Few documents provide a clearer window into the heart of Hutterian faith. Here the scattered testimonies, confessions, and beliefs of the early brotherhood are woven together into a coherent and compelling statement of faith. The result is a Hutterian synthesis: five great articles that express the essential vision of Christian discipleship, community, and witness that sustained the movement through persecution and growth alike. Emmy Barth Maendel's translation is both accurate and readable, and her introduction is superb – learned, insightful, and deeply attentive to the historical world from which this text emerged.—Leonard Gross, author, The Golden Years of the HutteritesThe Great Article Book is a magnificent display of communal Bible interpretation, charting multiple pathways through the complicated terrain of the biblical canon with attention to key contested spiritual and ethical practices of early Hutterian Anabaptism. Readers will find themselves immersed in the scriptural reasoning practices of the Early Modern era. This collection of biblical arguments about defenseless community and married life rooted in the sacramental practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper shows us a form of early Anabaptist scholarship that was fully engaged in the consequential theological debates of the time while working out the practical dimensions of faithful Christian discipleship in creative and nonconformist ways that still inspire and challenge. —Gerald Mast, Series Editor, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite HistoryDrawing on extensive research into sources and manuscripts, this is a very welcome and highly readable new translation of a remarkable Hutterite document, which includes insights from other Anabaptist streams but presents their distinctive and radical approach to discipleship and community.—Stuart Murray Williams, director, Centre for Anabaptist Studies, Bristol Baptist CollegeI am delighted that through Emmy Barth Maendel's excellent work in translating and editing, Peter Walpot’s The Great Article Book is now published in the Classics of the Radical Reformation series. Peter Walpot was a significant leader in the sixteenth-century Hutterite movement, which was an influential part of wider Anabaptism. His powerful writing, on such issues as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, community of goods and non-violence, remains of considerable relevance and challenge today.—Ian Randall, CambridgeThe Great Article Book was assembled to prepare Anabaptist missionaries who were more likely to face interrogations that could cost them their lives than to evade capture and return home. Taking on the most contentious issues of the day, the Great Article Book follows the sequence of Scripture and responds directly to frequent counterarguments. Quotations from Catholic theologians are included at the end of each section, to demonstrate that the other side’s authorities agree with the “heretics.” Emmy Barth Maendel has preserved the sharp polemical tone of this sixteenth-century Hutterite text and rendered its many biblical quotations directly so that the compilers' understanding of each passage remains intact. Her source-tracing of borrowed material to other Anabaptist writings is a contribution to scholarship.—Kenny Wollman, Hutterite Book CentreThis foundational Anabaptist treatise is key to understanding Hutterite theology, and its significance for understanding ethical and doctrinal essentials of the Anabaptist tradition extends far beyond that. Emmy Barth Maendel has gone to great lengths to establish a reliable text and to locate the sources that were used by the original compilers. The English translation is both contemporary and fluid, making it possible for today’s readers to wrestle with the intellectual process, biblical hermeneutics, and arguments that were current five centuries ago. Detailed annotations offer scholars a depth of insight into the coherence of the Hutterite compilers’ breadth of knowledge and insight.—Jonathan Seiling, coeditor, Jakob Hutter: His Life and LettersDoctrinal writings among the German and Swiss Anabaptists of the sixteenth century are comparatively rare. For this reason the . . . writings of this type produced by the Hutterian Brethren and carefully preserved through the centuries are especially welcome. In fact, they are a major element in the foundations of this brotherhood which have enabled it to survive in almost its original form to the present day.—Robert Friedemann, Mennonite Quarterly ReviewIn this writing we see both Walpot’s spiritual vision of yielding the individual will to that of the community and his defense of the Hutterian communal ethic against its detractors … Considering the terrible persecution which the Hutterians had suffered and the witness of nearly five hundred years of communal existence they have given the world, the integrity of their spiritual vision, emphasizing internal surrender and the conquest of selfishness, which Walpot’s writing capsulizes, speaks for itself.—Daniel Liechty, Early Anabaptist Spirituality
