Model Martyrs: Sixteenth-century Anabaptist Martyr Narratives as Living Texts

Beginning with Het Offer des Heeren (1561), Dutch Anabaptists collected and circulated narratives describing the deaths of their martyrs in ever-expanding volumes, culminating in the 1685 edition of  Martyrs Mirror . These martyrologies intersperse narrative accounts of the martyrs' deaths with theological treatises and prison letters as well as purported interrogation records and official court sentences. This paper examines the editorial decisions made by the compilers of the martyrologies to advance their apologetic aims of presenting Anabaptist Christianity as both legitimate heir to the Church of the Apostles and non-threatening to governing officials. The argument proceeds via two lines. First, it identifies the use of literary tropes employed in early Christian martyr texts and medieval hagiography to establish the martyrs as true Christians—not heretics deserving execution. Second, it examines how Anabaptists received and retold the narratives of two Christians executed as heretics in 1527 claimed as martyrs by other Protestants to present them as Anabaptists. 

The quest to establish the “authenticity” of early Christian martyr texts has been a preoccupation of historians of Christianity since the Renaissance. The value of this quest recently has been challenged by Éric Rebillard in his recent edition and translation of ancient Christian martyr narratives. Rebillard argues that martyr narratives should be approached as 'living texts,' written anonymously and experienced by their intended audiences not as historical reports of "what really happened" but as versions of a narrative that would necessarily be changed and adapted with the telling. This is true, he claims, even for those martyr acts that include transcriptions of purported trial records. To this end, rather than attempting to establish which iteration of the narrative is the "original" or most “authentic,” Rebillard’s volume of ancient martyr stories includes multiple exemplars of each martyr's passion in what he calls the “dossier" of each martyr. This approach brackets the question of the historicity of the martyr's suffering and allows the reader more immediately to appreciate that martyr narratives are inextricable from the decisions made by those who collected, copied, and retold them. 

This paper uses Rebillard's 'living text" model to shed new light on the martyrologies produced by sixteenth and seventeenth century Anabaptists. The "authenticity" of the documents preserved in Anabaptist martyrologies was affirmed in the early twentieth century by Samuel Cramer, who writes in the Introduction to his edition of Het Offer des Heeren that “we are dealing here with nothing other than reliable records" and "we have before us only real documents, delivered in print by meticulous hands." More recently, Brad S. Gregory has argued for the reliability of these accounts as authentic writings of the martyrs, with little evidence of tampering by later editors, conceding, "such evidence cannot guarantee that we have the martyrs' ipsissima verba, but it does justifiably predispose us toward confidence rather than skepticism when assessing and using the martyrs' writings from these late sixteenth-century printed collections. We have good reason to think that they reflect the martyrs themselves much more than those who readied them for publication." Authentic documents, however, are not necessarily reliable representations of the events those documents depict. In this paper, I argue that, like their ancient and early modern counterparts, the editors of the martyr texts preserved in Het Offer des Heeren and Martyrs Mirror make use of inherited concepts and literary tropes about martyrdom to create idealized depictions of heroic fidelity, tailored to the apologetic aims of their communities.

Select Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Cramer, Samuel (ed.). Het Offer des Heeren. Biblioteca Reformatica Neerlandica, Vol. II. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1904.

Gregory, Brad S (ed.). Documenta Anabaptistica Volume 8: The Forgotten Writings of Mennonite Martyrs. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

Rebillard, Éric (ed.). Greek and Latin Narratives About the Ancient Martyrs. Oxford Early Christian Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

van Braght, T.J., Het Bloedig Tooneel, of Martelaers Spiegel der Doops-Gesinde of Weereloose Christenen. Second Edition. Amsterdam: 1685.

Secondary Sources:

Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Kolb, Robert. For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987.

Lambert, Erin. "Friction in the Archives: Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism" Renaissance and Reformation 41.2, 2018.

Rebillard, Éric. The Early Martyr Narratives: Neither Authentic Accounts Nor Forgeries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 

Vermeersch, Louise. "Mennonite Martyrs and Multimedia: On the Form and Function of Intermediality in Reformation Communication" Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte‑Archive for Reformation History 111 (2020): 194–216.