CMW Journal

Martyrs
Vol. 1, No. 5

In 1660 in Dordrecht, Thieleman van Braght published the first edition of The Bloody Theater, better known as Martyrs’ Mirror in North American Mennonite culture. The second edition, published in Amsterdam in 1685, contained 103 etchings by the prolific Mennonite artist Jan Luyken. The book has remained in print for ...

  • Me and the Martyrs
    Me and the Martyrs
    by Kirsten Beachy

    Kirsten Beachy is one Mennonite of a younger generation who has read Martyrs Mirror. She has not only read it but integrated its images, stories and lessons into her and her husband’s genealogies and her liberal arts education. She reflects the ambiguities and ironies that many Mennonites find in ...

  • Four Poems
    Four Poems
    by Rhoda Janzen

    Rhoda Janzen honors her own reading in Martyrs Mirror by transforming its plain style and narrative into a complex poetic art, linking early Anabaptist suffering with wide-ranging literary and historical allusions--like the martyr in “Last Words,” who “instead of plain words . . . speaks in bright jewels, rubies and emeralds and aquamarines.”

  • An Insider’s Pearl Diver
    An Insider’s Pearl Diver
    by Julia Spicher Kasdorf

    While Janzen offers us an ars moriendi, Julia Spicher Kasdorf finds an ars poetica for Mennonite writers in her analysis of Sidney King’s prize-winning film, The Pearl Diver. She finds that the film raises the question of the relationship between suffering and the artist-writer’s responsibility to individuals and ...

  • Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
    Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
    by Jessica Baldanzi

    Jessica Baldanzi reviews Janzen’s forthcoming memoir, which depicts with “wit and spirit” Janzen’s recovery from a traumatic divorce and her adult return, for an extended visit, to the close-knit, conformist Mennonite home and community in which she grew up.