ABSTRACT
In the wake of the German Peasants’ War, political authorities throughout Germany began to issue and enforce harsh new decrees against ‘Anabaptists,’ a subset of Protestant believers who practised adult baptism and rejected both the Catholic establishment and the emerging mainstream Protestant churches. This is the general context in which the short but remarkable career of Augustin Bader may be understood. Bader was an Augsburg weaver who rose to prominence as a lay elder among the city’s Anabaptists in the mid-1520s. By 1529 he and a small group of followers had established a communal existence in the hamlet of Lautern in the Duchy of Wurttemberg, then under the administrative control of the Habsburg regime. It was there that the group’s identity continued to evolve, bolstered by dreams, visions, and continuous reflection on the intellectual currents that ebbed and flowed through late medieval and early modern Germany.
