Wood (Oxford, 2010), pp. 1–29. 42 Wright, The Early English Baptists, ch. 3. On Overton, see pp. 200–202. 43 See The Confession of Faith of those Churches which are Commonly (though Falsly) called Anabaptists (1644), and A Brief Confession or Declaration of Faith Set Forth by Many of Us, who are (Falsely) called Ana-Baptists (1660), both in: Baptist Confessions of Faith, ed. W. L. Lumpkin, rev. ed. (Valley Forge, 1969), pp. 153, 224. The anonymous Anabaptists Catechisme with all their

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argued that the supposed rebellion of ‘two or three in Germany’ had no relevance to English Baptists. They had sided with Parliament not to subvert the State but ‘to preserve the State’.44 Indeed, Richardson’s Baptists (the Calvinist wing of the movement) did ‘utterly abhorre and detest’ a host of errors associated with continental Anabaptists:  … That no malefactor ought to be put to death, That it is lawfull to have more wives then one at once, That a man may put away his wife if shee differ from him in point of religion, That we are to goe naked, and not be ashamed, That we hold it lawfull to slay wicked Magistrates, That no Christian may goe to law, but right himselfe by violent means, That wicked men have no propriety in their goods, but all things ought to be held in common, That we maintain pretended Revelations, That Christ took not flesh of the virgin Mary, That there is no originall sinne, That men have free will in spirituall actions, That election is for foreseen faith and repentance, That God gives all men sufficient grace to be saved, That a man hath free will of himself to accept or refuse grace, That Christ died indifferently alike for all, That a true beleever may fall away from grace totally and finally, And that wee hold Libertinisme & Familisme …45

The fact that English Baptists retained important elements of the Reformed tradition sets them at odds with the European Radical Reformation. As Williams noted, most Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists were pacifists, especially after the debacle of Münster.46 Yet during the English Civil War, Baptists eagerly took up arms for Parliament, a telling indication of how far they were removed from Mennonites and Hutterites. One could say that Anabaptists became Baptists in the Parliamentary armies. The gulf between Mennonites and English Baptists is also evident in matters of soteriology. The Radical Reformers had rejected Luther’s principles of sola gratia and sola fides, emphasising the role of human free will and evangelical obedience; in place of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone, they accented regeneration and sanctification, the imitation of Christ, and strict obedience to the Sermon on the Mount.47 In England, by contrast, the Particular Baptists remained staunchly Calvinist in their soteriology; even many General Baptists adopted a softened Calvinism that stopped short of Arminianism. The result was the creation of hybrid identities. Calvinist Baptists would have been a contradiction in terms for continental Reformed Protestants; they would become an English peculiarity.

44 45 46 47

Practises, Meetings and Exercises (London, 1645) charges English Baptists with rejecting war and oaths, and practicing community of goods and wives. Samuel Richardson, Some Brief Considerations on Doctor Featley, his Book, Intitutled, The ­Dipper Dipt (London, 1645), p. 3. Richardson, Some Brief Considerations, p. 6. Williams, The Radical Reformation, p. xxv. Williams, The Radical Reformation, pp. xxv-xxvi.

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Spiritualists Spiritualism too would look different in English dress, but here there is a much stronger case for positive reception of European texts. First, the 1640s and 1650s saw the publication of translations of numerous works in the German mystical tradition, including a raft of translations by radical Puritans John Everard and Giles Randall. Everard translated medieval mystical texts by Johannes Tauler and Nicholas of Cusa as well as Englishing Sebastian Castellio’s Latin edition of the anonymous Theologica Germanica, which had been championed by the young Luther before it was taken up by his Spiritualist and Anabaptist critics. In addition, Everard translated radical Reformation writers such as Sebastian Franck and Hans Denck (see Figure 5). As Nigel Smith notes, Everard ‘was at the centre … of an enterprise devoted to Anglicizing the central mystical anthropology of Medieval German spiritualism as it had been interpreted by the sixteenth-century German Spiritualist and Anabaptist movement’.48 Secondly, some Familist texts were in circulation, confirming the claims of heresiographers like Rutherford about the pernicious influence of Familist ideas. These claims had more foundation than similar allegations about Anabaptists, for whereas the latter had made some small incursions into England during the Edwardian era, they Figure 5: John Everard’s translation of S­ ebastian had been fiercely persecuted and failed Franck, De Arbore Scientiae Boni et Mali (1642), translated as The forbidden fruit, or, A treatise of to survive into the seventeenth century. the tree of knowledge of good and evill, of which The secretive Family of Love, however, Adam at the first, and as yet all mankinde do eate had established a presence both at the death moreover, how at this day it is forbidden to royal court and in small rural commuevery one as well as to Adam. © British Library Board. General Reference Collection 873.c.25. nities, for example Balsham in Cam48 Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640– 1660 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3, quotation at p. 136. See also David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), ch. 7.

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bridgeshire.49 In contrast to Anabaptist texts, their writings were in circulation during the English Revolution, though Nigel Smith has concluded that ‘among English sectarians he leaves only a trace, as opposed to the more distinct influence of the Germany mystics and Spiritualists’.50 David Como’s research has made the case for a Familist strain within English Puritanism, promoted before the Civil War by figures such as Edward Fisher, John Everard, and Roger Brearley. In particular, he argues that the writings of Niclaes (along with texts like the Theologica Germanica) contributed to a distinctly ‘perfectionist’ or ‘inherentist’ style of antinomianism, which maintained that believers could be free from the law and sin by achieving an inherent perfection or divinisation. Yet Como also emphasises that ‘the influence of these sources was often indirect’, and that they were typically ‘read through the lenses of mainstream puritanism’.51 A third body of Spiritualist writing was associated with the heterodox German Lutheran, Jacob Boehme. Between 1644 and 1662, Boehme’s treatises and much of his correspondence were published in English translation. Research in library catalogues and book citations has revealed the names of one hundred of Boehme’s readers, from ‘mainstream’ figures like Henry More, John Owen, John Selden, and Samuel Pepys, to radicals like John Pordage, the Welsh Puritan Morgan Llwyd, and the prophet Thomas Tany.52 According to Richard Baxter, Pordage was ‘the chiefest’ Behmenist in England. With amphibian flexibility, he was welcomed in the elevated company of the fifth Earl of Pembroke and the Conway circle, while encouraging or hosting Ranters, Diggers and prophets like Coppe, Coppin, Tany, Elizabeth Poole and William Everard.53 Nigel Smith concludes that ‘Boehme’s impact upon sectarian discourse and thought was greater than that of Everard and Randall’s translations, and of the Familist writings’.54 Even here though, the impact can be exaggerated. As Ariel Hessayon has recently shown, there is little evidence to support the contention that the Digger Gerard Winstanley was a Behmenist; indeed, ‘it appears very probable that he never read Boehme’, since ‘the disparities between them are far too great’.55 Historical debate over Spiritualist influence has focussed on the Quakers, just as debate over Anabaptist influence has focussed on English Baptists. Here there may seem to be a stronger case, if only because Spiritualist tracts were being widely circulated and read by the 1650s. The bookseller, Giles Calvert, who published Quaker 49 50 51 52

Christopher Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994). Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, ch. 4, quotation at pp. 183–84. Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 38–40, passim. Ariel Hessayon, Jacob Boehme’s Writings during the English Revolution and Afterwards: Their Publication, Dissemination, and Influence, in: An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (Abingdon, 2014), ch. 5, esp. pp. 80–81. 53 See Ariel Hessayon, Pordage, John (1607–1681), in: ODNB. 54 Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, ch. 5, quotation at p. 225. 55 Ariel Hessayon, Gerrard Winstanley and Jacob Boehme, in: Cromohs, 18 (2013), pp. 36–56, quotation at p. 36.

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writings, was also the publisher of translations of Hendrik Niclaes, Jacob Boehme, and Valentin Weigel, whose Life of Christ appeared in English in 1648. Calvert also published works by radical Puritan Spiritualists such as John Saltmarsh and William Dell, the Digger Gerard Winstanley, and ‘Ranters’, which suggests that he was serving a Spiritualist subculture during the English Revolution that was at least open to ideas and writings from the German mystical tradition.56 As we have seen, critics of the Quakers were quick to associate them with ‘German enthusiasts’. Boehme’s works were certainly read by some Quakers. The library of George Fox included a copy of a book by Niclaes, as well as Franck’s Forbidden Fruit, and he may have had some knowledge of Boehme’s writings.57 Nevertheless, Nuttall maintained that ‘to any one who reads Boehme’s and Fox’s writings consecutively and comparatively, the utter difference between their respective spiritual climates is soon apparent’. Fox had been steeped in the culture of English Puritanism; continental influences were supplementary, not decisive to his development. Indeed, at least one Quaker would publish a refutation of the ‘Behmenists’.58 On Nuttall’s view, which became dominant among historians of Quakerism, the Quakers arose from the spiritist and anti-formalist tendencies within radical English Puritanism.59 Melvin Endy qualified this thesis, plotting a middle way between Nuttall and Rufus Jones. He emphasised both the bitter conflict between Puritans and Quakers, and the powerful affinities between continental Spiritualists and English Quakers. Even so, Endy’s argument did not rest on direct influence, and he agreed that Jones had placed ‘undue weight on causal contacts with Continental thinkers in explaining the origins of the Quakers’.60 His point was simply that ‘Puritan roots do not necessarily produce Puritan fruits’.61 The most recent and thorough investigation of continental links concludes that there is no evidence of contact between Quakers and continental Anabaptists before 1655; that the first Quaker visitors to the Netherlands had no prior knowledge of Dutch Anabaptist groups; and that alleged similarities between the writings of the Quaker leader George Fox and Jacob Boehme are coincidental.62 56 On Calvert see Mario Caricchio, Religione, politica e commercio di libri nella Rivoluzione inglese. Gli autori di Giles Calvert, 1645–1653 (Genoa, 2003); Ariel Hessayon, Calvert, Giles (1615–1663), in: ODNB; Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005), esp. ch. 2. 57 See Ariel Hessayon, Jacob Boehme and the Early Quakers, in: Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 60 (2005), pp. 191–223, esp. pp. 206–208. 58 Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, pp. 16–18. 59 See also Alec Ryrie’s chapter in this volume. 60 Melvin B. Endy, Jr., The Interpretation of Quakerism: Rufus Jones and his Critics, in: Quaker History, 70 (1981), pp. 3–21, quotation at p. 12. 61 Melvin B. Endy, Puritanism, Quakerism, and Spiritualism: An Historiographical Essay, in: The World of William Penn, eds Richard S. Dunn and Mary M. Dunn (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 281–301, quotation at p. 294. See also Melvin B. Endy, Jr., William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton, 1973), chs. 1–2. 62 Stephen Wright, An Investigation into the Possible Transfer of Theology and Practice from Continental Anabaptists to the first Quakers [unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham] (2013).

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It seems clear then that Quakers grew out of Puritanism (in both senses of that phrase) rather than being inspired by the European Radical Reformation. Nevertheless, German Spiritualist texts had a circulation and a vogue during the English Revolution that was not enjoyed by Anabaptist writings. Anti-Trinitarians In contrast to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, ‘Evangelical Rationalism’ did not produce a burgeoning popular movement during the revolutionary decades. Instead, it is associated with individuals rather than groups. Once again, there is firm evidence that heterodoxy could arise spontaneously from within radical Puritanism, rather than being injected from outside. The Oxford-educated John Biddle claimed to have reached his anti-Trinitarian conclusions without reading Socinian writings. The same may be true of the MP John Fry, whose critique of the Athanasian creed veered in the direction of modalism (technically Sabellianism), in which Father, Son and Spirit were seen as three modes of God.63 The Protestant principle of sola scriptura was sufficient by itself to prompt awkward questions among those who recognised that patristic Trinitarian formulations were a later development. The primitivist drive to restore an apostolic Christianity destroyed by the fall of the Church was the main driver of anti-Trinitarianism. Yet the works of Polish Socinians did find a readership in England. Recent work by Sarah Mortimer and Paul Lim has shown how seriously the Socinian threat was taken by orthodox Reformed divines like John Owen. As with Boehme, the Socinians were often read by mainstream figures who studied in order to refute, or selectively appropriated what was useful while rejecting their anti-Trinitarianism. Yet a few gave Socinian writings a more enthusiastic reception. Paul Best, imprisoned by Parliament for his anti-Trinitarian teachings in 1645, had personally interacted with Socinians during his travels in Germany, Poland, and Transylvania. Best’s experience was unique, and contrasts with the more normal pattern represented by Biddle. Yet by the 1650s, Biddle was probably responsible for the translation of the Racovian Catechism, and it was he who translated three other Socinian works, including Samuel Przypkowski’s The Life … of Faustus Socinus (1653) and the same author’s Dissertatio de Pace &c (1653).64 John Milton, the most famous intellectual defender of the English republic, had licensed the Racovian Catechism for publication (in line with his critique of pre-publication censorship in Areopagitica). In his own unpublished 63 Stephen Snobelen, Biddle, John (1615/16–1662), in: ODNB; Dario Pfanner, Fry, John (c. 1609– 1656/57), in: ODNB. 64 Paul Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), chs. 1–4; Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, pp. 158–71, passim. See also McLachlan, Socinianism; Nigel Smith, ‘And if God was One of Us’: Paul Best, John Biddle, and anti-Trinitarian heresy in seventeenth-century England, in: Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, eds David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 7.

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systematic theology, De Doctrina Christiana, he would reject Athanasian Christology in favour of something close to Arianism rather than Socinianism (which denied the pre-existence of the Son). Like Biddle, Milton insisted on the biblical sources of his theology, and most of his non-biblical citations were to Lutheran and Reformed divines; yet there can be no doubt of his familiarity with radical Protestant anti-Trinitarianism.65 The example and the texts of Europe’s Radical Reformation were an inspiration for English heterodoxy.

‘The Last and Greatest Triumph of the European Radical Reformation’? What then shall we conclude about Jonathan Scott’s claim that the English Revolution ‘unleashed the last and greatest triumph of the European radical reformation’. Determining whether it was ‘the last and greatest’ would require a comparative examination of other possible triumphs, not least the upsurge of radical German Pietism in the early eighteenth-century.66 This is beyond the scope of our enquiry. But was the Puritan Revolution a ‘triumph of the European radical reformation’? Heresio­graphers feared that it was, and they told the story of England’s sectaries as a re-run of Anabaptist history. As we have seen, however, they had little interest in tracing the transmission and reception of Radical Reformation texts, contenting themselves with finding parallels to prove that the devil was up to his old tricks. Studies in reception history have produced mixed results, drawing a blank when investigating the transmission of Anabaptist texts, but finding a substantial English readership of German Spiritualist literature and Socinian writings. It is telling that the extensive library of Milton’s friend, Nathan Paget, contained twenty-one works by Socinus, and sixteen books and manuscripts by Boehme, as well as further Socinian, Familist and Spiritualist works, but nothing by sixteenth-century Anabaptists.67 Whatever the availability of such texts, the majority report among historians of Baptists and Quakers maintains that the emergence of these movements owed far more to the hothouse environment of English Puritanism than to encounters with Anabaptist and Spiritualist texts. Indeed, the dramatic success of Baptists and Quakers was due in part to the fact that they 65 See William Poole, Theology, in: Milton in Context, ed. Stephen Dobranski (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 478–80, 482–84; Smith, ‘And if God was One of Us’, pp. 176–78. 66 See Gottfried Arnold’s appropriation and rehabilitation of Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and anti-Trinitarians, in his Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie [Impartial History of Churches and Heretics] 4 vols (Franckfurt am Mayn, 1699–1700), where he translated texts by Menno Simons, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Hans Denck, David Joris, Jacob Boehme, and the Anti-Trinitarian Peter Günther. See also Astrid von Schlachta, Anabaptists and Pietists: Influences, Contacts and Relations, in: A Companion to German Pietism, ed. Douglas Shantz (Leiden, 2015), ch. 4. 67 See Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), Appendix 3: ‘Nathan Paget and his Library’.

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were home-grown products of the English Puritan tradition, domestic variants well adapted to the local climate, rather than exotic imports from abroad. The same might be said of English antinomianism. David Como’s study finds two major varieties, the imputative version (which taught that Christ’s perfect obedience was imputed to the believer), and the perfectionist version (teaching that believers could be inwardly perfected under the influence of the spirit and through mystical union with God). Both versions had previously emerged within Europe’s Radical Reformation, one taking its cues from a reading of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the other drawing on Hendrik Niclaes and German mystical tradition. But in England they were generated from within English Puritanism. Como, like Geoffrey Nuttall, does not deny that foreign influences had some role in fostering this development, yet he follows Nuttall in adopting a ‘structural approach’ to the origins of English radicalism. Radical Puritanism was the product of structural tensions, tendencies, and potentialities within mainstream Puritanism. Moderate Puritans sought to maintain a careful balance between law and grace, word and spirit, sacrament and spontaneity, clericalism and lay participation, tradition and primitivism; but this was somewhat precarious, and easily upset. There was, writes Como, ‘a deep structural instability within Puritanism itself ’.68 Baptists, Quakers, and even anti-Trinitarians did not require external inspiration from the European Radical Reformation in order to reinvent some of its characteristic positions. Heresiographers presented the fragmentation of Puritanism as an action replay of Europe’s Anabaptist nightmare; historians need to acknowledge both the wider Radical Reformation tradition and the peculiarities of the English Puritan context.69 Nevertheless, if England’s Radical Reformation was largely home-grown rather than imported, and if it had its own national distinctiveness, it was no less of a Radical Reformation. English Puritanism had intensified tensions and tendencies inherent within Protestantism itself, and the English Civil War released potentialities which had been held in check in previous decades and in other Reformed churches (including the Scottish Kirk). Established order was replaced by political and military upheaval, a church settlement by a quest for further reformation, censorship by an explosion of pamphleteering, persecution with the protection and patronage of the New Model Army, clerical control by lay initiative. In this new climate, there was a luxuriant growth of radical Protestantism. Calling for an eschatological restoration of primitive Christianity, radical Puritans (like their sixteenth-century counterparts) assailed infant baptism, external forms, even the doctrine of the Trinity. While England’s Calvinistic Baptists may have rejected Mennonite views on war, oaths, Christology and soteriology, that was hardly enough to reassure their numerous critics. As Como observes, 68 Como, Blown by the Spirit, pp. 20–24, quotations at pp. 22, 131. See also David Como, Radical Puritanism, in: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds John Coffey and Paul Lim (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 241–58; and Peter Lake, Introduction, in: Nuttall, The Holy Spirit, pp. ix–xxv. 69 For a model of how this might be done see Ariel Hessayon, Gerard Winstanley, Radical Reformer, in: Varieties of Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century Radicalism in Context, ch. 4.

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‘the extremity of the Anabaptist turn should not be underestimated, involving as it did a decision to repudiate not merely the English church, but centuries of Christian tradition and one of the most critical rituals of the early modern social fabric’.70 Yet despite its extremity, radical Protestantism thrived. By 1660, there were perhaps 25,000 Baptists gathered in over 250 congregations across the British Isles. Many others had passed through Baptist churches en route to another destination. As for the Quakers, who were even less acceptable to orthodox Protestants, they experienced spectacular growth. In the decade after their birth around 1650, they won as many as 60,000 adherents, one per cent of the total population, with greater concentrations in cities like London and Bristol.71 The success of this Radical Reformation owed everything to the toleration (and even patronage) granted by the dominant Independent faction and the New Model Army. Led by figures like Oliver Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane Jr., the Independent grandees offered shelter to sectaries, shielding them from Presbyterian attack. Cromwell, advised by conservative Congregationalist divines like John Owen, still sought a magisterial reformation and a national confession of faith, but he was anxious not to trample on ‘tender consciences’. Vane, a friend of Milton and Roger Williams, was more emphatically radical in his Protestantism, overtly sympathetic to mysticism and the Baptists, and prepared to speak out against the persecution of John Biddle.72 Only a minority of Independents went this far, and anti-Trinitarian books were burned in the 1650s, though Arminian and Spiritualist works were freely published in what looked to critics like an open market of religious ideas.73 Once Cromwell became Lord Protector, Vane was marginalised, and the regime moved in a more conservative direction. Even so, Presbyterians remained frustrated at how much heterodoxy the regime would tolerate. The Quakers, for all their provocations, enjoyed a measure of protection from army officers and Independent grandees, starting with Cromwell himself.74 The extraordinary lengths to which Independents would go to accommodate Radical Reformation are most evident in the case of the Baptists.75 Numerous Congre70 Como, Radical Puritanism, p. 248. 71 See McGregor and Reay (eds), Radical Religion, pp. 33, 141–42; Hessayon and Finnegan, Introduction, pp. 17–18. 72 On the tensions between Vane and Cromwell as highlighted by John Milton see Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), pp. 241–49. 73 Ariel Hessayon, Incendiary texts: book burning in England, c.1640 – c.1660, in: Cromohs, 12 (2007), pp. 1–25: http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/12_2007/hessayon_incendtexts.html 74 For further reflections on magisterial and radical Reformation in the English Revolution see Coffey, Religion. The best guides to the religious landscape of the 1650s are Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), and Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2012). 75 For what follows see John Coffey, From Marginal to Mainstream: How Anabaptists became Baptists, in: Mirrors and Microscopes: Historical Perceptions of Baptists, ed. Douglas Weaver (­Carlisle, 2015), pp. 1–24.

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gationalist churches operated an open membership policy when it came to baptism, allowing individuals and families to make up their own minds about the vexed question of infant baptism. By the 1650s, Baptistic views were embraced by the President of Cromwell’s Council of State (Henry Lawrence), and the regime’s Latin Secretary (John Milton), as well as by the President of Harvard (Henry Dunster), though he was removed from office due to the less tolerant policy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In sixteenth-century Zurich, Anabaptists had once been sentenced to death by drowning (a punitive re-baptism); in Interregnum England they were welcomed by the Puritan state. Baptist congregations assembled (by official approval) in prestigious public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and Dublin’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.76 Several open-membership Baptists – John Tombes, Henry Jessey and William Packer – sat on the national committee of Triers, who examined candidates for the parish ministry. Baptists were now helping to run the state church, and in 1655, Jessey and Henry Lawrence played an active role in promoting the Whitehall Conference, which debated the readmission of the Jews to England. There were five Baptist MPs in the Nominated Assembly of 1653. For a once persecuted sect, this was indeed a triumph, even if it depended on the hybrid identities of Calvinist Baptists, some of whom were parish clergy. Pilgram Marpeck had once endeavoured to create a moderate ‘civic Anabaptism’ in central Europe; in Cromwellian England, this vision was partially realised. Of course, one might argue that England’s Radical Reformation was a short-lived triumph. The Restoration of 1660 inaugurated an era of reaction and repression, a return to bishops and Anglican hegemony. Sectaries were imprisoned in unprecedented numbers. This was ‘the experience of defeat’.77 Yet a Radical Reformation had been institutionalised by both the Baptists and the Quakers, who for all their anti-formalism never lacked for organisation. Both would survive the Restoration, becoming entrenched as Dissenting denominations, recognised and protected by the ‘Act of Toleration’ in 1689. In the long run, Baptists and Quakers would leave a deep impression on Anglo-American culture, making them one of the English Revolution’s most enduring legacies. Moreover, the writings of Spiritualists and Socinians had found a readership within mainstream English Protestantism. The newly constituted ‘Anglicanism’ of Restoration England was deeply suspicious of enthusiasm and mysticism, but Spiritualist ideas had been absorbed and adapted by divines like the Cambridge Platonists. More strikingly, the anti-Trinitarianism that had flourished among certain radical Puritans would in due course exercise its greatest appeal among members of the established church, including John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Clarke (though the most radical speculations of Locke and Newton remained unpublished). In the eighteenth-­ century Church of England, Arianism and Socinianism would provoke fierce controversy. Radical Reformation had entered the bloodstream of English Protestantism. 76 Ariel Hessayon reminds me that parts of St Paul’s had been used in the 1640s for stabling horses, so we should not exaggerate the prestige of this venue under the Puritans. 77 Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some of his Contemporaries (London, 1984).

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From English Trembleurs to French Inspirés: A Transnational Perspective on the Origins of French Quakerism (1654–1789)

The history of the French Reformation has been almost entirely dominated by the fate of its largest Protestant minority: the Huguenots. The French Wars of Religion, the Fronde, the Edict of Nantes (1598) and its Revocation (1685), and the Huguenot diaspora constitute some of the most important events of the early modern period. Yet Calvin’s homeland was also the scene of other religious communities, movements and experiments worthy of the radical Reformation. Apart from the better known Camisards’ rebellion (1702–1710), few of these movements have been studied except by a handful of French historians. Among such movements were the ‘Inspirés de la Vaunage’, a loosely organised charismatic movement founded in eighteenth-century Languedoc, in the fertile Vaunage valley between Nîmes and Montpellier, south of the Cévennes (see figure 1). The Inspirés, also known as ‘Couflaïres’ in their native Occitan, i. e. ‘Swellers’, a derogatory term to mock their swelling bodies when filled with the Holy Spirit, were mainly based in the village of Congénies. Often conflated with the Camisards owing to their belief in prophecy, the Couflaïres were in reality non-violent, in sharp contrast with the former. They were the forebears of the French Quakers. Much of the historiography of this movement dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has virtually not been revisited until recently.1 Faulty transcriptions and inconsistent referencing based largely on oral history and local memory have inevitably led to the perpetuation of certain myths. This essay reappraises the origins of French Quakerism based on new archival research conducted on both sides of the Channel. It first re-examines the public emergence of the Inspirés and their oral history, before considering the reception of Quakerism in seventeenth-century France. Focusing on the paradigm of non-violent resistance and charismatic preaching, it reveals that Quakerism came to France much earlier than previously assumed and suggests possible ramifications linking them to the Couflaïres. Finally, this article argues that French Quakers manipulated their oral history in order to gain legal recognition on the eve of the French Revolution. 1

Charles Tylor, The Camisards: A Sequel to the Huguenots in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1893), pp. 431–460. Edmond Jaulmes, Les Quakers français, étude historique (Nîmes, 1898). Norman Penney, Life and Letters of Jean de Marsillac, in: The Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 15/2 (1918), pp. 49–56. Henry van Etten, Chronique de la vie Quaker française, de 1750 à 1938 (Paris, 1938).

Figure 1: Jean-Baptiste Nolin, Le Diocèse de l’eveché de Nismes (Paris, 1698). Bibliothèque Nationale de France.CPL GE DD–2987 (354).

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From English Trembleurs to French Inspirés227

Public Emergence of the French Quakers It was by pure chance that French Quakers first came to public attention early in 1785. In the aftermath of the American War of Independence (1775–1783), the Quaker shipowner Joseph Fox of Falmouth had his son, Dr Edward Long Fox, place an advertisement in the Gazette de France on 24 February 1785 to condemn the looting of French ships by his own privateers as contrary to Quaker principles. He had found himself ‘inevitably concerned in (sic) some privateers which his partners would fit out during the late war, notwithstanding all his remonstrations and opposition, and having received his share of the profits’ he sent his son to Paris to offer financial compensation to the victims. The announcement was read in Congénies, a small village in the Vaunage, where five people replied to Fox on 1 April, not to claim compensation, but to express their admiration for the Quaker’s pacific beliefs and political neutrality. The letter was written by ‘the Quakers of Congénies, Calvisson etc to the virtuous Mr Fox’ to inform him of the existence of a small, isolated community of Friends of some 100 people living in a fraternal spirit according to their Inner Light.2 They also claimed to be great admirers of the work of William Penn and stated that they were ‘the Objects of the hatred, and contempt of the Catholicks & Protestants’, but ‘rejoice[d] in being hated and despised for the Name of Christ who foretold such things’.3 Fox responded favorably and with great surprise to these French Quakers and inquired about their origins. In November 1785, the Friends of Congénies sent Jean de Marcillac-Lecointe, a former Huguenot officer who had renounced warfare, to represent them before the London Quakers and to instruct them about their community. Central to their beliefs was the Inner Light principle enabling every man [and woman] to worship God without temples, rituals or priests; silent worship to purify and regenerate the soul; preaching allowed only when inspired by the Holy Spirit; the rejection of social hierarchies, swearing oaths and taking up arms; and the need to wear simple clothing. The French Quakers also held an assembly on the first Sunday of the month; they had one meeting house in Congénies and another in SaintGilles, amounting to some 300 Friends in total. Marcillac returned to Congénies after a month, in January 1786.4 From that date onward, the Friends in Congénies worked to establish closer connections with their British coreligionists. Several Quakers visited them two years later and, with their financial support, the Société des Amis de Congénies was founded in France in May 1788.5

2 3 4 5

Library of the Society of Friends, London (LSF), Ms Vol. 314, nos 7–8. LSF, Ms Box 5/21/3. LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 8. LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 5. LSF, Ms Vol. 314, nos 18–24.

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Established Genealogy Such striking similarities between the Friends in Congénies and the Society of Friends in England and the ease with which the former joined the Quaker movement cannot but raise an obvious question: could a forgotten Quaker community have existed in southern France unbeknownst to the outside world? One has to go back to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in order to answer this question, for the Couflaïres claimed in 1785 that their movement was already one century old and even argued that there had already been a sizable community of Quakers in Languedoc before 1685.6 It is true that Languedoc, and the Cévennes mountains in particular, had seen numerous heresies since the Middle Ages that earned the region a reputation for heterodoxy. As Huguenot ministers fled into exile in the weeks following the Revocation, charismatic lay preachers rapidly emerged in the region to replace them. The destruction of Protestant temples forced them to hold clandestine assemblies in the Désert – the Wilderness –, which typically attracted hundreds of people at a time.7 The teenage shepherdess Isabeau Vincent of Crest, in Dauphiné, achieved some fame, in 1688, as far away as England and the Dutch Republic for prophesying in her sleep and speaking in tongues, but it was François Vivens and Claude Brousson who best embodied the two ideological responses to religious persecution in this period.8 The former, a twenty-six-year-old wool-carder, fomented armed rebellions from 1686 until he was killed six years later.9 Brousson, by contrast, was a lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse and an early advocate of civil disobedience – a circumstance which forced him to flee into exile from 1683 to 1689. During this period he toured Europe (Switzerland, Württemberg, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Hanseatic cities and the Dutch Republic) to raise political support for the French Protestant cause. Upon his return, he preached non-violence and martyrdom as a divine trial across southern France and became the leading voice of the Huguenot resistance after Vivens’s death in 1692. But Brousson was forced into exile a second time (between 1693 and 1698) and met leading Pietist figures such as Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf and Friedrich Breckling, both of whom counted him among the greatest preachers of their generation.10   6 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 11. ­  7 W. Gregory Monahan, Let God Arise: The War and Rebellion of the Camisards (Oxford, 2014), pp. 7–20. Jeanne-Henriette Louis, The ‘Desert’ Society in Languedoc (1686–1704) as Popular Culture and the Roots of French Quakerism, in: Quaker Studies 9/1 (2004), pp. 54–67, here pp. 54–57.   8 Pierre Jurieu, The Reflections of the reverend and learned Monsieur Jurieu, upon the strange and miraculous exstasies of Isabel Vincent, the shepardess of Saov in Dauphiné (London, 1689). Anon. A Relation of Several Hundreds of Children and others (of Dauphiné) that Prophesie and Preach in their Sleep (London, 1689).   9 Monahan, Let God Arise, pp. 25–27, 32–35, 42–45. 10 Francke Historical Library, Halle, H C144a, nos 34, 37. Forschungsbibliothek Gotha (FbG), Chart. A 306, fols 194–195. FbG, Chart. A 310, fol. 14. Walter C. Utt and Brian Eugene Strayer, The Bellicose Dove: Claude Brousson and Protestant Resistance to Louis XIV, 1647–1698 (Brighton, 2003).

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He also met the Presbyterian minister John Quick in London in 1694, who was so impressed by Brousson that he wrote a flattering biography of the Huguenot preacher six years later.11 Brousson’s execution on the wheel in Montpellier in November 1698 was recorded across Europe.12 Yet Brousson’s plea for passive resistance seemed to have died with him, as the Camisards rebelled against Catholic oppression in 1702. These radical Calvinists from the Cévennes mountains formed a ‘military theocracy’, whose leaders were chosen according to their level of inspiration. Their rebellion effectively marked the last French war of religion, a traumatic episode that was to last until 1710, but the legacy of which remained in everyone’s mind throughout the eighteenth century.13 It was precisely this memory of religious violence that Marcillac would exploit to plead the cause of the Couflaïres on the eve of the French Revolution. It seems particularly striking in this context of extreme persecution and violence that the Congénies Friends never mentioned Brousson when tracing their genealogy of pacifism, even though he was known to have preached in Congénies in June 1693.14 They referred instead to lesser-known – if not mythical – figures of the Protestant resistance as part of their oral history. Accordingly, the first French Quaker was one Claude Craistan, who was arrested for preaching under inspiration in a field and was executed in December 1698, only five weeks after Brousson. Another Friend named Kamaini was likewise sentenced to be hanged on 27 December 1698, but managed to escape from prison with the help of his followers.15 Regrettably, nothing is known about either Craistan or Kamaini, nor is there any evidence that they ever existed. Local Catholic sources, by contrast, blamed one Gras for spreading ‘Enthusiasm throughout the Vaunage’ in 1701.16 Of all the early French Quakers listed in the Congénies papers, only Daniel Raoux or Raoul(x) is known to have prophesied in the region in 1701 at the dawn of the Camisards’ revolt. This charismatic, illiterate ploughman and his friend Flottier were both allegedly inspired by the Holy Spirit. They were imprisoned, supposedly on 3 March 1702, for instilling fanaticism amongst the younger generation, an accusation that indicates Raoux’s spiritual authority in the region, for which he was eventually executed in 1703. On 7 January 1703, during his imprisonment, Raoux is said to have dictated a letter to Flottier in which he publicly condemned the Camisards’ armed rebellion as fundamentally anti-Christian: 11 Alan C. Clifford, Reformed Pastoral Theology Under the Cross: John Quick and Claude Brousson, in: The Evangelical Quarterly 66/4 (1994), pp. 291–306. 12 FbG, Chart. A 310, fol. 15. Monahan, Let God Arise, p. 46. 13 Monahan, Let God Arise. 14 Jean Marc Roger, Les ‘Couflaïres’ de la Vaunage: Identité et Racines, in: Mémoires de l’Académie de Nîmes LXXVI (Nîmes, 2003), p. 260. 15 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 5. 16 Jean-Baptiste Louvreleul, The History of the Rise and Downfal [sic] of the Camisars (London, 1709), pp. 26–27.

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We are informed by public & undoubted report that you have incendiaries amongst you & murderers […]. We learn by all accounts that you suffer among you […] mad blasphemers who are daring enough to pretend they are inspired by the Holy Spirit […] that you run about at night wth fire & sword, murdering people asleep & burning their houses, so that in the morning nothing is to be seen but ruined dwellings & blood spilt without pity. […] We […] disown you in your criminal actions & declare we have never known you as brethren; but by the inward influence of the Holy Spirit we are moved to blame your violence & crimes, & to exhort you to forsake them – to suffer patiently, & to recollect that the supreme Being has sent us this Scourge to try our faith & manifest his power & Glory even in the midst of Idolatry. Endeavor therefore to train liberty of conscience by a holy life, free from murders & crimes & not by the works of darkness wch you are committing.17

For centuries, Raoux’s letter was considered fundamental in defining the ideological differences that separated the Friends from the Camisards when both were suffering persecution at the same time and in the same region. A concluding annotation stating ‘this letter from the Friends made the Protestants more moderate & less sanguinary than before’ suggests how the Couflaïres claimed a century-long tradition of political loyalty toward their temporal ruler. This narrative would become the cornerstone of Marcillac’s plea for the recognition of Congénies in the Edict of Versailles in 1787 and before the National Assembly two years later. Historians of French Quakerism have until recently taken Raoux’s letter at face value, but its chronology reveals in fact a forged genealogy – one that may be ascribed to Marcillac himself. As Jean Marc Roger has now demonstrated, Raoux was executed in 1701, not 1703, that is before the Camisards’ rebellion.18 This is further substantiated by other factual errors relating to this traumatic period: first because the Inspirés claimed that Marshal de Montrevel had forced the Camisard Jean Cavalier to capitulate, when in reality it was his successor, Marshal de Villars who made peace with the rebels’ leader in May 1704.19 Second, because the conflict actually intensified in 1703–1704 and continued sporadically until 1710, which disproves the impact that Raoux’s alleged letter is supposed to have had on the rebels. In short, Raoux’s letter to the Camisards was nothing but an apocryphal attempt to position the Congénies Friends as longtime loyal subjects defined by their belief in non-violence.

The Reception of Quakerism in France The French reception of Quakerism is almost as old as the Society of Friends itself. The earliest French account of the English Quakers that I have been able to find was 17 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 3. 18 Roger, Les ‘Couflaïres’ de la Vaunage, p. 277. 19 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 5.

From English Trembleurs to French Inspirés231

published in Théophraste Renaudot’s Gazette de Paris in February 1655.20 The term ‘Quaker’, also spelt ‘Quakres’ or ‘Couacres’ or in its translation ‘Trembleurs’, subsequently appeared in French dictionaries to define an ecstatic sect from England. But the Quakers were also eager to address the outside world directly. In 1655, George Fox published A Tous ceulx qui vouldroyent cognoistre la voye au Royaume, possibly the first Quaker work to appear in French. Many more followed, including James Parnell’s L’Espreuve de la Foy (1660), Penn’s La Clef, pour ouvrir la voye à quiconque à le sens commun: afin de reconnoître la difference qu’il y a entre la religion de ceux qu’on appelle Trembleurs … (1701) and Barclay’s Apologie de la veritable theologie chretienne … pour l’instruction des Étrangers (1701). Furthermore, as the largest Huguenot refuge after 1685, the Low Countries also contributed to French awareness of Quakerism. Huguenots played a prominent part in the Dutch print market, which soon became the center of a francophone battle of pamphlets over Quakerism.21 Exiled theologians and other religious minorities seeking to distance themselves from the Society of Friends, such as the Jansenist Pierre Nicole and the mystic Antoinette Bourignon, were among the first to decry the spread of Quakerism to the Dutch Republic in the 1680s. In contrast, the French tolerationist Noël Aubert de Versé wrote favorably of them in his Protestant pacifique (Amsterdam, 1684). The first history of the Quakers to appear in French, by Philippe Naudé, was published in 1692.22 All of these works, however, referred to the Quakers in England and the Dutch Republic and targeted primarily an exiled Huguenot readership. They did not give any indication that Friends had reached France, nor is there any evidence that these works were being read in Languedoc. The exiled theologian in Rotterdam Pierre Jurieu, by contrast, was an influential figure of the Huguenot resistance. His works circulated widely, albeit clandestinely, across southern France and on several occasions denounced the Quakers as a fanatical sect.23 One of his most vociferous critics, David Augustin de Brueys of Montpellier, accused Jurieu of instilling fanaticism in the Protestants of southern France, whom he compared to the thousands of sectarians to be observed in England ‘under the name of Quakers or Trembleurs’.24 It seems almost certain, in light of such polemical literature, that the Huguenots of Languedoc and the Dauphiné knew about Quakerism before 1700. 20 Recueil des Gazettes nouvelles ordinaires et extraordinaires (Paris, 1656), pp. 157–158 (12 Feb. 1655). 21 See David van der Linden, Experiencing Exile: Huguenot Refugees in the Dutch Republic, 1680– 1700 (Farnham, 2015). Marion Brétéché, Les Compagnons de Mercure: Journalisme et politique dans l’Europe de Louis XIV (Ceyzérieux, 2015). 22 Pierre Nicole, Les Imaginaires: ou Lettres sur l’heresie imaginaire (Liege, 1667), pp. 29, 35, 90. Antoinette Bourignon, Avertissement … contre la secte des Trembleurs (Amsterdam, 1682). Philippe Naudé, Histoire abrégée de la naissance et du progrez du Kouakérisme (Cologne, 1692). 23 Pierre Jurieu, Histoire du Calvinisme & celle du Papisme mises en parallele (Rotterdam, 1683), vol. 1, pp. 245–246. Jurieu, Le Vray système de l’Eglise et la véritable analyse de la foy (Dordrecht, 1686), p. 260. 24 David Augustin de Brueys, Histoire du fanatisme de nostre temps (Paris, 1692), p. 26.

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Figure 2: [s.n.] L’Assemblée des Couacres (18th century), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Hennin, 6734.

In fact, France’s interest in Quakerism predates Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734), in which the philosophe famously described his encounter with the Friends in London. As foreign news reports and polemical literature continued to grow, the French readership had become familiar with Quakerism in the early 1700s [Figure 2], enough to use it as a smear word against homegrown charismatic movements. The outbreak of the Convulsionaries of St. Médard in the late 1720s provided playwrights with an opportunity to deride them as ‘les Quakres François’ or ‘nouveaux Trembleurs’.25 Although the use of the term ‘Trembleurs’ is clearly misleading here, an extensive account of the real Society of Friends by the Jesuit priest François Catrou also appeared in Paris at the same time.26 25 Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, Les Quakres François, Ou Les Nouveaux Trembleurs: Comédie (Utrecht, 1732). 26 François Catrou, Histoire Des Trembleurs (Paris, 1733).

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Connections between English Quakers and Huguenots can be traced back to the mid-seventeenth century. Before joining the Friends, William Penn had studied at the Protestant Academy in Saumur under the celebrated Huguenot theologian Moïse Amyrault in 1662–1664.27 Penn’s later correspondence reveals his concern about the persecution of the Huguenots in France. In a letter dated 25 October 1685, addressed to the Councillor of Pennsylvania James Harrison, Penn reacted with shock to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: In france, not a meeting of Protestants left. they force all by not suffering them to sleep to conform. they use drums or fling water on the drowzy, till they submitt or run mad, they pray to be kill’d, but the K[ing]. has order’d his dragoons; that are his Inquisitors & converters, to do any thing but kill & Ravish. such as fly & are caught, are executed or sent to the Gallys to row. thus they use all qualitys from dukes & dutchesses to the meanest of that way. many, & much wealth, will visitt your parts. be wise, weighty, kind & strict agst loosness; beleive me it is an extreordinary day, such as has not been since generations agoe. read this to weighty Fr[ien]ds & Magistrates in privat, & Gird up your Loyns & serve the Lord in this Juncture. no matter in wt part they settle in our country [Pennsylvania], lett not temporall interest sway: on my land or theirs that have bought of me, no matter; the publick will gett in a while by their establishmt.28

Penn was actively recruiting European immigrants to his eponymous colony at the time with the help of fellow Quakers such as John Bellers or the Rotterdam merchant Benjamin Furly.29 In April 1686, he was ‘sending 60 fam[ily]s by the next [ship], most french venerons [vignerons], fitt for our Country’.30 These Huguenots winegrowers came from Languedoc and Poitou, fueling Penn’s hopes to plant ‘hundreds of vinyards’ to stimulate Pennsylvania’s economy.31 More importantly for our purposes, there is also hard evidence that English Quakers travelled through France in the seventeenth century. Oddly enough, historians of the Vaunage have systematically dismissed this possibility. Yet, if English Quakers

27 Jeanne-Henriette Louis, Relations transatlantiques et transmanche entre Réformés et Quakers francophones du XVIIème au XXème siècles, in: Actes Du 2me Colloque 16–18 Octobre 2009: Relations entre Quakers et Réformés francophones à travers les siècles (Congénies, 2009), pp. 16–19. 28 The Papers of William Penn, eds Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn (Philadelphia, PA, 1986), III, pp. 65–66. 29 The Papers of William Penn, II, p. 108. William Penn, Benjamin Furly and Thomas Paskell, Recüeil de diverses pieces, concernant la Pensylvanie (La Haye, 1684). Richard Blome, L’Amérique Angloise, ou description des isles et terres du Roi d’Angleterre, dans l’Amérique (Amsterdam, 1688). John Ormerod Greenwood, Friends and Relief: A Study of Two Centuries of Quaker Activity in the Relief of Suffering Caused by War or Natural Calamity (York, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 1–2. 30 The Papers of William Penn, III, p. 85. 31 The Papers of William Penn, II, pp. 285–287, 395, 470–471, 641, and III, 3, pp. 37, 138.

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were already present in Holland, Germany, Italy and indeed across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, why not in France?32 The earliest documented account of Quakers in France dates back to September 1654, when Christopher Atkinson and two women were reported to have crossed the Channel on a mission.33 In June 1655, William Caton and Edward Burrough reached Calais and Dunkirk before continuing their journey to Holland. Christopher Birkhead, an English shipwright from Bristol, was arrested at La Rochelle on 18 July 1656 ‘for having dogmatised and preached a new religion and pretended doctrine’ in the region. Birkhead refused to swear an oath or take off his hat during his interrogation, and declared he belonged to those mocked in England as ‘trembleurs ou quaquers’.34 In early December of the same year, ‘ONE of James Nayler’s disciples, having attained to some knowledge in the French tongue, went over into France to a city called Burdeaux’ [Bordeaux], where he disrupted a Huguenot service and publicly accused its minister of imposture.35 His name was William Bayly, one of the 22 Quakers imprisoned with Nayler in Exeter in the previous summer before the latter notoriously impersonated Christ in Bristol on 24 October 1656. Bayly may have performed the same in Bordeaux and, while conflicting reports survive about his ultimate fate, the city governor ‘caused some six or seven, who had been infected with [Bayly’s] doctrine, to be whipped through the streets’.36 According to the Jesuit priest Catrou, Bayly was presumed to have traveled to the Cévennes and introduced Quakerism in the region, before marrying Mary Fisher upon her return from Constantinople in 1662.37 Whether or not Bayly ever reached Languedoc and found an audience there requires further investigation, but the Huguenot writer Jean-Frédéric Bernard noted

32 Sylvia Stevens, Travelling Ministry, in: The Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, eds Stephen Ward Angell and Pink Dandelion (Oxford, 2013), pp. 292–299. Sünne Juterczenka, Über Gott und die Welt: Endzeitvisionen, Reformdebatten und die Europäische Quäkermission in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2008). 33 Stefano Villani, Tremolanti E Papisti: Missioni Quacchere Nell’Italia Del Seicento (Roma, 1996), p. 20. 34 Bibliothèque Municipale de Grenoble (BMG), France, Ms 1669. Later accounts all give 1657 as the year of Birkhead’s trial, but the date 1656 is clearly stated three times in the original transcript. I am indebted to Ariel Hessayon for pointing at this manuscript and to Corinne Denoyelle for digitising it. 35 Anon., The Grand Impostor Examined: Or, the Life, Tryal and Examination of James Nayler (London, 1656), p. 36. William Greaves, Status Ecclesiæ Gallicanæ: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of France (London, 1676), p. 172. 36 John Towill Rutt (ed.), Diary, of Thomas Burton, Esq. Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell From 1656 to 1659 (London, 1828), vol. 1, p. 98. Anon., The Grand Impostor Examined, p. 38. 37 Catrou, Histoire des Trembleurs, pp. 220, 223. Stefano Villani, Fisher, Mary (c.1623–1698), in: ODNB online (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9505, accessed 27/06/16). Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY, 2011), pp. 101–102, 115.

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that ‘from that time we meet with no other Sect [in France] which bears any Resemblance to Quakerism, except the Prophets of Dauphiné, and Fanaticks of Cevennes’.38 France kept a close eye on this new English heresy. The fact that two manuscript translations of Nayler’s trial were produced within weeks of the English original in December 1656, suggests how much of a perceived threat Quakers already represented to the French authorities.39 And for good reasons since George Fox had promised Quaker support to the Vaudois refugees in Dauphiné in 1656. The following January, two Quakers arrived in Paris claiming to be ambassadors to the Duke of Savoy.40 Four months later, John Harwood and George Bayly, possibly related to William, reached the French capital. They had prior connections among a local ‘Comunitye of Irish & English’ before going to France and Bayly also spoke French. Harwood visited ‘severall Colledges & Religious Houses’ and preached in Charenton. He may have established a Quaker cell in Paris, where he was imprisoned in the Bastille two months after his arrival. George Bayly was arrested on his way to Italy and died in the Bastille in the autumn of 1657, while Harwood was subsequently banished from France. He nevertheless reappeared in Morlaix, Brittany, the following year, where he was imprisoned with another Quaker, William Salt, for two months.41 More Quakers traveled across France in this period. In July 1657, John Perrot was in Lyon with Beatrice Beckley, Mary Prince, Mary Fisher, John Luffe and John Buckley, on their famous mission to Rome and Constantinople to convert the Pope and the ­Sultan.42 In October, Henry Fell escaped from Spain after his ship had been captured on its way from Barbados to London. He travelled ‘through part of France by land to [La] Rochelle’, whence he sailed to Norfolk.43 Several months later, Charles Bayly and Jane Stokes crossed France all the way to Marseilles and reached Genoa, intending to join Perrot in Italy. The latter returned to England through France with Bayly and Stokes in late July 1661 after years of imprisonment. On the way, Bayly was imprisoned in Ault near Dieppe for confronting local priests.44 The Quaker sympathiser William Dundas had settled in nearby Dieppe in 1665, when an English woman dressed in sackcloth and ashes began distributing books, in French, by George Fox and William Dewsbury in the city with her maid. Dundas translated some of the woman’s own writings into 38 Jean-Frédéric Bernard, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World (London, 1737), vol. VI, pp. 130–131. 39 BMG, Ms 1671. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, Ms 5427, fols 93–108. I am grateful to Ariel Hessayon for this reference. 40 Stuart Carroll and Andrew Hopper, A Yorkshireman in the Bastille: John Harwood and the Quaker Mission to Paris, in: Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England, eds Nadine Lewycky and Adam David Morton (Farnham, 2012), pp. 185–212, here p. 191. 41 BMG, Ms 1670. LSF, Ms Vol. 354, fol. 96v. Carroll, Hopper, A Yorkshireman in the Bastille. 42 Nigel Smith, Perrot, John (d. 1665), in: ODNB online (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21987, accessed 27/07/16). 43 LSF, Ms Vol. 351, no. 71. 44 Kenneth Carroll, John Perrot, Early Quaker Schismatic (Friends’ Historical Society, 1971), pp. 30, 47–48.

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French and gave the two women accommodation for the night, for which he ran into trouble with the authorities. The Parliament of Rouen expelled both women back to England and had their books burned on the market place, while Dundas was forced to leave the city. In the months that followed he continued distributing Quaker books in Rouen, Caen and Alençon despite growing hostility from the Huguenot community, and he officially joined the Quakers upon his return to England in 1666.45 Similarly, the Quaker merchant Edward Coxere is known to have traded in northern France during the Second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–1667).46 The Quaker wine merchant William Popple resided in Bordeaux from 1670; he was forced to convert to Catholicism at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but escaped to London in 1688 and became a close companion of Locke and Penn thereafter.47 Other Quakers were actively preaching in France in the same period. In April 1672, four missionaries from Yorkshire – John Watson, William Stubbs, Nathaniel Golden, and Rowland Jenkins– travelled through France on a mission to Rome and Constantinople. In Lyon, ‘the tumultuous spirit began first to exert and shew it self to the French Nation.’ Stubbs disrupted a Mass in St John’s cathedral and was immediately confined to a madhouse. Three English gentlemen pleaded his case before the Archbishop of Lyon a week later. They ‘represented to his Grace […] that he was not a mad-man but one of those Sectarians which in England are called Phanaticks and Quakers’, whereupon Stubbs and his fellow missionaries were ordered to leave Lyon within two days.48 Ester Biddle likewise led a mission to France in 1694–95, where she implored Louis XIV to make peace with William III.49 The Norwegian Quaker Christopher Meidel, who had been held successively in Pont and St Lys, exhorted Parisians to repent of their sins as he was brought, chained together with other prisoners, to the Grand Châtelet in August 1708.50 Lastly, an undated letter from the eighteenth century reports that Quaker missionaries visited a lonely lady ‘in Languedoc near the City of Macon’, who claimed that ‘the Lord was her Husband’.51 At least 34 Quakers are now known to have visited France, most of them to preach, by the early eighteenth century. Whether Quaker cells existed there beyond the confirmed audiences of Birkhead, Bayly and Harwood is difficult to say. Paris 45 William Sewel, The History of the Rise, Increase and Progress, of the Christian People Called Quakers (Burlington, New-Jersey, 1774), pp. 519–521. 46 Bernard Capp, Coxere, Edward (bap. 1633, d. 1694), in: ODNB online (http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/64878, accessed 27 July 2016). 47 The Papers of William Penn, III, p. 520. 48 Elias Wilson, Strange and Wonderful News From Italy, Or, A True And Impartial Relation of the Travels, Adventures, and Martyrdome of Four Eminent Quakers of York-shire Who in the Year 1672 Travelled Through France, Italy, and Turkey to Propagate Their Religion (London, 1673), pp. 1–3. 49 Bernard, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs, pp. 130–131, note c. Lydia Rickman, Esther Biddle and Her Mission to Louis XIV, in: Journal of Friends’ Historical Society XLVII (1955), pp. 38–45. 50 Henry Cadbury, Christopher Meidel and the First Norwegian Contacts with Quakerism, in: Harvard Theological Review 34/1 (1941), pp. 7–23, here pp. 20–21. 51 LSF, TEMP MSS 11/4, no. 10.

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in those days was confronted with another, homegrown heresy with the outbreak of the ‘Illuminés’, a term also used synonymously for Quakers in 1656 and the Couflaïres throughout the eighteenth century.52 All three movements present striking similarities. The Illuminés infiltrated Paris around 1640 and soon found a leader in Simon Morin, who held private assemblies in his house. In 1647, Morin published his Pensées de Simon Morin, in which he claimed to embody the Second Coming of Christ and announced the reign of the Holy Spirit on earth. Morin compared the Pope to the Antichrist, prophesied the fall of Rome and called for the establishment of a Universal Church; he condemned all external rituals and preached instead silent worship and the inner testimony of the Holy Ghost to achieve a state of perfection and glory. He also protested against social injustice and called Jews and Illuminés ‘the true Children of God’. Morin was imprisoned several times in the Bastille and the Conciergerie, and even confined in a madhouse, but he was released every time upon abjuring his heterodox views. He and François Davenne published more millenarian works in the 1650s.53 Significantly, the ‘Placard des Illuminés’, hand-dated 1656 in the margin, proclaimed: We are neither of Jansenius, nor of Molina, no more than of Paul, nor Barnaby, nor Cephas: but only of Jesus-Christ, according to the Apostle, seeking the way to remain in the simplicity of the Christian faith, undefiled by the useless modern questions about salvation, according to Saint Paul. [and concluded:] Happy are the pacifists, for they will be called the Children of God.54

The Illuminés continued to meet secretly; they read La Chaine du Hercule gaulois (1651), an ecumenical work that allegedly encouraged sects to return to the Church by the ‘Catholic explanations, made on the memoirs of the late king of England’.55 French authorities estimated their number at over 20,000 in Paris around that time, a blatant exaggeration that only reflects the perceived threat of a growing heresy. On account of Morin’s prediction that Louis XIV must die in order to usher in the reign of the Holy Spirit during the Dauphin’s regency, he was ordered to be burned at the stake on the Place de Grève on 14 March 1663.56 English Catholics and proto-Quietist Illuminés thus coexisted in Paris when the first Quaker missionaries came to the French capital in the 1650s. It should come as no surprise if contemporary accounts saw them as part of the same movement.57

52 53 54 55 56 57

BMG, Ms 1669. Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire Sorbonne (BIS), Paris, MSVC 188, fols 2–15. BIS, MS 1202, no. 3ter. BIS, Ms 1202, no. 2. BIS, Ms 1202, no. 2bis. BIS, Ms 1202, nos 3–3bis. William Griffith, An Exact and True Relation of the Birth and Life of Simon Morin, Who Professed Himself to Be Jesus Christ (London, 1663), p. 6. Nicole, Les Imaginaires, p. 90.

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Non-Violent Charismatic Movements in eighteenth-century France In the eighteenth-century, the Vaunage saw a proliferation of non-violent prophetic movements, literally one per decade within a 20-kilometre radius of Congénies. The first one of these was the Multipliants, who, by rejecting Antoine Court’s restoration of Calvinist orthodoxy in Languedoc, defended a non-violent approach to prophecy after the Camisards’ rebellion. Their movement was founded in Lunel in 1719 by Jean Vesson, himself a Camisard who had recanted, and spread as an underground ecumenical movement across the Vaunage. Unlike the Camisards, the Multipliants consisted primarily of a literate, urban bourgeoisie who seemed indifferent to the ongoing persecution of the Huguenots. They spoke in tongues, recorded their assemblies in writing and allowed charismatic women to preach. They expected the Second Coming of Christ in 1723, but their leaders were suddenly arrested in Montpellier in March of that year. Five of them were subsequently executed, the women were imprisoned for life in the notorious Tour de Constance and other men were sentenced to the galleys.58 The possibility of direct Quaker influence over the Multipliants seems unlikely at first sight. Yet a tract recently discovered in Toulouse reports indeed that ‘des Anabatistes & des Trembleurs’ were arrested together with the Multipliants in 1723. While its content does not provide any formal evidence of Quakers in Languedoc, its title confirms at least a local awareness of the Society of Friends a decade before the beginning of a French fascination for Quakerism.59 Sister Demerez, writing from the Ursuline convent in Nîmes in March and April 1723, reported that similar sects existed not only in nearby Lunel, but also in the central province of Berry, as well as in England and Germany.60 Interestingly, a French traveler visiting London in the mid-seventeenth century had indeed listed both ‘Trembleurs’ and ‘Multiplians’ among ‘Les Religions d’Angleterre’.61 News of an inspired religious movement began to spread around Quissac in 1736. The ‘sect of the New Zion’ assembled around one Isaac Elzière or Auzière, possibly as an offshoot of the Multipliants. Little is known about Elzière. By his own account, he came from a Huguenot background and had traveled to Switzerland, the Low Countries and England. Like Birkhead, Harwood and Morin a century earlier, Elzière adopted a non-denominational discourse by proclaiming:

58 Bibliothèque universitaire de l’Arsenal (SCD Toulouse 1), Resp Pf pl A 0014/6, fol. 4. Daniel Vidal, La Secte Contre Le Prophétisme: Les Multipliants de Montpellier (1719–1723), in: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 37/4 (1982), pp. 801–825. 59 SCD Toulouse 1, Resp Pf pl A 0014/6. 60 Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Ms Français 13957, fols 342–345. 61 Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, Ms 5423, fols 1145–1146. I am grateful to Ariel Hessayon for sharing this information.

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I am neither of the Papist law, nor of the Lutheran law, nor the Calvinist law, nor of any other of those different sects, which are invented and fabricated by the philosophy of men of this kind. But I am of the religion of Jesus-Christ and of his prophets and apostles, and of all those who have been invested with the Holy Spirit, by faith or by prophecy, as were the prophets and apostles and the faithful believers of the past.62

Elzière wrote in defense of the gift of prophecy as characteristic of primitive Christianity. Jean Marc Roger has also pointed out that his anticlerical rhetoric resembled that of the French Prophets thirty years earlier, whose writings he may well have come across during his journey abroad and whose followers remained active on various parts of the continent.63 Significantly, however, a letter addressed by the priest of Quissac to Cardinal Fleury, then France’s chief Minister, reported that ‘their [the New Zionists’] worship is to remain prostrated in contemplation waiting for the revelations of the Holy Spirit’.64 Such practice of course echoed that of the Quakers in England as well as that of other Quietist communities in northern Europe. It also seems consistent with the ecumenical worship of the Multipliants and might suffice, as Pierre Poivre argued, to make Elzière the first theologian of French Quakerism.65 Two further episodes of non-violent prophetism broke out in the Vaunage in subsequent decades. In December 1745, the prophet Maroger was arrested for his fanatical preaching in Nages. According to the minutes of his interrogation, his followers ‘swelled’ under inspiration, thereby giving us the earliest dated account of the Couflaïres. The Consul of Générac accused Elzière, who was evidently still active as a prophet in the valley, of having fomented his fanaticism in Congénies and SaintGilles, precisely the same two villages where the first French Quaker assemblies would be established four decades later.66 Three kilometers away from Congénies, clandestine assemblies were being held somewhere between Junas, Aujargues and Sommières around 1750. Followers allegedly met to celebrate the Last Supper and were explicitly labelled as ‘Couflaïres’ by local Huguenots who sought to distance themselves from their practices. Although this account stems from local oral history and raises more questions than answers, the existence of a non-violent, charismatic community in the Vaunage is now established. In 1770, Gabrielle Dalbos, a disinherited woman from Lunel, challenged her aunt Mazauric’s will on the ground that the latter had bypassed inheritance laws against Protestants to bequeath her estate to a fellow ‘Couflaïre’ named Clavel instead of to

62 Samuel Ribard, Un Inspiré, Isaac Elzière, De Saint-Ambroix, D’après Ses Manuscrits, in: Bulletin Historique Et Littéraire, 40/1 (1891), pp. 365–372, here pp. 368–369. 63 Roger, Les ‘Couflaïres’, p. 271. On the French Prophets, see Lionel Laborie, Enlightening Enthusiasm: Prophecy and Religious Experience in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2015). 64 Roger, Les ‘Couflaïres’, p. 267. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.

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her legitimate niece. The reporter justified his request to the intendant of Languedoc to cancel the will by emphasizing Mazauric’s heretical faith: The Couflaïres derive their name from the sort of orgies they celebrate with a frenzy similar to that of the Bacchae: he or she that presides over, appears to swell prodigiously after some madness, pretends to fall into an ecstatic sleep, struggles persuasively, as if by supernatural impulsions; pretends to reach a superior world and to bring orders from it, which he delivers in the form of an oracle and which often, as it is said, violates divine and human laws as far as the rights of nature and genres.67

Another letter addressed by the sub-delegate of Languedoc Tempié in Nîmes to his intendant on 10 March 1772 confirms the distinctive identity of this community: The fanatical sect that still exists today under the vulgar name of Couflaïres, which may be translated [into French] as Gonfleurs [Swellers], was known towards the end of the last century under the name of Illuminés. But for over fifty years, these people do not appear dangerous, either because they have no leader, or because they pride themselves in being good and faithful servitors of the King, or else because they attend the assemblies of the Nouveaux Convertis [Huguenots] even less than our parishioners and because they do not like Protestants any more than Catholics.68

This rare testimony, what is more from a hostile source, confirms the existence of a non-violent, egalitarian community that had remained loyal to the Crown since at least 1720, when the Multipliants emerged, and even hints at earlier origins, possibly dating back to Simon Morin’s Illuminés. Similarly in August 1784, three years before the Congénies Friends gained national recognition, a scientific report signed by Benjamin Franklin, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and Antoine Lavoisier, among others, referred to the fanatical ‘trembleurs des Cévennes’ as a case of mass contamination of the imagination by animal magnetism. The authors cited the memoirs of Marshall du Villars who, shortly after reaching a truce with the Camisards in 1704, witnessed ‘an entire town [in the Vaunage valley], where all the women & girls, without exception, seemed possessed by the Devil. They quaked and prophesied publicly in the streets.’ Around the same time, a prophetess exhorted M. d’Alais ‘to stop tormenting the true Children of God’, whereupon she began speaking in tongues and was arrested, even though she was allegedly pregnant with ‘the true Saviour of the world’. These eyewitness accounts did not take place up in the Cévennes mountains, but down in the Vaunage valley, presumably in Calvis-

67 Ibid., p. 294. 68 Ibid., p. 295.

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son, just two kilometers from Congénies.69 Taken together, these accounts appear to support Marcillac’s claim of a Vaunage tradition of non-violent charismatic religion. It would be a mistake to regard the Couflaïres as culturally isolated with no foreign contacts prior to 1785. Recent scholarship has revealed the presence of Moravian missionaries in the Cévennes and the Vaunage in the 1740s and 1760s, for example.70 Like Elzière, other southern Huguenots are known to have travelled to northern Europe to join the Quakers. The famous Quaker abolitionist and educator Anthony Benezet (1713–1784) was himself of Huguenot background and his family originated from Congénies and Calvisson. When they migrated from London to Philadelphia in 1731, the Benezets maintained contacts with Europe. Both Anthony and his father JeanEtienne corresponded with the Huguenot printer Prosper Marchand in Rotterdam between 1732 and 1751, for example, and ‘young Benezet arrived safely [in London] from America’ with Moravian missionaries in February 1743.71 Despite the lack of a direct connection with their Vaunage relatives, it is nevertheless striking to find a Jeanne Benezet among the Multipliants in 1722 and seven Benezet families among the Congénies Friends half a century later.72 The first French Quaker to be formally identified as such was Claude Gay. This former Catholic tailor from Lyon is best remembered because of his encounter with Voltaire and his correspondence with Rousseau. He took employment as a tailor in Jersey and converted to Anglicanism in 1731. He joined the local Society of Friends ten years later, after reading Barclay’s Apology and was imprisoned for nine months, then banished to England. Gay settled in London in 1745, and he taught French for a living. Around the same time he began translating about a dozen Quaker works into French, including Penn’s No Cross, No Crown (1669), Rise and Progress (1694) and sections of John Tomkins’s Piety Promoted (1701–1706).73 In 1763, Gay visited the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, and was arrested in Geneva in November of the same year for preaching and holding assemblies. He was evicted from Geneva and was invited by Voltaire to visit him in Ferney early in 1764. The meeting did not go well as Voltaire could not help but mock his guest despite his initial promise and Gay

69 Benjamin Franklin, Majault, Le Roy et al, ‘Magnétisme animal’, in: Journal de médecine, chirurgie et pharmacie LXII (Paris, 1784), pp. 449–534, here pp. 518–522. 70 See Dieter Gembicki and Heidi Gembicki-Achtnich, Le Réveil des Coeurs: Journal de voyage du Frère Morave Fries (1761–1762), (Saintes, 2013). 71 Leiden University Library (UBL), MAR 2, fols no. 1–9. Moravian Church House, London (MCH), Ms C/36/7/1, fol. 68. 72 Bernard Douzil, The Vaunageole and Cévenole Roots of Anthony Benezet, in: The Atlantic World of Anthony Benezet (1713–1784), eds Marie-Jeanne Rossignol and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Leiden, 2016), pp. 7–22. Vidal, La Secte Contre Le Prophétisme, p. 813. LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 75. 73 William Penn, Point de croix, point de couronne (Bristol, 1746). Penn, Exposition succincte de l’origine et du progrès de peuple, qu’on appelle les Quakers, ou, les Trembleurs (London, 1764). John Tomkins, Piety Promoted: Ou, La Pieté Promuë, Ou Avancée (London, 1770).

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was forced to leave.74 He protested around the same time against Rousseau’s claim in Émile (1762) that man was naturally benevolent and emphasised instead the need for an individual savior. Gay returned to Jersey in 1775 to revive the dying local Quaker assembly. He returned to England thereafter and died in Barking in 1786.75 Gay is nowhere to be found in the Couflaïres’ oral history, unlike Paul Coudognan, another non-violent Inspiré of the Vaunage, who, in 1769, left his homeland by foot to publicise the cause of his community in Holland. It was there that Coudognan first heard of the Quakers and decided to go to London shortly afterwards. He met with John Eliot, an eminent member of the Society of Friends but, being unable to speak English, he failed to maintain lasting contact with the London Quakers. He returned to the Vaunage after a few weeks with a copy of No Cross, No Crown and Rise and Progress, both translated into French, which he introduced to his coreligionists at home.76 Despite the lack of further evidence, it seems somewhat improbable that Coudognan might have spent several months among the London Quakers without meeting his fellow countryman Claude Gay, who was still residing in London at the time and was continuing to translate Quaker works into French. Unlike Gay and Coudognan, Jean de Marcillac-Lecointe successfully established contact with British Quakers and became the architect of their rapprochement with the Couflaïres. Born to a noble Huguenot family near Nîmes sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, Marcillac received military training in his father’s regiment, where he met several high-ranking officers. One of these, the Count of Essec, had met Quakers during the American War of Independence and praised their beliefs and practices. Marcillac began reading about Quakerism and, convinced that Christianity and warfare were incompatible, he deserted the army in 1777. Sometime in the following years he visited the Quakers of Spiegelberg, Lower Saxony, and finally returned to the Vaunage in April 1783 to join the Couflaïres and study medicine in Montpellier.77 Marcillac also spent part of the year on his wife’s estate in Alençon, Normandy, where he met Nicholas Naftel, a Quaker merchant from Guernsey, who would serve as his interpreter during his first mission to London in late 1785.78 He soon learnt English and worked relentlessly to secure the integration of the Couflaïres into the Quaker community. In May 1788, a group of English (John Eliot, Adey Bellamy), Irish (Mary Dudley, Sarah and Robert Grubb) and American (Georges and Sarah Dillwyn) Quakers traveled to the Vaunage. Their visit formally established Congénies as the first French Quaker assembly, with its own school and poor relief fund, and inaugurated decades of transnational cooperation.79 74 Anon., Voltaire and the Quaker, Claude Gay, in: Bulletin of Friends’ Historical Society of Philadelphia 7/1 (1916), pp. 27–30. 75 Etten, Chronique de la vie quaker française, pp. 11–22. 76 Etten, Chronique de la vie quaker française, pp. 190–191. 77 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, nos 5, 49. LSF, Ms Vol. 315, fol. 10. 78 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, nos 10–11. 79 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, nos 18–23, 49.

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The Recognition of French Quakers on the Eve of the French Revolution Although Marcillac was the mastermind of the Couflaïres’ full integration into Quakerism, his greatest achievement was the prior recognition of his community as a distinct religious minority by the French government. This is apparent in the Edict of Versailles, signed by Louis XVI on 7 November 1787 to create a civil register of ‘those who do not profess the Catholic faith’.80 Since 1685, Huguenots had lost all their civil rights and existed only clandestinely, while Jews and Lutherans were allowed to remain in Alsace and Lorraine if they did not worship in public. As religious persecution declined in the 1760s and the need for a legal recognition of a growing clandestine population became pressing, petitions began to urge the French government to create a civil register for its non-Catholic community. Voltaire’s Traité de la Tolérance (1763) and his defence of the Calas and Sirven cases helped support the rights of the Huguenots, as did prominent libertarian figures such as Turgot and Benjamin Franklin. The Marquis de la Fayette likewise pleaded the cause of French Protestants on his return from the American War of Independence in 1785. He introduced the deputy general of the Huguenot community, Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, to the government minister Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who was already favorable to civil marriage for Protestants.81 In the months preceding the edict, Marcillac had petitioned the Count of Vergennes to include the Couflaïres in the edict, addressing him in a typical Quaker fashion with the informal pronoun ‘tu’ instead of the appropriate ‘vous’. Whilst Vergennes responded favorably to his request, Marcillac complained that the Huguenot delegates pressured negotiators to exclude the Couflaïres from the edict, which further confirms the latter’s isolation from the French Protestant community. The Huguenots’ efforts nevertheless failed. Writing from Alençon on 18 February 1788, Marcillac rejoiced that the edict made provisions for those French Protestants living in the south of France who ‘had hitherto been near unknown to the King’ and who were ‘neither Roman Catholic, nor Protestants’.82 Although it maintained existing discriminatory measures and did not reintroduce toleration as such, the edict henceforth allowed marriages, baptisms and burials celebrated outside of the Roman Catholic Church to be recognised and transcribed into a civil register by a judge or priest. It made explicit provision for those sects ‘that do not recognise the necessity of baptism’ in article 25,

80 Edit du Roi, concernant ceux qui ne font pas profession de la religion catholique. Donné à Versailles au mois de novembre 1787 (Lyon, 1788). 81 Hubert Bost, De la Secte à l’église. La Quête de légitimité dans le protestantisme méridional au xviiie siècle, in: Rives Méditerranéennes 10 (2002), pp. 53–68. Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo, Ont., 1991), pp. 197–246, 295–307. 82 LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 16.

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which, still according to Marcillac, persuaded several Dutch families, presumably of French ancestry, to immigrate in Languedoc and set up their manufactures.83

Conclusion A close examination of the Couflaïres’ oral history leaves no room for a traceable genealogy of French Quakerism. As I have shown, much of it turned out to be reconstructed from collective memory for the purpose of presenting the Congénies Friends as anti-Camisards, that is pacific, loyal subjects of the king, worthy of toleration. Still, Marcillac’s propaganda was not entirely fabricated. I have argued, contrary to the existing scholarship, that Languedoc in general, and the Vaunage valley in particular, were not culturally isolated by suggesting that the French reception of Quakerism proved much stronger than previously acknowledged. Quaker missionaries had indeed travelled through France on multiple occasions in the seventeenth century, including to Dauphiné, where prophetism would emerge in 1688. Whether Couflaïres, Trembleurs or Illuminés, a culture of charismatic, non-violent preaching likewise appears to have existed in the Vaunage for most of the eighteenth century, even though the evidence of connections between these various movements remains inconclusive. Nevertheless, the possibility of French Quaker cells before 1700, in light of the evidence presented above, cannot be entirely excluded. As they integrated with Anglo-American Quakers, the Congénies Friends embraced the abolitionist cause during the French Revolution. Marcillac and William and Benjamin Rotch, two American Quakers who had recently moved from Nantucket to Dunkirk, presented a petition for the abolition of slavery to the French National Assembly in 1791, which however was rejected.84 Back in the Vaunage, the Quaker community in Congénies, Saint-Gilles and Fontanes continued to grow for half a century thanks to the financial support of their Anglo-American coreligionists. Although it survived into the early twentieth century, its population declined after the 1830s, when Congénies became the birthplace of yet another religious movement: French Methodism.

83 Edit du Roi, concernant ceux qui ne font pas profession de la religion catholique, pp. 15–16. LSF, Ms Vol. 314, no. 16. 84 Jeanne-Henriette Louis, La Révélation atlantique, in: Politica Hermetica No. 3 (1989), pp. 32–49, here pp. 37–39.

Ulrike Gleixner

Millenarian Practices and the Pietist Empire

Pietism has recently been integrated into the long history of the Protestant Reformation, mostly in the context of the study of religious culture.1 With regard to the subject of the present volume, it would have been easy to consider radicalism and dissent in the Protestant Reformation by focusing on radical Pietist currents. However, I will take another approach. I will explore the transformation of millenarianism from the heterodox concept during the confessional age to the more moderate Pietist version beginning in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This transformation was marked by a developing concept of a positive this-worldly future, and the more moderate millenarianism had a fundamental impact on Lutheran Pietism.2 Of course the more heterodox wing of millenarian thinking was passed on in radical Pietist groups.3 For the purpose of this article, however, I will focus on the millenarian activities of the Pietist overseas mission.

Millenarian transformation Millenarianism, or in the Greek derivation chiliasm, is a global concept. It exists in many religions and different forms even today.4 In medieval and early modern times, Christian millenarianism was one variant of Christian eschatology. It referred to the belief – on the authority of the Book of Revelation (Chapter 20, 4–6) – that after the second coming, Christ would establish a messianic Kingdom on earth and would reign over it for a thousand years until the Last Judgement.5 Variants of this teaching 1 Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA, 2012). 2 Hartmut Lehmann, Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus. Gottesgnadentum und Kriegsnot (Stuttgart, 1980), pp. 131 f.; Wolf-Dietrich Schäufele, Geschichtsbewusstsein und Geschichtsschreibung um 1700, in: Geschichtsbewusstsein und Zukunftserwartung in Pietismus und Erweckungsbewegung, eds Wolfgang Breul and Jan Carsten Schnurr [Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 59, 2013] (Göttingen, 2013), pp. 29–55. 3 Johann Wilhelm and Johanna Eleonora Petersen are two of the most famous millenarian writers. 4 Roland Robertson, Global millennialism: A Postmortem on Secularization, in: Religion, Globalization and Culture, eds Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman [International studies in religion and society, 6, 2007] (Leiden/Boston, 2007) pp. 9–34; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Connected Histories. Notes towards a Refiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, in: Modern Asian Studies, 31, 1997, pp. 735–762. 5 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium, (1st ed. 1957; reprint London, 1970), pp. 13.

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divided along questions of whether crises would necessarily precede the Empire of God; whether Christ’s return would come at the beginning or the end of the thousand-year Kingdom; and whether the Empire of God would spread gradually.6 After the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the concept – often with apocalyptical overtones – changed to more cautious versions in Protestantism. Especially within intellectual and non-conformist circles in England and on the continent, the concept was used to articulate reform programs, for example those advocated by Johann Amos Comenius, Samuel Hartlib, Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke. Pietism was rooted in orthodox Lutheranism, but also drew on traditions from outside. Spener and his Frankfurt circle, for instance, undertook intensive reading of English devotional literature, studying authors such as Lewis Bayly, Daniel Dyke, Joseph Hall and Richard Baxter.7 Impulses from Dutch and German Reformed congregations were also taken up by the Frankfurt circle. The writings of German mystics, Anabaptists, Schwenk­ felders, spiritualists, Paracelsists, and alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to have an impact, through religious discourse, on small circles of de­­ votees, and literature. Philipp Jakob Spener was influenced by mystical spiritualists such as Jean de Labadie and his millenarian thinking. August Hermann Francke and Count Zinzendorf were both influenced by Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) and his central concern for a new birth and inward transformation through Christ. And the Pietist inclusion of female participants in leading roles had already been evident among Schwenkfelders.8 In many respects Pietism was able to appropriate Lutheran traditions. When it came to concepts of eschatology, however, there was a significant break. Until the second half of the seventeenth century, Lutherans placed their hopes for a better future in another world and expected an early end to this one. Whereas Lutheranism located the hoped-for future in the afterworld, the Pietist vision of a better life focused on its realisation on earth. Pietists saw themselves as responsible for its efficient implementation. Philipp Jakob Spener expressed his millenarian views carefully without any apocalyptic references, turning the concept into an expectation of a positive future for 6

Martin Brecht, Chiliasmus in Württemberg im 17. Jahrhundert, in: Chiliasmus in Deutschland und England im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Klaus Deppermann [Pietismus und Neuzeit 14, 1988], pp. 25–49; Hartmut Lehmann, Pietistic Millenarianism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany, in: The Transformation of Political Culture. England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth [Studies of the German Historical Institute London, 1990] (Oxford, 1990), pp. 267–279; Ulrich Gäbler, Geschichte, Gegenwart, Zukunft, in: Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten, ed. Hartmut Lehmann [Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 4, 2004] (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 19–48. 7 Udo Sträter, Sonthom, Bayly, Dyke und Hall. Studien zur Rezeption der englischen Erbauungslite­ ratur in Deutschland im 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1987). 8 Lehmann, Absolutismus, pp. 129 f.; Martin Brecht, Die deutschen Spiritualisten des 17. Jahrhunderts, in: Der Pietismus vom 17. bis zum frühen 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Brecht [Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 1, 1993] (Göttingen, 1993), pp. 205–240; Caroline Gritschke, ‘Via Media’. Spiri­ tualistische Lebenswelten und Konfessionalisierung. Das süddeutsche Schwenckfeldertum im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin 2006); Douglas Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2013), pp. 15–37.

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the church. In his 1675 Pia Desideria, he hoped for church reforms and in addition the conversion of the Jews and the fall of papal Rome.9 Pietists translated millenarian concepts into a practical approach to creating a future society. Social, educational and missionary work would, they believed, realize God’s Empire on earth gradually. Based on this approach, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) and the Halle institutions developed a campaign of ‘universal social reform’.10 With the support of the Prussian court, Francke and his colleagues succeeded in institutionalizing Pietism in Halle, developing the newly established university into a Pietist training centre. The orphanage complex was quickly expanded into a ‘school city’, a campus encompassing various types of schools.11 Self-help, rather than welfare, was supposed to combat poverty. Piety, diligence and personal responsibility were the educational goals. Orphanages and schools on the Halle model developed in the German-speaking lands, in England, in Eastern Europe, in North America and in India. Many of the university graduates influenced by Halle Pietism saw themselves as active ambassadors for the expansion of the Empire of God on earth. In his research, Udo Sträter has described the millenarian framework of Halle. For the activists, the success of the institutions lay in demonstrating that the Empire of God had already been realized there. Halle was the spearhead of God’s expanding Empire on earth.12 Active conversion work would turn more and more sites into islands of God’s Kingdom, which would finally become realized like a patchwork tapestry. Lutheran Pietists understood the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth as a gradual process. In his memorandum Project for a Universal Seminary or the Planting of a Garden (1701)13, August Hermann Francke mentioned his millenarian vision of a global Prot  9 Johannes Wallmann, P. J. Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus (2nd rev. and ext. ed.; Tübingen, 1985), pp. 324 f. 10 Juliane Jacobi, Thomas Müller-Bahlke (eds), ‘Man hatte von ihm gute Hoffnung …’. Das Waisen­ album der Franckeschen Stiftungen 1695–1749 (Tübingen, 1998); Peter Menck, Die Erziehung der Jugend zur Ehre Gottes und zum Nutzen des Nächsten: Die Pädagogik August Hermann Franckes (Tübingen, 2001); Juliane Jacobi (ed.), Zwischen christlicher Tradition und Aufbruch in die Moderne: Das Hallesche Waisenhaus im bildungsgeschichtlichen Kontext (Tübingen, 2007); Holger Zaunstöck, Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke, Claus Veltmann (eds), Die Welt verändern. August Hermann Francke – ein Lebenswerk um 1700 (exhibition catalogue) (Wiesbaden, 2013). 11 These included the German school as a primary school, the Latin school, which prepared students for university, and the Pädagogium regium for the upper classes and nobility. Francke outlined the principles of his innovative educational programme in his pedagogical text Kurzer und einfältiger Unterricht, wie die Kinder zur wahren Gottseligkeit und christlichen Klugheit anzuführen sind (Brief and Simple Instruction in How Children are to be Led to True Godliness and C ­ hristian Wisdom, 1702). 12 Udo Sträter, Der hallische Pietismus zwischen Utopie und Weltgestaltung, in: Interdisziplinäre Pietismusforschung. Beiträge zum Ersten Internationalen Kongress für Pietismusforschung 2001, vol. 1., eds Udo Sträter et al. [Hallesche Forschungen 17,1, 2005] (Tübingen, 2005), p. 32; Udo Sträter, Spener und August Hermann Francke, in: Philipp Jakob Spener – Leben, Werk, Bedeutung. Bilanz der Forschung nach 300 Jahren, ed. Dorothea Wendebourg [Hallesche Forschungen, 23, 2007] (Tübingen, 2007), pp. 89–104. 13 August Hermann Francke, August Hermann Francke’s Project zu einem Seminario Universali oder Anlegung eines Pflanz-Gartens, in welchem man eine reale Verbesserung in allen Ständen in und

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estant mission. He demonstrated his claim for global conversion by defining the mission field in and outside Europe. This was one of the first times in Lutheranism that a mission outside Europe was proclaimed in public. Especially after China opened up to Jesuit missionizing in 1692, Protestant scholars were committed to the imperative of a Protestant mission. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s enthusiasm regarding the opening up of China was accompanied, for example, by grave concern about the growing spiritual and scholarly influence of Catholicism. In his letters to Francke, Leibnitz advocated the setting up of a Protestant mission outside Europe.14

Millenarian practices The realization of a new society required daily practical commitment. Not only was ‘the spread of the Empire’ omnipresent in Pietist communications; the vibrant, almost breathless, activity of the organizers was also proof of the project’s millenarian basis. To be sure, using the term ‘Empire of God’ in letters, networking and journal reporting is not in itself millenarian. But the overall effect of these efforts points to an intentional millenarian perspective. For me the most surprising conclusion is that not only were the mission organizers acting within a millenarian context, but that the mission supporters and donors were also involved in the millenarian project. The millenarian activities of the Halle network are my focus in this essay. The Halle orphanage operated on a local, regional and global basis simultaneously. The realization of the Christian Empire started outside the city walls of Halle and was executed in other places in Germany and was then directed finally at the harbor colony of Tranquebar in South-East India. The expansive concept resulted in four strategic concerns: (1) Transnational organization (2) Building up a support network (3) Medialisation of the mission (4) Transcultural practices in the contact zone außerhalb Deutschlands, ja in Europa und allen übrigen Theilen der Welt zu gewarten, in: Viro illustrissimo Humanissimo Friderico Augusto Eckstein Philosophiae Doctori Scholae Thomanae Lipsiensis Rectori … (Halle, 1881), pp. 9–24. 14 Gerda Utermöhlen, Die Rußlandthematik im Briefwechsel zwischen August Hermann Francke und Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in: Halle und Osteuropa. Zur europäischen Ausstrahlung des hallischen Pietismus, ed. Johannes Wallmann (Tübingen, 1998), pp. 109–128; Wenchao Li: Leibnizens Plan einer protestantischen Mission in China, in: Neuzeitliches Denken. Festschrift für Hans Poser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Günter Abel (Berlin, 2002), pp. 251–266; Thomas Fuchs, Aufbruch in fremde Welten. Die Formierung der protestantischen Missionsbewegung im 18. Jahrhundert, in: Das eine Europa und die Vielfalt der Kulturen. Kulturtransfer in Europa 1500–1850, eds Thomas Fuchs, Sven Trakulhun [Aufklärung und Europa, 12, 2003] (Berlin, 2003), pp. 185–204.

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Figure 1: Guillaume de L’Isle: Peninsula Indiae citra Gangem, hoc est Orae celeberrimae Malabar & Coromandel Cum adiacente Insula non minus celebratissima Ceylon. Secundum prototypon Del’Islianum edita, insuperq[ue] novissimis Observationibus correcta, et notatis, quae cuivis genti Europaeae possidentur, terris et emporiis aucta. Nuremberg 1733. Herzog August Bibliothek ­Wolfenbüttel, K 23,30a – D75.

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Transnational organization The Danish Halle mission was a transnational and transconfessional undertaking among Lutherans, Pietists and Anglicans. It went to southeastern India, started in 1706 and lasted until 1845. The mission was founded on the southeastern coast of India, in the Danish trading colony of Tranquebar – today Taragambadi, part of the federal state of Tamil Nadu.15 It was initiated by Frederick IV of Denmark and maintained by a committee of the Danish royal court, the London ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)’ and the Halle Orphanage in Germany. Within this trilateral network, the organizers had different responsibilities. The Danish crown held the colonial trading post, paid the missionaries’ salaries and ran a steering committee of high-ranking officials. The SPCK in London provided money, material support and promoted the project in England. The third player, Halle, educated the missionaries, established a wide network of financial supporters in the German-speaking Protestant lands and edited the mission journal. In southeastern India, the mission was based on a network of churches, schools, and charitable institutions.16 The trilateral organizers communicated via correspondence. Building a Supporting Network The Halle Orphanage built up a network of supporters in the Holy Roman Empire via letters and a constant flow of information. Francke during the later years of his life, and, after his death in 1727, much more intensively his son Gotthilf August Francke (1696–1769) established a network of middle-class and aristocratic female and male 15 The colonial pattern in Tranquebar was that of a typical European trading port in India before the British Raj. The Danish East India Company leased the colony from the king of Thanjavur for an annual rent. The colony covered an area of 40 square kilometers. It consisted of the town of Tranquebar on the coast of the Bay of Bengal and 15 inland villages. The mission was part of a broader colonial system, but it was not directly connected with the Danish political authority in Tranquebar. The jurisdiction over the Indian residents in the colony remained with the king of Thanjavur. The Europeans in the Danish colony were under the authority of the Danish governor, installed by the directors of the East India Company in Copenhagen. The mission itself was neither connected with the East India Company nor the Danish State Church, but only with the Danish court. 16 Johannes Ferdinand Fenger, Geschichte der Trankebarschen Mission (Grimma, 1845); Daniel L. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England. Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge [Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 29, 1993] (Göttingen, 1993); Harald Nielsen, The Danish Missionary Society and Tranquebar, in: It began in Copenhagen. Junctions in 300 years of Indian-Danish relations in Christian Mission, eds. George Oommen, Hans Raun Iversen, (Delhi, 2005), pp. 181–203; Geliebtes Europa ‒ Ostindische Welt. 300 Jahre interkultureller Dialog im Spiegel der Dänisch-Halleschen Mission. Jahresausstellung der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle vom 7. Mai– 3. Oktober 2006 (exhibition catalogue), ed. Heike Liebau (Halle, 2006); Heike Liebau, Das Hallesche Waisenhaus und die Tranquebarmission, in: Europäische Aufklärung und protestantische Mission in Indien, ed. Michael Mann (Heidelberg, 2006), pp. 125–142; Andreas Gross, Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, and Heike Liebau eds, Halle and the Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India. Vol. 3 (Halle, 2006).

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supporters. A mission journal was sent to potential supporters, accompanied by a letter. Most of the recipients answered and sent money to Halle and in turn recruited other interested individuals. Regular correspondence and the journal established the network connections. Two examples will serve to illustrate the practical networking: Maria Magdalena Böhmer (1669–1743), who lived in Hanover, was a poet of sacred hymns. She came from a family of wealthy lawyers. Her brother Justus Henning Böhmer was Professor of Law and President of the Halle University and Chancellor of the Duchy of Magdeburg. The brother and sister read the mission journal and donated regularly to the Indian mission and to other Pietist projects. Furthermore, Maria Magdalena Böhmer established a support group in Hanover. The middle class involved in the mission project consisted mostly of academics, city notables and merchants. The upper clergy formed another strong group of supporters. The court preacher Friedrich Wilhelm Berchelmann (1679–1754) in Darmstadt kept in close contact with Halle as a result of his time as a student at the Pädagogicum and later at the University of Halle. At the court of Darmstadt, he collected money for the mission and was the distributor of the missionary magazine. He also campaigned for support of the Salzburg exiles and initiated large collections for this project.17 Court preachers deployed their position at court to involve nobility and high-ranking civil servants in the millenarian project. The progress of the expansion of the Empire of God was reported in thousands of letters within the mission’s network. After receiving a mission journal many of the mission supporters wrote back to Halle describing the edifying feelings that they had experienced during the reading process. Many of them wrote extensively about their religious motivation and emotions, modifying the millenarian mantra: ‘Let the Kingdom grow among the pagans.’18 Funding activities formed another main topic within the correspondence. The names of those who had donated and the amount of their donations were reported with tireless diligence. Medialisation of the mission Pietists used the new media just as intensively as the Jesuits did (for example in their Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 1702). The Halle missionaries wrote letters, work diaries and reports and sent them back to Europe by ship. After the Danish mission council had examined the correspondence, the journal editors in Halle selected the reports, annotated and published them. This was a common way in which journals were compiled in the early eighteenth century.19 In this transformative process, the mission developed into a media event. The medialisation included four components: 1. the narrative 17 AFSt/M 3 H 31, p. 133; AFSt/M 3 H 32, p. 76; AFSt/M 3 H 34, p. 185; AFSt/M 3 H 36, p. 78; AFSt/M 3 H 37, p. 135; AFSt/M 3 H 40, p. 67; AFSt/M 4 C 2, p. 21; AFSt/M 4 C 3, p. 18. 18 AFST/M 1 J 14, p. 16 (Apr. 1733) ‘May the donation serve the spread of His Kingdom’; ‘May His Empire spread out in all places and to the ends of the earth’. 19 Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven, 2014).

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of success combined with promotion for financial support, 2. the edifying, emotional character of the journal based on the Indian Christian experience, 3. knowledge transfer from India to Europe, 4. the report of transcultural practices in the contact zone. I have reconstructed the subscribers to the mission journal [1729/1757/1770], resulting in a database, which includes their names, title, profession and place of residence.

Figures 2–4: German subscribers of the mission journal 1729/1757/1770

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Between 1720 and 1770 – as the diagrams show – the number of clergy increased, whereas the significance of the nobility, especially the male members, declined. Also, by 1770 the participation of the middle class also grew slightly. The upper clergy constituted the largest social group involved in the mission project. As you can see, besides male members, the group also contained of female members such as widows of preachers, abbesses and canonesses of Protestant monasteries. The relatively high percentage of female supporters is in accordance with the fact that women of high rank were deeply involved in patronage activities and in religious affairs. In 1729 the mission journal had around 485 subscribers. By 1770 its readership had increased by nearly half, to 716. The Halle institution developed a complex system for distributing the journal. The average number of pages was around 100 to 250. I am not sure of the exact number of printed editions, but the number of subscriptions does not, in any case, necessarily reflect the total readership. Family, friends, colleagues, and students also read the journal. On average, one subscription probably reached ten readers or more. The readers could exert direct influence on the topics reported. Sometimes the missionaries informed the readers that a ‘friend/supporter’ (usually no names were given) had asked about a certain problem, and because of the wider interest in the topic they intended to publish the answer. The Halle mission journal provided a striking range of information including science, climate, theology, cultural anthropology, travel narratives, political conditions, reports of the mission work, descriptions of Catholic missionaries in the neighborhood and appeals for donations.20 The journal conferred the illusion that the reader was directly involved in the mission adventure. The journal’s editorial model – advertising, reporting success and conveying information – followed Pietistic media patterns. The printed Indian mission activities triggered an interactive process: the documented confirmation of the broadening out of the Pietist Empire kindled religious emotions in Europeans, which resulted in financial contributions. From reading the journal, the subscribers received affirmation of how useful their support was. The journal conferred the illusion that the reader was directly involved in the millenarian project. The journal contents were also directed at a readership that was not explicitly pious but instead rather interested in Asia. This accounts for the journal’s success. The narratives were also transferred to other formats, for example books.

20 The journal was published from 1710 to 1770 in 108 series (‘Continuationen’). The title is: Der Königl. Dänischen Missionarien aus Ost-Indien eingesandte Ausführliche Berichte von dem Werck ihres Amts unter den Heyden, angerichteten Schulen und Gemeinen, ereigneten Hindernissen und schweren Umständen; Beschaffenheit des Malabarischen Heydenthums, gepflogenen brieflichen Correspondentz und mündlichen Unterredungen mit selbigen Heyden, Continuation 1–108. Halle 1710–1770 (see http://192.124.243.55/digbib/hb.htm).

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Transcultural practices in the contact zone The journal provides information about transcultural practices in India. This includes reports from the mission schools, the setting up of a book market with Christian literature written in Tamil and Portuguese as well as reports about Tamil Lutheran catechists.21 The immediate integration of Indians into the missionary work resulted from the millenarian background. Only a stable and responsible Indian Lutheran Christianity could guarantee God’s Kingdom in India. Accounts of the work of Catholic missionaries, presumably viewed negatively, provide an insight into the multi-religious situation in which the mission found itself and especially the difficulties the Lutherans had with the local Catholic mission. Disputations among religious experts on Hinduism and Christianity – Brahmins and missionaries – on ethics and religion testify to the discursive approach of Lutheran missionaries. Hints at the work of translating the Lutheran canon into Tamil showed, partly unintentionally, the collaborative character of the translations shared by missionaries and Brahmins. In the contact zone knowledge was created, transferred, and mediated.22 The mission journal presented a millenarian master narrative. Embedded in this narrative we find information on transcultural dynamics. The millenarian inclusion of every human being and the revitalized Lutheran idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ included Tamil converts from the very beginning. Transcultural go-betweens, such as interpreters, translators, Tamil catechists, male and female bible helpers and schoolteachers, were employed in large numbers. In 1733 the first Tamil was ordained. Today, Indian scholars see in the early participation of Tamils in the mission work ‘the Indianness of Protestant Christianity’.23

21 Caste system: The mission took over the caste system in their schools and church; lower caste: paraiyar/untouchables and sudra. 22 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (2nd ed. reprint; London, 2010); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (8th ed.; Minnea­polis/London, 2008 (1996)); Robert Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries in India. Cross-­Cultural Communication since 1500 (London, 2003); Heike Liebau, Die indischen Mitarbei­ ter der Tranquebarmission (1706–1845). Katecheten, Schulmeister, Übersetzer (Tübingen, 2008). 23 Daniel Jejaraj, Inkulturation in Tranquebar. Der Beitrag der frühen dänisch-halleschen Mission zum Werden einer indisch-einheimischen Kirche (1706–1730) (Erlangen 1996); Robert Eric Frykenberg (ed.), Christians and Missionaries in India. Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500 (London 2003); Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India. From Beginnings to the Present (Oxford 2008); Richard Fox Young (ed.), India and the Indianess of Christianity. Essays on Understanding – Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical – in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2009).

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Concluding remarks Within the mission network, letter-writing was a productive process that generated Pietist subjects. The to and fro structure of sending and receiving letters interconnected people and content. Rhetorical formulas concerning ‘the necessary spread of the Empire of God in India’ circulated in this way. Letter-writing was the performative act of establishing a shared understanding of Pietist millenarianism. Only at first glance does the mission network appear to be centered on Halle, with its influence radiating out from there. An analysis of the correspondence shows that participants established new support groups in their own places of residence, whether these were urban or at court. Halle was the planet, but many supporters became satellites, building small new groups with their own sphere of activity.24 In the closer support network, the nobility and members of the middle class engaged equally in the same project. The opportunity to participate in the network was not limited by social differences, it was based on the idea of a common Protestant Empire. In this respect, the network had a club-like structure that allowed class boundaries to become more permeable. With the decline of the aristocratic elite and the rise of middle class subscribers, we see a social broadening out of the field of supporters. In the eighteenth century, the mission’s activities faciliated a socialization that transcended social and mental barriers. At the same time, the broader network of readers was relatively open and could include everybody within Protestantism who was interested in India. Pietists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and supporters of the Enlightenment25 subscribed to the mission journal. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it even attracted interest within scientific circles.26 Millenarian expectations became an essential element of the Pietist missionary campaign. Educational, social and missionary projects as well as conventicles and communities all campaigned for the realization of God’s Empire on earth. Written and printed media were used extensively in this process. Christian millenarianism traveled to India and linked Europe and India. The global expansion of Protestantism emerged from the

24 Mark S. Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties, in: American Journal of Sociology 78, 1973, pp. 1360–80; Mark Casson, Networks in Economic and Business History: A Theoretical Perspective, in: Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914, eds Andreas Gestrich and Margit Schulte Beerbühl (London, 2010), pp. 17–49. 25 See Matthias Frenz and Hansjürg Deschner, ‘Das Werck der Bekehrung’. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Pietismus, Aufklärung und Mission im frühen 18. Jahrhundert, in: Europäische Aufklärung und protestantische Mission in Indien, ed. Michael Mann (Heidelberg, 2006), pp. 33–55. 26 Andreas Nehring, Orientalismus und Mission. Die Repräsentation der tamilischen Gesellschaft und Religion durch die Leipziger Missionare 1840–1940 (Wiesbaden, 2003); Ann-Charlott Trepp, Von der Missionierung der Seelen zur Erforschung der Natur: Die Dänisch-Hallesche Südindienmission im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36, 2010, pp. 231–56.

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margins of state churches.27 With state support, voluntary religious associations and reform movements such as the SPCK and Pietism made cross-border projects possible. The hope for better times in this world intersected with the optimistic prognosis of the Enlightenment, but the underlying explanations remained different. The ­Pietists in the seventeenth century saw themselves as continuing the Lutheran reformation. Thereafter, they translated earlier millenarian concepts into future-­oriented social concepts, and the movement became part of the religious Enlightenment. The medialization of the mission with its narrative of progress consolidated European religious identity. Starting from places of piety in Europe, the process of religious expansion and colonization extended to India in the name of religion to realize the Kingdom of God. However, God’s Empire was not congruent with the political colonial Empire. The millenarian goal was instead to establish an independent Indian Lutheran church.

27 Similar results for North America, see Alexander Pyrges, Das Kolonialprojekt EbenEzer. Formen und Mechanismen protestantischer Expansion in der atlantischen Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2015).

Jon Sensbach

The Radical Reformation and the Black Atlantic

If John Locke was right that, in the beginning, all the world was America, then Pennsylvania was its perfect colonial exponent. Founded in 1682, the colony was a refuge from persecution, a sanctuary for Quakers and other dissidents, a fair chance at a new life of freedom. Yet in almost no time at all the slave ships began unloading Africans destined for work on Quaker farms and in Quaker homes – so many that in 1688 a group of Dutch and German Mennonites and Quakers in Germantown, near Philadelphia, protested. ‘Here is liberty of conscience which is right and reasonable; here ought to be liberty of ye body,’ the group, led by Daniel Francis Pastorius, petitioned the Germantown Monthly Meeting. ‘But to bring men hither, or to rob and sell them against their will, we stand against. In Europe there are many oppressed for conscience sake and here there are those oppressed who are of a black colour. Do consider, you who do it, if you would be done at this manner? And if it is done according to Christianity?’ Their famous petition, widely considered the first formal antislavery protest in colonial America, telescoped the growing divide within Quaker thought and action over the rightness of those seeking freedom to express the light within to enslave others of a different hue. The protest made little difference. While the Quakers enjoy a modern reputation as antislavery activists, that reputation emerged mostly in the second half of the eighteenth century. Earlier in the century, thousands of Quakers in Pennsylvania and throughout British America owned slaves.1 In similar terms, the Puritan magistrate Samuel Sewall, a repentant prosecutor in the Salem witch trials of 1692, in 1700 decried the expansion of slavery in Massachusetts. In his well-known tract ‘The Selling of Joseph’, he declared that it ‘is most certain all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward comforts of Life’. God had ‘Made of One Blood, all Nations of Men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth … [s]o that Originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery’.

1

See Katherine Gerbner, ‘We are against the traffick of mens-body’: The Germantown Quaker Protest of 1688 and the Origins of American Abolitionism, in: Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (Spring 2007).

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By this logic, Sewall remonstrated, ‘Man Stealing is ranked amongst the most atrocious of Capital Crimes’: ‘That which God has joined together men do boldly rend asunder; Men from their country, Husbands from their Wives, Parents from their Children. How horrible is the Uncleanness, Mortality, if not Murder, that the Ships are guilty of that bring great Crouds of these miserable men and women.’

Like the Quakers’ petition, Sewall’s ideas gained little traction in a Puritan culture that had embraced African and Indian enslavement since the 1620s.2 The protests by both the Quakers and Sewall unfolded at the intersection of two powerful forces that shaped the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first was the spread of the Reformation to North America and the West Indies through Northern European colonization. The second was the swift expansion of the African slave trade to feed the burgeoning plantation system. As the enslaved population multiplied, dwarfing the number of European settlers in many English, Dutch and Danish colonies by ratios of eight or nine to one, radical Protestants often put themselves on the forefront of the complex ethical and theological debates created by the convergence of religion and global capitalism. Two basic issues emerged that quickly became intertwined: was it just to enslave brown and black non-Europeans, and if so, under what circumstances? And did enslaved people deserve the opportunity to hear the Christian gospel? Again, under what conditions? The Reformation was at the heart of the evolving relationship between slavery, race and religion and at the genesis of black Protestant Christianity. As the experience of both Pastorius and Sewall showed, Protestants themselves were sharply divided on these issues. While to those men the lessons of the golden rule (‘do as you would be done by’) seemed clear, many others who were quite radical in their opposition to established authority and in their views on such fundamental matters as personal revelation, freedom of conscience, the visible versus invisible church, and the believer’s relationship to worldly authority, struggled to extend those principals, or even a basic Christian recognition of humanity, to the Africans they enslaved. Still, when white Protestants did challenge slavery – and that opposition became more frequent as the eighteenth century progressed – or when they did insist that people of color also had the right to hear the gospel, those voices of empathy often reverberated from radical reformers’ own unhappy experiences with power. Disputes over worldly power were threaded deeply into late medieval reform movements long before radical Protestants’ encounters with Africans and Atlantic 2 Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700); Mark A. Peterson, The Selling of Joseph: Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733, in: Massachusetts Historical Review 3 (2002), pp. 1–22. On Puritan slaveholding, see Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York, 2016).

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slavery. For fifteen hundred years, Christian theorists from Paul to Thomas Aquinas and beyond conceived of bonded servitude as a fixture in the divine hierarchy. Slavery and serfdom were deserved and unalterable consequences of sin, ordained by God. The enslaved could find spiritual freedom in the eternal salvation offered by Christ but must remain in their earthly station. Waldensians, Albigensians, Hussites and other reformers challenged these conventions. Along with their calls for ethical cleansing of the clergy and greater participation in worship by the laity, they opposed the medieval class structure and sought to improve the lives of the poor. In the 1450s the Czech reformer Peter Chelcice (or Chelciky), founder of the proto-Reformation Unitas Fratrum, denounced wealth and privilege as false, since they had been stolen and maintained by violence; the nobility were ‘useless drones’ living on corrupt gains, ‘quite unable to show any passages from God’s scriptures why, apart from their superior descent, they are any different from other people’. As for serfdom, if the nobility’s ‘forefathers bought human beings together with their hereditary rights to the property, then they bought something that was not theirs to buy and sell’. Social inequality was based on ‘fear, cruelty, beating, fighting, killing, reviling, violence, imprisonment, cutting-off of limbs, murder, and other physical torments’. Chelcice’s Unitas Fratrum attempted to abide by these dictums, but within thirty years a new generation of leaders eager to prevent persecution by placating state authorities adopted more conservative social values. The poor should now ‘realize that the world order is ordained by God for their own good; they should know their place, and that the servants of the world [authorities] are set up for their good also and to preserve them from evil. The poor should be obedient [and] never exercise authority not properly entrusted to them but rather endure suffering. They should refrain from striving after equality.’3 Similar conflicts erupted in the early years of the Lutheran Reformation during the German Peasants’ War and the Anabaptist revolution in Münster, both premised on social equality as the corollary of spiritual freedom and emancipation from Rome. Though initially supportive of some of the peasants’ concerns, Luther vigorously opposed their insurgency, denouncing them in his tract of 1525, ‘Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants’. Reformation theologians such as Heinrich Bullinger defended worldly inequalities, drawing on Paul’s letters to conclude that ‘it is lawful for Christians to have wealth, including slaves and other kinds of possessions’.4 Among the many theological fractures arising in the wake of the Reformation, one important legacy was a sharply divided Protestant worldview on servitude and

3 Peter Brock, The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries (London, 1957), pp. 64, 90, 228. See also Howard Kaminsky, Peter Chelciky: Treatises on Christianity and the Social Order, in: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History I (1964), pp. 107–79; and Marianka Fousek, The Perfectionism of the Early Unitas Fratrum, in: Church History XXX (1961), pp. 396–413. 4 Heinrich Bullinger, Commentary on Ephesians, in Gerald L. Bray, ed., Galatians, Ephesians (Downers Grove, IL, 2011), 395.

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bodily freedom. Transferred to the Americas, those divisions found new life in the African slave trade and the emerging plantation system. In fact, Atlantic Protestantism in its many manifestations played a fundamental role in the creation of that capitalist enterprise based on the buying and selling of human beings. Following Catholic precedent in Latin America, where African slavery was present as early as the 1490s, English and Dutch colonizers quickly began importing Africans for slave labor in the early seventeenth century. The Reformation itself, as a stimulant for Protestant nationalism, imperial expansion, and commercial development, proved a major accelerant for the Atlantic slave trade. It made little difference whether colonists importing slaves were Anglican, Puritan or Dutch Reformed – all agreed that some combination of phenotype, paganism, inferior culture, just war and captivity created a logic supporting African enslavement. The laws that began emerging in mainland North America and the Caribbean by the 1630s reveal the tangled connections between the origins of chattel slavery and the legal, religious and social construction of race.5 Perhaps the most-scrutinized succession of these laws was drafted between the 1630s and 1670s by legislators in Virginia, Barbados, and Maryland, who sought to remove the legal and social ambiguity that had characterized the status of the enslaved population and to close religious loopholes through which a few Africans had managed to gain freedom. Since English common law prohibited the enslavement of Christians, some Africans had claimed, and been granted, liberty upon receiving baptism. These emancipated people contributed to the growth of a small but visible class of free blacks in a planter-dominated society that was striving to secure a stable labor source by equating blackness with perpetual servitude. Clearly, Christianity threatened the slave-labor system the emerging planting class envisioned.6 Accordingly, colonial officials sought to resolve any lingering ambiguity about the connection between Christianity and African freedom. In 1663 the Maryland legislature drew up an ‘act obligeing negros to serve durante vita … for the prevencion of the damage Masters of such Slaves may susteyne by such Slaves pretending to be Christned And so pleade the lawe of England’. More succinctly, the Virginia General Assembly in 1666 passed a law that ‘the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome’. The Assembly claimed that the law would allow masters to ‘more carefully endeavour the propagation of C ­ hristianity’,

5 Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1995); A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process. Vol. I: The Colonial Period (New York and Oxford, 1978); Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens, GA, 1989). For Spanish precedents, see David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill, 2016). 6 Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, 2012).

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but such apparently innocuous language masked the revolutionary intent behind the statute and the result it brought.7 Slavery, as Winthrop Jordan pointed out years ago, ‘could survive only if the Negro were a man set apart; he simply had to be different if slavery was to exist at all.’ The new slave laws flaunted a raw display of power defining that difference by making slavery hereditary and by severing the connection between a person’s spiritual status and legal status under common law, excluding them from the law’s protection. The insidious effect of this legal coup was reported by the Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn in 1680: ‘These two words, Negro and Slave, have by custom grown Homogeneous and Convertible’, adding that in the same way ‘Negro and Christian’ had become opposites, as though it were impossible for Africans to become Christian. In this vein, the Barbados Assembly in 1681 declared its opposition to Christianity for enslaved Africans not on the basis that they would use it to claim freedom but on cultural grounds, arguing that Africans’ ‘Savage Brutishness renders them wholly incapable: of accepting Christianity’.8 Other colonial slave codes were less harsh in condemning Africans’ intelligence and even encouraged planters to Christianize them, but they padded that encouragement with ample assurances that Christianity would not bring legal emancipation with it.9 Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century English colonies throughout North America and the Caribbean had erected a legal architecture of slavery and a racialized logic of spiritual exclusion that militated against enslaved Africans’ embrace of Christianity, putatively the religion of spiritual emancipation. These were the conditions that radical nonconformists encountered and, in some cases, helped construct when they, too, settled in disparate parts of the Protestant Americas. Many of these migrants had little experience with people of African descent; whatever they may have read or heard about the rapidly rising slave population across the Atlantic, most were suddenly coming face to face with Africans for the first time in slave societies under construction. Their responses fell into several different categories. Some, whose sympathy for victims of cruel and arbitrary worldly power was sharpened by their own experience of oppression at the hands of civil and ecclesiastical authorities, opposed 7 Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (Boston, 1990), 116–117. 8 Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), p. 184; Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s & Indians advocate, suing for their admission to the church (London, 1685), quoted in Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia, p. 3. 9 Edward Rugemer, The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century, in: William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser. 70 (July 2013), pp. 429–58. For broader overviews of the origins of racial slavery’s links to the emerging plantation economies of the British Atlantic, see Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2016); Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in the British America, 1650–1820 (Chicago, 2015); and Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens, GA, 2012).

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slavery outright. Others accommodated to the institution of slavery but vigorously supported missionary outreach to enslaved people, often in the face of intense opposition from planters. Still others supported slavery and remained skeptical that Africans had souls worth saving. And a fourth category found that the attitudes toward slavery and enslaved Africans they had forged in Europe were thrown into disarray once they arrived in America. We can examine these kaleidoscopic responses as a series of specific flashpoints involving English dissenters, particularly the Quakers, in England and in several colonial settings, along with a variety of German Anabaptist and Pietist groups in Pennsylvania, the southern colonies, and the West Indies, and these groups’ interactions with, and ideas about, enslaved Africans. We see a combination of these reactions, for example, in the story of a ‘Blackymore Maide named Francis’, a member of an ‘Anabaptist’ congregation founded by the seamstress Dorothy Hazzard in Bristol on the eve of the English revolution. During the antinomian fervor of the Cromwellian reign, this gathering of Baptists, along with Quakers, Diggers, Ranters, and other radical levelers, summoned divine wrath upon the powerful. Francis, it was said, was ‘truly convinced of Sin […] This poor Aethopian’s soule savoured much of God, and she walked very humble and blameless in her Conversation.’ And yet, within a few years, when the world failed to stay turned upside down, some of those same congregants who embraced Francis as a sister and as an equal invested in Bristol’s slave trade and had even begun buying plantations and slaves in Barbados. Here was a vivid example of the ideals of the Radical Reformation in jarring collision with an ascendant world of property held in human chattel.10 The Quaker founder, George Fox, tried to grapple with this dichotomy as early as the 1650s. In response to persecution, the group was in the process of suppressing some of its most radical teachings just at the moment the African slave trade was accelerating, and Quakers began migrating to Barbados both to escape oppression and to take part in that colony’s sugar revolution. Some went as indentured servants and others as aspiring planters; in any event, so many began buying slaves that Fox was inspired in 1657 to write a letter ‘To Friends beyond the Sea that Have Blacks and Indian Slaves’. In this letter Fox did not protest against Quaker slaveholding, but reminding Friends that ‘God is no respector of persons’, and that ‘he hath made all nations of one blood’, he urged them to expose enslaved workers to Christianity. ‘The gospel is preached to every creature under heaven; which is the power that giveth liberty and freedom, and is glad tidings to every captivated creature under the whole heaven.’ Fox therefore did not oppose the social order that could allow slavery, but he believed that enslaved people had the potential to find the ‘indwelling Christ’ as much as anyone. Fox reiterated this theme some years later when he visited Barbados in 1671. By the time of Fox’s visit the great majority of Quakers were slaveholders in a colony that was rapidly making the transition away from white indentured servants 10 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), ch. 3.

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to an African-majority sugar plantation labor force. Fox was appalled at what he saw there, but his disenchantment was not with slavery, or even specifically with Quaker slaveholding, but with the flourishing of what he saw as barbaric African religions and polygamous mating practices. For this he blamed colonial authorities and planters for tolerating this immorality by not preaching Christianity to Africans. In a sermon to Friends a month after arriving, he criticized this laxness and the disorder it brought to the family of Christ. It was imperative, he said, for Quakers to ‘preach the everlasting Covenant, Christ Jesus, to the Ethyopians, the Blacks and the Tawny-Moors in your families’. Fox never denounced slavery as unholy, but following Biblical precedent, he encouraged Quakers to liberate their slaves after seven years, which may have been either a proto-abolitionist stance or simply a reflection of the fluid nature of West Indian slavery that was in the process of becoming permanently heritable.11 In any case, Fox’s exhortations produced the effect he sought, or at least part of it. Quaker slaveholders became much more active in preaching to Africans, though this new missionary outreach yielded only modest results. Although some Africans responded to Quaker overtures, perhaps finding some congruence between West African and Quaker concepts of personal revelation, the Quaker missions yielded few converts. Most Africans had no wish to abandon their own religions and struggled to accept Christianity as a slaveholders’ religion. Still, the idea of preaching spiritual equality to the enslaved alarmed planters and colonial authorities, who accused the Friends of teaching dangerous doctrine that could light the match of slave rebellion. Quakers were already considered subversive for their refusal to bear arms, and their newfound enthusiasm for instructing slaves brought them under further suspicion. It was the Quaker example, in fact, that spurred legislators in Barbados to pass statutes explicitly stating that baptism would not, and could not, be a pathway to emancipation. These statutes became an influential template throughout the English Atlantic as emerging slave societies defined the legal and racial conditions that denied enslaved Africans freedom while prescribing when and how they could learn of Christianity.12 At the same time, the Barbados experience proved an enduring model to Quakers and other Christian missionaries, particularly Anglicans, who sought to preach to enslaved Africans in the heart of the emerging plantation empire. They might acknowledge that Africans had souls worth saving, and perhaps try to humanize and alleviate their servitude somewhat, which amounted to a critique of the planting class. But it was a limited critique because they seldom challenged the rightness of slavery itself, 11 George Fox, To Friends beyond the Sea That Have Blacks and Indian Slaves, in: The Works of George Fox, Vols. 7–8, Epistles (Philadelphia, 1831), No. 153, p. 1657; idem., Gospel Family-Order, Being a Short Discourse Concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks and Indians (London, 1676); Larry Gragg, The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia, MO, 2009); Block, Ordinary Lives. 12 Gragg, Quaker Community on Barbados; Block, Ordinary Lives. For Anglican acquiescence to slavery, see Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia; and Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York, 2011).

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and thus we might interpret their influence in part as making Christianity and slavery safe for each other. This acquiescence contrasts with the Germantown antislavery protest of 1688. By no means was that instance the only recorded Quaker protest against slavery. In 1698, for example, Robert Pyle, a member of the Chester, Pennsylvania, meeting, considered buying a slave; later he dreamed that while walking he picked up a black pot in the road. He tried to climb a ladder holding the pot but feared he would fall, so he set it down. A man holding the ladder said it represented ‘the light of Christ Jesus, and whoever it be that his faith bee strong in the Lord, God, will uphold that it shall not fall; upon which I awoke.’ Pyle interpreted his dream to mean that ‘self must bee left behind, and to let black Negroes or potts alone.’ Pyle became an antislavery activist. Perhaps Pyle’s protest, and that of Pastorius and his associates, was an echo of the most radical Quaker beliefs from thirty years earlier that empathetic spirit of the inner light pointed in only one direction – toward human freedom. These ideas would live on in the full-blown antislavery activism later in the eighteenth century by Benjamin Lay, Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and many other Friends on both sides of the Atlantic.13 Perhaps, as well, the Germantown protest originated from the German and Dutch origins of the Germantown protestors. While it is true that many German-speaking immigrants to the British colonies endorsed and participated in African slavery as the key to economic prosperity in America, they tended to be Lutheran and Reformed parishioners more accepting of social hierarchies. German dissenters from Anabaptist and Pietist traditions were much more critical of worldly inequalities fixed in the feudal system by which they themselves had been victimized and persecuted, and as immigrants to America they applied that criticism to slavery. For one thing, as Germans they were not interested in the national power or imperial expansion that slavery in America fostered. More importantly, for Pastorius and the Germantown group, as well as for Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, and other noncomformists, slavery had no defensible moral underpinnings. It was unfair and ungodly to imprison someone on an arbitrary basis of skin color. Slavery, moreover, represented a corruption of the very reason Germans sought to escape the shackles of the Old World. Slavery undermined the free labor of European newcomers, on the one hand making them dependent on brutalized underlings to work for them, and on the other making it impossible for honest hardworking white people to compete against slaveowners. Slavery made freedom-seeking people force unfreedom on someone else, it made hardworking people lazy, it made Christians defile their religion. Slavery evoked the hubris of demanding more than one’s divine allotment – it undermined free labor even 13 Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, 2002), pp. 55–56. On Quaker antislavery, see Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia, 2010); Thomas P. Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (New York, 2008); and Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Anti-Slavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, 2012).

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as it burrowed into the soul. Within the Pietist tradition, as A.G. Roeber has written, the critique of ‘worldly goods’ encouraged ‘the development of reflection, criticism, and a language capable of conceiving of an “inner core self ”’. Slavery led the believer down the path away from that self.14 A famous example of this philosophy unfolded in the colony of Georgia, founded in the 1730s as a humanitarian social experiment designed to give the English poor and imprisoned a second chance in life through hard work and sober living. Against all precedent in the English colonies, that plan rested on a prohibition of slavery, which the colony’s Trustees, most of them Parliamentarians, saw as a hindrance to the moral regeneration urgently needed by the Georgia settlers. James Oglethorpe, the energetic leader of the Trustees, was a religious man connected to international networks of like-minded Protestants. He recruited allies and participants who shared his views, including several hundred Lutheran Pietist refugees from the Austrian principality of Salzburg seeking asylum from Catholic persecution. Many of them miners used to working in Alpine conditions, the Salzburgers arrived to Georgia’s swampy humidity in 1733 eager to embrace Oglethorpe’s promise of religious freedom and the colony’s identity as an anti-Catholic bastion on the Florida frontier. From Ebenezer, their settlement on the Savannah River west of the capital town of Savannah, they became some of Oglethorpe’s most ardent proponents of the antislavery ban. The Salzburgers cleared hundreds of acres to plant crops, vineyards and mulberry trees for the production of silkworms. They followed the most modern agricultural practices, including those advanced by English horticultural theorist Jethro Tull in his 1731 book Horse Hoeing Husbandry. Their flourishing fields, they claimed, were evidence that godly, industrious settlers could thrive in America without slave labor. True, the Salzburgers were more concerned with the effects of slavery on white people than on enslaved Africans themselves. Still, here was the Radical Reformation in diaspora and in praxis, embracing freedom, critiquing authority, proclaiming their corner of America as a new Zion redeeming the corruptions of the Old World and the temptations of the New.15 But the best ideals fall the hardest. Almost from the start, the ban on slavery came under attack from a group of English dissidents in Georgia who clamored that slave labor was the only route to economic prosperity if the colony was ever going to amount to anything. ‘It is as clear as light itself ’, they wrote, ‘that negroes are as essentially necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes, or any other utensil of agricul14 Anthony G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1998), pp. 2, 5. See also Roeber, ‘The Origin of Whatever Is Not English among Us’: The Dutch-Speaking and the German-speaking Peoples of colonial British America, in: Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, eds Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill, 1991), pp. 220–283. 15 On the Salzburgers’ role in early Georgia, see James Van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier (New York and Cambridge, 2014); Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, GA, 1984).

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ture.’ With friends in Parliament, by the late 1740s the proslavery advocates gradually gained the upper hand in the debate. The Salzburgers remained steadfast in their opposition to slavery, but by 1750 they had lost; Parliament rescinded the ban and drafted a new slave code for the colony. As planters from South Carolina raced into Georgia to set up new rice plantations worked by African slaves, a new economic elite gained control, displacing the economy of small farms. By 1754, even the Salzbur­gers acknowledged that times had changed. ‘Negroes are reliable, cheap, and industrious labor’, one minister admitted. ‘We have tried everything in our power to make do with white people. Had we succeeded, we would have been able to dispense with Negroes in our town; but this will not be possible until this country is full of people.’16 With a wistful nod to the past, they began buying slaves, too. Whereas the central issue in some German nonconformists’ encounter with the black Atlantic was whether to enslave or liberate people of African descent, for others the most important question, as it was for George Fox, was whether they had souls worthy of spiritual emancipation through Christ. For many slaveholding Christians, the answer remained anything but straightforward through the first half of the eighteenth century. Since the theological justification for enslavement rested on a rigid insistence on African inferiority, significant numbers of slaveholders asserted that Africans had no souls at all, or that they were actually devils incapable of redemption. In the late seventeenth century the Anglican cleric Morgan Godwyn ridiculed ‘This Fiction of the Brutality of the Negro’s’, arguing that ‘God looks upon the Heart’, not outward physical markers like skin color or height. The Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts had begun missions to enslaved Africans in Carolina and Barbados in the early eighteenth century but made little headway in the face of resistance from both planters and Africans themselves. In the 1730s, evangelical work by the Brethren among enslaved Africans in the Caribbean marked a radical advance in mission theory and practice. The German-speaking Moravian Brethren, spiritual descendants of the original fifteenth-century Unitas Fratrum, were not the social radicals their Czech antecedents had been, and like many eighteenth-century dissenters accepted slavery and other worldly hierarchies as divine will. But they took the principal of the priesthood of all believers much farther than any Protestant group had to that point, sending missions to Africans in the New World and to an enormous array of indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Though not the first Protestant missionaries, by the mid-eighteenth century they were easily the farthest-ranging and had the deepest impact of any, particularly among people of African descent. Profoundly immersed in transatlantic evan-

16 Diary entry, Feb. 20, 1754, in: George Fenwick Jones (ed.), Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America … Edited by Samuel Urlsperger, 17 vols., transl. by Hermann J. Lacher (Athens, GA, 1968), vol. 16, pp. 164–65.

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gelical networks from Continental Europe to Britain to the Americas, the Brethen’s missions forged an influential model that Methodists, Baptists, and others emulated.17 Those missions did not spring from a vacuum but drew upon precedents in both English Puritanism and German Pietism. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the leader of the Renewed Unity, was educated at August Hermann Francke’s Pietist academy in Halle in the early eighteenth century, where he absorbed the Pietist emphasis on charity, education, and evangelical outreach to non-Christians. Zinzendorf made those tenets central to the Renewed Unity’s identity as a fellowship, drawing inspiration in particular from the Pietist mission in Tranquebar, the Danish colony in India, twenty years earlier.18 That mission, in turn, had emerged from a transatlantic conversation between Pietists and New England Puritans such as Cotton Mather about the benefits of mission to native or colonized peoples. Francke and other Pietists were fascinated by John Eliot’s mission to American Indians in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, especially the use of techniques such as translating Biblical texts into native languages, empowering native instructors to lead prayer groups, and separating communities of native converts from the unconverted. The adaptation of such techniques by the Moravians in the 1730s and 1740s proved crucial in igniting an upsurge of black Pietism in the West Indies.19 On the Danish sugar colony of St. Thomas, Moravian missionaries gained a foothold in the mid–1730s by befriending sympathetic planters who allowed them to preach on their plantations, believing that Christianity would help keep their enslaved workforce in check. To convince Africans and Afro-Caribbean creoles that Christianity was an empathetic religion, preachers visited the slave quarters to shake hands and hold searching conversations, addressing slaves as ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’. They held nightly meetings in which they taught black students to read the Bible and to write, a risky tactic in a slave society kept in check by violence and intimidation. They preached a Christianity that exalted enslaved people while emphasizing their fellow-

17 On the Moravians’ role in transatlantic Protestant evangelical networks, see David Hempton, The church in the Long Eighteenth Century (London, 2011); J.C.S. Mason, The Moravian Church and the Missionary Awakening in England, 1760–1800 (London, 2001); W.R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992); Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton (eds), Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820 (Farnham, Surrey, 2009); and Dana Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Chichester, 2009). 18 See the article by Ulrike Gleixner on “Millenarian Practices and the Pietist Empire” in this volume. 19 On the St. Thomas mission, see Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 2005). On transatlantic connections between Pietists and Puritans, see Mark A. Peterson, Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739, in: Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, eds Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA, 2011), pp. 329–70. On the Pietist mission to Tranquebar, see Daniel Jeyaraj, Inkulturation in Tranquebar: Der Beitrag der Fruehen Daenish-halleschen Missin zum Werden einer indisch-einheimischen Kirche (1706–1730) (Neuendettelsau, 1996).

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ship in the community of the spirit. One pupil named Mingo ‘asserted on the authority of his teacher that black men were no less creatures of God than were the Whites’.20 A key to this approach lay in an explicit biblical critique of the slaveholders themselves. ‘When they learned to read the testimony of the Scriptures’, Moravian Bishop August Spangenberg explained, ‘the Negroes can see for themselves how to avoid the false teachings and wicked life of the so-called Christians under whom they live.’ His judgment on the ‘so-called Christians’: ‘Damned are the authorities who want to take the honor of baptism from the Lord and rule over the conscience of the people.’ The Moravian preachers were not antislavery, nor were they urging Afro-Caribbean students to develop a biblical attack on slavery or to resist the social order. Their strategy was to encourage the enslaved to set themselves apart from, and spiritually above, the ‘so-called Christians’ who purported to rule them. In this vein, one woman captured the prophetic spirit of the Book of Revelation by pointing out that the slaveholders would pay dearly for their wickedness. Though she was a slave, she said, it was plain to her that ‘the Christians do not serve their God’, and that the world would end with the masters ignorant of the terrible punishment they would face.21 For many enslaved people, this version of radical Christianity, with its emphasis on emotion, a heartfelt relationship with Christ, and openness to all, was something new and alluring. A congregation, formed in 1736, became extremely popular. Two or three hundred people regularly walked miles over the rugged mountains to attend meetings. The missionaries depended heavily on a core of black exhorters or ‘helpers’ to spread the word in the slave quarters. On Sundays, the slaves’ free day, many helpers walked across the hilly roads of St. Thomas to visit plantations and recruit new members. To a remarkable degree, Christianity spread across the island not because it was imposed by force on an unwilling audience, but because it became a movement promoted and managed by Afro-Caribbean worshipers themselves.22 As might be expected, planters did not take kindly to these developments. ‘If one wants to have a Rebellion in which all the whites would love their lives’, said one colonial official, ‘the surest way is to continue tolerating the Herrnhuters.’ White colonists responded violently, beating up missionaries and whipping black congregants for attending meetings. ‘Don’t teach my Negroes to be Pietists’, one planter warned a missionary. Another master made a practice of setting fire to the Bible and beating out the flames on his slaves’ faces; another chained enslaved Christians to the ground to keep them from devotions. In response, the Moravian Brethren assured officials that they intended no challenge to slavery and that they would preach a doctrine of Christian submission to enslaved people. In a speech to several hundred gathered 20 C.G.A. Oldendorp, History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, ed. Johann Jakob Bossart, English trans. and ed. Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac (Barby, 1777; repub. Ann Arbor, 1987), p. 322. 21 Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, pp. 55–56. 22 Ibid. ch. 4.

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worshipers on St. Thomas in 1739, Count Zinzendorf himself told them that ‘God has punished the first Negroes with slavery’ and that ‘the blessed state of your souls does not make your bodies accordingly free.’ Forced to compromise with the slaveholding class, the Brethren made their version of Pietism more palatable to the worldly authorities they sought to placate.23 Nonetheless, enslaved converts continued to embrace the radical egalitarianism of the original Moravian message. On St. Thomas and the other Danish colonies of St. John and St. Croix, missionaries baptized thousands of people, making those islands the epicenter of African-Protestant organization by the 1760s. The missions spread to the British islands of Antigua and Jamaica as well with similar results, proving influential models for British evangelical missions in the Caribbean and North America. When white Methodist and Baptist itinerant preachers ventured into southern plantation country in the 1750s, invoking a language of religious equality by urging the enslaved toward a ‘new birth’ in Jesus and an emotional conversion of the heart, they patterned themselves in important ways after the Brethren. Once embedded in African-American diasporic populations, the simplest, most radical elements of the Reformation – spiritual equality, individual equality, universal priesthood – proved the essential moral fulcrum in the struggle against slavery. By the time of the American Revolution, black Christians in the Americas and Britain were among the vocal opponents of the slave trade and advocates for African-American spiritual and social equality. In 1754, an enslaved Congregationalist parishioner named Greenwich in Canterbury, Connecticut, used scriptures to contest his bondage, contending: ‘Some say that we are the seed of Canaan and some say that we are the Tribe of Ham but Let that be as it will Justise must Take Plase [sic].’ It was written in the Bible, he continued, that ‘non[e] should impose upon another nation.’ As talk of independence from Britain swirled through Massachusetts in 1774, a group of enslaved protestors petitioned the governor: ‘We have in common with all other men a natural right to our freedoms without Being deprived of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this blessing by any compact or agreement whatever. There is a great number of sincere members of the Church of Christ, how can the master be said to bear my Burden when he bears me down with the chains of slavery.’ The governor ignored the logic and the plea, but prominent African-American and African-British spokesmen such as John Marrant, Lemuel Haynes, Ottobah Cuguano, Olaudah Equiano and Richard Allen combined the rhetoric of revolution with the Christian idiom of equality to claim basic human rights. Forged in this colossal challenge to slavery, the distinctive African-American churches that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Baptist denominations, which form the core of modern African-American Protestantism

23 Jon Sensbach, ‘Don’t Teach My Negroes to Be Pietists’: Pietism and the Roots of the Black Protestant Church, in: Pietism in Germany and North America, eds Strom, Lehmann and Melton pp. 183–198.

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in the U.S., were the spiritual descendants of African churches founded half a century earlier in the Caribbean and sacred bulkheads in the long struggle for freedom.24 In these ways, the Radical Reformation was intimately bound up with, and left an indelible imprint on, the black Atlantic. Ideas about human freedom unleashed by the Reformation found an inevitable outlet in intense debates about human slavery. Even bounded by compromises with the slave regime, concepts about religion of the heart, the spirit within, became powerful engines of empathy and inclusion that challenged the brutality and racial exclusion of slavery. Building on African traditions of resistance and revelation, people of African descent incorporated these ideas, pushed them to their logical conclusion, used Christianity to critique Christianity, never stopped challenging power, ceaselessly insisting on equality. That challenge remains fundamental to our own time.

24 Erik R. Seeman, ‘Justise Must Take Plase’: Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England, in: William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 56 (1999), pp. 399–402, 411–13; Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (2nd ed. Amherst, MA, 1989), p. 13. On the broader spread of black Atlantic Protestantism, see Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998), and John W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World (Gainesville, FL, 2016); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1988); Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York, 2009); Joanna Brooks and John Saillant (eds), ‘Face Zion Forward’: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (Boston, 2002).

Contributors

John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester, with a particular interest in the rich and complex history of Protestantism in Britain and America. He has published on various aspects of early modern Protestant culture: toleration debates, the English Revolution, Puritanism, Evangelicalism, and antislavery. Michael Driedger is an Associate Professor of History at Brock University in Canada. His ongoing research is about the relationship between the ‘Radical Reformation’ and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, particularly the activities of Mennonite and Remonstrant publishers, philosophers, and political activists in the Dutch Republic. He is a co-investigator with Gary Waite on the project ‘Amsterdamnified! Religious Dissenters, Spiritualist Ideas and Urban Associationalism in the Emergence of the Early Enlightenment in England and the Low Countries, 1540–1700.’ Ulrike Gleixner is Head of the Research Department at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and Professor of Early Modern History at the Technical University Berlin. Her research fields include the cultural history of religion, especially Pietism, auto­ biographical writings, the gender history of knowledge and education, the materiality of books and the entangled history of Europe and Asia. Kat Hill is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia and is working on Lutheran culture in the later 16th century after Luther’s death. Her broad interests are in the religious and cultural history of early modern Europe. Thomas Kaufmann is Professor of Church History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. His research encompasses the radical Reformation and the relationship between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in early modern Europe. Since 2011 he has served as President of the German Society for Reformation History.

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Lionel Laborie has been traveling across Europe since 2011 to follow the Camisards’ millenarian missions for a postdoctoral project entitled ‘Millenarian Networks in Enlightenment Europe: The French Connection’. His research concentrates on religious dissent and toleration in early modern Europe. Hartmut Lehmann has been a Professor of Modern History at the University of Kiel since 1969. From 1987 until 1993 he was founding Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. and from 1993 until 2004 Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for History in Göttingen. Dmitri Levitin is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College Oxford, where he has been since 2015. He has published extensively on philosophical, scientific, medical, religious, legal and political thought in early modern Europe. He is interested above all in large-scale patterns of change from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, patterns that transcend the influence of any individual or group. Susan Royal completed her PhD at Durham University in 2014, and has since taught in the Department of History at the University of York and in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and Visiting Professor in History of Religion at Gresham College, London. He is co-editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. He is currently holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on the experience of radicalism in mid-seventeenth-century England. Gerd Schwerhoff studied history and sociology at the Universities of Cologne and Bielefeld. Since 2000 he has been Professor for Early Modern History at the Technical University Dresden. His research interests focus on urban history, the history of criminality and deviance, witchcraft research, the history of religion and the history of violence. Ethan H. Shagan is Professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of ‘Popular Politics and the English Reformation’ (Cambridge, 2003), ‘The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England’ (Cambridge, 2011), and ‘A History of Modern Belief ’ (forthcoming).

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Jon F. Sensbach received his Ph.D. in early American history from Duke University. He joined the University of Florida Department of History in 1998. He has been an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center and an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture. He is currently working on a study of religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world. Mirjam van Veen is Professor of Church History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has published on the polemic between the Radical Reformation and the mainstream reformation. She coordinates a research project on reformed migration to the German Rhineland in the sixteenth century. Gary Waite Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick, is author or editor of seven books and dozens of papers and chapters focusing on early-modern religion, hetero­ doxy and persecution, especially in the Low Countries. With Michael Driedger he has begun a new research program called ‘Amsterdamnified!’ on the role of religious non-conformism, especially spiritualism, in the development of the early Enlightenment in the Low Countries and England.

Editors

Bridget Heal is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. She is currently Director of the Reformation Studies Institute and co-editor of the journal “German History”. Her next book, ‘A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany’, will appear with OUP in 2017. Anorthe Kremers As Vice Head of the conferences & symposia unit at the Volkswagen Foundation in Hanover, Germany, she is responsible for the contents of the foundation’s own conferences, symposia, and lecture series in the humanities and the social sciences. She studied history and French at the universities of Tübingen and Grenoble.

Hosts

VOLKSWAGEN FOUNDATION

The Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) is an independent foundation incorporated under private law with registered office in Hanover, Germany. Its overall funding volume of around 150 million euros per year makes it Germany’s largest private research funding foundation. The Foundation supports the humanities and social sciences as well as science and technology in higher education and research. It perceives a special mission in fostering cooperation between researchers across the borders of disciplines, cultures, and nation states. GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE LONDON

The German Historical Institute London is an academically independent institution and part of the Max Weber Foundation – German Humanities Institutes Abroad. It promotes research on medieval and modern history, in particular on the comparative history of Britain and Germany, on the British Empire and the Commonwealth, and on Anglo-German relations. Its public library specializes in German history. UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

Founded in the fifteenth century, St Andrews is Scotland’s first university and the third oldest in the English-speaking world. Teaching began in the community of St Andrews in 1410 and the University was formally constituted by the issue of a papal bull in 1413.