In the Clergy’s Sights: Making Anabaptists Visible in Reformed Zurich

Abstract

This article examines how Reformed pastors’ understanding and exercise of their office shaped their response to Anabaptists living in rural parishes of the Swiss Confederation in the seventeenth century. In the wake of Swiss reformations, illicit Anabaptist communities continued to represent a threat to territorial religious unity and the Reformed clergy’s spiritual leadership, but the precise contours of their activity and social influence at a village level remained obscure. In the absence of a clear picture of dissent, Reformed churchmen endeavored to make Anabaptism visible, employing tools of information management, into which their training had initiated them. A series of cases from rural jurisdictions (the counties (Landvogteien) of Kyburg and Grüningen) and a seat of ecclesiastical power (Zurich) illustrate how documentary production, organization, and activation consistently drove this project forward. These means rendered Anabaptist life perceptible, facilitating and justifying its elimination by Reformed governments.

1. Introduction

By 1645, the Anabaptists of Zurich had suffered the worst of the city council’s decade-long campaign of repression that would end their presence in the territory where their movement was birthed (Leu 2007). In the group’s most substantive account of their experience, A True Report of the Brethren in Switzerland, in the Region of Zurich concerning the Tribulations which Came Upon Them, for the sake of the Gospel, they lashed out at the Reformed ministry. Author Jeremias Mangold distilled their grievances against those whom they blamed for their plight:

“[W]e believe that the foremost instigators and instruments of this affliction and heavy persecution are those who proclaim grace and peace to the people, for they have prompted this oppression from the pulpit and alongside it. They have betrayed themselves by joining the hunts [for us]. To the government they preach that they are guardians of both Tablets, both the first and the second…These fomenters are most culpable…, for they have incited the common people, so that each thinks he has offered good service by treating us cruelly”.1

These charges were not new. They had often served disempowered dissenters in their appeals for the magistracy’s grace. Rather than impugning the secular authorities who held power over their lives, Anabaptists instead directed officials’ attention to the shortcomings of the Reformed pastorate. “We cannot in fact believe that the high authorities know that we have been treated so cruelly”, Mangold wrote in the wake of years of violence perpetrated by the council against his coreligionists.2

However, accusations against the pastorate went beyond rhetorical strategy and the parroting of well-worn polemical discourse. They reflected genuine antagonism generated by years of face-to-face encounters. Although Anabaptism in the Swiss Confederation began near the center of processes of urban reform, nonconformists were rapidly pushed to the social margins and geographical edges of Reformed councils’ domains. There, embedded in the social and economic life of rural communities, they found ways to survive (Furner 2001; Hofer 2000; Leu 2022; Scheidegger 2007). In the regime of coexistence that developed, the rural parish pastor and the clergyman in urban prison cells came to represent, for dissenters, the primary mediators of Reformed confessional policy.3 Their hostility was born of social intimacy.

This essay uses Anabaptists’ accusations as a prompt to examine the ministry’s approach to dissenters at this crucial interface. It is not concerned with evaluating whether clerical agitation played a primary role in the suffering of dissenters. Rather, it asks how pastors’ understanding and exercise of their office, which conjoined the care of souls and the enforcement of disciplinary norms, shaped their ongoing work to bring this suffering about.4 The challenge for the Reformed clergy was one of seeing: both discerning the shape of a clandestine, dynamic movement of religious competition in their own parishes and making that threat visible to those whose attention they wished to attract.5 In the absence of a clear picture, Reformed pastors sought to fix Anabaptism in place, employing the tools of information management into which their training had initiated them. At both the parish level and in the seats of ecclesiastical power, pastoral work vis-à-vis dissenters residing in their jurisdictions took the form of documentary production, organization, and activation.6 These means rendered Anabaptist life more stable, coherent, and perceptible for the purposes of its elimination by Reformed governments.7

2. The Partial Blindness of the Pastorate

Lienhard Wäber died in the early winter of 1631 in the village of Brütten. His death was self-inflicted.8 Anna Richi, his wife, found him hanging from a tree in an oak grove near their home, having followed his footsteps through freshly fallen snow. Wäber’s passing shocked the parish pastor Hans Rudolf Fischer, who felt compelled to investigate how such a gruesome thing could happen in the village under his care. Fischer had known Wäber only as a dedicated school teacher. But as he canvassed villagers who had spent time with the deceased man, Fischer discovered that, despite outward appearances, Wäber had long been mired in spiritual turmoil, a psychological sequela of his former work as a soldier. The bailiff of nearby Nürensdorf remembered Wäber’s persistent but unfulfilled desire to share with him an unnamable horror he had perpetrated. “Could a man like him be saved?” he had asked the owner of a vineyard in Winterthur.9 Fellow day-laboring peasants recalled that, at mealtimes in the field, Wäber would distance himself from the group, going off on his own to kneel and pray aloud, his voice becoming so agitated that it disturbed them. The devil harassed him continuously, he claimed, once appearing to him in the form of a large black mouse. His daughter testified that she had seen the demonic rodent stretch out its neck and threaten to ensnare her father in the same trap he had laid for it. No matter what he did, Wäber had lamented, his heart continued to cause him intense distress.

Fischer’s investigation revealed that, during this period of searching, Wäber frequented meetings of Anabaptists around Obholz. His visits were sporadic, but they appear to have left a significant impression on him. Wäber began to question the legitimacy of the baptism of children. He acquired and read an “Anabaptist book” (toüffrisches buch) that he hid from those around him.10 Richi complained that, when the couple attended the local Reformed church, she was subject to running commentary from her husband on the content of the sermon. When the minister preached the consolation that came from knowing that God had forgiven the assembled congregants’ sins, Wäber denounced the lie of cheap grace. “Now every door and gate have been opened for people to sin. They should preach that immorality and the immoral are punished”, he continued.11 His own heavy burden of guilt required a reckoning with God.

While remarkable in its particular detail, this case illustrates common dimensions of the clerical view of Anabaptist dissent. Across Zurich’s largest rural jurisdictions, parishes remained fields of contestation, where the official Church and local dissenters clashed over the nature of the moral reform of the countryside and the legitimate agents of its implementation. Prior to his investigation in Brütten, Fischer had been oblivious to the specific local contours of this contest. But even in parishes where these conflicts were long-standing and Anabaptist leadership well-known, the clergy’s view—and that of the larger official apparatus—of the identity and character of their opponents remained partial. In rural areas of the Confederation and southern Germany, local solidarities, stemming from kinship and shared profession, traversed religious communal boundaries (Räisänen-Schröder 2017). The rural populace harbored hostility to the creeping influence of urban power, often represented by the minister himself (Tosato-Rigo 2014, p. 280). Further, muddying officials’ perceptions was the “moving” character of association with Anabaptist congregations, which often maintained a porous social membrane despite firmly marking membership with the rite of baptism and exercise of discipline (Monge 2015).

At the same time, the fight against Anabaptism invested what was often frustrating ministerial labor with purpose. Bruce Gordon has termed the Zurich Church’s submission to the city’s council a “Faustian bargain” that, while granting the clergy a privileged place in the project to create a godly, reformed society, often contaminated the provision of pastoral ministry with the expression of hard political power (Gordon 2003, p. 138). Core responsibilities included both pastoral care and the enforcement of legal codes, generating structural tension between the officeholder and his flock (Zellweger 2022, p. 427). Ministers were further challenged by a lack of power to exercise discipline themselves, the bespoke instruments at their disposal restricted to the coercion of the Word, and the infectiousness of example. Confronting dissenters offered ministers a concrete way of resolving such tensions. By marking Anabaptists as outsiders, ministers could settle into an understanding of pastoral care as the protection of the “upright” majority (biderbe leuth) whom dissenters threatened to drive to doctrinal confusion and civil disobedience. They argued that parishioners’ constant breaches of moral codes resulted from the imitation of local dissenters rather than the ineffectiveness of their own preaching. This vision generated a range of pastoral responses. Remarkably persistent efforts at suasion attest to many pastors’ deep trust in the power of the Word to move Anabaptists to reconciliation with God and the Church. Frequent complicity in the city’s brutalization of the recalcitrant spoke to the limits of those hopes.

Consistently, the ministry’s collective response to the survival of Anabaptist life was marked by the creation and circulation of documents. At Zurich’s lectorium, candidates for rural ministry were trained in specific techniques of information management (Goeing 2016). They turned to these when confronting particularly vexing pastoral challenges. In the opening pages of Brütten’s morals court (Stillstand) records, Hans Rudolf Fischer explained that, during the first five years of his tenure, the smooth operation of the deliberative body had rendered any inscribed account of proceedings “unnecessary”. Wäber’s suicide, however, provided “occasion and reason for this written register”, which would, from that point forward, offer a fuller and more durable accounting of “what things I have said or done” for later reference.12 The registration by pastors of specific aspects of the social life of the parish in documents—in this case, the mediation of moral violations—helped (re)create these aspects as “social objects” capable of being seen, understood, and addressed.13

In his impulse to register and reveal the activity of Anabaptists through documentation, Fischer aligned his approach with that of Swiss Reformed authorities. Officials’ attempts to stamp out dissent had long engendered the documentary practices on which they later relied to inform them about the broader reform of subject populations. In Zurich, parish registers were adopted by decree in 1526 in order to more systematically verify that infants in parishes had been properly baptized (Letsch 2017, p. 44). The introduction of periodic censuses of the rural population in the 1630s was intended to better assess the social dimensions of impediments, most prominently Anabaptists, to territory-wide pedagogical reform (Egger 2022). The city mandated the keeping of written records of proceedings of parish Stillstände at the same time, only a few years after Fischer had undertaken the task of his own initiative. In the earliest of these protocols, such as those kept in the parish of Birmensdorf, the volume of dealings with dissenters outweighed their small membership (Neufeld 2023, pp. 278–85).

Parish pastors, who generated these records, were foremost among a sizeable corps of local officials, drawn primarily from the rural elite, on whom Zurich relied to supply its information order.14 Their immersion in the matrix of paper that came to mediate connections between countryside and city, commoner and scribe, was driven by both sides of their pastoral responsibilities: theological reflection and sermon preparation, on the one hand, and the tasks of administrative record production and organization, on the other. In their daily fight against moral laxity and disobedience, of which they saw Anabaptism as emblematic, they employed documentary strategies necessary to turn illicit activity on the local level into a Handel, or matter of legal concern to the government. The purpose was to digest complex social reality into a legible form, to credibly fill the gaps in the authorities’ view of rural parish life, to which they remained partially blind. This work was intended to trigger processes of escalation that, in response to Anabaptist misdeeds, might transform the city’s published decrees into concrete intervention at the parish level.

3. Ministers and the Handel in Grüningen

This dynamic comes into clear view in the Landvogtei of Grüningen, the pre-alpine jurisdiction to Zurich’s southeast where, in the earliest years of the city’s Reformation, Anabaptism in the Confederation had come closest to achieving mass popular support.15 At the turn of the seventeenth century, a faint echo of that critical moment instigated a pastoral crisis among the local ministry, who reported fears of losing their entire parishes to the sectarians. Such was the uncertainty provoked by Anabaptist withdrawal from official religious life that the common people had requested a territory-wide disputation to evaluate whether the ministers could defend Reformed doctrine against Anabaptist critique.16 Adding insult to the pastors’ injury was the tenor of the earliest response by the central government to the situation on their territorial periphery, which identified pastoral shortcomings as an important causal factor. In an instruction to the Landvogt Jacob Zur Eich in October 1601, the council directed ministers to read out their 1585 anti-Anabaptist decree from the region’s pulpits with greater frequency,17 accompanied by an implied critique of ministerial performance. “All pastors and preachers…must each be earnestly admonished, by their oath and honor, to more diligently carry out the duties and powers of their office as outlined in our mandate”, the order continued.18 In a wounded reply, the pastors asserted that they had long been complying with these formal responsibilities but that they were insufficient for the task at hand.19

The minister of Bäretswil Hans Jakob Wagner, the author of this response, spoke on behalf of a corps of pastors that represented the full range of ministerial competency in the clerical chapter of Oberwetzikon, the regional body under whose supervisory structure they ministered. By the early seventeenth century, much of Zurich’s rural pastorate was professionalized, erudite, and committed to assigned parishes over the long term.20 Johannes Heinrich Zingg, for example, served the nearby parish of Hinwil from 1599–1629, during which time he became an amateur historiographer of religious radicalism. Outliers, such as Andreas Wolf in Fischenthal, wracked up debts and drank too much, giving local Anabaptists a rhetorical stick that they used to beat the clerical estate (Dejung and Wuhrmann 1953, p. 632). Despite their differences, these colleagues were pushed together by the common experience of meager living conditions and the frustration of their efforts to either minister to or elicit serious disciplinary measures against the dissenters in their midst.

A wave of ministerial correspondence preserved in Anabaptist legal files and codices of clerical writings offer a rare look into this collective pastoral experience, marked by feelings of repudiation, fears of physical danger, and the sense that partners in the governing apparatus had abandoned them. Generally, commoners in Grüningen viewed the presence of urban burghers in ministerial garb with suspicion, and Anabaptist locals apparently channeled this general hostility in their less formal interactions with the pastorate (Sierszyn 2007, pp. 51–53). Ministers were pained by repeated accusations of money-grubbing, drunkenness, and ineffective preaching. “They place all responsibility for their separation, and the immorality of the common people, on [us]”, Wagner lamented, “And even if each one of us, in the parish that has been entrusted to us, were willing to hear from them where our shortcomings lie, what and whom amongst us angers them, and commit to improve our intentions with God’s help and assistance (for we are human beings, not angels, and freely recognize ourselves as sinners), even then they would not engage with us on these matters”.21 Visits to Anabaptist residences, which often lay outside small settlements in the foothills, intimidated ministers.22 Pastors were met with what they reported as “contemptibly harsh words” (verachtliche spitzwortt), and their invitations to attend Reformed services were repelled.23 A young man from Fischenthal had boasted that he would rather be condemned to galley service than be made to listen to Zingg’s sermons.24 Meanwhile, Wolf claimed that he carried a rifle with him on pastoral visits in order to protect himself from Anabaptists’ dogs.25 When their direct outreach was frustrated, pastors decried the inconsistent assistance they received from policing and morals officers (Weibeln and Ehegaumern) who had been charged with the task of legal enforcement. The sworn citizenry, whose responsibilities included service in the apprehension of those who threatened the community’s wellbeing, proved unreliable allies. Indeed, it was the pernicious influence of dissenters on the Reformed majority that most concerned the pastorate. In the parish of Wald, the newly-arrived pastor Hans Heinrich Schinz had learned from reputable informants “that while there are not a great number of avowed Anabaptists [here], there are a great number who are sympathetic to them and protect their sect”.26 A threat this grave could “not be dispersed by any warning, admonition, or shouting from the pulpit”.27 Only through the direct involvement of the divinely appointed authorities could the ministry protect the flock from the Anabaptist “mountain wolves”.28

In order to elicit intervention, the ministers of the chapter of Oberwetzikon produced and circulated documents: letters, lists of complaints, and concrete recommendations for governmental action. Across these writings, the pastors established Anabaptists as dangerous outsiders, casting their activity as the leading indicator of moral decay and imminent judgment in the region under their care. In a joint letter to a regional bailiff, Wagner claimed that the population’s unrepentant sinfulness had earned them a wage of divine punishment, portended by “unusual cooling and ripening” and an earthquake “which throughout the entire territory aroused us all from the sleep of sin during the night”.29 Emblematic of popular rebelliousness were the Anabaptists, who “every day greatly increased rather than decreased [in number], so that many ignorant and simple-minded people are confused and the greatest disobedience results”.30

The channels through which these documents were transmitted proved as impactful as their framing as part of a larger, existential “spiritual drama”.31 According to the prescribed procedure, the deans of clerical chapters collected matters of concern to parish ministers (gravamina) and presented them in order at biannual meetings of the synod in Zurich (Baltischweiler 1904, p. 61). The chapter’s collective efforts to call attention to their plight were registered in protocols of synodal meetings in May 1601, May 1602, and October 1604.32 The ministers nonetheless butted up against the reality that, in a venue where complaints about Anabaptist activity across the countryside had become routine, the particular gravity of matters in Grüningen was not fully understood.33

Direct communication with conciliar officials yielded more tangible results. Prompted by the deteriorating conditions in his chapter, Oberwetzikon’s dean and minister of Dürnten Hartmann Hamberger made recourse to the Fürtrag, a regular but more forceful appeal addressed directly to the magistrates who attended meetings of the synod. In June 1601, he informed the burgomasters and council that, despite the ministers’ diligent efforts to oppose the Anabaptists with God’s Word and good pastoral care (gu[o]t sorg), the dissident movement was swelling like an ocean tide. Hamberger hoped that his cry would serve as an impulse to action, convincing the city’s authorities to repress the nonconformists with appropriate seriousness.34

Alongside numerous detailed, on-the-ground reports of individual Anabaptists’ activities, the pastors also appended enumerated lists (Verzeichnisse) of their grievances. The most comprehensive of these was the undated “Articles of Complaint against the Anabaptists resident in the chapter of Oberwetzikon, in the parishes and communes of Wald, Fischenthal, Bäretswil, Hinwil, Dürnten, and Egg”. The articles, which survive in several copies, linked Anabaptist activity with a surge in hostility to pastoral work and the council’s pursuit of reform.35 When the pastor Schinz had read out the anti-Anabaptist mandate from the pulpit in Wald’s parish church, a young man had laughed loudly over his voice, channeling broader communal opposition to Zurich’s imposition of fines, imprisonment, and control over the property of those who did not attend Reformed services. The Anabaptist Jost Müller from Edikon had impugned Heinrich Bullinger as a “common scoundrel” (gsell) who had modeled subjection to secular power for the ministers of the day. The ministry lamented the faltering grasp of “our Religion and Confession” over swaths of Grüningen’s commoners, who were opening themselves to Anabaptists, claiming that they had been given a “special Holy Spirit” (sonderen Heils-Geist) that empowered them to face the prospect of death for their faith with steadfastness.

These documentary forms appear to have broken through governmental inertia, initiating deliberations inside Zurich’s small council, followed by a slew of direct communication to officials in Grüningen and then to rural administrators across Zurich’s territories. In a letter to Zur Eich, the small council referenced the “writing of the minister of Bäretswil” as grounds for targeted capture orders and demands that specific Anabaptist leaders be transferred to the city for interrogation.36 Zur Eich was ordered to threaten his deputies with the loss of their jobs if they continued to delay in executing arrests.37 Once the pastorate had created sensitivity to their concerns among their superiors in urban government, they found officials’ attention easier to refocus. When pastors lodged a renewed set of complaints about growing Anabaptist activity in the countryside in 1604, the authorities moved rapidly to transfer clerical pressure downwards, first onto their governors across major rural jurisdictions and then onto the officials at the community level (underAmptlüten), whom the council blamed for the rise in dissent.38

These strategies succeeded in a variety of ways. In their correspondence from the period, officers in urban government adopted wholesale the framing embedded in the reports of rural ministers, in which natural portents served as a warning of God’s impending wrath should Anabaptist disobedience continue to be tolerated.39 Actions against individual Anabaptists were described as measures to protect a vulnerable majority from the “bursting in” (Jnbruch) of harmful external forces.40 This full set of documents, however, did not simply reflect the pastors’ view of local battles with Anabaptists. They intensified them. The yield from this coordinated program of document production included a spate of arrests of local leaders, the dissolution of a number of their estates, and a series of banishments. Outside of territory-wide waves of repression in the 1580s, 1610s, and 1630s-40s, these efforts constituted an unusually precise direction of repressive resources from the city toward the elimination of the Anabaptist threat in a specific rural jurisdiction.

4. Activating the Archives of Anabaptist Error

At the parish level, the clergy’s persistent recreation of Anabaptism as a threatening force involved the registration of patterns of inner-village social life into parish books, morals court protocols, and channels of clerical correspondence. In Swiss cities, it involved the digestion and processing of the information contained in such documents into more coherent narrative form (Burke 2000, p. 74). High-ranking churchmen synthesized particular complaints into broad appeals to the secular authorities (Fürträge) to reinvigorate their action against Anabaptists (Egger 2023, pp. 248–56). When the city did act, further impulse for this work was the defense of the council’s repressive interventions against the claims of both internal and external critics, some of whom numbered among the city’s most valued confessional allies.

In Zurich, the incident requiring the most substantive and careful narration was the council’s successful, decade-long campaign to extirpate Anabaptist life from their territory, which began in 1635. The program—in which long-standing policies of arrest, long-term incarceration, familial separation, and material dispossession were generalized from a male leadership stratum to all members of the dissenting minority—generated fierce controversy, first within dissenters’ villages and then among outside observers (Wälchli et al. 2010). These included Dutch Mennonites who enlisted Dutch Reformed powerholders in their inquiries into Swiss cities’ anti-Anabaptist measures. This attention raised the stakes of what had been a local conflict, spurring a contest over the collection, organization, and publication of information intended to demonstrate the true nature of Anabaptists.

Johann Jakob Breitinger dedicated himself vigorously to this matter over the final years of his term as Antistes, or first minister, of Zurich’s Church. In his tireless work to build up and defend Reformed religion—if not in his theological originality—Breitinger was Bullinger’s heir. Recent assessments of the churchman’s impact highlight the remarkable scope of his administrative, political, and pedagogical interventions within Zurich’s borders and his diplomatic efforts beyond them, all achieved in the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War and the fight against resurgent Catholicism (Rindlisbacher Thomi 2022, pp. 94–100). Largely omitted in these evaluations is Breitinger’s unrelenting commitment to the contest with so-called sectarians, a further illustration of Bullinger’s enduring influence on his distant successor.41 An appointment to the marriage court to “instruct” recalcitrant Anabaptists and advise the city in how to deal with the minority group immediately preceded his elevation to the position of Antistes (Bergmann 1916, p. 94). His strategic reformulations of the city’s policy vis-à-vis dissenters in 1615 and 1630 shaped the approaches of Reformed allies across the Confederation (Bergmann 1916, pp. 97–99; Leu 2007, pp. 213–15). Despite his elevated position, Breitinger’s understanding of Anabaptists was rooted in direct pastoral experience, not heresiological tropes. Throughout his career, which concluded with his death in 1645, Zurich’s leading churchman regularly argued with dissenting peasants and craftspeople in rural castle halls and visited them in the city’s prisons, urging their return to the civic and religious body of the majority.42

In various areas of his work, Breitinger immersed himself in the documentary culture of Zurich’s government and bent it toward his purposes.43 His involvement, as well as that of his close colleagues, in the anti-Anabaptist public relations battle of the mid-seventeenth century illustrates the nature of the urban clergy’s activity to shape broader visions of Anabaptism. Analysis of this dispute has focused on the so-called Manifest, an account published under the name of the mayors and councils of the city that detailed their recent dealings with dissenters (Wälchli et al. 2010). After its printing in 1639, the Manifest was disseminated, first, to all rural parishes and, second, to foreign recipients. Breitinger tapped his former student and archdeacon Johann Kaspar Suter to draft the text and then involved himself heavily in its edition, as a surviving marked-up manuscript draft demonstrates.44

A broader assessment of compilations of Anabaptist legal records in the State Archive, however, reveals more extensive experimentation with documentary and textual forms. By trial and error, churchmen and chancellery officers collaborated in seeking the best way to take immobile and confidential records out of the archive and publicize them in the service of Anabaptist removal. Urs Leu first suggested that the Manifest formed part of a larger historiographical project inside Zurich’s governing apparatus. He considers Suter’s later sixty-six-manuscript-page history, entitled A Continuation of Anabaptist Dealings…, to be a draft of a sequel to the Manifest, abandoned after a city commission decided not to publish the piece in late 1640 (Leu 2010, pp. 46–47). Suter’s explicit recognition of his reliance on archival materials proffered by the city’s chancellery to shape his account invites a re-examination of the wider dimensions of this project.45

The extant outcomes of this collaboration were indeed extensive, encompassing the following documentary products:

• Bÿlagen. Teüfferischer Handlungen. 1636.46
• Summarische Deduction der Widertoüfferischen Handlungen. Anno 1636.47
• Toüffer Sextern von Missiven, Gleits- und anderen Schÿnen und Bkantnusßen von Januario Ao 1636. bis in Apr. Ao 1638.48
• Substantzliche Continuation der Toüfferhandlung vom 12te Octobris 1636. biß Inn Apr. Ao 1638. or Memorial49
• Wahrhaffter Bericht Unserr des Burgermeisters/des Kleinen und Großen Rahts genannt die zweyhundert der Statt Zürich. or Manifest (1639)50
• Continuation der Täüfferischen Handlungen was sich sÿter Anno 1639 nach publicierung des getruckten Manifests wÿter mit ihnen verloffen habe51

These working titles, which combine the terminology of official information management processes with a description of the works’ content, illustrate how scribal diligence to better inform city government bled into the work of Breitinger and his collaborations to create the framework for an official presentation of regional Anabaptism.

Distinctions between these works stem from the degree to which they synthesize and narrate the contents of assembled archival record collections. The Bÿlagen and Sextern, both simple copybooks organized chronologically, are the least processed. Written in multiple hands, they represent the typical collective labor of an office whose staff were tasked with providing those who exercised lordship with actionable information. The lengthiest of these works, the 123-page Deduction, differed by introducing prose as connective tissue. The bulk of its contents are synthetic descriptions of archived legal records interpolated with full copies of specific records themselves, set apart neither by font, punctuation, nor indentation. The Memorial, chronologically and formally, is an extension of the Deduction.

The printed Manifest itself did away with this mixed mode of exposition. Its authors eschewed source excerpts and any of the variety of citational practices evident in the aforementioned works to which it was related, obscuring the archival processes on which its composition relied. Instead, its framers preferred uninterrupted narrative prose, or what one of them described as “historical form”.52 This decision, it appears, was made by Breitinger. In an undated letter written to the city secretary and later mayor Johann Heinrich Waser, Breitinger wondered “if the narration of the records [might be] significantly abridged, simply covering the substance of the main plot, with the naming of actions, dates, extended interactions [with dissenters], and the forbearance that our Gracious Lords first demonstrated [toward them]. At the same time, other salient details could be incorporated, as a witness to Anabaptist malice”.53 Evidently, in the preparation of the Manifest, Waser had handed over to Breitinger a copiously detailed account of Reformed-Anabaptist encounters since 1635. This internal draft, perhaps the Deduction, first established an official narrative arc. Here, churchmen’s reliance on the work of the city’s chancellery, who found, ordered, and presented them with records, is clear.

At the same time, Breitinger and his colleagues directed this process, prompting the generation of new document collections and reactivating old ones in pursuit of their narrative vision. It is notable that it was the Bÿlagen’s contents—formal Anabaptist doctrinal statements submitted in response to Reformed authorities’ demands—that made their way disproportionately into the Manifest, rather than the records of predominantly legal character contained in the Sextern. By foregrounding a series of disputations with growing circles of Anabaptist interlocutors who remained stubborn in error and intransigence, the authors established collective responsibility for disobedience shared by all dissenting men and women in the territory, thereby justifying generalized punishment.

The picture of Anabaptism that emerged from this collaborative historiographical project was enduring, its legacies reaching well beyond the immediate context of its production. Inside the city’s government, Waser’s archival work guaranteed the transmission of the Manifest’s evidentiary basis. In 1646, Waser completed a monumental registry, the Index Archivorum Generalis, that reflected a full restructuring of the city’s archives completed under his leadership. As Randolph Head has shown, the organizational principle that undergirded this work was “ideal-topographical”: abstract lists of categories (Titulen), reflecting officials’ understanding of the social world, were assigned to physical spaces, in this case, boxes (Trucken), where inventoried records were safeguarded (Head 2019, pp. 205–6). In the wake of Waser’s labor, a significant segment of those records deemed pertinent to the category “Anabaptist matters” (Taüffersachen) were stored in two of these boxes, numbered 444 and 445, in a cabinet in the Fraumünster.54 An itemized inventory, created later as part of the more granular Index Specialis, lists the Deduction and Sextern among their contents. The copied sources in these works had not been disarticulated as separately registered records or returned to their original source file. They now existed, in the archived memory of the council, only within a larger narrative of Anabaptist deceit. Official knowledge of the early years of intensified repression of dissenters in the territory came to reside in the Deduction and Sextern.

The purposes of these registries were, according to their creators, “the easier reporting and investigation for future matters regarding our honorable city, and knowledge about such matters”.55 How the government activated these records in the decades following their reorganization remains opaque. What is clear is that they expected to do so. A necessary condition for the effectiveness of the information management system Waser had adopted was the provision of space for the accumulation of future records in a given category (Head 2019, p. 207). In hindsight, by 1646, the authorities’ need to actively engage in disputes with Anabaptists had diminished since they had largely crushed this minority’s capacity to maintain community life in the territory. At the time, however, the chancellery thought otherwise. The file remained open. Two empty boxes were designated for the future storage of records generated by contestation with local Anabaptists.56

Zurich’s new registries were not intended exclusively for internal use. They had also been created “particularly for others who are curious or lovers of the city”.57 Johann Heinrich Ott fit this description. A well-traveled local churchman who had received theological training in the Dutch Republic, Ott returned to Zurich in the early 1640s, serving as a minister in Dietlikon, contributing to early Enlightenment intellectual circles in the city, and, at Breitinger’s invitation, reorganizing Zurich’s ecclesiastical archive (Friedrich 2020, p. 268). In 1672, Ott published the Annales Anabaptistici, the most complete seventeenth-century history of Anabaptism and one that remained a reference work for those hostile to the tradition for some time (Ott 1672).

Evidence of Ott’s decades-long project of source collection and ordering that preceded this monumental publication resides in eight workbooks held by the State and University Library in Hamburg.58 Composed primarily of thousands of pages of notes and source excerpts, these volumes testify to Ott’s aspiration to write a total history of Anabaptist dissent.59 Yet, while the volumes contain traces that hint at the mobilization of intellectual networks throughout Europe to extend his source base, Ott’s reliance on archival material from Zurich remained disproportionate. Large portions of his workbooks are constituted by copies, in multiple hands, of full assemblages of records from Zurich’s archives. This is especially clear in the fourth volume, covering the years 1617–1639, where source concentrations mirror chronologically those stored in Zurich’s repositories.60 The authorship of the Annales, in short, relied on the continuation of existing patterns of collaboration, in which Reformed churchmen in Zurich directed city scribes in the production and organization of documents.

5. Conclusions

Breitinger and Ott, situated at the heart of ecclesiastical power in Zurich, and the pastorate of Grüningen, ministering at the periphery of the Church’s influence, engaged the Anabaptist challenge from varying degrees of remove. The documentary practices through which they apprehended popular religious dissent illustrate these distinct positions. From their desks in simple rural parish houses, some of which they had built with their own money, ministers generated documents to serve as portable windows into the embattled, first-hand experience of struggle against the enemies of reform. In the city, such reports became the raw material with which church leaders constructed synoptic knowledge of local dissent that could be projected beyond the particularities of local conflicts.

At each of these levels, knowledge about Anabaptists depended on the narrowing of the ministry’s own field of vision. The recourse to physical documents encouraged the simplification of presentations of the social environment, including pastoral encounters with dissenters, into a legible form. These “abridged maps”, which featured only those mountains and hills in the religious landscape that pastors wished to make low, made both possible and justifiable a more decisive intervention of the city government into parish affairs (Scott 1998, p. 3).

Such representations were not intended to capture the complexity of the social geography of the ministers’ parishes. Nor did they reflect the diversity of the clergy’s own labor. Many Swiss Reformed churchmen, across time and place, remained remarkably persistent in their pastoral responsibilities to Anabaptists, such as they understood them, most often through the direct, face-to-face instruction and admonition that might reconcile wayward subjects to the spiritual body of the majority. Further occluded in this limited view were those instances where encounters across religious boundaries engendered recognition of a common purpose. “If he were outside his city in another land and met such people [Anabaptists] with such teachings and faith, he would be glad to stand with them and hope to be saved”, Breitinger was reported to have conceded.61

Such admissions found no place in the clergy’s documentary assessments of dissenters. The maps of rural society unfurled by Anabaptists, for their part, were no less skewed. The difference, as it had been from the late 1520s onward, was that dissenters’ assessments of the moral deficiencies of rural society had only limited bearing on official sight.62 Instead, it was the Reformed clergy’s visions that retained outsized power to remake the social reality they described.