The Great Article Book

Reviews / Votes

Drawing on extensive research into sources and manuscripts, this is a very welcome and highly readable new translation of a remarkable Hutterite document, which includes insights from other Anabaptist streams but presents their distinctive and radical approach to discipleship and community.

-Stuart Murray Williams, director, Centre for Anabaptist Studies, Bristol Baptist College


I am delighted that through Emmy Barth Maendel's excellent work in translating and editing, Peter Walpot's The Great Article Book is now published in the Classics of the Radical Reformation series. Peter Walpot was a significant leader in the sixteenth-century Hutterite movement, which was an influential part of wider Anabaptism. His powerful writing, on such issues as baptism, the Lord's Supper, community of goods and non-violence, remains of considerable relevance and challenge today.

-Ian Randall, Cambridge


Doctrinal writings among the German and Swiss Anabaptists of the sixteenth century are comparatively rare. For this reason the . . . writings of this type produced by the Hutterian Brethren and carefully preserved through the centuries are especially welcome. In fact, they are a major element in the foundations of this brotherhood which have enabled it to survive in almost its original form to the present day.

-Robert Friedemann, Mennonite Quarterly Review


In this writing we see both Walpot's spiritual vision of yielding the individual will to that of the community and his defense of the Hutterian communal ethic against its detractors ... Considering the terrible persecution which the Hutterians had suffered and the witness of nearly five hundred years of communal existence they have given the world, the integrity of their spiritual vision, emphasizing internal surrender and the conquest of selfishness, which Walpot's writing capsulizes, speaks for itself.

-Daniel Liechty, Early Anabaptist Spirituality


The Great Article Book became the synthesizer and simplifier, in a format which all brethren could understand - five articles, around which the fundamental Hutterian truths were built. ... Written in simple biblical language, it bears witness that Christianity is a way of life where mind and action relate integrally and where both are colored by the message and acts of Jesus and fulfilled in the spirit of Jesus, who lives on in the community gathered in his name.

-Leonard Gross,The Golden Years of the Hutterites