Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Münster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia (review)

“Eloi keeps prodding me gently, he wants to hear the next part of the story: clearly he wants to hear about Münster. The City of Madness has the fascination of fantastic things, it’s the shiver that the name still provokes, a shiver that was once an earthquake” (Luther Blisset, Q [2000], 222–23). Not surprisingly, Anabaptist Münster, with its tales of polygamy and communism, its lurid accounts of the excesses of Jan of Leiden’s pantomime court, all played out before the backdrop of the instruments of state terror, has held the attention of both contemporaries and subsequent generations. Perhaps for these reasons we continue to see intriguing work published on Münster at a time when interest in the Radical Reformation seems to be waning, and when much of what is written on the subject comes from an increasingly sectarian perspective — in addition to the volume being reviewed here, Ralf Klötzer’s excellent chapter in Brill’s A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (2007); a forthcoming work by James Stayer, Michael Driedger, and Willem de Bakker, provisionally entitled Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster, 1530–1535; and, of course, parts of the wonderfully enigmatic novel Q, come immediately to mind.

Kerssenbrock’s lengthy Latin chronicle, written between 1564 and 1573, has long been an important source for writing this history. Later a staunchly Catholic schoolmaster in Münster and other cities in the region, Kerssenbrock witnessed the beginnings of the Anabaptist takeover as a child, before being expelled from the city in early 1534. The chronicle circulated in numerous manuscripts, but was not published until 1899/1900, although an unreliable German translation was first published in 1771. This is the first English translation.

As Mackay indicates in his introduction, there are some serious problems with this chronicle as a source for the history of Anabaptist Münster: it was written three decades after the events it describes; Kerssenbrock witnessed only a small portion of those events; he is highly partisan; and, put simply, he is not a very good historian. Nonetheless, as Mackay also notes, Kerssenbrock’s work remains valuable: it preserves numerous documents associated with the events under discussion; it is the most extensive contemporary account of these events; it has been an important source for much of the subsequent historical writing on Anabaptist Münster; and it provides valuable insights into the mind of a staunch Catholic in the confessional age.

This is a very readable translation, supplemented with a number of valuable images and maps. Mackay’s extensive introduction and notes are a testimony to his thorough research into the primary sources associated with the topic — errors or lacunae in Kerssenbrock’s narrative are noted with references to Heinrich Gresbeck’s eyewitness account of events in the city and numerous other contemporary sources. Sometimes, though, he seems unsure of his audience. For example, it is unclear why a reader of a specialized work like this one would need a definition of the medieval church as “the institutional descendant of the state-sponsored church established in Late Antiquity by the Roman Emperors” (4, n. 3). Furthermore, although Mackay has done his homework when it comes to primary source materials, he does not appear to be as firmly grounded in the secondary literature on this event or on Melchiorite Anabaptism more generally. His bibliography is disappointing in this regard, as are some of the references in his notes. For example, when discussing the chambers of rhetoric, he refers his readers to a very brief discussion of this topic in the third edition of George H. Williams’s The Radical Reformation, rather than to Gary Waite’s monograph specifically on the subject (587, n. 241). All in all, though, this is a...