Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments During the Reformation.

Although the book here reviewed does present a narrative of "Hutterite beginnings," as its title indicates, it describes Moravian Anabaptism in its entirety from its beginnings in 1526 to ca. 1540. Like the earlier work of Jarold Zeman, it undertakes to broaden the history of Moravian Anabaptism from its previous pattern, which was to tell the Hutterite story from the Hutterite point of view.

The Hutterocentric approach to Moravian Anabaptism began with the first scholarly utilization of Hutterite sources by the late nineteenth-century Austrian researchers Josef von Beck and Johann Loserth and continued in this century in the United States with the work of the Mennonite scholars Robert Friedmann and Leonard Gross. Since the Hutterites, of all Anabaptist groups, collected their historical sources most assiduously and cultivated a tradition of chronicle writing and epistle-collection, and since none of the Moravian Anabaptist groups that competed with them survived, a Hutterocentric presentation of Moravian Anabaptism flowed easily from the sources. However, the dominance of the Hutterite standpoint in the story of Moravian Anabaptism tended to make Moravian Anabaptism seem a somewhat eccentric deviation from the main developments of Anabaptist history. The Mennonite pattern of Anabaptism was seen as the rule, the Hutterite as the exception. It appeared that Anabaptists generally maintained private property, although they cultivated a generous practice of mutual aid, while their small offshoot, the Hutterites, practiced Christian communism in Moravia.

Packull has deconstructed the Hutterite narrative of Moravian Anabaptist beginnings by adding to the Hutterite sources all other pertinent sources: the records of the Habsburg persecution of the Anabaptists, primarily in the South Tyrol, and surviving writings of non-Hutterite groups in Moravia, particularly the Gabrielites, the Philipites and the Marpeck brotherhood. The latter sources include the Philipite songs that provided the core of the earliest Anabaptist hymn collection (the Ausbund); Clemens Adler's Judgement Concerning the Sword, the first extended treatise on Anabaptist nonresistance, which appears to have been of Gabrielite origin; Gabriel Ascherham's Distinction between Divine and Human Wisdom; and A Short Instruction of Some Points of Our Faith, which Packull convincingly attributes to Hans Umlauft. All of these sources were previously known to Anabaptist researchers; Packull's contribution is to place them in the historical context of Moravian Annbaptism, to which he also ties the earlier career of Pilgram Marpeck and his controversies in Strasbourg with the Spiritualists Hans Bunderlin and Christian Entfelder.

The outcome of this meticulous research is to retouch significantly the previous picture of sixteenth-century Anabaptism. Virtually all Anabaptist groups attempted to replicate the community of goods of the apostolic church as described in Acts 2 and 4, although other groups were more spiritualist and voluntarist in their Christian communism than the Hutterites. Rather than an exceptional development, Moravian Anabaptism now appears as the main stage for Swiss and south German Anabaptists in the early 1530s, since these nonconformists were mainly driven into exile by the fierce persecutions of the late 1520s in their homelands. Packull, who in an earlier book led the way in studying south German-Austrian Anabaptism as a continuation of the piety of Thomas Muntzer and in distinguishing it from Swiss Anabaptism, is now inclined to stress the intermingling of the Muntzerite and Swiss traditions in Moravian Anabaptism, and also in Anabaptist mission activity in the Tyrol. He regards both the New Testament-centered biblicism and the oldest Anabaptist congregational order, which called for community of goods, as Swiss imports to Moravian Anabaptism. In addition to this the book provides the most detailed reconstruction now available of the biography of Jacob Hutter and of the emergence of the Hutterite movement in the south Tyrol, as well as an empathetic depiction of the Hutterite martyrdoms at the hands of the Habsburg government.

JAMES M. STAYER Queen's University