Studies in the Radical Reformation (1517–1618): A Bibliographical Survey of Research Since 1939

Abstract

Anabaptism was a religious movement of the little people of village and town, affecting in the end almost the whole area of the Germanic dialects from the Tyrol to Flanders, from Alsace to Prussia. Anabaptism, for all its, or perhaps precisely because of its, dissociation from principality and privilege, was more exclusively a Germanic movement than even Lutheranism; for the latter could at least go beyond the Germanic dialects to express itself in a Scandinavian or Slavic tongue; and, of course, Anabaptism was far less international than the Reformed movement. The linguistic containment of Anabaptism is all the more remarkable for the reason that in principle Anabaptism was much more world-minded and mission-minded—because of the seriousness with which it took the great commission— than any variety of the Magisterial Reformation. Yet when it moved beyond the deeply sinused speech frontier to the East, for example, it did so in ethnically and linguistically closed colonies in Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere. Documents from the pens of Anabaptists in French, a Scandinavian tongue, Polish, Czech, or Italian, surviving from the Reformation Era, could be held between two fingers; while the surviving Anabaptist writings in the international language of the Humanists and the Reformers are even fewer. (In contrast, a good deal of the surviving literary corpus of the Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and especially of the Evangelical Rationalists is in Latin, as well as in the Romance and Slavic tongues and Hungarian.) The little people of Anabaptism were not without recruits and even leadership from former priests and monks with their Latin and an occasional patrician with his Humanist training, but the lingua franca of Anabaptism was German, although progressive modification in idiom was necessary as the radical evangelical gospel was proclaimed by preacher or epistle from North to South.