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Pilgram Marpeck, Tyrolese Engineer and Anabaptist Elder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John C. Wenger
John C. Wenger
Affiliation:
Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana
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Extract

Most of the early leaders of Anabaptism were martyred after a few months or years of activity. Two of the more outstanding exceptions are Menno Simons and Pilgram Marpeck, neither of whom is numbered among the founders of the Anabaptist movement, however. With Menno the world has long been familiar, and the group with which he united now bears his name. His writings in the original Dutch, or in German or English translation, are found in Mennonite homes in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and America. But even Mennonites know little of Marpeck today. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Marpeck labored among the south-German and Swiss Anabaptists, thus sustaining a more direct relationship to the main body of American Mennonites than does the Dutch Menno Simons. The persecution and oppression which the Swiss and south-German Mennonites long had to bear is responsible, at least in part, for the early disappearance of Marpeck's name among his followers. One may add that this was also the fate of Conrad Grebel, the founder of Swiss Anabaptism. Yet Marpeck was the greatest of the south-German and Swiss Anabaptist leaders, and well deserves a closer study.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 1940 , pp. 24 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1940

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References

1 The German and Dutch literature on Marpeck is listed in the Mennonitisches Lexikon, herausgegeben von Christian Hege und D. Christian Neff, article “Marbeck, Pilgram,” (Frankfurt am Main and Weierhof, Pfalz, 1938) III, 34.

Note also the Mennonitische Geschichtsblaetter, III, (12, 1938), 13–15.Google Scholar

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3 Ibid., 175f.

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16 Roehrich, , “Zur Geschichte der Str. Wiedertaeufer”, 56Google Scholar, published the text from. Argent hist. eccl., I, fol. 318.

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23 Gedenkschrift zum 400 Jaehrigen Jubilaeum aer Mennoniten oder Taufgesinnten. 1525–1925 (Ludwigshafen a. Rhein, 1925), 178–282.Google Scholar

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25 Each of the following libraries has one copy of the Verantwortung: Stadtbibliothek, Zuerich; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; and the Studienbibliothek, Olmuetz.

26 See footnote number 2.

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