This post shares images from a famous 19th-century German printmaker that depict Anabaptist rule at Münster in the 1530s. It also outlines how these images have been confused repeatedly as 16th-century images.

UPDATED: 1 Jan. 2023

If you are a publisher looking for an image of 16th-century Anabaptists, especially the “fanatical” Anabaptists who controlled the city of Münster, Westphalia, for much of 1534 and 1535, one of the likely places you’ll look is the Granger Historical Picture Archive, or similar image collections online. This database is a poor source of information about representations of Anabaptists, because it has mislabelled many. An example is the image of Hille Feiken (https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Hille_Feicken_(d._1534)). The image of her is described by Granger as a “Contemporary woodcut, 1534-35”. Huh? The site is wrong by about 360 years!

A few years ago I purchased a copy of Joseph Sattler’s 1895 artbook Die Wiedertäufer [The Anabaptists]. The image above is #13 from Sattler’s 30-image collection.

I would like to thank David Sharron, Archivist at Brock University, for scanning the images. I am making the complete 1895 collection available online (use on the terms of a CC licence). For a pdf version of the collection, go to http://amsterdamnified.ca/learn/reformations/media/joseph-sattler-die-wiedertufer-1895. (Note: The link seems to work best when viewed using the Chrome web browser.)

For a transcription of the table of contents, click this link to a PDF file named Sattler 1895 Inhalts-Verzeichniss.

Readers should know that these images from 1895 are often described incorrectly as images from the 16th century. The Granger Collection is not the only source of the mistake. The image below is taken from a textbook aimed at college and university history students. The authors of the collection are Lynn Hunt, Thomas Martin, Barbara Rosenwein, and Bonnie Smith — all well-established and accomplished historians.

I do not know who wrote the caption for the image, but the image is not what is advertised. While it does depict John of Leiden’s corpse, it is not Dutch, and it is not from the sixteenth century. This is illustration #30 from Joseph Sattler’s 30-image collection from 1895. If you look closely, you can even find Sattler’s monogram along the right-hand side of the image. Sattler was one of the great illustrators of the Jugendstil and Art Nouveau movements. What does the image show? A crowd in a mood of jubilation after the violent death-by-torture of an Anabaptist leader. The previous image (#29) in the collection is the one that actually depicts the torture and execution of three Anabaptist leaders. The translated caption for illustration #30 is “John of Leiden’s Ascension” (Johann von Leidens Himmelfahrt). This is meant to be an ironic, mocking, mean-spirited title. John of Leiden is nothing like the resurrected Christ, the picture asserts. His “ascension” consists only in his caged, rotting corpse rising on a rope to hang on public display from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church in central Münster.

This same image is also included in David Bell and Anthony Grafton, The West: A New History (first edition, 2018).  Like the other textbook, their caption to Sattler’s image describes it as “a sixteenth-century engraving.”

At the end of the collection, on the page titled “Joseph Sattler’s Werke,” we learn that there were two versions of Die Wiedertäufer that Verlag Stargardt published: a “larger edition” that sold for 100 Marks, printed on Japanese paper, and including 3 hand-coloured images; and a “smaller edition” that sold for 20 Marks, printed on Dutch hand-made paper (Büttenpapier), and including only 1 hand-coloured image (No. 21). Only 100 copies were made of the more expensive larger edition. My copy is one of the less-expensive versions.

Again, if you would like to see the entire artbook, go to http://amsterdamnified.ca/learn/reformations/media/joseph-sattler-die-wiedertufer-1895.