Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness

In 1534, a variety of Anabaptists took over the German city of Munster, instituted polygamy and a form of collective ownership, elected a Dutch tailor as king, and held out against siege and attacks for over a year. Schoolmaster Kerssenbrock was a child in the city at the time of the kingdom, and wrote a history of it three decades later, and from the perspective of a committed Catholic. His account has highly influenced subsequent scholarship, though neither the original Latin nor the poor German translation is much read. Mackay (history and classics, U. of Alberta) thought it was time to make the work available to English speakers. He does not spend time explaining how Kerssenbrock diverges from more reliable sources of information. The two volumes are numbered consecutively. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christopher S. Mackay, Ph.D. (1994) in Classical Philology from Harvard University, is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classics of the University of Alberta. He has published a general introduction to Roman history (Ancient Rome: a Military and Political History, Cambridge University Press, 2004) and a edition with translation of the early-modern handbook on witchcraft entitled the Malleus Maleficarum (Cambridge University Press, 2006).