Knipperdolling capture: Kerssenbrück 850 (Löffler 240).
Divara execution: Kerssenbrück 855 (Löffler 242).
Women returning: Kirchhoff, Belagerung, 144.
Bishop and Jan meeting: Gresbeck 213. Emphasis added.
CHAPTER TWELVE: PUNISHMENT
Jan and maidens: Dorp 399; Baring-Gould 360–61.
Jan and cages: Kirchhoff, Die Drei Käfige, 11.
Jan interview with Corvinus: Löffler 253–56.
Archbishop of Cologne: Reck 191.
Knipperdolling, Jan responses to questioning: Cornelius 403–05, 398–03.
Kerckering death: Kerssenbrück 855 (Löffler 243). Kirchhoff, in “Christian Kercherincks Aufstieg und Fall,” Auf Roher Erde Nov. 1968, writes that Kerckering had been born in 1498 to a noble and wealthy family that had lived for two centuries in a great house on New Bridge Street. Stubborn and wayward as a boy, in 1519 he married a neighbor who was “wellborn” but not of the nobility, against his family’s wishes. By 1532 his rebellious nature had led him to side with the Lutherans in their dispute with the Catholics concerning the disposition of St. Lambert’s Church. In February 1534, he was elected to the new city council that would soon allow the Anabaptists to achieve total control of the city. After Jan became king the following summer, Kerckering took charge of supervising the city’s defenses. His descendants would later claim that he had been persuaded by his wife against his own inclinations to support the Anabaptists, but he chose to remain to the end when he could have left in May. Before he was executed, Kerckering left a note for his cousin Johann Kerckering, directing him to pay one hundred and ten guilders from his estate toward his debts and to pray that his soul would go to Heaven.
Melanchthon: Baring-Gould 368, citing Martin Luther Collected Works, 1545–51, ii, 325.
Criminal code: Der Wiedertäufer in Münster: Stadtmuseum Katalog, 212.
Sentencing, priest’s visits, executions: Löffler 267–68, citing Corvinus.
Corvinus description of executions: Die Wiedertäufer in Münster: Stadt Museum Katalog, 213
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE LEGACY OF THE TAILOR-KING
Plunder and pay: Kirchhoff, Belagerung, 144–45.
Bishop’s problems: Kirchhoff, Belagerung, 163–65.
Bishop’s death: Baring-Gould 370.
Houses: Hansel Eck: Homann 201–202.
Henry Krechting’s peaceful death: Homann 215.
Rothmann’s supposed survival: Reck 177.
Cages and lights: Kirchhoff, Käfige, 3.
Hauptmann’s visit: Homann 11–13. Some visitors were harder of heart than might be expected: Heinrich Heine, the great poet, who visited the city in 1842, wrote a jingle suggesting that the new Cathedral at Cologne might “follow my advice and adorn it with the three iron cages that are now hanging high above Münster from the tower of the church called St. Lambert’s”: “Folgt meinem Rat und steckt sie hinein/in jene drei Körbe von Eisen,/die hoch zu Münster hängen am Turm/ der Sankt Lambert geheissen.” Kirchhoff, Käfige, 24.
Overwater Church. The tower had been replaced in the nineteenth century but was later destroyed in a storm, after which it was decided to leave it as it had been in 1535.
Cages’ damage: Kirchhoff, Käfige, 30.
Debate over cages: Kirchhoff, Käfige, 41–42.
185 Peace of Westphalia: Nevertheless, the city was besieged once again in 1657 by the Austrians; it was later occupied by Napoleon’s army and it was severely damaged during World War II.
Anabaptists and Satan: Grieser 302, 304, 308.
Luther: Grieser 312–15.
Rhegius and Rothmann: Grieser 340–41.
Corvinus: Grieser 328.
Philip of Hesse: Grieser 331, 332, 334.
Jan and psychoanalysis: Jones 173–80.
Carnival world: Scribner 98; Bakhtin 78.
Reck on Jan: Reck 26.
Reck on Anabaptist-Nazi comparisons: Reck 19.
Cohn on Middle Ages, Introduction, xiii.
Chiliasm, Nazis: Cohn 307–14.
Year 2000: Denise K. Magner, “Apocalyptic Predictions and Millennial Fervor Attract Scholarly Notice,” The Chronicle oƒ Higher Education, October 14, 1997.
Apocalyptic portents: See Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins. “Religious Totalism, Exemplary Dualism, and the Waco Tragedy,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.
The year 1000: Richard Erdoes, A.D. 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988, 2.
Modern groups: Anthony and Robbins 261–63.
Jonestown: Anthony and Robbins 267–68, citing Constance H. Jones, “Exemplary Dualism and Authoritarianism in Jonestown,” in New Religions, Mass Suicide and the Peoples Temple, ed. Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1989.
Concept of Elect: Anthony and Robbins 268.
Koresh background: Anthony and Robbins 272–73.
FBI at Waco: Anthony and Robbins 275.
SOURCES AND WRITINGS ABOUT THE ANABAPTISTS
This book draws from a variety of original and secondary sources in an effort to tell an old European story to a new American and European audience of general readers, not professional historians. Works cited about the Anabaptists are listed first, those consulted second. General works cited and consulted are similarly listed. The introductory note discusses works in English first, then those in German, and concentrates on those works in both languages that were particularly helpful.
WORKS IN ENGLISH
There are only a few detailed reference sources available in English, and all, of course, are based on sources discussed in the “Works in German” section that follows. Those that I found useful (full citations follow below in the Bibliography) include Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, which since its appearance in 1957 has been the standard point of department for English-speaking readers who are interested in learning about the more bizarre aspects of life in the Middle Ages. Cohn’s narrative summary of the events in Münster is presented by him as the culmination of a series of events that began around the year 1000. I found only two works of fiction in English on the subject. A 1962 novel, The Siege, by Peter VanSittart, is impressionistic and colorful. It is something of a potpourri of medieval lore and superstition, in places close to the original sources and elsewhere taking advantage of the novelist’s imaginative license. The 1993 novel by Nicholas Salaman, The Garden of Earthly Delights (London: Harper-Collins), describes the action through the eyes of a protégé of Hieronymus Bosch who ends up in Münster with his young wife, who then leaves him to become the ruler’s queen. Salaman uses some recognizable sources but changes names and invents incidents to suit his fictional purposes. S. Baring-Gould, a Victorian man of letters, devotes a long chapter to Münster in his 1891 collection, Freaks oƒ Fanaticism and Other Strange Events, which was helpful in providing an English perspective and a narrative overview, as well as useful, though dated, translations from the German.
American scholarly work on Münster for many years was left almost entirely to those connected with the Mennonite Quarterly Review (MQR), a bi-monthly journal published at Goshen College, Indiana, and devoted to issues related to the Mennonites in this country and abroad. Most of the earlier MQR essays on Münster have a defensive quality to their tone, concerned as they are to demonstrate that Jan and his followers were radical and unacceptable apostates from the tenets of true Anabaptism as represented by Menno Simons, after whom the Mennonites are named. Of the approximately two dozen articles in the MQR (excluding book reviews) over the past half century, the most important for me has been the two-part series in 1934 by John Horsch entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists of Münster,” which lays out the narrative structure, themes, and characters of the story. In his 1936 article, “Menno Simons’ Attitude toward the Anabaptists of Münster,” Horsch explains in further detail the basis for separating the true Anabaptists from Jan’s radical splinte
r group.
The major North American scholar on the subject is James Stayer, whose 1972 book Anabaptists and the Sword explains both the repression of the Anabaptists and their sometimes violent reactions, as in Münster, to that repression. More recently, in a 1986 MQR article, “Was Dr. Kuehler’s Conception … Correct?” Dr. Stayer argues that Jan van Leyden was essentially just an actor who needed to resort to outlandish antics because he lacked the authority ofJan Matthias. Like many modern scholars, he notes in order to question it the story line that Kerssenbrück set for Münster, and which Horsch adopted: a weak, traitorous council was toppled by lower-class rabble stirred up by outside agitators. Later research indicates that wealth was relatively evenly distributed among the citizens, meaning many supporters were not economically motivated; some of the immigrants who came into the city were also wealthy, though they naturally didn’t bring much with them. My own account falls between these two poles but leans more toward the Kerssenbrück/Horsch interpretation.
The foremost living German expert on Münster is Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, who is represented more fully in the German-language section. In an MQR article in 1970, Kirchhoff anticipates and provides support for Stayer’s position, asking, rhetorically, “Was There a Peaceful Anabaptist Congregation in Münster in 1535?” He argues that it was Jan Matthias who brought the violence with him to Münster. Left to their own devices, Rothmann and the others there before him could have worked things out peacefully. I benefited greatly from Dr. Kirchhoff’s many works and, as mentioned in the ‘acknowledgements,’ enjoyed the privilege of a fruitful and pleasant interview with him at his home in the former Bishop’s seat of Wolbeck.
Two dissertations address the event in part. Mary Eleanor Bender’s 1959 Indiana University study, “The Sixteenth-Century Anabaptists as a Theme in Twentieth-Century German Literature,” appraises several novels, plays, and historical narratives published in this century, all in German, about Münster, including three that are noted more fully in the German section below. Dale Grieser’s 1996 Harvard dissertation, “Seducers of the Simple Folk,” examines the contemporary objections to the Anabaptists in popular pamphlets of the time and devotes a chapter to the “carnival in Münster,” as he calls it.
Of the many works in English on Luther and the Reformation, I relied on George Huntston Williams’s The Radical Reƒormation (1962) and Cornelius Krahn’s Dutch Anabaptism: Origin, Spread, Life and Thought (1450–1600), published in 1968. The first is widely recognized as the standard text, and I found its scattered references to the elements that made up the Münster tragedy very helpful. The second text was essential in setting the Dutch scene and in establishing the relationship between the Germans and the Dutch of this period. Biographers of Luther such as Heiko Oberman seem not to deal with Luther and Münster in any detail; more helpful was John S. Oyer’s 1964 study, Lutheran Reƒormers Against Anabaptists. Oyer was a professor at the Mennonite Goshen College, and his account is intended to reveal and explain the “unremittingly hostile” attitudes of the Lutherans to the Anabaptists which have led to historical distortions in the representations of this varied group of dissidents.
WORKS IN GERMAN
My point of departure for the voluminous sources in German on the Anabaptists in Münster was the book-length city museum catalog published there in 1983 to commemorate the new museum’s first large show, which was a large display of artifacts about the Anabaptist rule of the city. The volume, Die Wiedertäuƒer in Münster, includes commentary on all of the exhibits and photographs of many, as well as explanatory essays and a useful bibliography. A key source for information and of colorful narrative details since the mid-nineteenth century has been the collection of eyewitness accounts of the Anabaptist Kingdom and the full introduction and commentary on these provided by C. A. Cornelius in his Berichte der Augenzeugen über das Münsterische Wiedertäuferreich (Reports of Eyewitnesses Concerning the Anabaptist Kingdom in Münster). Published in 1853, this work includes the influential man-in-the-street’s narrative by Henry Gresbeck, “Meister Henry Gresbeck’s Bericht,” the so-called confessions of Knipperdolling, Jan, and others, and letters and reports by various figures, including some of the Bishop’s commanders.
Cornelius’s comments on Kerssenbrück and Gresbeck are detailed and instructive. The first version of Kerssenbrück’s account, and the one used by Cornelius, was the handwritten narrative done in Latin, Anabaptist Furosis Historica Narratio. Kerssenbrück had returned to Münster to serve as rector of the Cathedral school in 1550; by 1566 he was, according to Cornelius, a respected writer of theological works and ready to write something about what he knew about the bloody history of Münster that would be useful for future historians. He began his history of the uprising in 1566 and finished it in 1575. Although the time of the kingdom was long since past, along with most of the eyewitnesses, Kerssenbrück had a rich source of material at hand. His own memories of what he had seen as a boy were aided by what he had been told about by others. For more than twenty years he had daily intercourse with relatives, friends, and associates of the participants to augment his own memories. According to Cornelius, Kerssenbrück’s sharply observant sense of the details and personalities that he observed, as well as his intimate knowledge of the city and its surroundings, let him keep the clarity of his youthful eyes as he pursued the causes and effects of what he had seen with the wisdom of his years. Additionally, he had the benefit of other published accounts before his, and he was given access to official city and state archives.
Cornelius says Kerssenbrück judged what he heard carefully, avoiding mere rumor or being carried away by the eloquence of the speaker. His style throughout is careful and selective; he likes to show his learning through mythological, literary, and historical allusions, adorning his factual narrative with tools of classical rhetoric. He even allows Knipperdolling, at the beginning of the Bishop’s siege, to cite Thucydides concerning the relative strength of the two opposing parties, the Bishop’s and his own. It is true, Cornelius says, that many of these observations are tedious, trivial, or tasteless; his attempts at irony and satire are often pale and silly; his reliance on astrology is laughable. For all his faults, though, Kerssenbrück’s narrative ability holds the reader’s attention, Cornelius says—and he is essentially reliable. It’s easy to tell what he observed himself, as he says “I,” “we,” and “our.” We see the boy as he stands in the street with his friends listening to the Anabaptists prophesying doom and demanding repentance, pointing to signs in the night sky. He peers into Knipperdolling’s house and sees the Catiline of Münster, (after the Roman traitor) standing in a corner and carrying on a conversation with his heavenly Father. Caught carrying a gun belonging to his landlord, Dr. Wesseling, he has to hide from the bullets of the Anabaptists behind the charnal house in the cemetery of St. Egedi’s Church, on the same day as a fellow student has been killed.
Eventually, Cornelius says, the city authorities grew tired of Kerssenbrück’s insistence on recalling such an unpleasant part Münster’s history. After twenty-five years as rector, he left it once again in 1575 for a similar post in the neighboring city of Paderborn, and ended his career in Osnabrück. He died in 1585. His original Latin work was translated into German in 1771. Reprinted in 1881 and in 1929 as Geschichte der Wiedertäuƒer zu Münster in Westphalen, it remains the point of departure for all later studies. However, the eighteenth-century German translation is generally regarded as inadequate. I consulted the H. Detmer 1900 edition of the Latin text and drew on Detmer’s German translations in his footnotes; I also used Clemens Löffler’s 1926 chronological assembly and translations of Kerssenbrück, Gresbeck, and other sources, the full title of which is listed in the Works Cited section of the Bibliography.
Cornelius also assembled the other major primary source for the kingdom of Münster, the narrative of Henry Gresbeck, from several archival sources. Written in a north-German dialect that is nearly as difficult for modern Germans as Old English is for us, it has
been translated in part by various researchers but nowhere in its entirety. Cornelius helpfully translates into modern German Gresbeck’s letter to (presumably) Count von Manderscheid and provides background information on the young carpenter that later scholars use. He stresses the contrast between the learned and somewhat stuffy Kerssenbrück and Gresbeck, the “lively and spirited” and independent young man, the common man who writes as he would have talked, full of slang and idioms. He sometimes reports on things he has heard but not seen, but he does not pretend to know what is beyond his own experience, such as the inner workings of Jan’s mind or his council, and he is very good on details such as the city’s defensive preparations and, of course, his own adventures. “We may regard his report in general, where he speaks from what he has seen and heard himself, as historical truth.” It is interesting to note that since Cornelius made Gresbeck’s contribution known, the young carpenter has figured largely in the imaginative reconstructions of the Anabaptist Kingdom.
Of the many relevant works by Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, several were especially helpful. The most recent (1996) and most easily accessible is a short book on the cages that still hang from St. Lambert’s Church, Die “Wiedertäufer-Käfige” in Münster. Kirchhoffput quote marks around “Anabaptist Cages” because he disapproves of both the term “Wiedertäufer” as one used only by their enemies, and of the word “cages,” which he thinks represents the three men whose bodies they contained as less than human. His sympathy for the rebels derives in part from his study of the oppression they faced, discussed in another work, published in 1962, about the suppression of civil liberties by Bishop Franz, “Die Besetzung Warendorfs” (“The Military Occupation of Warendorf”). The siege and conquest of the city that followed as a partial result of the Bishop’s own policies is described in the 1962 work, Die Belagerung und Eroberung Münsters 1534/35. In Die Täuƒer in Munster (The Baptists in Münster) 1534–35, published in 1963, Kirchhoff provides an overview of the social, economic, and religious structures of the Anabaptists in Münster. A book-length summary of the events and the scholarship concerning the episode is found in Kirchhoff’s Das Phänomen des Täuƒerreiches zu Münster 1534/ 35 (The Phenomenon of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster), in Der Raum Westfalen (The Westphalian Region), VI, 1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1989).
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