Did Mennonites, the descendants of the Reformation's radical Anabaptists, have an influence on European history beyond the first twenty years following the first adult baptism in 1525? The nineteen essays in this edited collection focus in various ways on this question. A second theme is the relationship of Mennonites to modernity during the five centuries between the Reformation and the end of World War II. The essays examine Mennonites from various regions, from their heartlands in the Netherlands and Prussia's Vistula Delta, to their colonies on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, to those living in Ak-Mechet near the city of Khiva in present-day Uzbekistan. As the subtitle suggests, the editors have grouped the contributions into sections determined by the relationship of the Mennonites to modernity, i.e., as “contributors,” “detractors,” or “adapters.”

The main argument that emerges from a reading of the essays is that Mennonites influenced the wider story European history even as they displayed a range of responses to modernity. On one level, the collection's goal is too ambitious. Mennonites were, after all, a small group in a religious sense (compared to the mainstream Protestant Lutheran and Reformed majorities), and were often intentionally marginal and marginalized in social and political terms. Thomas Brady's opening essay acknowledges, in some ways, the limitations of the book's ambitious agenda. In a stimulating piece that provides historiographical context for the essays that follow, Brady concludes that the Mennonite story might enhance our understanding of European history in the following sense: “sources about Anabaptism could be a goldmine for the study of late medieval European religion” (22). Yet, he suggests, at the same time, that the Mennonite story may need to be distanced from the European story and instead be framed as a Christian story in order for it to break out of being mainly a story of marginalized sectarians—and thereby engage themes of interest to contemporary readers. The degree to which the other authors are able to argue persuasively that Mennonites influenced European history to a greater degree than their marginality would suggest is uneven. Mark Janzten concludes that the question of military service—an important Mennonite theme—was key to subsequent political debates about the duty of the citizen to the emerging nation-state. The other authors are not as conclusive. Dutch Mennonites were interested in the natural sciences; they “embodied the capitalist ethic” (70) and played “leading parts” (89) in the Dutch Enlightenment. As a whole, however, the collection of essays remains no more than a brave foray into expanding the context for the Mennonite story, usually a minor subtheme in the Reformation narrative.

The volume is stronger when the authors engage more directly with the place of the Mennonites in the project of modernity. The chapters as a whole suggest that, despite their official embracing of a separatist stance, Mennonites were much more likely to contribute to modernity—or at least adapt to it—than flee from it. As the editors point out in their Introduction, Europe did not seem to be a place where separatism and a concomitant distancing from modern influences could survive. A sustained ethos of being separate from the world essentially required emigration to the New World, where Amish, Hutterite, and other conservative Mennonites found a home. One strength of the essays is their exploration of how those Mennonites who remained in Europe dealt with modernity, adapted to it, and became its agents and proponents—and of the various conflicts that emerged as a result of this.

The variety of geographic settings discussed in the volume reveals the full range of how Mennonites engaged with modernity. In the late modernizing Russian Empire of the eighteenth century, for example, their colonies became laboratories for modernization experiments among Orthodox peasants. In the realm of religion, they were “catalytic agents” (249) for the development of Russian Baptists in the nineteenth century. In Central Asia, they became agents of modernization by introducing new technologies while living in a Muslim Khanate. In Europe, by contrast, Mennonites selectively embraced modernization, which, in turn, often eroded their religious ideals. In the Netherlands, “definitions of worldliness changed” (70) for some, while, for others, “intense engagement” with the forces of modernity “eroded, if not eliminated, their old ideals of pacifism and the refusal of political offices” (89).

Although most chapters limit themselves to the political, economic, and social aspects of Mennonite and European life, several delve into theological questions related to the theme of modernity. Karl Koop, for example, argues that Mennonites were both on the margins and at the center of modern expressions of secular rationalism. Whereas the enlightened rationalists among them steadily drifted toward the Reformed church, others reasserted their confessions of faith, thereby representing an alternative to secular rationalism. Jeremy Koop's article, which focuses on the Third Reich, uses Mennonite interpretation of the “Doctrine of Two Kingdoms” as illustrative of their theological approach to the challenge of Nazi ideology. To that end, Koop chooses Benjamin Unruh, a prominent Mennonite leader who had migrated to Germany from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as representative of the Mennonite theological perspective. His choice suggests that Mennonite theological responses to Adolf Hitler and Nazi völkish ideology fell somewhere between absolute acceptance (by someone like Emmanuel Hirsch) and complete rejection (as in the case of Karl Barth). Koop concludes that, in the years leading up to World War II, Mennonites had moved away from earlier community-based understandings of how to relate to the state, and toward a position that allowed autonomous individuals to determine their relation to the modern nation-state. In that sense, they moved toward both a modern and a more Lutheran understanding of the two kingdoms and, in the process, became “increasingly comfortable inhabiting both” (345–46).

On the whole, this collection of essays is remarkable in its breadth and in the varied case studies it covers. Some essays are more descriptive than analytical, not all chapters contribute equally to the overarching themes, and the somewhat arbitrary assignment of essays to the categories of “contributors,” “adapters,” and “detractors” does not always work well. The volume neverless considerably enhances our understanding of how Mennonites related to modernity. Less convincing is the case made here for a far-reaching Mennonite influence on European history, but the volume certainly achieves its goal of opening the door to more research and conversation on that topic.