Knights Amid the Rubble of the New Jerusalem

The sixth chapter concludes the study by tracing the Christian knighthood motif among Melchior Hoffman’s disciples in the wake of Anabaptist Münster’s demise. The chapter argues that the literary construction of the miles Christi followed two diverging paths in response to the failure of Münster: mystical interiority and humanist literalism. These two streams recall the differing approaches found in late medieval piety. Like the late medieval mystics, some Anabaptists, like David Joris, emphasized the inner battle against vice and the necessity of reclaiming the innate nobility of the soul. Others, like Menno Simons, rigorously applied the Erasmian emphasis on virtuous living and coupled it with an emphasis on the literal sense of scripture and a primitivism that held up the New Testament church as the paradigm for faithfulness. In this way, it was the external emphasis on physical suffering, martyrdom, and loyalty that carried over into the next generation of Dutch Anabaptists.