About
Michael Driedger is an associate professor of history at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His teaching duties and interests range widely and include: historiography and research methods; the history of Protestant radicalism; and apocalyptic movements in world history. He has experimented with role-playing as a method of teaching history.
His current project is about the relationship between the Radical Reformation and the Radical Enlightenment in the Netherlands. In particular, he is investigating the activities of dissenting Protestant printers, philosophers, and political activists, with a focus on the 18th century. This project, entitled Mennonite Revolutionaries, is in the process of becoming a website. In the coming years he plans to investigate the role of Dutch dissenters in the early Enlightenment – i.e., up until about 1700.
His broader research interests concern the comparative study of religious minorities and new religious movements around the world from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and the relationship between early modern politics and religion. As a consequence of my collaborative research on Anabaptist Münster, he has begun to look at the cultural and religious dimensions of early modern siege warfare.
Publications
Books:
- Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age, Aldershot, 2002.
- Willem de Bakker, Michael Driedger and James M. Stayer (eds), Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster, 1530-35, Kitchener, Pandora Press, 2009
- Anselm Schubert, Astrid von Schlachta, and Michael Driedger (eds), Grenzen des Täufertums / Boundaries of Anabaptism: Neue Forschungen. (Series = Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 209.) Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2009.
Articles:
- Mennonites, Gender and the Rise of Civil Society in the Dutch Enlightenment, in Mirjam van Veen, Piet Visser, Gary K. Waite, Els Kloek, Marion Kobelt-Groch, and Anna Voolstra, eds., Sisters: Myth and Reality of Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Doopsgezind Women ca. 1525-1900, Leiden, Brill, 2014), pp. 229-249.
- Protestantische Heterodoxie als Deutungsproblem: Kategorisierungsversuche zwischen konfessioneller Identitätsfindung und postkonfessioneller Geschichtsschreibung [Protestant Heterodoxy as a Problem of Interpretation: Categorization between Confessional Identity Formation and Post-Confessional Historiography] in Toleranz und Identität: Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein zwischen religiösem Anspruch und historischer Erfahrung [Tolerance and Identity: Historiography and Historical Consciousness between Religious Ideals and Historical Experience]. (Series = Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte, vol. 79.) Eds. Kerstin Armborst-Weihs and Judith Becker. Mainz, Institut für europäische Geschichte, 2010, pp. 177-194.
- [Krefeld’s Mennonites, the Freemason Lodge ‘Perfect Equality,’ and the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment], «Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter», 65 (2008), pp. 99-113.
- Anabaptists and the Early Modern State: A Long-Term View in Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700. Eds. John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, Brill, 2007, pp. 507-544.
- The Intensification of Religious Commitment: Jews, Anabaptists, Radical Reform, and Confessionalization, in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in 16th-Century Germany. Eds. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2006, pp. 269-299.
- An Article Missing from the Mennonite Encyclopedia: ‘The Enlightenment in the Netherlands’ inCommoners and Community. Ed. C. Arnold Snyder. Kitchener, Pandora Press; and Scottdale and Waterloo: Herald Press, 2002, pp. 101-20.
- Crossing Max Weber’s ‘Great Divide’: Comparing Early Modern Jewish and Anabaptist Histories in Radical Reformation Studies. Eds. Geoffrey Dipple and Werner Packull. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999, pp. 157-174.
