Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525–1585

Abstract

In 1534 Georg Knoblauch was arrested for being an Anabaptist, for refuting the validity of infant baptism and denying that God was present in the sacra- ment of the Mass. Knoblauch was an otherwise unremarkable copper miner from the small village of Emseloh on the edge of the deeply wooded forests of the southern Harz Mountains. Married to a woman named Greta, he had two children with her, Liese and Hosan. Georg was not Greta’s first hus- band.1 She had been married once before to Vind Wedekind, who had been arrested in Frankenhausen at the end of the Peasants’ War in 1525, the wave of violent unrest which swept through the German lands from 1524–5 and which looked to the Gospel to justify its demands.2 Georg and his wife came into contact with the Anabaptist movement in 1533, as a man known only as Alexander travelled around northern Thuringia and the Harz Mountains with his associates Heinz Kraut and Peter Reuße, teaching Anabaptist ideas to anyone who would listen. As Knoblauch, his family, and those who worked with him were drawn into Anabaptist circles, he heard teaching on the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and sang prayers and psalms. He even trav- elled to Vacha, a distant village on the Hessian border, and was present when a letter written by exiled Hessian and Thuringian Anabaptists in Moravia and addressed to the Anabaptist leader Hans Both was read aloud. In March of the following year he was apprehended and tried in Sangerhausen along- side his wife.