Tag Archives: Swiss Anabaptism

A Theology of Suffering: Suffering and Martyrdom in Sixteenth-Century Anabaptist Hymnody

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Alec Loganbill

Whoever wants to have fellowship with [Christ]
and be a partaker of his kingdom
must also do like him
here on this earth.
Whoever would inherit with him
must have much pain here
for the sake of his name.1

The strong connection between suffering and salvation displayed in this Swiss Brethren Anabaptist hymn is underscored throughout sixteenth-century Anabaptist hymnody. Such a connection was inspired by Anabaptists’ developing theological beliefs and by their experiences of persecution and suffering in early modern Europe. The writing and singing of hymns were popular and powerful means of religious expression for early Anabaptists, whose music could be heard everywhere from worship spaces to prison cells to the burning stake. They wrote and sang hymns to declare their faith, memorialize their martyrs, and connect to other believers. As music historian Rosella Reimer Duerksen has observed, in the case of Anabaptists, “hymnodists practiced little restraint or sophistication, but presented their views and beliefs freely in the stanzas which they penned.” 2 Thus, their compositions offer an unadulterated look into the hearts and minds of lay people rather than the formal doctrine found in other confessional hymnals of the Reformation. The lack of any formal doctrine in Anabaptist hymnody is also reflective of the fact that, as historian John Rempel has noted, “little time was taken for doctrinal or liturgical formulation; what mattered was spiritual rebirth and a life of surrender.”3 This grassroots form of religious expression and experience emphasized passionate spirituality, concern for living a holy life, and, perhaps most strikingly, the powerful and effective motifs of suffering and martyrdom.4

Among the developing doctrinal and theological ideas with which Anabaptist hymnodists interacted, adult baptism appears as one of the most prominent, for it was both the distinguishing feature of the confession theologically and politically. In the sixteenth century, adult baptism, or believer’s baptism, was “cited more often than any other doctrine as the crime condemning an Anabaptist to execution.”5 The connection between baptism and death was not lost to hymnodists, who frequently set baptism in a context of suffering. In addition to the baptismal sequence of grace followed by water, Anabaptists understood there to be a third rite of baptism: that of blood.

The Lord Jesus Christ, therefore,
assigns three witnesses for us.
The two are called water and Spirit.
The third, blood, that is, suffering.6

In a very real way, Anabaptists thought of baptism as the first step on the path to martyrdom. Baptism was a commitment to a godly life and a suffering life, a statement of faith that was a violation and rejection of the state church punishable by death. The emphasis of suffering in sixteenth-century Anabaptism, especially among the Swiss Brethren, was both a response to their experiences as a persecuted people and their theological formulation that true Christian discipleship demanded that Christians follow in the way of Christ, suffering as Christ suffered.

The importance of believer’s baptism was stressed in the context of martyr hymns, like in the account of the imprisonment, trial, and execution of Claesken Gaeledochter. In recounting Claesken’s inquisition, the hymnodist stresses her commitment to believer’s baptism, intimate knowledge of Scripture, and personal and passionate spirituality—all of which are common themes in Anabaptist martyr hymns.

About her baptism he did question;
But she, without alt’ring her course,
Courageously the Scriptures told:
That of new life and repentance
Both John and Christ most clearly tell;
‘Repentance first!’ was taught the people.7

Not confined to a baptismal context, Anabaptists’ theology of suffering consistently appears throughout their robust oral and literary traditions, most especially in their hymns.8 Like other confessions of the Reformation, Anabaptists connected their own suffering to the larger narrative of Christian persecution. One Passau hymnodist recounted the lineage of Christian suffering, declaring that “it began with Abel.”9 The author goes on to write:

Afterwards, all the prophets
and other pious also—
some were killed,
other experienced especially great humiliation
through fear and distress, cross and affliction.10

Anabaptist hymnodists accounted for the suffering of martyrs as well as their own affliction. In doing so, many hymns depicted imprisonment, torture, and execution in graphic detail. Stanzas told of burning, beheading, drowning, and stretching on the rack, along with other forms of physical torment. One of the most gruesome examples appears in the hymnal account of Elisabeth van Leeuwarden:

They had two thumbscrews put on
When for a long time she refused to confess,
So that they smashed thumb and fingers
Till the blood spurted out from her nails.11

However grim this theology of suffering may seem, it was often closely linked to messages of consolation and hope. The acceptance of “innocent suffering,” as one wrote, was not only a manifestation of discipleship but necessary for salvation.12 This union between suffering and salvation simultaneously inspired, sustained, and consoled sixteenth-century Anabaptists. Often, consolatory hymns took the form of prayers, pleading for God to grant peace to the suffering:

In anguish and distress,
Give us the bread of heaven,
And in the pain of death
Let peace to us be given.13

Anabaptist hymnodists also looked directly to Christ to inspire their work, as in this stanza, adapted from the Sermon on the Mount:

When you are slandered and abused now,
Persecuted and beaten for my sake,
be joyful, for see, your reward
is prepared for you on heaven’s throne.14

Many hymns that connected suffering to consolation and salvation were created by those who immediately needed such a message, namely, the imprisoned. The most famous collection of such hymns is the Ausbund, the primary hymnal of the Swiss Brethren. The core of this hymnal was first published in 1564 and consisted of fifty-three hymns, which were composed by Swiss Brethren Anabaptists imprisoned in Passau between 1535 and 1540 and include hymns written by well-known early Anabaptist leaders such as George Blaurock, Felix Mantz, and Michael Sattler, and others.15

Motifs of sorrow and distress underscore much of the Ausbund, a clear reflection of the immediate situation of the hymns’ authors. These understandable themes, however, are offset by “a note of triumph [and] of a conviction that [the authors’] past of sorrow and tribulation is leading them to everlasting life.”16 In one hymn, Michael Schneider joins the reality of bondage and suffering with the hope of salvation in the opening and closing stanzas:

We cry to you, Lord God,
and lament to you all our distress,
which now confronts us
in dungeons and in stocks
where they have stuck us.
Give our spirit power and much strength
that it may lay hold of the goal
which has long stood before us,
so that we might obtain it.
O God, Release the captives! Amen.17

Schneider’s urgency, religious conviction, and belief in the salvation of and from suffering were common themes often repeated in many of the hymns composed in Passau.

While the composition of many hymns was often an individual practice of meditation and expression, singing hymns was nearly always communal. For early Anabaptists across Europe, the singing of hymns was decidedly a shared practice, be it in a congregational, familial, or clandestine setting.18 Because of the wide variety of Anabaptist hymnody, songs were sung to worship God, express religious ideas, commemorate martyrs, and give comfort and hope to the persecuted and imprisoned. Dutch martyrologist Hans de Ries believed that “songs of the cross” were “profitable to be sung at times when the congregation [was] burdened with the cross and suffering.”19 Anabaptists readily recognized and employed the power that singing hymns could have for a community of believers. Simply, the hymns of the Ausbund and other hymnals were written by the suffering, for the suffering.

Related to the motif of salvation and suffering was the prevalence of a belief in imminent eschatology. Several hymns in the Ausbund expressed the hymnodist’s belief that Christ would soon return and usher in the Kingdom of God. Here, hymnal messages were intended to instill a sense of urgency to convert, repent, and “console the suffering and encourage them to endure a little longer.”20 Michael Schneider conveyed the urgency of repentance in the face of imminent eschatology on multiple instances throughout the Ausbund:

God burned Sodom
for its sinful deeds.
You should accept this.
It is certainly an example
for all who live godlessly
in this time.
God will give them their reward.
The fire is already prepared.21

In another hymn, which anticipates the New Jerusalem in a remarkable forty-six verses, Schneider consoles his audience:

You, Church of God, keep your pure covenant,
namely the covenant of your groom, Christ.
For a short time be patient and suffer.
He will soon give your rest.22

Prominently, Anabaptists experienced and expressed their suffering through the drama of martyrdom, which included not only execution but also imprisonment and prosecution. Although Protestants and Catholics of the sixteenth century also published their own extensive martyrologies, those of Anabaptists were unique in that they were preserved primarily through song. When Anabaptist hymns were published, they rarely appeared with musical notation but rather with a familiar tune designation. Believers preserved these tunes, often adopted from popular folk songs, and the lyrics through communal singing and rote memorization.23 Anabaptism’s distinctive separatism, strong in-group orientation, and low literacy levels among believers contributed to hymnal martyrology for Swiss Brethren and Dutch Anabaptists in the sixteenth century.24

The extant of hymnal martyrologies was not long-lasting among some Anabaptist groups, however. Hans de Ries, who published a new Dutch Mennonite martyrology in 1615—one that became the basis of the Martyr’s Mirror—refashioned much of the content from earlier hymnals into prose. Although no information was lost, a certain distinctiveness was. This editorial decision reflected a transition in Dutch Mennonite life: the stories of martyrs were no longer memorized and sung in secret by illiterate Christians; instead, they were studied openly by the educated.25 The Swiss Brethren and their descendants, on the other hand, continued publishing updated versions of the Ausbund in America until 1785 and in Europe until 1838, which helped to maintain a “theology of suffering…long after the actual experience of martyrdom had become relatively rare.”26 Generally, however, the intense attention paid to the theology and experience salvation and suffering, sustained through early believers’ hymns, faded with their own martyrdom. Nevertheless, an interest in Anabaptist martyrdom is still alive among many present-day Anabaptists.

Despite the near absence of sixteen-century hymns in modern Anabaptist worship and experience, these songs were absolutely foundational to the experience of the Christians who wrote and sang them. The composition and singing of original hymns provided consolation, meaning, and continuity to a persecuted religious movement still in its infancy. The themes of suffering and martyrdom pointed to a distinctive and immensely meaningful aspect unique to this Reformation-era confession. Beyond the narratives which many of these hymns outlined, early Anabaptist hymnodists also unveiled their own understandings of the larger narrative of the unfolding of the Kingdom of God, as well as their place in it. Viewed from the twenty-first century, these hymns provide a unique glimpse into the temporal and existential realities of the first Anabaptists.

1. Galen A. Peters, ed., The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund: Some Beautiful Christian Songs Composed and Sung in the Prison at Passau, Published in 1564, trans. Robert A. Riall (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2003),62.

2. Rosella Reimer Duerksen, “Anabaptist Hymnody of the Sixteenth Century: A Study of Its Marked Individuality Couples with a Dependence upon Contemporary Secular and Sacred Musical Style and Form.” Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1956, 268-269.

3. John D. Rempel, “Anabaptist Religious Literature and Hymnody,” in A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, ed. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer (Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), 391.

4. Rosella Reimer Duerksen, “Doctrinal Implications in Sixteenth Century Anabaptist Hymnody,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 35, no. 1 (January, 1961), 38.

5. Ibid., 44.

6. Peters, The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund, 266.

7. Hermina Joldersma and Louis Grijp, eds. and trans., Elisabeth’s Manly Courage: Testimonials and Songs of Martyred Anabaptist Women in the Low Countries (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 91.

8. John D. Roth, “Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren,” in Roth and Stayer, A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, 352.

9. Peters, The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund, 409.

10. Ibid.

11. Joldersma and Grijp, Elisabeth’s Manly Courage, 119.

12. Duerksen, “Doctrinal Implications in Sixteenth Century Anabaptist Hymnody,” 42.

13. Quoted in Paul M. Yoder, et al., Four Hundred Years with the Ausbund (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1964), 45.

14. Quoted in Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 203.

15. Yoder, et al., Four Hundred Years with the Ausbund, 5-6.

16. Ibid.,6.

17. Peters, The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund, 143-148.

18. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, s.v. “Hymnology of the Anabaptists,” accessed March 2, 2019, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Hymnology_of_the_Anabaptists.

19. Quoted in Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 239.

20. Duerksen, “Anabaptist Hymnody of the Sixteenth Century,” 259.

21. Peters, The Earliest Hymns of the Ausbund, 133.

22. Ibid.,244.

23. Yoder, et al. Four Hundred Years with the Ausbund, 7.

24. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 212.

25. Ibid., 237.

26. Roth, “Marpeck and the Later Swiss Brethren,” in Roth and Stayer, A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700, 352.

Scattered Among Strangers

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In the mid-seventeenth century, Dutch Mennonites inquired with increasing persistence into reports of Swiss Reformed governments’ mistreatment of Anabaptists living in their rural territories.1 In response to these expressions of concern, nonconformists in Zurich sought to provide their own testimony of what they had experienced. The primary result of this effort was Jeremias Mangold’s True Report . . . Concerning the Tribulations Which Came Upon Them, a description of the suffering of Anabaptist women and men, and their children, during a campaign of repression instigated by the city’s council in 1635.2 “It is not possible with a few words to tell of the great tribulation and cruelty which came upon us, as well as our wives, children, the aged, the sick, those with child, and those nursing—how they dealt with us poor subjects so harshly, inhumanely, and mercilessly,” Mangold wrote.3 Despite a recognition of the limited capacity of language to capture the breadth of their hardships, community members had contributed to a “short, simple, sure, and true account” of what had occurred. As the text revealed, the detention of Anabaptists and their separation from their children stood at the center of nonconformists’ understanding of the source of their suffering.

Oetenbach_Image

Detail from Jos Murer’s woodcut Der uralten wytbekannten Statt Zurych gestalt und gelaegenhait… (Zurich, 1576) depicting the Oetenbach cloister, which lay just inside the city’s walls. By the 1630s, the city’s council had converted the complex into an orphanage, workhouse, and prison and used it to incarcerate scores of Anabaptist women and men who lived in the surrounding countryside.

For a period of more than a century after the city’s reformation, Zurich’s government had sought to achieve uniformity of religious belief and practice in the territory under its control. The authorities had employed a variety of means, including social exclusion, financial penalties, and control of physical mobility, to compel Anabaptist conformity. Yet, despite the existence of a stable legal framework under which nonconformists could be prosecuted, officials had not implemented penalties systematically. Exemplary punishment of male Anabaptist leaders achieved only short-lived successes. Nonconformists continued to threaten the unity and health of the sacred society which authorities believed they had been ordained to institute and protect.

In the mid-seventeenth century, the council extended the scope of its repression. Frustrated by Anabaptists’ ongoing unwillingness to agree to their basic demand to either conform or leave, the authorities decided to incarcerate both nonconformist men and women in large numbers and to relocate their children, now separated from their parents, into Reformed households throughout the region. In the eyes of the authorities, given the failure of previous initiatives to address Anabaptists’ intransigence, this tactic was a lamentable but necessary means to achieve what they deemed a public good, the elimination of Anabaptist religious culture and the removal of nonconformists from the social body. “But as long as the Anabaptists . . . neither want to move away, nor be obedient, is not an Honorable Government compelled to take such a disobedient people into civil custody?” they asked.4

Thus, the breaking up of Anabaptist families became routine. Reports of family separation punctuate the True Report’s biographical vignettes which relate the details of each Anabaptist family’s experience. When Rudolph Hägi and his wife were detained in the orphanage-cum-prison of Oetenbach—Hägi for a period of eighty-three weeks–their five children were “scattered . . . from house and home among strangers.”5 The children of Adelheid Egli, the daughter-in-law of the martyred Anabaptist Hans Landis, suffered a similar fate during the nearly four years she survived in confinement.6 Anabaptist parents who agreed to leave the territory in exchange for their freedom later returned, incurring significant personal risk to find their daughters and sons. Mangold, describing the actions of the expelled Anabaptist Jacob Gochnauer, reported that “when he came into the area again to search for his scattered children, he walked into the hands of the enemies on the street, and they took him prisoner.”7

Evidence of family separation also appears in the city’s archived financial records. When Anna Peter and her husband Hans Müller, a miller from the small rural settlement of Edickon and an Anabaptist deacon, were imprisoned in Oetenbach for more than a year, their nine-year-old twins and three-year-old son were handed over to Müller’s Reformed brother, while their eighteen-month-old daughter was placed in the home of Müller’s Reformed brother-in-law, an official with policing functions in a nearby village government. The authorities mandated that these children be billeted and supervised without any support from the common funds.8

Members of local Anabaptist communities, who had survived in hostile conditions for decades, recognized that the breaking up of families represented a departure from a previous punitive regime. They lamented this punishment over any other. In addition to concern about the physical well-being of children–who were now “buffeted about among strangers, looked down upon, scolded, and mocked”—Anabaptists also harbored fears about the long-term consequences of their children’s separation from “fatherly and motherly care.”9 Who would supply their children’s needs and with what intentions? Who would protect them as they matured? Who would care for their spiritual well-being? Who would they become? How these questions would be answered had grave implications for the maintenance of fragile community life.

If anything, the authorities believed that separating children from their Anabaptist parents would improve their lot; integrated into the life of the Reformed parish, children stood a chance at social and spiritual restoration.10 Yet, this remained the secondary benefit of a coercive program with a more important objective. By exerting intolerable pressure on Anabaptist parents, the breaking up of families forced them to choose between conformity or exit. This practice helped authorities articulate a basic message: “We do not want you here, at least not as you are.” Within a few years after the implementation of this program, there was no longer an Anabaptist presence in Zurich. The government’s project of religious and cultural purification found success.

 

  1. Translated editions of many of the records produced by these inquiries and the efforts of mutual aid that followed are found in Documents of Brotherly Love: Dutch Mennonite Aid to Swiss Anabaptists, Volume I, 1635- 1709, trans. James W. Lowry, ed. David J. Rempel Smucker and John L. Ruth (Millersburg, Oh.: Ohio Amish Library, 2007), and Letters on Toleration: Dutch Aid to Persecuted Swiss and Palatine Mennonites, 1615-1699, ed. and trans. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs (Rockport, Maine: Picton, 2004). ↩
  2. All subsequent passages cited from this work, originally titled “Ein Warhafftiger Bericht, Von den Brüdern im Schweitzerland, in dem Zürcher Gebiet, Wegen der Trübsalen welche über sie ergangen seyn, um des Evangeliums willen; Von dem 1635sten bis in das 1645ste Jahr,” are taken from Lowry’s full translation in Documents, 24-83. On the attribution of authorship of this manuscript to Mangold, see Documents, 25n1. ↩
  3.  Documents, 27. ↩
  4. Johann Heinrich Ott to Isaac Hattavier (July 1645), translated in Documents, 103. Here, Ott, a Reformed minister defending the Zurich government’s actions to Hattavier, a merchant representing the interests of Dutch Mennonites, paraphrased an anti-Anabaptist tract known as the Manifest, published and disseminated by the city council in 1639. The original passage is found in Täufer und Reformierte im Disput: Texte des 17. Jahrhunderts über Verfolgung und Toleranz aus Zürich und Amsterdam, ed. Philip Wälchli, Urs Leu, and Christian Scheidegger (Zug: Achius, 2010), 104. ↩
  5.  Documents, 43. ↩
  6.  Documents, 61. ↩
  7.  Documents, 73. ↩
  8. Staatsarchiv Zürich, F I 190, 253. There is no mention of the removal of Peter and Müller’s children in the True Report. ↩
  9.  Documents, 81-83. ↩
  10. Reformed authorities considered children’s attendance at regular catechetical classes in the parish church an essential step in young people’s spiritual formation. Anabaptist parents regularly impeded their children from attending Reformed religious instruction. ↩

An Anomalous Defense of Anabaptist Mobility

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The Zurich government’s efforts to end the long-term presence of an Anabaptist minority in their territory in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on the control of nonconformists’ physical mobility. The council’s anti-Anabaptist decrees, provoked in part by the movement of Hutterite missionaries in the city’s lands, obliged middling officials to collaborate in a project to segregate, enclose, or banish local dissidents from parishes across rural jurisdictions.1 Periodically, Anabaptist community members were barred from using the commons, incarcerated, or expelled. By imposing these sanctions, Swiss Reformed authorities joined governments across early modern Europe who saw in the restriction and control of movement a means to force members of religious minorities and other marginalized groups to conform.2 Their stated objective was the restoration of subjects’ obedience and communal wholeness. The violence inherent in this approach marked the everyday lives of Anabaptists living in the region over a period of decades. The more systematic implementation of this punitive regime in the 1630s and 1640s helped to permanently eliminate an Anabaptist religious culture from Zurich’s territory.

Plague Image

The burial of three victims of plague in the church yard of Zurich’s Grossmünster, 1582. From the chronicle of the Zurich canon Johann Jakob Wick, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Handschriftenabteilung, Wickiana, Ms. F 30, Fol. 11r.

In this context, it is difficult to imagine that these same authorities would forward an argument in favor of the free movement of Anabaptists through imperial territory. Yet, in a November 1612 letter to Ernst Georg, the Duke of Hohenzollern residing in Krauchenweis, this is precisely what Zurich’s burgomasters and council did.3 This piece of incongruous reasoning stemmed from the arrest and incarceration of a group of five travelers traveling east between Mengen and Rüdlingen in the duke’s jurisdiction, among them one citizen and one subject of Zurich, one of them a barber surgeon, and three Anabaptist men from Moravia, who were journeying home.4 After being held for several days, the Swiss officials reported, the party’s members had been relieved of a significant sum of money, more than two hundred ducats, before being expelled from the German territory upon the swearing of an oath not to return. The travelers’ misfortune was regrettable, the Zurichers explained, because they had only had cause to traverse Ernst Georg’s lands after being summoned by the doctor Bastian Herber to aid in his efforts to treat victims of an outbreak of plague, which had devastated the city’s territory over the previous year.5 Herber—and, putatively, the assistants he had called for—had “behaved kindly towards us,” using his God-given medical arts and enduring great personal danger. His collaborators were now returning home along a familiar route connecting Zurich and Moravia, carrying with them significant monies bequeathed to them by grateful patients.

The letter’s authors expressed some understanding for the punitive instincts of the duke’s agents. The Swiss officials themselves had been dismayed when circumstances had forced them to welcome wrong-believing adherents of Anabaptism into their territory, where they were not usually tolerated. They also knew the content of the Constitutiones of the Holy Roman Empire, under whose stipulations they assumed that the travelers had been detained and relieved of their possessions. Nevertheless, under the same legal code, the officials contended, if an Anabaptist were to pass through a German territory without spreading error, without coercing those with whom he came into contact, without transporting his property, while remaining quiet (sich still haltend), there was no cause to judge him an evildoer. Under such conditions, even a Jew or Turk could not be treated as the travelers had been. Thus, the officials requested that the confiscated money be returned to the Anabaptists and sought assurances that citizens of Zurich would have no more reason to submit further grievances.

This curious episode warrants attention, first, because it provides yet more evidence of the deep integration of Anabaptists into professional networks of medical practitioners in Swiss territories.6 These networks included local nonconformists and those living well outside the region, whose reputation and ability warranted temporary toleration of their presence in Zurich during times of desperation. Long-distance connections within this network remained viable, it seems, because of the groundwork laid by Hutterite missionaries and Swiss migrants’ ongoing need to settle outstanding financial concerns.7

Second, this case shows that authorities had no obligation to restrict and control the mobility of nonconformists. A variety of options between hospitality and open hostility remained open to them. Under certain circumstances, officials drew on available legal resources to make countervailing arguments, even in an environment in which their coercive approach, and the justifications that buttressed it, appeared to have ossified. Repeated determinations to segregate, enclose, and expel were made deliberately, despite the variety of other paths open to the territory’s governors.

  1. See, for example, “Verbot des Täufertums (1585 [1612]),” in Zürcher Kirchenordnungen, 1520-1675, ed. Emidio Campi and Philip Wälchli (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2011), 429-35. Astrid von Schlachta has argued that concerns raised by the activities of Moravian missionaries shaped the 1585 mandate. Hutterische Konfession und Tradition (1578-1619): Etabliertes Leben zwischen Ordnung und Ambivalenz (Mainz: Von Zabern, 2003), 352-53. ↩
  2. For a broader study of this phenomenon, see Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). ↩
  3. The following account draws from this missive, found in Staatsarchiv Zurich, B IV 71, 519-22. ↩
  4. Leonhart Rützensdorffer was the citizen of Zurich and Conrad Bentz, from the Rumstal west of Winterthur, the city’s subject. The scribe did not record the names of the Anabaptist travelers. It is possible that the party included a man referred to as “one of our doctors” in the Hutterite Chronicle. The Chronicle reports that in 1612 an unnamed medical practitioner “had been in the city of Zurich and Swabia for over a year. God had blessed his work, and he had rendered good service to many prominent people with his medicines, especially during the epidemic in Zurich when eight thousand people died within a short time.” The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, Volume I, ed. and trans. Hutterian Brethren (Rifton, N.Y.: Plough Publishing House, 1987), 598. ↩
  5. Otto Sigg’s study of records from the rural parish of Ossigen in Zurich’s lowlands suggests that between 35-44% of the population perished in the twelve months preceding the authorities’ letter. “Die drei Pestzüge in Ossingen, 1611/12, 1629/30 und 1636,” Zürcher Taschenbuch 99 (1979): 107. ↩
  6. For more on this phenomenon, see Hanspeter Jecker, “Im Spannungsfeld von Separation, Partizipation und Kooperation: Wie täuferische Wundärtze, Hebammen und Arzneyer das ‘Wohl der Stadt’ suchten,” Mennonitica Helvetica 39 (2016): 21-33; Roland Senn, “Wer war (Hans) Jacob Boll? Die Geschichte Zweier Täufer aus Stein am Rhein,” Mennonitica Helvetica 37 (2015): 11-44. ↩
  7. Given the location of the travelers’ arrest, it is likely that they were following a path well-established by Hutterite missionaries and the hundreds of migrants they recruited in Zurich’s territory. Travelers left Zurich’s territory through the northern lowlands, skirted Schaffhausen to the east, walked overland to Ulm, and then contracted water transportation downriver on the Danube. For more on this route, see von Schlachta, Hutterische Konfession, 355-56. Long after they left for Moravia, Swiss migrants returned to Zurich to address outstanding debts and claim inheritance. The Chronicle’s account of Hutterite participation in the provision of medical care highlights the fact that, because of their doctors’ faithful service to the Swiss citizenry, “the lords at Zurich [allowed] more than usual of the money inherited [by the brothers from Switzerland] to go out of the country to the church [in Moravia].” Chronicle, 598. ↩

Praying to the Lord Against the City?

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Dürer_FourHorsemen

Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut The Four Horsemen (1498), an interpretation of Revelation 6:1-8 featuring Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence (from left to right).

In 1639, the city council of Zurich published its so-called Manifest, an apologetic mandate which justified authorities’ recent repressive actions against the Anabaptist population living in the rural jurisdictions surrounding the city. Among the reasons given for a campaign of incarceration, intentional impoverishment, and child removal—the weight of which ended a more than century-long Anabaptist presence in the area—was the nonconformists’ alleged utterance of malevolent prayers. Instead of interceding on behalf of the authorities, in keeping with the instruction of the apostles [1 Tim. 2:1-2], Anabaptists were accused of asking God to visit “pestilence, war, and other plagues” on the territory’s inhabitants.1

This particular accusation is of uncertain origin, but it was not new. The authors of the Manifest claimed that Anabaptists had cultivated this specific prayer “among themselves for years.” Indeed, clerics stationed in rural parishes had complained of a prayer with similar content in a list of grievances submitted to Zurich’s synod already in 1601. Allegedly, several local Anabaptists had asked God to rain down disaster on the territory so that Reformed authorities would forget about the dissidents and leave them alone.2 Anabaptists denied such claims. For example, Hans Müller, a deacon from Zurich’s southeastern Oberland, dismissed the charge categorically as an untruth spread by “evil people.” In keeping with Christ’s command, his brethren prayed for those who persecuted them, Müller insisted.3

We cannot determine definitively whether beleaguered nonconformists actually beseeched God to inflict their Reformed neighbors with disease, famine, and armed conflict. Still, the occasional reappearance of the claim that they did leaves us with a few interesting questions: why were some members of Reformed communities convinced that Anabaptists engaged in such malicious devotions, despite dissidents’ frequent denials, and why did they care?

Reformed pastors—those who reported the practice in question—likely believed that Anabaptists were capable of such spiritual sabotage because it accorded with the stereotypes of the dissident movement reinforced by their clerical education. Ministers’ libraries contained texts that attributed to local Anabaptists the seductive power of heretics and the disruptive potential of rebels.4 In addition, in the early 17th century pastors periodically attended academic events organized around discussion of anti-Anabaptist theses, including one entitled “Concerning the diabolic possession of men . . .”5 Furthermore, ill-seeking prayer communicated a lack of concern for the welfare of the Reformed society. This fit with clerics’ understanding of the intentions behind Anabaptists’ withdrawal from the religious life of the majority: nonconformists’ refusal to participate in certain religious and civil ceremonies was viewed as an act of spiritual arrogance. Since religious disunity held the potential to invite divine wrath, their behavior put the entire Christian community at risk. By offering up malevolent prayers, Anabaptists requested with their words what they were calling for with their actions.

Other members of the Reformed majority may have believed allegations of ill-intentioned prayers because of some rhetorical consistency with other instances of Anabaptist speech. Anabaptists often openly denounced what they deemed to be the generalized moral depravity of Reformed society, and implied its members’ perdition. They also frequently got into trouble for purposefully provoking their Reformed neighbors in shared social spaces. When Anabaptists told fellow travelers on the street that they had seen a devil on the local minister’s shoulder, or suggested that reconciliation with the Reformed church was akin to a dog vomiting and snarfing the results back up again, they deliberately baited their audience by publicly impugning their faith.6 In this context, the malevolent prayers which accusers attributed to Anabaptists might have been understood to reflect a similar spirit.

Undergirding all of these concerns was an assumption that Anabaptists’ words mattered, that they had the power to enact some kind of effect on reality. One the one hand, this belief existed in tension with Reformed leaders’ claims that Anabaptists’ spiritual and civil disobedience had cut them off from communion with God. On the other, it fit easily within a worldview that saw the crises of the period—indeed, exactly those disasters the Anabaptists were accused of appealing for—in the context of a broader spiritual conflict, in which Zurich was deeply engaged. These were not theoretical disasters, but catastrophes that marred seventeenth-century Europeans’ everyday existence. A primary response of the city council to the threat posed by the period’s economic ruin and the Thirty Years’ War was to mandate mass participation in days of prayer and repentance. That Anabaptists were engaging simultaneously in spiritual counter-efforts simply confirmed their identity as opponents of the common good in the eyes of authorities. The assumption, of course, was that God would only answer the petitions of those faithful to him. Some, however, believed that Anabaptists’ utterances had the power to invoke diabolical forces. This was the charge often lodged against Anabaptist medical practitioners—midwives, doctors, and veterinarians—who supposedly harnessed dark powers in the practice of healing arts.

The charge of uttering malevolent prayers represents a curious facet of the long-standing relationship between Anabaptists and representatives of Zurich’s Reformed majority. It sheds light on how contemporaries understood the effects of dissidents’ clandestine devotional practices on social well-being. It also shows that, despite their non-participation in Reformed religious culture, Anabaptists were deeply implicated in rural communal life. Their participation in networks of village sociability and exchange was a feature of long-term coexistence. Differences in religious belief and practice did not make living together impossible. However, as this case shows, this coexistence did not exclude conflict over speech with religious content. When open conflict did erupt, latent accusations (of questionable derivation) could be reactivated and used to sanction the repression of members of the local religious minority.

  1. “Wahrhaffter Bericht…,” in Täufer und Reformierte im Disput: Texte des 17. Jahrhunderts über Verfolgung und Toleranz aus Zürich und Amsterdam, ed. Wälchli, Philip, Urs Leu, and Christian Scheidegger (Zug: Achius, 2010), 125. ↩
  2. Zentralbibliothek Zürich (ZBZ), Ms B 163, 82v. ↩
  3. ZBZ, Ms B 163, 303v-304r. ↩
  4. Hanspeter Jecker, “Lange Schatten und kurzes Gedächtnis – Heinrich Bullingers posthumer Einfluss auf die Behandlung der Täufer in der Schweiz,” in Heinrich Bullinger: Life – Thought – Influence, ed. Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2007), 709-713. ↩
  5. A thesis entitled “Disputatio theologico-philosophica, de diabolica hominum obsessione, et de daemonum eiectione” was submitted for dispute during synodal meetings in October 1626. Urs B. Leu, “Letzte Verfolgungswelle und niederländische Interventionen,” in Die Zürcher Täufer, 1525-1700, ed. Urs B. Leu, and Christian Scheidegger (Zürich: Theologisher Verlag Zürich, 2007), 208. ↩
  6. Francisca Loetz has argued that blasphemers engaged in similar forms of verbal performance. Dealings with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a Cultural History of Religiousness (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), 272-73. ↩

Sexual Violence in the Deep Anabaptist Past

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This post includes descriptions of sexual violence.

AH Post_102617

“An excerpt from the Zurich marriage court scribe’s transcription of Verena Tanner’s testimony, presented on October 9, 1630. StAZH, E I 7.5, #95.”

Verena Tanner and Anna Nägeli met Jakob Zehnder during separate visits to his home in early 1630. Both women were active in Anabaptist communities in the territory governed by the city republic of Zurich, Nägeli residing near the town of Hirzel where the family of Hans Landis, the last Swiss Anabaptist to be killed by Zurich’s city council, had a farm. They had traveled for some distance around or across Lake Zurich to Zehnder’s home in the settlement of Waltenstein, near Winterthur, as patients seeking medical treatment for illness.

Zehnder, like a significant number of fellow Swiss Anabaptist doctors, barber surgeons, and midwives, was a respected medical practitioner, who viewed the practice of medicine as a “special burden and gift of God,” a means to live out a divine call to service.1 Zehnder’s reputation, apparently well-established among local Anabaptists, surpassed the boundaries of his nonconformist religious community. The authorities’ investigation into his healing practices revealed nothing but dedicated and principled competence. In 1634, for example, the local Reformed minister testified that,

[o]n different occasions, [he] had seen Zehnder linked with very evil harm, but [Zehnder] had used nothing other than appropriate natural remedies, and he generally admonishes his patients earnestly [that] they should fervently ask and call on the loving God [that] he might wish to make the medicine successful, so that it might function and they might return to their previous health, for without God’s blessing, the external remedy is futile and for nothing. Subsequently, they inspected his printed and written books, herbs, spices, oils, etc., which were great in number, but found no spells, crucifix, characters, or any other similar superstitious things and [Zehnder] had vigorously asserted from his heart that he always [held that] all consecrations, witchcraft, dark magic, etc., things which were highly forbidden in God’s word, were an enemy, and indicated further [that] it was indeed his custom that he administers all remedies in the name of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If he failed in this or engaged in idolatry, it was an unconscious sin of his, for he attributes no power to words, but all effects to the love of God. If one asks if he avoids these forbidden arts in localities in Your Graces’ possession, in St. Gall, in the Netherlands, etc., where he sends remedies at his own cost, nothing of the kind is found.[^2]

Yet, contrary to the pastor’s claims, the way that Zehnder practiced medicine was not benign, at least not for women. In October 1630, the doctor found himself jailed in the Wellenberg tower by order of Zurich’s council, on the evidence of testimony provided to the city’s marriage court by Nägeli and Tanner.2 They alleged that Zehnder had sexually harassed and assaulted them, respectively, in his house. Nägeli reported that Zehnder had taken advantage of his proximity to her as he applied a remedy to her diseased finger in order to pressure her to marry him. Initially attracted by this proposal because of Zehnder’s standing, means, and her own desire to be married, Nägeli accepted a gift from him. However, she soon became suspicious of Zehnder. On numerous occasions, he tried to convince her to sleep with him “as if she were his wife,” even though she had not exchanged vows with him. She verbally repelled him, accusing him of being afflicted with the vice of lust. Zehnder responded by dismissing these accusations as “worldly” slander, insisting that God protected his people from the work of the devil. Nägeli was unmoved, eventually returning the money Zehnder had given her after hearing that he had begun a sexual relationship with a woman in a nearby village and engaged in other abusive behavior.

The details of Verena Tanner’s earlier interaction with Zehnder shed light on what had frightened Nägeli. One evening a few months before, in the doctor’s home, Zehnder had subjected Tanner, who was suffering from a “painful illness,” to similar appeals to marry him. He told her that God had informed him directly that she had been sent to him as a spouse and twice spoke a marital vow aloud, which Tanner did not reciprocate. Later in the evening, Zehnder extinguished the light, approached Tanner uninvited, threw her on a bed, and raped her. She experienced physical and psychological pain, motivated in part by her uncertainty over whether Zehnder would fulfill his marriage vow. In the morning, Zehnder forced Tanner into further sex acts, which he now claimed had medicinal benefits, and insisted that she remain silent about what had happened. When Tanner returned to Zehnder’s home three weeks later, he attempted to justify his actions by insisting that the two were now married and that she held high esteem among God’s people. This manipulation did not convince Tanner to pursue a relationship with the doctor, who redirected his attention towards Nägeli.

Zehnder appears to have avoided serious sanctions for these offenses. As a result of his identity as an Anabaptist, Zehnder’s activities were subject to intense scrutiny by Zurich’s government over the course of his adult life. The documentary evidence that resulted suggests that the doctor had a track record of abusive behavior towards women. In 1618, for example, a case against Zehnder presented to the marriage court after the death of his first wife featured accusations by a female patient against the doctor quite similar to those presented by Nägeli. Yet, when Zurich’s authorities punished Zehnder—and they did so on a number of occasions, usually through fines and property confiscation that threatened to leave him and his family in ruin—it was on account of his withdrawal from the common civic and religious life of the Reformed parish, not his sexual crimes. Even then, Zehnder was often protected from the consequences of his religious nonconformity by local officials and neighbors who valued his medical skills. In the case described here, Zehnder accepted the content of Tanner’s and Nägeli’s accusations. Yet, although the terms of the punishment meted out against him are not extant, we know he was free again soon thereafter.

The reaction of the region’s Anabaptist community is more difficult to ascertain. Nägeli reported that, after initially encouraging her to show interest in Zehnder’s proposal, the “brethren” had counseled her against betrothal. Anabaptist leaders in the southwest of Zurich’s territory must have harbored suspicions about Zehnder despite the geographic distance that separated them from him. Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence suggests that he maintained his place among the community’s membership. For example, he kept in close communication with a regional Anabaptist leader into the early 1640s. Various factors may have allowed this. Firstly, the exigencies of survival in a hostile social and political environment meant that Anabaptists were forced to rely on the scarce human resources (such as medical practitioners) available to them in networks of affinity. Secondly, the sparseness of the Anabaptist population in the area where the doctor lived suggests that the communal structures within which discipline might have been imposed on Zehnder were weak or absent. Finally, imbalances of power within the community based on the involved parties’ gender and professional status likely affected processes of discipline among Anabaptists, as they did in so many contemporary cases adjudicated by the city’s secular court.3 Whatever the reasons, local Anabaptists appear to have failed to ban Zehnder from their midst, as they did with other sexual offenders connected to their communities.4

As I write, tens of thousands of women are sharing stories online of their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault under the #metoo hashtag. For a long time, but especially in the past few years, women have revealed the extent of trauma wrought by sexual violence perpetrated by men within the church and in society more broadly. So, perhaps surprise will not accompany feelings of sadness and anger provoked by this account of what Jakob Zehnder did to Verena Tanner and Anna Nägeli and his avoidance of meaningful sanctions. Still, since the deeper Anabaptist past often serves as a well for ideas and stories that shape contemporary Anabaptist traditions, today it seems fitting to lift this story out for consideration. Two Anabaptist women, victims of a man who exercised authority within their religious community, courageously took the opportunity provided to them by a secular court to denounce their perpetrator and defend their sexual integrity.5 The content of the account narrated here relies largely on the details they decided to share, the framing they selected to recount their experiences. As a result, we know that it happened to them too.

  1. For more on this healing and medical culture among Swiss Anabaptists, see Hanspeter Jecker, “Im Spannungsfeld von Separation, Partizipation und Kooperation: Wie täuferische Wundärzte, Hebammen und Arzneyer das ‘Wohl der Stadt’ suchten,” Mennonitica Helvetica 39 (2016): 21-33. ↩
  2. The following account is based largely on Nägeli’s and Tanner’s testimonies, which are recorded in Staatsarchiv Zürich (StAZH), E I 7.5, #95. ↩
  3. For more on the way gender shaped prosecutions of sexual crime in Zurich, and early modern Europe more generally, see Francisca Loetz, A New Approach to the History of Violence: ‘Sexual Assault’ and ‘Sexual Abuse’ in Europe, 1500-1800, trans. Rosemary Selle (Leiden: Brill, 2015), especially 25-160. ↩
  4. For more on seventeenth-century Swiss Anabaptist practices of communal discipline, especially in cases of sexual offenses, see my “‘Ihr hand dergleichen Leuht auch under Euch’: Gemeindedisziplin unter Zürcher Täufern im siebzehnten Jahrhundert,” Mennonitica Helvetica 39 (2016): 34-46. ↩
  5. In an early modern European context, a single woman’s sexual integrity was a precondition for full participation in society, impacting her marriage prospects and family’s social standing. Tanner did later marry, as documented in records from 1640 detailing the confiscation of her and her husband Uli Öttiker’s property by Zurich’s authorities. StAZH F III 36b, 20. ↩