David L. Weaver-Zercher. Martyrs Mirror

In 1660 a thirty-five-year-old Mennonite minister, Thielemann van Braght of Dordrecht in the Netherlands, completed the immense task of publishing a 1,500-page martyrology, the Martyrs Mirror. The book, whose featured martyrs are mostly Dutch Mennonites, marked the zenith of various collections of martyr stories published in the Netherlands shortly after the onset of religious freedom following William of Orange’s rebellion against the Spanish during the 1570s. In Martyrs Mirror: A Social History, David L. Weaver-Zercher argues that the Martyrs Mirror did more than report on a historic fact: true, with some 2,500 victims, persecution of Anabaptists “outpaced” that of all other Christian groups combined during the Reformation (16). But for Weaver-Zercher the original Martyrs Mirror is more than an archival record; it marks a cultural creation set in a shifting and complex social context, as do its many editions over the centuries. Indeed, its immense staying power—with thousands of copies still sold each year to both the “tradition-minded . . . and assimilated” (xvi) branches of the Mennonite world—reveals a text that has taken on disparate meanings. The result of Weaver-Zercher’s approach sheds significant new light on evolving ethnoreligious identities at the heart of Mennonite history.

Anabaptists · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology) · Genealogy · Literature · Martyr · Multitude · Persecution · Political science · Power (physics) · Publishing · Sociology · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies