At the end of the Middle Ages, the moral prestige of the old papal church was severely shaken in all the countries of Europe. Open criticism of its moral shortcomings and its organizational defects had been going on for centuries. To the diverse splinter-movements of heretical sects (which were never wholly suppressed) had been recently added the great reform movements of the Wyclifites and the Hussites. But even they had brought about no lasting and widespread upheaval. Ultimately the old hierarchy had always prevailed. Why then did the Germans, a people slow to be aroused, fond of order, and faithful to the church, take it upon themselves to carry out the most prodigious revolution in the church? And why did only their revolt against the papal church have such vast and enduring consequences?

Of the many lost causes in history, one of the most dramatic was the struggle for power and religious rights waged by the French Huguenots in the sixteenth century; and, as lost causes are wont to do, this one inspired poets, writers, musicians and artists for at least two centuries to depict in graphic detail the courageous men who led a zealous minority through miraculous victories, but finally into inevitable defeat. Less dramatic than the heroic period of Huguenot history, and therefore neglected by poets, and also by historians, but no less important—and more significant in the story of the development of religious toleration—is the struggle of the French Protestants in the eighteenth century to secure civil and religious rights.

Anabaptism was a religious movement of the little people of village and town, affecting in the end almost the whole area of the Germanic dialects from the Tyrol to Flanders, from Alsace to Prussia. Anabaptism, for all its, or perhaps precisely because of its, dissociation from principality and privilege, was more exclusively a Germanic movement than even Lutheranism; for the latter could at least go beyond the Germanic dialects to express itself in a Scandinavian or Slavic tongue; and, of course, Anabaptism was far less international than the Reformed movement. The linguistic containment of Anabaptism is all the more remarkable for the reason that in principle Anabaptism was much more world-minded and mission-minded—because of the seriousness with which it took the great commission— than any variety of the Magisterial Reformation. Yet when it moved beyond the deeply sinused speech frontier to the East, for example, it did so in ethnically and linguistically closed colonies in Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere. Documents from the pens of Anabaptists in French, a Scandinavian tongue, Polish, Czech, or Italian, surviving from the Reformation Era, could be held between two fingers; while the surviving Anabaptist writings in the international language of the Humanists and the Reformers are even fewer. (In contrast, a good deal of the surviving literary corpus of the Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and especially of the Evangelical Rationalists is in Latin, as well as in the Romance and Slavic tongues and Hungarian.) The little people of Anabaptism were not without recruits and even leadership from former priests and monks with their Latin and an occasional patrician with his Humanist training, but the lingua franca of Anabaptism was German, although progressive modification in idiom was necessary as the radical evangelical gospel was proclaimed by preacher or epistle from North to South.