| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Sigrun Haude. In the Shadow of "Savage Wolves": Anabaptist Münster and the German Reformation During the 1530s. (Studies in Central European Histories.) Boston: Humanities Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 192.

A couple of years ago, a well-known German historian exclaimed in a casual conversation that the sixteenth-century Anabaptists of Münster were the communists of their day. Far from original (this comparison was made after the Great War of 1914–1918), his glib comment nonetheless revealed the long memory and myth of the millenarian kingdom of the Anabaptists, whose practice of communal property and polygeny has excited and disgusted public opinion from the 1530s to our day. The events of 1533–1535 in the Westphalian metropole are well known; the extant documentation has been carefully and repeatedly scrutinized, especially by Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff in the 1970s and 1980s, although historians still disagree on the social significance of the spectacular event. 1

Sigrun Haude stays clear of the well-trodden path and therein lies the contribution of her solid monograph. Taking the Anabaptist kingdom only as a starting point, Haude focuses instead on the impact and meaning Münster exerted for the German Reformation during the 1530s. In her tightly argued, short book, she assembles neglected and unknown archival sources to put Münster in the larger political and religious context of the Holy Roman Empire. . . .

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