On January 1, 1484, Zwingli was born. His life and career were entangled with central events of his age, most notably the rise of anti-Papal reforms. He originally worked with but later reacted against Conrad Grebel and other Christian biblicist radicals — and the same could be said for his relationship with Martin Luther. Like Luther, Zwingli was an early opponent of Anabaptists, and his polemics against them has done a lot to shape historiography of “the fanatical Anabaptists”.
On December 29, 1625, Thieleman Jansz van Braght (Bracht) was born in Dordrecht, the Dutch Republic.
He is most famous for his editorial work on The Martyrs Mirror (Martelaars Spiegel). His original edition was published by …. in 1660. The most famous version of The Martyrs Mirror appeared in 1685, about two decades after van Braght’s death in 1664. The second edition is famous for its 100+ engravings by Jan Luyken.
He played a central role in the “War of the Lambs” (Lammerenkrijgh) among mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonites.
— Last updated: 30 Dec. 2024 —
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.
Since 25 June is the anniversary of the fall of Münster to siege forces, I have brought this post from June 2015 to the top of the blog, and I have updated the post in a few places.
Inspired by the Twitter hashtags #executedtoday and #onthisday, I have been looking through the Global Anabaptist-Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (gameo.org) from time to time. Today I came across this note in the GAMEO article by Irwin Horst on “England”:
The first Anabaptists in England, according to various polemical treatments written in the 17th century and later, came from Holland subsequent to the seditious uprising at Amsterdam on 10 May 1535 (A Short History of the Anabaptists, 1642, 48). The source of this information is Lambertus Hortensius, a Dutch ecclesiastic and chronicler, who lived contemporary with the events and whose Tumultuum Anabaptisticarum was first printed at Basel in 1548, but he nowhere holds that these Anabaptists were the original ones in England. The 25 Dutch Anabaptists arrested and brought to trial at St. Paul’s on 25 May 1535, 14 of whom were condemned and burned at London and other English towns on 4 June 1535, may have been members of the party mentioned by Hortensius.
I am noting Horst’s work here so I can find it again on a rainy day and look into this further. Please let me know if you know anything more about the early history of English “Anabaptism”.