Book Description

Published eight years after the first volume in Documents of Brotherly Love, this second volume continues to refine the narrative of " Dutch Aid to Swiss Anabaptists." In contrast to the first volume's scope, spreading across seven decades following 1635, the correspondence of the present volume dates from only a two year span, 1710-1711. Readers now gain further access to materials archived ( primarily in Amsterdam) beginning in the seventeenth century. Though most were carefully inventoried in the late nineteenth century, and microfilmed (poorly) in the twentieth, they were only selectively consulted and quoted by historians. The international story unfolding through this epistolary conversation was thus only partial represented in either scholarly or popular history. The unusual strength of the Christian bond powering this episode of "Brotherly Love" is evident beyond its north-south dynamics, in its eastward reach to Swiss-deriving Mennonite Communities south of Heidelberg, or westward to Germantown in Pennsylvania, from which a nascent Mennonite community looked to both Dutch and Palatine leaders for advice. Readers can thus newly trace the arc of brotherly aid from an insecure Bernese haystack to donated land in the Netherlands in 1711 or a home carved from the woods of Pennsylvania in 1718.