Mennonite Martyrs and Multimedia: On the Form and Function of Intermediality in Reformation Communication

Abstract

In August 1566, chronicle writer Marcus Van Vaernewijck noticed the vigor with which a young man debated a Calvinist preacher during one of the illegal hedge-preachings in Ghent. Van Vaernewijck identified the man as an Anabaptist. Anabaptists, he continued, were known for their clever debating tricks, a skill they had mastered because they were inspired by the arguments in the letters and songs that had been written by imprisoned and eventually executed Anabaptists.1 Most of these texts were compiled in the martyrology entitled Het Offer des Heeren (hereafter abbreviated as ODH).2 The popularity of this compilation suggests that printed communication played an important role in the dissemination of Anabaptist ideas. Yet Van Vaernewijck’s comment illustrates how the content of those printed texts also reached citizens through complex processes of medial interactions. The printed content was not simply read, it was also circulated and mediated through oral and performative communication. Most of the scholarship on these printed martyr texts has focused on the theological message of the text itself, but since the non-textual communication and iteration of the ideas within the text were at least as important as the text itself, this article seeks to analyze the form and functions of those medial interactions in the urban context of Ghent. Its central argument is that the content of early modern print must be analyzed as both the result and the subject of