Gary Waite's book is the first volume in the recently launched series Anabaptism and Mennonite Studies from Pandora Press, now based in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Waite, who is professor emeritus in the department of history at the University of New Brunswick, has been involved in ‘Amsterdamnified!’, a research programme begun in 2015 which has contributed significantly to our understanding of how heterodox religious groups in seventeenth-century England influenced religious discourse on the eve of the Enlightenment. The present volume builds on that research and extends Waite's already impressive previous work on religious movements and figures of especially the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That body of work includes significant contributions to understanding heresy and witchcraft (and witch-hunting) as well as the inconsistent development of religious diversity. Much of Waite's work focuses on these and other matters by way of studying Anabaptism and figures such as David Joris. Here Waite continues his life's work by investigating anti-Anabaptist polemics used in England from 1531 to 1660 as a weapon in debates regarding religious diversity, understood during this historical period primarily as a threat to English society. Reading these English polemical publications targeting continental Anabaptism provides Waite with a ‘lens to peer at broader attitudes toward religious dissent, toleration, witchcraft, and God and the devil, among other things’ (p. xviii). This polemical literature was designed to inspire revulsion and fear, and the specific attacks on Anabaptism shaped the larger discourse on English nonconformist groups.
As is the case with Waite's previous publications, he proceeds by way of examining a host of primary sources, including print material along with a series of historical images which both illustrate and serve to generate Waite's arguments throughout the book. Waite draws on the Early English Books Online database of all English books printed to 1700 for his source material, acknowledging that his is ‘not a comprehensive overview, but merely a preliminary analysis of key works on the subject’ that he hopes will inspire further research (p. 26).
Drawing liberally on these primary sources (including numerous lengthy direct quotations), Waite patiently displays the various wide-ranging dimensions and impacts of these anti-Anabaptist polemics. Anabaptism stands accused of rejection of infant baptism, of embracing the heterodox doctrine of the Celestial Flesh of Christ, of polygamy, of practising community of goods, of sectarianism and pacifism, along with rejection of civil offices for true Christians (p. 41). Further, readers were warned of the work of the devil in Anabaptism, leading to increased anxiety about the activity of witchcraft, and thus contributing to the revival of large-scale witchcraft trials (a subject Waite has previously dealt with at length in his book Eradicating the devil's minions, Toronto 2007 [p. 54]). Overall, Anabaptism was characterised as an assault on true faith, and therefore a menace to English society.
These polemics were ‘successful’ to varying degrees, both in spreading suspicions regarding Anabaptists, but also other dissident groups, such as the Quakers. Waite's research also brings to view important and perhaps counter-intuitive observations concerning the unanticipated and unintended consequences of anti-Anabaptist polemics. That is, ‘the ideas portrayed in the controversial pamphlets and books proved attractive rather than repulsive’ (p. 20), a dynamic observed already by some seventeenth-century writers, as is the case with John Saltmarsh, writing in 1677, who accuses Thomas Edward of ‘making Hereticks by writing against them’ (p. 21). Waite highlights these kinds of ironic effects at numerous places in the book, arguing that polemical works ‘inadvertently offered the discontented a number of innovative ideas to draw from, helping in fact to inspire the surge in new religious movements of the 1640s, even though the intention of the authors was to suppress, not encourage dissent’ (p. 4). Indeed, as polemicists demonised Anabaptist thought and practices, it seems that the more detail they offered, the more interest was raised in those very ideas.
The obvious strength of Waite's book is his close perceptive reading of primary sources, interpreted carefully within the broader historical contexts in which these sources were generated. Waite's references, along with his extensive direct quotation of primary sources, serve as the engine of his arguments. His display of these sources means that nearly every page includes not only brief phrases but extensive quotations both in the body of the text and in long content footnotes. These inclusions provide the reader with historical evidence to consider, and, as Waite hopes, guide the reader to other possible research which can still be undertaken in the field. At the risk of being churlish, I think there are times when these lengthy direct quotations almost seem excessive, as they can not infrequently take up nearly a full page, which when combined with equally lengthy content footnotes, can make the text unnecessarily choppy, as is the case where Waite includes a lengthy title of a publication in the body of the text only to reproduce it in an equally lengthy footnote on the same page.
This book serves as a fine contribution to our understanding of English and Anabaptist religious history, the development and erosion of religious authority and the uneven expansion of religious diversity on the eve of the Enlightenment. The close reading of polemical literature also provides Waite with an opportunity to consider what might be learned as it applies to our current situation, where issues such as polarisation, hate literature and indirect and direct violence abound. These connections between the polemical literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and our situation seem pregnant with possibility for understanding our own time, and learning lessons that might make the earlier period relevant for our time. Waite does not develop these possibilities at any length, and rightly so, since to do so requires much more work; work that would give an account of differences between the two eras and show the significance of the developments in religious practices and political realities; work that needs to be done before direct causal lines and analogies are asserted as plausible. Waite's book inspires the possibility that such work ought to be pursued while taking seriously English polemics of 1531 to 1660 on their own terms.
