James M. Stayer - Anabaptists and the Sword

Anabaptists and the Sword is a detailed look at the evolution of the Anabaptists and their ideas, focusing particularly on the earliest period and the Reformation. James M. Stayer is one of the foremost historians of the radical Reformation, and in his opening remarks he aregues that the Anabaptists were "the most important group of radicals" and that a "major historical problem about them is that they seemed to oscillate between the polar antitheses of pacifism and revolution in their early history."

Many students of the period will notice this most obviously because we associated Anabaptism today with pacifiscm and communities isolated from the wider world. But the sixteenth century saw the forerunners of Anabaptists playing a central role in the Peasants' War in Germany, and most importantly in the capture of Münster when a theocratic radical regime took over the city in the expectation of the end of days.

Anabaptists and the Sword is not for the faint-hearted. Its detailed study of early Anabaptist ideas will appeal to specialists and historians particularly. Perhaps the most important concept is the idea of "the Sword" itself, a contested concept that evolves out of different biblical readings. Where the two powers of "coercive jurisdiction", the civil and ecclesiastical, or just one, wielded solely by the temporal (non-religious) regime. The Anabaptists held to the later, which meant that "the one, temporal, Sword stood for all the authority and force necessary to cement a social order comprised of individuals assumed to be in the vast majority radically wicked, egoistic and, hence, unresponsive to the common good". The concept of the Sword troubled the Anabaptists because it was closely tied up with ethics, and as Stayer argues, led to a multiple of ideas about whether or not it was right to use force to protect oneself, or your beliefs, or use violence to promote those same ideas. 

Writing at the end of the 1960s Stayer finds some interesting parallels between contemporary debates within social movements. But most of his focus is on the evolution of Anabaptist thought through this framework. Much of the book focuses on the evolution of these ideas through looking at key figures of this movement, from Müntzer to Hoffman. There are plenty of useful and interesting titbits and ideas here. I found it particularly interesting that Stayer points out that radical (revolutionary, and hence violent, in the context of sixteenth century Europe) Anabaptism did not end with the defeat of Münster, but lingered on even in almost guerrilla ways. 

Stayer's conclusion however is to avoid any easy generalisations. He argues that early Anabaptism was both radical and apolitical (in the sense of abstention from wider issues) but at the same time there were always important, if minority voices of "crusading radicals" such as Rothmann in Münster. Not all Anabaptists were, or perhaps are, nonviolent (nonresistant). Understanding the dynamics between the groups exposes a wider engagement of the movement with the Reformation and society in general that defies simple answers. 

Related Reviews

Stayer - The German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods
Kautsky - Communism in Central Europe in the time of the Reformation
Bax - The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists