In Water and Blood

Chapter 3 turns to the literary production of Anabaptists themselves. This chapter examines two primary functions that the knight of Christ literary construction served in Swiss and South German Anabaptism. First, the importance of believer’s baptism in water could be illustrated by drawing analogies from the chivalric ethos. Here, service to Christ was signified by equating baptism with the chivalric oath of fealty. Second, martyrdom was frequently recounted as a martial contest in the rich tradition of Anabaptist martyrology, a practice that developed rapidly in these persecuted communities. Martyrs’ stories were recounted in prose but also in the hymnody of various Swiss and South German Anabaptist communities in the sixteenth century. Many of these hymns followed popular musical trends of the late medieval period. Using surviving hymns from the first half of the sixteenth century, primarily drawn from the Ausbund and the Hutterite songbook, Die Lieder der Hutterischen Brüder , this chapter closes by arguing these hymns-as-heroes’-songs were crucial to instilling group values of loyalty, bravery, and honor, as well as bolstering sentiments of nobility and belonging among these marginalized groups.