The Institute of Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies (IAMS) and Conrad Grebel University College invite you to celebrate the launch of Later Writings of the Swiss Anabaptists, 1529-1592, edited by former Grebel professor C. Arnold Snyder.
From the Publisher:
The story of Anabaptist origins in Switzerland is well known. By contrast, the life and thought of the Anabaptists who continued to live in Switzerland over the last two-thirds of the sixteenth century has remained in relative obscurity. One reason for this is that Swiss Anabaptists after 1530 communicated their ideas by circulating handwritten writings rather than by printing books. The primary historical sources relating to later Swiss Anabaptism are thus hand written manuscripts that must be located and read in local archives. This present volume contains a selection of writings that were being copied and circulated among the later Anabaptists in Switzerland. The text that dominates the present collection, both in terms of length and complexity, is the massive 466-page Codex 628, copied in 1590 and containing a wide sampling of material considered significant by the Swiss Anabaptists at the end of the century. Readers of this volume thus have the opportunity to peruse, in translation, significant archival holdings that document the development of Swiss Anabaptist thought over the length of the sixteenth century. These writings reveal a maturing religious and social movement, whose members continued to reflect biblically on their call to discipleship, all the while living in a world that designated all adult baptizers heretics and disobedient, dangerous citizens.