Hermann von Kerssenbrock (d. 1580), a staunch Catholic of an old family of the German lesser nobility, prolific historian, controversialist and versifier, and rector of the Münster cathedral school, published his history of the 1534–5 Anabaptist revolution in the Westphalian city in 1573. His authorial efforts landed him in protracted legal disputes with the city council, which threatened him with beheading, on account of his disclosure of the city's secrets and his slighting attitude to its customs, institutions and people. Perhaps it was his squirearchical snobbery that made him so contemptuous of the Münsterites: ‘the order of the commons encompasses the undifferentiated mob of the whole city … they celebrate carnival with such lechery and licentiousness’ – but the same acerbic qualities, along with a squirreling collector's passion for documents and a vivid journalist's sensationalism, made him a marvellous, intensely readable, waspish recorder of the excesses taking place during the seizure of that city in the mid-1530s by the messianist disciples of Melchior Hoffman – Kerssenbrock's ‘large and foul heap of rebaptized people’, led by the Rasputinesque and priapic Jan Beuckelszoon, an ‘actor king who was a guardian of harlots’, in this chronicler's wonderfully dismissive phrase. So students of this episode in the radical Reformation are indebted to the classicist Christopher Mackay for his careful translation of von Kerssenbrock's Latin original, for his painstaking, sometimes slightly over-explanatory, editorial notes and for his wide-ranging introductions to one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of extremism.