Mysticism and the Early South German - Austrian Anabaptist Movement 1525 - 1531

Werner O. Packull was Professor of History at Conrad Grebel University College from 1983 to 2003.

Werner Packull delineates more clearly than any previous scholar the theological and spiritual differences between South German and Swiss Anabaptists. He examines thoroughly the dominant medieval mystical influence in the thought of Denck and Hut and the latter's immediate South German Anabaptist followers. Indeed, Packull decides that South German Anabaptism derives more from medieval mysticism than from the Reformation.Packull is convincing in his demonstration of this thesis because of his meticulous care in reading the primary sources and because he examines and refutes the arguments of those who would place the Protestant influence as the primary one. He carefully isolates and explains particular ideas of the medieval mystics and demonstrates their influence on Denck and Hut.Packull expands and elaborates the earlier suggestions of Kiwiet and Williams, both of whom postulated a discrete Anabaptism in South Germany as against that of Switzerland. He draws on the more recent and still unpublished work of Gottfried Seebass, especially on Seebass' selection of writings which he ascribes to Hut.Packull's second major thesis is that the earliest form of South German Anabaptism was transitional both sociologically and theologically. He demonstrates that there were indeed strains of Anabaptism which were not as clearly biblicist in emphasis as the one in Zurich.Packull's work makes the phenomenon of early Anabaptism more complex, less uniform, but hi252*.00storically more accurate, more in line with the realities of the religious ferment of the 1520s among German-speaking people.