Batavian Republic

“Anabaptist,” Mennonite and Doopsgezind Women in Early Modern Dutch History (ca. 1570-1800)

“Anabaptist,” Mennonite and Doopsgezind Women in Early Modern Dutch History (ca. 1570-1800)

Mike Driedger

Updated: 3 Jan. 2023. The basic message of this post is: Check out the Vrouwenlexicon!!! There are lots of fascinating details here about the lives of women from adult baptizing backgrounds before 1800. Look below for more details. I cite this post in my 2023 article “The Year 1625, the Dutch Republic, and Book History” (https://www.academia.edu/93269154/The_Year_1625_the_Dutch_Republic_and_Book_History_Perspectives_for_Reframing_Studies_of_Mennonites_and_Early_Modernity_2023_).

Updated: 18 Feb. 2023. In “The Year 1625, the Dutch Republic, and Book History” (Jan. 2023) I provide reasons for preferring “adult baptizers” to “Anabaptists” or even “Mennonites” as a general term. In short, the people who baptized adults in the early modern world were diverse. In addition to Mennonites, they included people from Mennonite milieus who rejected that name, and they included Baptists (of course), as well as some Socinians and Collegiants. With this diversity in mind, I have expanded the list below to include women who do not fit into the general framework of Mennonite church history.

On the technical front, I have also updated the URLs from http the https (it looks like the website has been updated).

Names that I have added in Feb. 2023 I have marked with an *. In an older version of this post I had two lists, and I have now integrated these lists into one.

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“The Ghost of Menno Simons”: 18th-century trolling?

“The Ghost of Menno Simons”: 18th-century trolling?

Mike Driedger

For a little fun on Hallowe’en 2021, this post provides highlights from a short, 8-page pamphlet written in the voice of a ghostly Menno Simons. The Dutch-language pamphlet is anonymous and undated, but it from the early 1780s. This was the era of the Patriot Movement against Orange family rule in the Dutch Republic. One of the leading national organizers of the Movement was the Mennonite preacher in Leiden, François Adriaan van der Kemp. The anonymous author of the pamphlet uses the voice of Ghost Menno to wag a finger at Van der Kemp and his ilk. In 2020s terms, the author seems to be “trolling” democratically oriented, anti-Orange, Dutch Mennonites of the 1780s.

You can read more about Van der Kemp at this website (https://dutchdissenters.net/wp/2015/03/quotation-kemp-1782/, and https://dutchdissenters.net/wp/2019/03/francois-adriaan-van-der-kemp/).

Post updated: 2 Nov. 2021 (see text that follows the image of the title page below)

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Biographical Sketches of Mennonite and Collegiant Revolutionaries in the Netherlands, 1780-1815

Biographical Sketches of Mennonite and Collegiant Revolutionaries in the Netherlands, 1780-1815

Mike Driedger

I’m planning more posts about the following politically significant figures, about whom little is known in the non-Dutch-reading world. For now, the links to Dutch and English sources (Biografisch Portaal van Nederland and the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, plus a few others when appropriate) will serve as a start.

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Maria Aletta Hulshoff (1781-1846)

Maria Aletta Hulshoff (1781-1846)

Mike Driedger

Updated: Dec. 2022

Maria Aletta Hulshoff (1781-1846), daughter of the significant Dutch philosopher and Mennonite preacher, Allard Hulshoff, was (like her father) an ardent supporter of democracy. Among her writings was the Peace-republicans’ manual; or, The French constitution of 1793, and the Declaration of the rights of man and of citizens, according to the Moniteur of June 27th, 1793; in the original French, together with a translation in English (New York, 1817).

Title page of Hulshoff’s 1817 book.

Other sources in English include the following:

A biography in Dutch is available in the Vrouwenlexicon online. Go to https://dutchdissenters.net/wp/2022/05/anabaptist-women-in-early-modern-dutch-history/ for more details. In Dutch, also see André Hanou’s notes at https://web.archive.org/web/20080125115929/http://web.mac.com/andrehanou/iWeb/Site/Herkauwer/1925AFEF-5C07-4FE9-95E3-775472D89D78.html.

Mennonite Revolutionaries: An Oxymoron? (2014 and 2019)

Mennonite Revolutionaries: An Oxymoron? (2014 and 2019)

Mike Driedger

This post shares slides from a presentation that I gave on Friday, 1 March, 2019, at the Grace Mennonite Church in St. Catharines. My talk’s title was “Mennonite Revolutionaries: An Oxymoron? Examples from the Dutch and Batavian Republics (ca. 1780-1810), and (Maybe?) Their Relevance for Today.” It was the second of four talks in a public discussion series called “Peace of Cake” (talks about peace church histories and ethics, plus continuing discussions afterwards over cake). I gave an earlier version of this presentation at Piet Visser’s retirement symposium in Amsterdam in June 2014.

*** You can view the slides by going to http://amsterdamnified.ca/learn/reformations/media/mennonite-revolutionaries. ***

Many of the quotations are in Dutch without translations. For the presentation in St. Catharines, I provided explanations.

For the 2019 presentation I prepared the following handout / timeline…