On or around December 27, 1521, a small group of lay preachers began public criticism of sacramental orthodoxy in Wittenberg. Starting in 1522 with Martin Luther’s attacks, they became known popularly as the Zwickau Prophets, since at least one of their leading figures, Nicholas Storch, was from the central German town of Zwickau.

A controversy among Reformation historians concerns the role that these preachers played in the rejection of child baptism and the influence they had in the actual practice of adult baptism that was first adopted by reformers in later years. In an article from 1959, the Mennonite historian Harold Bender outlines some of the older scholarship on this question. Bender’s own view (the conventional Mennonite view) is to argue that the Zwickau Prophets played no role whatever in the origins of “Anabaptism proper,” which Bender argued began in Zürich in January 1525.

Bibliography

Harold S. Bender, “Zwickau Prophets,” in Mennonite Encyclopedia (GAMEO), 1959, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Zwickau_Prophets.

Matthew Rowley and Marietta van der Tol, “Reports Concerning the Zwickau Prophets (1521),” in A Global Sourcebook in Protestant Political Thought, Volume I: 1517-1660 (Routledge, 2024), 85–86, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003247531-14.

 — Last updated: 27 Dec. 2024 —

 

For the next update…

http://individual.utoronto.ca/mmilner/history2p91/primary/hausmann-zwickau.htm

http://individual.utoronto.ca/mmilner/history2p91/seminar/section8.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwickau_prophets

Bender in MQR…

Bender, “Anabaptist Vision” (1944)

Hans-Peter Hasse in RGG (German) / Religion Past and Present Online (English)

Amy Nelson Burnett, “Karlstadt and the Zwickau Prophets: A Reevaluation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte – Archive for Reformation History 114 (2023): 105–28 (https://doi.org/10.14315/arg-2023-1140106).

Thomas Kaufmann, …

(https://www.tgcme.com/lesson-10-progress-of-reform-in-germany)