Preservings, 2006

A short biographical sketch of an important Flemish Mennonite preacher and businessman in Altona and Hamburg. My essay is part of a special issue of _Preservings_ on the Dutch roots of early modern German Mennonite communities. Other contributors include Walter Klaassen, Marjan Blok, Allan Friesen, Karl Koop, Jack Thiessen, and Nanne van der Zijpp.

Mennonite Quarterly Review, 2000

NOTE: The attached PDF is a pre-publication draft. If you wish to use this material in research, please read and cite the published version in the MQR

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, edited by Michael J. Halvorson and Karen E. Spierling, 2008

ABSTRACT: Early modern Mennonites and Doopsgezinden could choose from elements of at least two competing visions of an ideal Mennonite _Gemeinde_ (congregation or community). In one vision, the _Gemeinde_ was conceived of as the visible, pure and disciplined community of true believers modeled on the example of the early Christians, while in the other it was conceived of as an invisible church of all individual believers who considered the love of one’s neighbor as the highest command. While it is useful heuristically to make a clear distinction between these two visions, in practice each Mennonite congregation usually found its own unique mix of the biblicist and communitarian tendencies of the first vision on the one hand and the spiritualist and individualist tendencies of the second vision on the other. To illustrate the distinctions and how they played out in lived circumstances, the essay critically reviews examples and interpretations from Peter Kriedte's important but problematic 2007 book _Taufgesinnte und großes Kapital_ (about Mennonite culture and proto-capitalism in the early modern Rhineland). Kriedte's book is problematic because it relies upon a religiously conservative portrayal of Mennonite life and ideals. The essay discusses sociological models by Tönnies, Weber, and Simmel.

Mennonite Quarterly Review, 2023

The essay presents evidence for the importance of printed books on a wide variety of topics by “Anabaptist” authors and other related contributors to the early modern book industry (e.g., printers, publishers, booksellers, and engravers). It shows that books written in Dutch made up the great majority of works published until 1700. Only some of these books fit the usual categories of Mennonite history. In short, the essay provides a way of analyzing early modern Anabaptist-Mennonite sources that does not assume the normativity of early sixteenth-century Swiss and German history nor of church history. The perspectives of book history and cultural history open important but too-often-neglected questions and evidence about the cultural and historical diversity of early modern Doopsgezind (baptism-minded) life and ideas. In particular, the essay highlights how seventeenth-century Dutch Doopsgezinden (baptism-minded people) of all orientations were both “in the world and of the world” of urban, urbane, cosmopolitan, ecumenical interactions. A consequence is that it is difficult to interpret them as a single, completely separated, self-contained confessional tradition. Their complicated, often close, and even overlapping relationships with their neighbors from other confessional traditions were integral to who they were. And these urban, Dutch-speaking people were the largest, most publicly active and significant community that debated and attempted to define “Mennonite” identity for about ten generations (approx. 1550-1800)!

1999

Your hkt Volre mkrsnce Our rSlo Notre reterma The author has granted a non-L'auteur a accorde me licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pernettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou copies of thls thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts &om it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be p~t e d or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent &re imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits saris son permission. autorisation. E M G Y SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MENNONITE CONFESSIONS OF FAITH: THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ANABAPTIST TRADITION Ph.D Thesis, 1999 by Karl Peter Koop submitted to the Faculty of Theology of the University of St. Michael's College and the Department of Theology of the Toronto School of Theology Dissertation Abstract Scholars have long agreed that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mennonites in the Netherlands produced a significant number of confessions of faith. Differences of opinion, however, have emerged on the question of the relationship between the confessions and their Anabaptist heritage. Some scholars have understood the adoption of confessional statements by Mennonites as a development inconsistent with Anabaptism, which, it has been argued, was more concerned with moral or social reform than doctrinal precision. Others have observed a degree of correspondence between the confessions and Anabaptism, noting, in particular, areas of doctrinal continuity. The present thesis-a historical-theological study-concedes that with the advent of fully developed confessions of faith, something essentially new in the Anabaptism tradition emerged. Further, it recognizes that the theological perspectives reflected in the confessions were not necessarily identical to Anabaptist views. Nevertheless, the central argument of the thesis is that the confessions of faith, as represented by the Short, Jan Cents and Dordrechtconfessions-confessions adopted by the largest Mennonite groups in the early seventeenth century-in the main, stand in historical and theological continuity with sixteenth century Anabaptism. The thesis does not disregard the moral and social dimensions of Anabaptism and Mennonitism. It brings into view, however, something that has often been overlooked; namely, that the Anabaptist and Mennonite concern for moral and social reform was in fact deeply rooted in a particular way of believing and thinking about God, Jesus Christ, salvation and the church. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In gratitude to my parents, & C J~ Henry Koop (1914-1982) and Hilda Lodde Koop (b. 1919) who first taught me the significance of tradition and to Katharina with Heidi, Noelle, Rebekah, and Mariette, who remind me of what is important i n life T h i s Thesis was prepared under t h e guidance of Professor A. James Reimer Gratitude is here expressed for his support direction and enthusiasm

Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter, 1999

This is the pre-translation English version of an essay I published in German the journal _Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter_ in 1999.

Oliviana: Mouvements et dissidences spirituels XIIIe - XIVe siècles, 2023

This series of four articles argues that the Church campaigns against the “heresy of the Free Spirit” of the early fourteenth century primarily targeted a new type of beguines and beghards, emerging in Cologne around 1290 and spreading across the Low Countries and the Lower Rhine in the following decades. Called swesteren, and “begging” or “wandering beghards”, or willige arme, or more properly “lollards”, these lay women and men distinguished themselves from traditional beguines and beghards by a stricter adherence to individual and collective poverty, by a special dress, and by a particular doctrine. Part Three, devoted to their beliefs and practices, returns to the well-known “confession” of John of Brünn (Brno) about his life in a “house of the poor” in Cologne in the first decades of the fourteenth century, but it is mainly concerned with the Middle Dutch “Dialogue between Meister Eckhart and a Layperson”, which I consider the work of a lollard or swester living in (northern) Brabant and writing in or shortly after 1333. It displays a complex affinity with the thought of Meister Eckhart (presented as a fellow martyr of an “unknowing” Church) on such issues as mystical union and good works. I argue that the apparent similarities between the movement’s doctrine and Meister Eckhart’s teachings, with which the author of the Dialogue was at least partly familiar, are not due to direct dependency but may best be explained by a common background in late thirteenth-century discussions about grace and human will; I also explain why the doctrine, while not antinomian, might have raised suspicion of free-spirit sympathies. I offer a brief sketch of developments after 1350: further expansion, now also into France (the Turlupins), despite still more intense persecution, and gradual transformation of lollards and swesteren into Cellite (Alexian) brothers and sisters in the second half of the fifteenth century. The essay ends with observations on the role of the poverty ideal and the possible use of books (in the German and Dutch vernaculars) in the movement.

2001

This is an English version of a book I published in 2001.

Sisters: Myth and Reality of Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Doopsgezind Women, ca. 1525-1900, 2014

Update 2023: The pdf with this entry is a pre-publication version of the essay. Other contributors to the collection are Mirjam de Baar, Martina Bick, Marian Blok, Nicole Grochowina, Linda A. Huebert Hecht, Mark Jantzen, Marcel Kremer, Marion Kobelt-Groch, Lucinda Martin, Mary S. Sprunger, John Staples, Mirjam van Veen, Piet Visser, Anna Voolstra, and Gary K. Waite. The collection arose out of a conference in 2007 in Amsterdam.