On March 31, 2019, following a thematically-diverse, well-attended international colloquium at Bienenberg Theological Seminary on “Anabaptist History and Renewal Movements,” John D. Roth moderated a day-long discussion on the subject of the identity of the Swiss Brethren. This conversation centered around Martin Rothkegel’s challenge to the scholarly consensus, which Arnold Snyder has recently reasserted, concerning the character of this Anabaptist tradition.¹ The essential contours of this disagreement are as follows: Snyder (along with most of his colleagues) sees the Swiss Brethren as a transregional confessional movement, rooted in the earliest theological statements of Anabaptists in Switzerland, with a consistent set of distinctive doctrinal and behavioral markers; Rothkegel, meanwhile, posits that the label Swiss Brethren was the name given to an organized, underground network of churches, analogous in structure to Calvinist églises plantées and centered in the Holy Roman Empire, with only incidental links to the Swiss Confederation and early Swiss Anabaptist theological positions and texts.

This interchange represents a new chapter in debates over group definition which have long characterized historical research into early Anabaptism. This focus persists, in large part, because the categories and models that historians have employed to explain the development of official confessional movements (Lutheran, Catholic, Reformed) during and after the Protestant Reformation cannot be easily applied to marginalized communities of nonconformists. Arguments about who Anabaptists were, what they believed and did, and how they related to each other and to those outside of their communities require creative interpretations of sparser evidence.

This particular iteration of a longer conversation about the identity of the Swiss Brethren is provocative because it encourages reconsideration of basic questions. Which sources matter in determining where the boundaries of the Swiss Brethren community lay? Which methods are most effective in uncovering these sources’ significance? And, at the core of the matter, what is the historical significance of Swiss Anabaptist origins to later Anabaptist-Mennonite traditions?

These questions brought to mind a rare reference to the “Swiss Brethren” in my reading of legal records from Zurich’s territory in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In May 1595, Markus Wydler, the pastor of the village of Kilchberg, along with a local deputy bailiff and lay elder authored a supplication to Zurich’s city government on behalf of their community.² They complained of the recent settlement of the glassmaker Heinrich Rützensdorfer “of the Anabaptist sect” and his wife and children in their parish. The new family refused to attend Reformed services. The locals’ efforts to persuade Rützensdorfer and his family to integrate into Reformed parish life had failed. On multiple occasions, the pastor, lay community leaders, and, eventually, Rützensdorfer’s own mother-in-law had visited the couple’s home in order to investigate their religious opinions. Rützensdorfer responded to these approaches, the supplication’s authors claimed, by outlining positions associated with the “Swiss Brethren, as they are called.”³ He would only attend a church that, one, exercised the ban and, two, allowed congregants to correct the preacher when he erred. (In a separate interrogation, Rützensdorfer also expressed unwillingness to swear an oath.)⁴ Out of fear of the potentially “damaging unrest” that might result from these new arrivals’ presence, the supplicants asked the authorities to remove the Anabaptists, “who had never existed in our parish since the beginning of the Reformation.”

In the framework of Snyder and Rothkegel’s exchange, this document presents intriguing evidence. On the one hand, the document’s authors appear to see continuity in the identity of Anabaptists within Zurich’s territory over time. One sect has been present in the region from the introduction of Zwinglian reform in Zurich to the end of the sixteenth century. At the same time, after diligently examining Rützensdorfer’s stated beliefs, the people of Kilchberg apply a label (Schweizerbruder) to him that authorities in the area simply did not use to refer to local Anabaptists settled permanently in their communities. Officials who governed parishes and bailiwicks inhabited by larger numbers of Anabaptists employed the derogatory labels Wiedertäufer, Täufer, or, in rarer cases, Taufbrüder. In my reading, the use of the name Swiss Brethren attributes a degree of foreignness to Rützensdorfer and his family.

There is a tension within sixteenth-century attempts to categorize the religious community or tradition to which Rützensdorfer belonged which suggest both continuity and change. Examination of other extant records are not particularly helpful in resolving this tension for modern observers. As Christian Scheidegger has shown, Rützensdorfer participated in a reading circle of Schwenckfelders in Zurich proper in the late-1580s before being temporarily expelled from the city.⁵ Although he continuously refused to attend Reformed services in Kilchberg into the 1610s, Rützensdorfer’s wife eventually participated actively in the life of the parish and regularly sent her children to Reformed religious instruction.⁶ I have not yet been able to document whether Rützensdorfer established membership in a specific Anabaptist congregation or, indeed, whether he was ever baptized. Still, in addition to his aforementioned statements regarding the proper form of Christian community, Rützensdorfer also used theological argumentation often employed by local Anabaptists when refusing to submit to authorities’ demands for him to leave the territory.⁷

This set of documents doesn’t provide conclusive evidence about the nature of Swiss Brethren group identity, organization, and theology. Rather, it shows that even contemporary observers struggled to understand the ongoing influence of early Swiss Anabaptism on nonconformists and the forms of nonconformity they encountered in their own time. Although unique in its particulars, this case represents many more which frustrate attempts to make narrow claims about who the Swiss Brethren were. On account of Anabaptists’ marginality, Rützensdorfer’s biography is complicated in ways that many nonconformists’ biographies are complicated. As we continue to refine an understanding of the Swiss Brethren, our models need to be flexible enough to account for this type of evidence. As this post has shown, the task of definition does not necessarily become easier as we move past the turbulence of the early Reformation.

1. Martin Rothkegel, “Schweizer Brüder,” Mennonitisches Lexicon, vol. 5, updated February 11, 2016, http://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=top:schweizer_brueder; Arnold Snyder, “In Search of the Swiss Brethren,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 90, no. 4 (2016): 421-515.↩
2. Staatsarchiv Zürich (StAZH), E I 7.3, #74.↩
3. The context of the referenced quote follows: “Demnach so habenn wir durch unseren pfarrer un[d] die Ehegoumer zu mehermalen un[d] undersheidenlichen ziten, Inne siner Meinung der Religion halben Laßen erforschen, die dan bey uns ungebrechlich, Insonders wie Er sich deß kilchgange halben wölle halten. do Er sich dan für das ine zu[o] den Schweitzerbrudern, wie man si nennt.”.↩
4. StAZH, E I 7.3, #70.↩
5. Christian Scheidegger, “Täufergemeinden, hutterische Missionare und schwenckfeldische Nonkonformisten bis 1600,” in Die Zürcher Täufer, 1525-1700.↩, ed. Urs B. Leu and Christian Scheidegger (Zurich: Theologisher Verlag Zürich, 2007), 155.↩
6. StAZH, E I 7.4, #43.↩
7. During an undated period of imprisonment prior to Rützensdorfer’s settlement in Kilchberg, Zurich’s authorities interrogated him in the Wellenberg tower in the middle of the Limmat river. When he was asked to promise to leave the city’s territory and not return, the prisoner responded by citing Psalm 24:1. Since the earth was was the Lord’s, secular authorities had no ultimate power to determine people’s movement through it, Anabaptists often claimed.↩

The annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference (SCSC) is the principal forum in which North American (and, to a much lesser extent, European) historians of the Radical Reformation and early modern Anabaptists present fresh results from their research. In these subject areas, the most recent meeting, held in Albuquerque from November 1-4, featured the broadest participation and widest range of research topics since I began attending in 2011. The following is a brief report of the conference, by no means comprehensive but focused on salient questions and themes around which research energies are focused.

A plenary roundtable on “New Approaches to the Radical Reformation,” organized by Geoff Dipple (University of Alberta, Augustana) and sponsored by the Society for Reformation Research, centered discussion around definitions and methods. The most provocative proposal came from Michael Driedger (Brock University), who suggested that historians discard altogether the session’s organizing principle, the Radical Reformation, as a historical phenomenon or framework for research. In his view, the category is inescapably problematic. It reflects early modern majorities’ descriptions of nonconformists too closely, a point Jim Stayer reinforced in his engaging historiographical survey. Instead, Driedger proposes studying post-Reformation religious radicalism as a sociological phenomenon which, once outlined, can be compared with other radicalisms across time and space. Amy Nelson-Burnett (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) echoed Driedger’s critique of the concept of Radical Reformation, suggesting that her work tracing patterns of dissent in early Reformation debates about the sacraments embeds “radicals” in the messy middle, rather than on the margins, of a broader conversation. Kat Hill (Birkbeck College, University of London) also spoke of the benefits of comparative analysis and of reevaluating Anabaptism in light of the insights of post-colonial history or the history of sexuality, for example. However, she highlighted the importance of “holding the difference” or, in other words, finding ways to emphasize features which distinguished specific “radical” communities from their neighbors and shaped a set of unique group identities over the long term. In keeping with this observation, one suggestion of my own contribution was that distinctive Anabaptist religious cultures remain legible in archival collections, despite the distorting effects of early modern and modern record-producing and -keeping practices.

Challenges to the categorization of post-Reformation radicalism in works like George H. Williams’ Radical Reformation (1962) are not new. Nonetheless, this framework remains durable–it continues to bring together scholars (at conferences like the SCSC) who work on topics of research which would otherwise be only loosely connected. Thus, the roundtable, and the question period, brought to the surface a series of important questions. If we were to take Driedger’s proposition seriously, what would be gained and lost? With which larger conceptual frameworks would we be left that might bring our interests together? Would there be any value in keeping a shared conversation among this group of scholars going, at least as intensively as we have done? There are not only historiographical consequences to how these issues are addressed, but also implications for the networks that historians of the early Reformation and Anabaptist religious cultures build and maintain.

Subsequent sessions provided a type of response to these questions. On the one hand, sets of papers illustrated the curious pairing of topics that an organizing concept like the Radical Reformation produces. Presenters forwarded engaging arguments about early modern catechisms, English Baptist views of natural wonders, and the development of Anabaptist masculinities, but it was not immediately clear how to synthesize or connect these findings. At the same time, the richness and breadth of fresh research projects suggested a renewed vitality in the field. In addition to engaging presentations on the intellectual history of the early Reformation, participants addressed issues of gender and the family, migration and mobility, archives, and material culture. Papers exhibited experimentation with new approaches to evidence and an alteration of familiar chronological and geographical parameters into which the history of Anabaptists has fallen.

Most encouraging is that this research really demonstrates the type of deep engagement and comparative work with broader scholarly debates that roundtable discussants had promoted. As a result, historians of “radicals” and Anabaptists are bringing new conversation partners into their ongoing discussions–as demonstrated by significantly increased attendance at and participation in these sessions. Perhaps broadening interest in this body of research should not surprise, given shared and growing concerns around majority-minority interactions, mobility and migration, and the nature and consequences of cultural and religious difference. This elevated level of engagement might event serve as an argument in favor of holding on to the Radical Reformation for a bit longer, even if only to keep these fruitful interchanges going.

List of Presentations

Inevitably, each presentation’s richness is lost in the report above. This list provides names of presenters and presentation titles, hinting at the variety in papers’ contents and approaches.

• Bonikowske, Adam M. (University of Arizona) “Anabaptist Masculinity and Civic Refusals in Southern Germany and Switzerland: Revisiting Gender History”
• Davis, Cory D. (University of Arizona) “That Our Manors May Be Rebuilt: Palatine Landlords and Toleration of Anabaptist Immigrants, 1650-1672”
• Dipple, Geoffrey (University of Alberta, Augustana) “What were Hans Denck and Ludwig Hätzer doing in Worms in 1527?”
• Lowe, Jessica C. (Vanderbilt University) “Inheritors of the Radical Reformation? Children of Münster Anabaptists and Dialogues around Dispossession”
• Hill, Katherine (Birkbeck College, University of London) “Pottery Wars: Materials Cultures in Anabaptist Communities and Diasporic Identity”
• Lambert, Erin (University of Virginia) “The ‘Gospel of All Creatures’ Reconsidered: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Early Reformation”
• Martinuzzi, Chris (DePaul University) “Attitudes towards Turks, Jews, and Heathens in the Works and Correspondence of Early Reformers and Anabaptists”
• Nelson Burnett, Amy (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) “Culture of Persuasion or Streitkultur?: The Flensburg Disputation of 1529”
• Neufeld, David Y. (University of Arizona) “Knowledge Production and Repressive Action: Anabaptist-Reformed Relations in Zurich’s Archives”
• Randolph, Jacob B. (Baylor University) “Polemic as Catechesis: Instruction and Opposition in the First Anabaptist Catechism”
• Smith, Joshua C. Smith (Baylor University) “Whirlwinds, Sudden Death, and an Army of Toads: Baptist Prodigies of the 1660s”
• Vice, Roy L. (Wright State University) “Reading the ‘Twelve Articles’ to the Rebels of 1525”
• Zhao, Julia Q. (University of Notre Dame) “‘I have already died’: Baptism and Conversion in Early Anabaptist Martyrdom Literature”