Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers

Margaret Hellwart of Beutelsbach

Elsbeth Theiller of Horgen 57 Item, Rudolf Usollring, called Herzog Kramer, is one who preaches [in the Anabaptist meetings]. Caspar Landertz's two sons also belong to the Anabaptists. Item, Klachtharen is also a pious man who belongs to them. Menu Hess of Wadiswil, the son, also belongs to the Anabaptist sect. There are many more who go to them and are Anabaptists, but she did not know them, nor what their names were. She asks Milords for grace and release from prison. [On the back; different ink]: This Theiller woman has promised to go to preaching and to be obedient in all things. She is to be released from prison after paying the costs [of her imprisonment]. Notes 1 See Cornelius Bergman, Die Tduferbewegung im Kanton Zurich bis 1660 (Leipzig: H. Nachfolger, 1916), passim. 2 The Wahrhaftiger Bericht von den Briidern im Schweitzerland ["True Report from the Brothers in Switzerland"] is found in the Ausbund, Das ist: Etliche schone Christliche Lieder. . . , (Many editions since 1583. I used an edition published in Elkhart, IN: Mennonitischen Verlagshandlung,1880), 1­52 of the secondappendix. 3 In this testimony, Hanns Sleeker names eight persons involved in Anabaptism in and around Horgen, of whom two were women. STAZ, signatureEl 7.2, document 97. 4 STAZ, signature El 7.2, document 119. 5 Ibid. ANNA SCHARNSCHLAGER OF HOPFGARTEN, TIROL The year was 1530. It was a situation made for panic and would have paralysed a weaker person. But not Anna Scharnschlager. She dealt with it deliberately and with an eye to the future. She and her husband Leupold were forced to leave the home where they had lived for over twenty years, and the beautiful town of Hopfgarten near Kitzbuhel in Tirol, where she had lived even longer.1 The future was entirely uncertain. It was a new and strange experience for Anna Scharnschlager. She was by then at least forty years old, an aging woman according to the life expectancy of the time. Until now it had been a good, comfortable, and secure life. Her parents, Konrad Honigler and Margaret Rieper, had been well­to­do citizens of Hall, near Innsbruck. Johannes Rieper, her maternal uncle, was Dean and Provost of the cathedral in Brixen (Bressanone).2 What would the Dean, that traditional churchman, think of their sudden departure? And what about her brother and sisters. Would her parents ever have dreamed that such a thing could happen to their daughter? Perhaps it was just as well that they were dead and did not have to experience what might for them have been a great shame and sorrow. Anna loved and was loved by her family.3 The grief of having to leave was tempered by that secure love and so she was able to do calmly and carefully what now had to be done. Ursula, already twenty years old but still at home, helped her mother pack.4 The Scharnschlagers were leaving their sumptuous home and secure life because they had become Anabaptists.5 Anna's husband, Leupold, had come from Rattenberg, a small town on the Inn River about twenty­five kilometres west of Hopfgarten. The new teaching, considered by the church authorities to be dangerously subversive, had come to Rattenberg two years earlier. Its most famous convert was Pilgram Marpeck, a prominent citizen, civil servant, and mining engineer. Perhaps it was Marpeck who had Anna Scharnschlager of Hopfgarten, Tirol 59 persuaded Leupold Scharnschlager to join the fledgling movement that was committed to a thorough reform of the church in living as well as in theology. That Anna also decided to join may be regarded as certain, for she was much too self­confident and independent a person to have simply followed her husband into such a dangerous and insecure future. But she was a private person; her few letters reveal nothing about her personal convictions. They left their home, she explained to her brother in a letter five years later, because her husbandwas threatened with persecution, torture, and coercion in his faith.6 His choices were staying and becoming untrue to his conscience, the prospect of death for his faith (between 1528 and 1542, 139 Anabaptists were executed in Rattenberg and Kitzbuhel), or exile. They chose exile, and there can be little doubt that it was a joint decision. Sometime before their departure they had paid a visit to Anna's sister and her husband, Veronica and Hans Steger...