Hermann von Kerssenbroch. Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Münster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia. Translated and edited by Christopher S. Mackay. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 2 vols. xiii + 772 pp. $247.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-90-04-15721-7.

Reviewed by R. Emmet McLaughlin (Department of History, Villanova University)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

A Translation in Search of an Audience

Since the sixteenth century the lurid events of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (1533-35) have exercised an understandable fascination. Sex, violence, and religious fanaticism have both scandalized and titillated. Of course, the event has an interest of an intellectual sort, too. Its significance and impact reached across the Holy Roman Empire and Europe as a whole. It gave secular governments further evidence that the religious developments unleashed by Martin Luther needed firm control, leading to renewed earnestness in the repression of radicals of all types, not just Anabaptists. Putting even less radical Protestants on the defensive, Catholics cited Münster as proof of the inherently seditious and socially destabilizing character of the Reformation, not to mention the depravity to which heresy led. The present volume is a translation of Herman von Kerrsenbrock's Anabaptistici Furoris Monasterium Inclitam Westphaliae Metropolim Evertentis Historica Narratio, the major Latin history of events. Valuable for the light it sheds on the kingom's military, politics, and diplomacy, it gives historians a remarkable insight into the ability of the Anabaptists to seize power and the efforts to suppress the kingdom. It provides an invaluable view into the forces at work within a major German city and the complex and tangled relationship that constituted politics on the imperial level. Its insight into the religious inspiration for the kingdom is more limited, however, since the author, a committed Catholic, found Anabaptism extremely distasteful and did not want to help spread it or enhance its potential attractions by too detailed a description. One purpose of the history, in fact, was as a salutary warning against the Anabaptists and Protestantism in general, as well as an appeal to secular authorities to suppress such movements before they could develop.

Kerrsenbrock's work was written forty years after the event and he was not in the city for most of the story he tells. The illegitimate son of a minor noble, he claimed to be a "boy" at the time, even though he was old enough to follow his landlord in a battle against the Anabaptists. He was expelled from the city along with many others in February 1534. From that point on, his tale draws primarily upon documents from the episcopal and city archives, many of which have not survived. Supplying those lost documents is the primary value of the narrative. His own reconstruction and evaluation was superficial and clearly biased toward the bishop and the Catholics, likely one reason that the Münster city council blocked its publication during the 1570s. As a result, the book circulated in manuscript form and only found its way into print in a defective German translation in 1771. The current translation is based upon Heinrich Detmer's Latin edition from the turn of the twentieth century.[1] My spot-check in Detmer's edition of a number of passages throughout the text  shows that Mackay's translation is reliable.

At the same time, it is unclear what purpose the translation was meant to serve or for whom it was intended. The translator, Christopher MacKay, provides no rationale for his choice of this text. His training is in classical philology. He has published an introduction to Roman history, although he has also prepared an edition/translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (1487). While the Malleus would be of interest to a wide range of readers, this can not be said of the Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness. The focus on military, political, and diplomatic issues instead of the infamous religious developments gives it little appeal to a non-expert readership. Nonetheless, the long introduction seems directed at readers with no background in the period, including, for example, a short history of the Reformation beginning with the Ninety-Five Theses (1517). I find it hard to imagine assigning it in the classroom, although it might be of use for term papers. Scholars will find it lacking: the introduction is lightly and unevenly footnoted, and the bibliography is short. Lack of an index renders this two-volume narrative of little use as a reference tool.

While important things are doubtless to be found in this book, it is doubtful that many readers will be willing to work their way through a text that is repetitious, turgid, and very, very long. This is most unfortunate, since Kerrsenbrock provides a valuable tool for placing the tabloid exploits of the Anabaptist Kingdom more firmly within the context of sixteenth-century German society and imperial politics.

Note

[1]. Heinrich Detmer, ed., Hermanni a Kerrsenbroch Anabaptistici furoris Monasterium inclitam Westphaliae metropolim evertentis historica narration, 2 vols. (Münster: Theissing, 1899-1900).

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Citation: R. Emmet McLaughlin. Review of Kerssenbroch, Hermann von, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Münster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15661

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