The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist community of goods

James Stayer argues that Anabaptist community of goods continued the popular radicalism of the early Reformation and the Peasants' War of 1525. During the German Reformation hundreds of thousands of commoners were mobilized by the hope that established clerical and aristocratic order could be replaced by justice and equity based on the divine law of the Bible. After the defeat of the commoners in the Peasants' War, some of the most ardent adherents of social and religious reform attempted to achieve these same aspirations by trying to implement the apostolic model of Acts 2 and 4 through the Anabaptists. Thus, as Stayer reveals, the Peasants' War was an essential formative experience for many of the original leaders of Anabaptism. "Contemporary misogyny and antisemitism have their roots in the demonization of women and Jews in medieval Christendom. In church art and mass preaching, the construct of the devil as an outcast from heaven and the source of all evil was linked both to the conception of women as sensual and malicious figures betraying man's soul on its arduous journey to salvation and to the notion of Jews as treacherous dissidents in the Christian landscape. These stereotypes, widely disseminated for over three hundred years, persist today. The exemplum, or cautionary story incorporated into preachers' manuals and popular homilies, was an important mode of religious teaching for clerical and lay folk alike. Sermon narratives drawn from Hindu mythology, Arab storytelling, and secular folktales entertained all classes of medieval society while dispensing theological and cultural instruction. In Devils, Women, and Jews, the vital genre of the medieval sermon story is, for the first time, made accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. Rendered in modern English, the tales provide an invaluable primary resource for medievalists, anthropologists, psychologists, folklorists, and students of women's studies and Judaica. Critical introductions and explanatory headnotes contextualize the tales, and comprehensive endnotes and a bibliography allow readers to follow up analogue and subject studies in their own areas of interest."--from amazon.ca Contents Acknowledgments Illustrations Introduction PART ONE: THE PEASANTS' WAR: THREE ESSAYS 1 The Peasants' War Seen through the Prism of Current Historiography 2 The Radicalization of the Social Gospel of the Reformation, 1524–1527 3 Anabaptists and Future Anabaptists in the Peasants' War PART TWO: ANABAPTIST COMMUNITY OF GOODS 4 The Swiss Brethren and Acts 4: A Rule of Sharing and a Rule against Exploitation 5 The Anti-Materialistic Piety of Thomas Müntzer and Its Anabaptist Expressions 6 Anabaptist Münster, 1534–1535: The War Communism of the Notables 7 Anabaptist Moravia, 1526–1622: Communitarian Christianity in One Country Epilogue Appendix A: Anabaptists in the Peasants' War Appendix B: Fragment of the Lost Chronicle of Gabriel Ascherham Notes Index A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z In the late 1520s persecution drove many Anabaptists to Moravia where, throughout the sixteenth century, they continued the commoners' resistance to privilege in church and state. Stayer argues that in Münster, however, where there had been no Peasants' War and where urban notables were prominent in the Anabaptist leadership, Anabaptist communism was badly corrupted. The historical continuities which Stayer establishes between the Peasants' War and Anabaptism in Switzerland, south Germany, and Moravia can in part explain this contrast.