Early Anabaptism in Global Perspective
Session 7
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 • 3:15–4:45 p.m.
A. Papers: Swiss Anabaptists and Early Modern Orders of Movement
The Confessional Mobility of Early Swiss Anabaptists
David Y. Neufeld
Early modern Reformed city councils in the Swiss Confederation expended great energy attempting to restrict and channel Anabaptist mobility. Dissent was a dynamic, moving phenomenon. In the eyes of the authorities, its purveyors need to be fixed in place in order to be brought to conformity or purged from the social body through removal. Yet, contrary to official intent, anti-Anabaptist measures pushed dissenters into motion, prompting periodic movement into marginal spaces, cross-jurisdictional travel, and escape from carceral institutions.
In this paper, I argue that these patterns of unexpected movement, and their justifications, represent a form of Swiss Anabaptist “confessional mobility.” This concept, developed by Liesbeth Corens to elucidate the development of the English Catholic diaspora, points to the power of a group’s collective involvement in periodic movements to contribute to their communal differentiation. Drawing on archival sources from Zurich’s State Archive between 1570 and 1650, I show that, in the case of Anabaptist residents of this city-republic, distinctive patterns of mobility were driven by dissenters’ persistent refusal to leave their territory. Unlike contemporaries attracted by Hutterite missionaries to eastward migration, or later communities of “Swiss” pushed to long-distance travel by official violence, communities of believers in Zurich’s rural lands long resisted official efforts to displace them by developing new patterns of movement and, in some instances, investing them with spiritual worth.
Anabaptists’ physical movements often conformed to the restrictions of state policy. Long-distance migration in search of toleration and material security did characterize the common life of many early modern communities of baptizing dissenters. Yet, this paper shows, early Anabaptist mobility during this period also responded to their durable bond to particular territories, “fatherlands” that dissenters refused to defend with arms, but to which they remained deeply tied, even after the experience of generations of persecution.
David Y. Neufeld is assistant professor of history at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo, where he directs the Institute for Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies. Neufeld received his PhD in history from the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation History at the University of Arizona in 2018. His current project, entitled Separating Tares from Wheat: Making an Anabaptist Minority in Early Modern Switzerland, reassesses Swiss Anabaptist separatism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has published in The Mennonite Quarterly Review, Mennonitica Helvetica, and The Sixteenth Century Journal, and has chapters in edited volumes recently published by T&T Clark, Brill, and Manchester University Press. Neufeld's research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, and the Society for Reformation Research.
(Re)constructing Identity: Swiss Networks of Mobility Reimagined in the Electoral Palatinate, 1650 to 1711
Cory D. Davis
Between 1650 and 1711, over a thousand Swiss Anabaptists made their way to the Electoral Palatinate in southwestern Germany, sometimes as willing immigrants but more often as refugees and exiles. Here, first from individual landlords and then formally from the elector in 1664, these Anabaptist immigrants gained official toleration. Despite the obvious positive effects of this development, the rebellious aspects of Anabaptist culture, developed in response to decades of persecution, did not fit the social and political context of the Palatinate. Accepting the terms of toleration would push Anabaptists to reassess closely held aspects of their identity, including their theology of communal care and their cultural preference for mobility.
Among the clearest hallmarks of Anabaptist life in the cantons was the network of mobility that enabled them to evade capture, ameliorate the effects of exile, and hold clandestine meetings. In short, Anabaptist mobility preserved their way of life by frustrating Swiss authorities. Palatine Anabaptists also constructed networks of mobility, but they did so while adhering to—and indeed in willing service of—official expectations. To this end, Palatine Anabaptists reinterpreted and reemployed the 1568 Strasbourg Discipline, several articles of which focused on caring for the families of exiled pastors, to support significant influxes of refugees from Bern in 1671–1672 and 1711. The nascent connections that fostered the settlement of these brothers and sisters evolved into networks facilitating the (mostly licit) movement of people, ideas, and support between far-flung centers of Anabaptist activity in the Netherlands, the Palatinate, Prussia, and British North America.
Weaving together archival material from southwestern Germany with published sources, this presentation explores the ways that Anabaptists adapted these practices to life in a new land, arguing that their solutions successfully established them as viable subjects of the elector while preserving, in culturally contingent form, essential aspects of their faith. Comparison to other communities, namely contemporary Calvinists in Maastricht and modern South Asian Muslims in the United States, highlights the benefits of this study’s approach to (re)constructing immigrant identity and suggests possible further applications.
Cory Davis is a 2022 graduate of the Division for Reformation Studies in the History Department at the University of Arizona. His dissertation, “Adapting to Toleration: Swiss Anabaptist Refugees in the Electoral Palatinate, 1650-1711," was undertaken with support from a Fulbright grant in the archives of southwestern Germany. His articles in The Mennonite Quarterly Review and The Sixteenth Century Journal, as well as a chapter in New Directions in Anabaptist Studies: Thinking Outside the Cages, develop ideas in his dissertation and his growing interest in teaching the early modern period. Cory is a world history teacher at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the founding sponsor of Union's Rho Kappa National Social Studies Honor Society. He has also worked as an adjunct at Tulsa-area colleges and universities.
Seeking Refuge: Exploring the Voyages Made by Anabaptist Women in the Early Eighteenth Century to Escape Religious Persecution
Kailey Freeman-DePelisi
In July 1711, Barbara Gerber from Guggisberg boarded a ship called The Thun in Basel, Switzerland. Her name is found in a handful of documents from the Dutch Mennonite’s Committee on Foreign Need now housed in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. Gerber was one of many from the Canton of Bern fleeing from religious persecution due to her association with the Anabaptists. What makes her stand out is the description next to her name: “25 Jaar, een vryster [,] Lam”—she was 25 years old, single, “crippled.” She was a young, unmarried, disabled woman traveling on a ship by herself. After that, it appears that she ended up at Deventer and at some point, might have been arrested.
But Gerber’s story poses more questions than answers. As a young woman, why was she and so many other Swiss Anabaptist women traveling alone? How did these women experience the journey? What was the journey like for someone who was disabled compared to those who were physically abled? What risks did Gerber and other solo female travelers face compared to traveling Anabaptist families and men? How did the experiences of Anabaptist single women compare to the experiences of non-Anabaptist single women who were also traveling? Some of the Anabaptist women who left the Palatinate went as far as Pennsylvania and others stayed within the European continent. Which group did Gerber belong to and how did travel on those different routes compare?
Much of the scholarly literature on Anabaptist women focuses on their experiences in the mid-sixteenth century; and historians writing about Anabaptist migration during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century seldom mention women’s experience of travel. My presentation will focus on the actual journey made by Anabaptist women traveling alone following the persecution and imprisonment they dealt with at home in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It will focus on some specific women that come up several times in the primary documents included in the P.R.I.N.T. portal, a portal connecting five repositories across four different countries and make comparisons to other solo-traveling female religious minorities such as the Quakers.
Kailey Freeman-DePelisi is an undergraduate history student at the University of Central Florida. She is a digital archives assistant with PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel), where she works specifically with Dutch Anabaptist documents from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
B. Papers: Reconsidering Anabaptist Theology and Historiography
Beyond the Crises of Origins and Ends: Theopolitical Normativity in Anabaptist Historiography
Maxwell Kennel
Anabaptist historiography has moved through several discrete and overlapping stages from the vilification of Anabaptism through association with the siege of Münster, to the myths of origin characteristic of monogenesis, to social historians’ push toward polygenesis, to Arnold Snyder’s work on moving “beyond polygenesis,” to the present diffusion of Anabaptist historian's relationship with confessional historiography. As “Anabaptist History” transforms—with increasing interest in the Dutch Early Modern context and waning supervision of graduate students in the field—the question of how normative Anabaptist historiography is or ought to be has remained unanswered. This presentation fields the major trends in Anabaptist historiography and then presents a realist option that affirms the inherent normativity of all historical writing (via Michel de Certeau) without abandoning history to the problems that arise when confessional and secular historians see what they want to see in the past. Drawing on the theopolitical work of Raoul Vaneigem and Simone Weil as case studies in normative historiography, this presentation will conclude with a series of concrete suggestions for the future of the discourse.
Maxwell Kennel is the director of Pandora Press and editor of its Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies series and is also affiliated with the Canadian Institute of Far-Right Studies. He is the author of Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and Ontologies of Violence: Deconstruction, Pacifism, and Displacement (Brill, 2023), and editor of Robert Friedmann’s Design for Living: Regard, Concern, Service, and Love (Wipf and Stock, 2017) and Astrid von Schlachta’s Anabaptists: From the Reformation to the 21st Century, translated by Victor Thiessen (Pandora Press, 2024).
Who Owns the Anabaptist Story? Looking to Margins as Well as the Past to Define Anabaptist Identity
Ryan Gladwin
In recent decades, there have been significant shifts in Anabaptist historiographies and theological self-understanding. Academic historians have brought attention to the hagiographical nature of much early Anabaptist history as well as the formation of Anabaptist theological identity during the twentieth century. They have noted the diversity of Anabaptist beginnings in contrast to monogenesis- and charismatic leader-focused historical readings. In like manner, academic theologians have pushed for shifts in Anabaptist theological self-understandings, as noted with a shift from nonresistance to active nonviolence and complication of attempts to define an Anabaptist theological core (e.g., Harold Bender’s Anabaptist Vision). Nonetheless, these newer historical-theological readings continue to emphasize the ‘otherness’ of Anabaptism as understood through proper re-readings of sixteenth-century Anabaptist history and identity. In contrast, in certain global contexts, the radicalness of Anabaptism has not always been seen as something defined by the sixteenth century but instead as part of a larger history of radical and prophetic movements throughout ecclesial history. One of the most common examples of this is the significant conversation that has occurred since the 1970s between Latin American Liberation Theology (LALT) and, more recently, decolonial theology and Anabaptism. This paper will examine this interaction and its influence among Anabaptists and beyond. First, the paper will document some of the history of the interaction between LALT, decolonial theology, and Anabaptism. Second, the paper will demonstrate how Latin American authors (Cesar Moya, Alix Lozano, Nancy Bedford, and others) and, in particular, the missionary John Driver helped create Latin American-informed Anabaptist readings of history and theology. For example, John Driver, informed by the work of Enrique Dussel and others, redefined the pursuit of Anabaptist and Christian identity as not simply recovery from the past but listening to the voices from the margins and the underside of history. Third, the paper will note some of the problems with this reading of Anabaptist history while at the same time arguing that a hermeneutical method that points to the margins and a larger reading of an ‘ecumenical’ underside of history is vital for Anabaptist historiography and theological self-understanding.
Ryan R. Gladwin is an associate professor of theology and the director of the Community Transformation Center at Palm Beach Atlantic University, which houses the Community Transformation and Chaplaincy program. Gladwin has a BA from Messiah College, an MDiv from Duke University Divinity School, and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has worked in ministry and community development in Anabaptist contexts around the world. His research interests include social ethics, Latin American and Latinx theology, Anabaptism, Pentecostalism, practical theology, and ecclesiology. He is the author of Streams of Latin American Protestant Theology (Brill, 2020) and is currently working on several other book projects.
Polygenesis and Polyphony: How Historic Anabaptism Invites a Contemporary Anatheism
Scott Holland
The 1975 Mennonite Quarterly Review article “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis…” transformed modern Anabaptist historiography and theology as eventually South German Anabaptist mystics, Dutch Mennonites, and irenic, ecumenical friends of Marpeck were invited into spiritual and intellectual communion with the normative Anabaptism of the Swiss Brethren. Indeed, before the Stayer, Packull, and Deppermann piece on polygenesis, George Williams’s The Radical Reformation (Westminster Press, 1962) and Rufus Jones’s Some Exponents of Mystical Religion (Abingdon Press, 1930) and other works called attention to a plurality of neglected 16th- and 17th-century Anabaptist-adjacent radicals and spiritualists. Current scholarship on the early church traces a great diversity of theological visions and voices all the way back to the first Christian movements (After Jesus Before Christianity, HarperOne, 2021).
In our age of Nones, Dones, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and the dramatic decline and death of religious institutions, contemporary poets and prophets are calling for an anatheism. An anatheism invites seekers, doubters, and sleepy believers alike to reimagine God after God, religion after religion, and faith after faith. This presentation will invite the once marginalized sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century radicals, mystics, spiritualists, poets, and Pietists to help us envision, compose, and embody a contemporary Anabaptist Anatheism for Mennonite, Brethren, Baptist, Quaker, and Believers’ Church faith communions for 2025.
Scott Holland is Emeritus Professor of Theology and Culture at Bethany Theological Seminary. He continues to teach Theopoetics and Writing in the joint graduate program of Bethany and the Earlham School of Religion.