The Legacy of Michael Sattler

Writings by and about an early leader in Anabaptism show how the movement coalesced around questions of community, nonviolence, and religious liberty.

Both admirers and critics have called Michael Sattler the most significant of the first-generation leaders of Anabaptism. This collection of documents by and about Sattler, with introductions and extensive notes, makes selected primary source material available in English for the use of students, pastors, teachers, and interested readers. It is the first volume in the Classics of the Radical Reformation, a series of Anabaptist and Free Church documents translated and annotated under the direction of the Institute of Mennonite Studies.

That Anabaptism survived as a viable movement, with visible structures from the naive beginnings in Zurich in the mid-1520s to the time of the synthesizers of the 1540s, was the work of Michael Sattler more than any other one person and was the effect of his Seven Articles of Schleitheim more than any other one single cause.--John Howard Yoder