The (not-so) simple confession of the later Swiss Brethren. Part I: Manuscripts and Marpeckites in an age of print
1999; Volume: 73; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0025-9373
Autores Tópico(s)Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies
ResumoAbstract: Recent archival work has focused attention on a notable tradition of manuscript production, editing and copying among the living in Switzerland in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. This essay analyzes some of the relationships that have come to light within one particular of manuscripts which appear to have grown out of an unpublished Anabaptist reply to the published protocol of the Frankenthal Disputation (1571). Although the manuscripts studied here were copied and put to use by leaders, the writings give evidence of Marpeckite provenance, and therefore suggest a growing influence of Marpeckite ideas on the later Brethren. Marpeckite ideas surface in later apologetics to the authorities and, most notably, in the 1583 preface to the Ausbund, the hymnal. An analysis of this one manuscript family also sheds further light on the possible sources of Hans Jakob Boll's argument for religious toleration, the Christenlich Bedencken (1615). ********** In the spring of 1993 while on sabbatical leave from Conrad Grebel College, I discovered an impressive and lengthy Anabaptist manuscript in the Staatsarchiv, Zurich. It was a hand-written book, dating from 1588, defending Anabaptist beliefs. It carried the title: Simple Confession. To the mayor and council of the city of Zurich, concerning the reason for the great division and disagreement among all who boast of Christ and the Holy Gospel. Some further sleuthing suggested a possible connection between this writing and Andreas Gut, an Anabaptist leader and farmer from Affoltern am Albis, near Zurich. Now, some six years later, it is most apparent that this confession was anything but simple in either its content or its composition. Rather, like the proverbial iceberg, the manuscript I stumbled upon in Zurich was simply a small visible outcropping of what was a much larger, very complex and largely-hidden literary tradition generated by Anabaptists (Swiss and Marpeckites) in the latter half of the sixteenth century in Switzerland and southern Germany. (1) This article, and the one which follows, hopes to shed more light on that little-known chapter of history. The story of Anabaptist origins in Zurich is one of the best-known and often-told chapters in Anabaptist history. It is therefore all the more curious that the trail of the Swiss Brethren grows so cold, so fast in the historical accounts. (2) The story as usually told becomes very obscure just after the Schleitheim Articles of 1527, with perhaps a note or two that the continued to live according to Schleitheim guidelines in small underground and exiled communities until they began to receive spiritual nourishment from other parts of the movement. Robert Friedmann, for example, noted that after its beginning stage, Anabaptism produced no outstanding leaders or teachers and so was dependent on and pamphlets from the outside. (3) Friedmann concluded that the Ausbund (the hymnal), the Confessio Thomas yon Imbroich, a Confession of Anabaptists in the Netherlands, and the Froschauer edition of the Bible were the books that constituted the spiritual equipment of the brotherhood in Switzerland as far as the records go. (4) Archival findings have allowed us to modify Friedmann's conclusion at this point, as will be seen below, but there is no doubt that in its broad outlines Friedmann's assessment still holds. Without a doubt, part of the reason for the rapid fading of the story is that in Switzerland the never thrived numerically thanks to severe persecution. (5) A second reason, as Friedmann noted, was the lack of notable leaders and a scarcity of printed texts beyond the notable cases of the Ausbund, reprintings of the Froschauer Bible and printings of a popular biblical concordance. …
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