David Joris and Dutch Anabaptism, 1524-1543

Geoffrey L. Dipple is a history lecturer at Queen’s University in
Kingston, Ontario.

Waite’s biography of Joris concentrates on his career as a Dutch
Anabaptist instead of his later, better-known activity as a Spiritualist
in Basel. Waite argues convincingly that, from 1536 to 1539, Joris was
the most influential Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands. Adopting a
middle path between the revolutionary chiliasm of the Mьnster
Anabaptist kingdom and the radical separatism of Menno Simons and his
flock, Joris sought to unite the splintered Melchiorite movement under
his leadership.

However, as Waite notes, history has been unkind to Joris: largely
ignored by historians (the last book-length biography to deal with his
career as an Anabaptist was published in Germany in 1937), he has
generally been portrayed in the light of his opponents’ polemics.
Nonetheless, interest in Joris has revived in recent years, and this
book answers the calls of historians of Anabaptism for a balanced
reassessment.

Waite discusses Joris’s life and the movement he led, within the
framework of the most recent interpretations of Anabaptism and of the
Reformation generally. He rejects the narrow definition of
“Evangelical Anabaptism” developed by Mennonite historians and
emphasizes instead the movement’s broad nature and pluriformity, and
its relationships to the popular Reformation. Joris’s spiritual
development from Sacramentarianism to Anabaptism and finally to
Spiritualism is remarkably well suited to this purpose.

Waite also investigates the socioeconomic backgrounds of Joris’s
followers, and the relationship of his movement to other Anabaptist
groups in northern Germany and the Netherlands. This research yields
some interesting insights into the nature of early modern religious
dissent, and the lives of the dissenters.

This book has important implications for our understanding not only of
Joris but also of northern German and Dutch Anabaptism.