The Forgotten Writings of the Mennonite Martyrs.

Brad S. Gregory, ed. The Forgotten Writings of the Mennonite Martyrs.

Kerhistorische Bijdragen 18: Documenta Anabaptistica Neerlandica 8. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002. xlvi + 403 pp. index. $149. ISBN: 90-04-12087-4.

Here we have a valuable by-product of Gregory's important comparative study of sixteenth-century martyrologies, Salvation at Stake (Harvard, 1999). In this volume he has edited sources of importance for the Anabaptist/Mennonite marty-rological tradition.

The volume contains ninety-seven sources extant in eleven sixteenth- and seventeenth-century publications that were omitted from the seventeenth-century Mennonite martyrologies of Hans de Ries and Thieleman Jans van Braght. The omitted sources often bear out Gregory's argument that De Ries fathered an ecumenical Mennonite martyrological tradition that insisted that all peaceful advocates of believers' baptism were "true Anabaptists," and hence true martyrs. He holds that this more inclusive Mennonite martyrological tradition emerged from a period of "micro-confessionism" in earlier Dutch Mennonite martyrologies--particularly from the Frisian and Flemish Mennonite groupings, as opposed to De Ries's Waterlanders. Accordingly the "forgotten writings" emphasize sectarian divisions among the Mennonites, and issues that were "sectarian distinctives," such as shunning and the particular understanding of the incarnation of Christ that originated with Melchior Hoffman. These particular martyrs discuss the attempt to ban Dirk Phillips following the Frisian-Flemish split, the Catholic accusation that the Mennonites would have behaved similarly to the Munster Anabaptists had they had the opportunity, or the difference between Adam's flesh, which comes from the dust of the earth, and Christ's flesh, which is the heavenly word. The elimination of such subjects from Anabaptist history served the Mennonite tradition well from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. When the schisms among the Dutch Mennonites were gradually overcome it was now possible, in the spirit of De Ries, to project this hard-won unity all the way backward to the first believers' baptisms in Zurich in 1525. The "forgotten writings" also include narrative songs about the martyrs, a genre that declined as seventeenth-century Dutch Mennonites increasingly adopted the Dutch-Reformed practice of psalm-singing. Because of the importance of the martyr songs in the sixteenth-century era of persecution, and because the Frisians and Flemish outnumbered the Waterlanders (perhaps by three to one), Gregory intends through republication of these "forgotten writings" to enrich the scholarship on Mennonite martyrology, which has up to now been focused too exclusively on Van Braght's Martyr's Mirror.

JAMES M. STAYER 

Queen's University