Gary K. Waite, Anti-Anabaptist Polemics: Dutch Anabaptism and the Devil in England, 1531-1660 (Hamilton: Pandora Press, 2023)
From the Book jacket comments: Dr. Michelle D. Brock (Washington and Lee University) — “This compellingly written book surveys anti-Anabaptist polemics in England from the Reformation to the Restoration. Waite deftly analyzes a wide range of printed texts to reveal the English attitude toward and caricature of ‘radical’ reform movements in continental Europe. Yet this book is about much more than the use of Anabaptism as a rhetorical cudgel carved for various purposes over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead, what Waite offers is a new window into the power — and unintended consequences — of fear, paranoia, and print in an age of demonization as much as reformation. Anti-Anabaptist Polemics is essential reading for scholars interested in the early modern polemics of hate and how they speak to our own moment of polarization and extremism.”
