Gary Waite is a prolific, internationally known scholar with ten books (six of them single authored) and over seventy scholarly articles and chapters published or forthcoming to date. He began his research in the Radical Reformation (Anabaptism and Spiritualism) of the Protestant Reformation, then brought the insights from that research into other fields: Dutch literature and drama; demonology, magic and witchcraft; and beliefs about Jews and Muslims in the early modern world. Building on his award-winning dissertation and then monograph on the Anabaptist career of the Dutch artist and lay religious leader David Joris (c.1501-1556), Waite remains the acknowledged expert on this controversial individual, focusing now on Joris’s later spiritualistic career and the reception of his controversial depreciation of institutional religion and of a literal devil.
In 1988 Waite embarked on his first SSHRC supported research on the Chambers of Rhetoric, the Netherlands’ influential amateur literary and drama societies, especially in how they adapted and then propagated reform ideas during the first half of the 16th century. His Reformers on Stage was the first English-language monograph on these influential dramatists. Waite has subsequently explored how the rhetoricians combined spiritualistic ideas with urbanites’ desires for prosperity and peace, and this is seen in his recently completed chapter on the rhetoricians in Amsterdam (up to c. 1630) for a volume on the history of Dutch Renaissance drama. This study reveals the very strong role that rederijkers played in the development and spread of Spiritualism in the Low Countries, and how they continued to promote it as a means of ending confessional conflict and promoting good civic society.
Waite’s subsequent research program (SSHRC, 1993-96) successfully brought together the fields of the Reformation and the witch hunts. With two books and no fewer than fourteen scholarly articles and chapters, Waite is now an acknowledged expert on this subject. Situated at the intersection of popular and learned elite cultures, Waite’s Eradicating the Devil’s Minions (2007/09) compares the persecution of 16th-century Anabaptist heretics with that of witches in early modern Europe. Demonizing propaganda against and persecution of real Anabaptists fed fears of other imagined diabolical conspiracies, although Waite explains why the Dutch Republic was an anomaly due to its unique policy regarding religious conformity. In subsequent publications (such as his “Sixteenth Century Religious Reform and the Witch-Hunts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack, 2013), Waite has explained the puzzle of the gender difference between the two sets of accused, as most arrested Anabaptists were men while witches were predominately women. With this project Waite extended his chronological expertise well into the 17th century on the subjects of demonology, magic and witchcraft, and he is well able to conduct the research on the reception of spiritualistic demonology that is part of this research program.
In 2006 Waite embarked upon his third SSHRC funded project on “The Religious Other in Seventeenth-Century Europe” exploring vernacular publications and governmental records by Flemish, Dutch and English writers relating to Jews and Muslims in the 17th century. He has completed this research, presented nine papers and published seven referred articles/chapters, and the monograph, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse: From Religious Enemies to Allies and Friends appeared in 2019 with Routledge Press. In this study Waite discerns important differences in tone and content among the three regions, revealing that the distinctiveness of the Dutch related to their rejection of enforced religious conformity within their borders that then affected how they regarded non-Christians, and this, he argues, was related to the confluence of artisanal and merchant priorities, urban culture and spiritualistic currents flowing through the realm.
Waite’s current research program is the subject of this website: Amsterdamnified!, where you can see much of our findings to date. Among his most recent contributions are Anti-Anabaptist Polemics: Dutch Anabaptism and the Devil in England, 1531-1660. Pandora Press: 2023, https://www.pandorapress.com/anabaptist-and-mennonite-studies-series.html#/; Spiritualism in Early Modern Europe, special double issue of Church History and Religious Culture, co-edited with Michael Driedger, Francesco Quatrini, and Nina Schroeder, 2021 (vol. 101, issues 2/3), 135-398 – https://brill.com/view/journals/chrc/101/2-3/chrc.101.issue-2-3.xml; and “The Devil of Delft in England: the Reception of the Dutch Spiritualist David Joris in 17th -Century English Polemics,” Church History and Religious Culture 101/4 (Winter 2021), 429-95, Open Access, https://brill.com/view/journals/chrc/101/4/article-p429_1.xml.
He has delivered two named lectures from Amsterdamnified!: “Mennonites as Social and Technological Innovators in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands,” and “Mennonites as Innovators of Philosophical Thought in the Dutch Golden Age,” presented as the John and Margaret Friesen lectures, Canadian Mennonite University, Winnipeg, March 9, 2023 – https://media.cmu.ca/events/lectures#jmf; and “The Use and Misuse of Dutch Anabaptism by English Opponents of Baptists, Independents, and Quakers, c. 1560-1660,” delivered virtually as the Jarold K. Zeman Memorial Lecture in Anabaptist Studies, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Sept. 20, 2021; the video is here.
Together with other team members, Gary is completing the Amsterdamnified monograph.
Gary lives in Fredericton, NB, with his spouse Kate.