Abstract
While Labadist fortunes overseas waxed and waned, the mother colony at Wieuwerd was entering a crucial phase of its existence as the year of 1692 dawned. Central to it all was a disenchanted former member, Petrus Dittelbach.1) His involvement in the community had been comparatively short (some five years) and punctuated with disagreements. It cannot have been easy for an ordained man to submit to elders with no recognised training, but from his own subsequent account we sense more than a trace of pride in the former pastor of Nendorp, and regularly we find Yvon and others admonishing him for disobedience. His wife and son, who had followed him to Friesland more out of duty than desire, were openly hostile to the disciplinarian ways, and it was over the issue of discipline of children that Dittelbach finally chose to leave the Labadists around 1688. Wieuwerd thereafter regarded him with the utmost suspicion, and when Yvon heard that an adherent at Emmerich had offered Dittelbach hospitality, he straightway wrote to remonstrate, calling the renegade ‘an enemy of the Work of the Lord.’ On his preaching trip to Amsterdam in 1689/90,2) Yvon had given the stewards at the door express orders to deny access to Dittelbach.
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Notes to Chapter 14
Johan Henrich Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen V, pp. 119ff. Fascimile reprint, Tübingen, 1982.
Dated 1 November 1694, it is reproduced in J.J. Kiestra, ‘Bijdragen tot de levensgeschiedenis en verdiensten van Hendrik van Deventer’. Tijdschrift, Nederlandsch maatschappeij tot bevordering der geneeskunst, 1853, pp. 52-54.
see also G.E. Guhrauer, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts aus den handschriftlichen Aufzeichnungen Gottlieb Stolles’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte 7 (1847), 385–436, 481–531.
She was, however, a spiritually sensitive woman and was valued by the Quakers; see William I Hull, William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1935), pp. 25, 99f.
G.A. Wumkes (ed), Stads-en Dorpskroniek van Friesland, p. 193. 1930.
C.P. van Andel (ed.), Gerhard Tersteegen. Briefe in niederländischer Sprache (Göttingen, 1982) prints a letter of 31 December 1735 (pp. 39, 40) and another of 16 May 1739 (pp. 128–130), with a possible third of uncertain date (pp. 300, 301). In the second letter Tersteegen gives his own testimony of God’s operations and quotes Bosman as having said how close he felt to God in his old age.
J. Hepkema, Wieuwerd en zijn historie, 10th edn, Oosterend, 1977, pp. 12–36.
And J.R. Jansma, ‘De tandprothese van Wieuwerd’, Tijdschrift voor tandheelkunde 51 (1944), 90–95.
Similar mummies are known, preserved by having dehydrated before putrefaction: at the Bleikeller in Bremen, in the vault at St. Michel, Bordeaux, and at the Convento de’Cappucini at Palermo; see J.F. Scheltema in The Antiquary, n.s.8 (1912), 18–24, 60–66.
Stellingwerf is no.467 in Elias Voet, Merken van Friese gouden zilversmeden, 2nd edn., The Hague, 1974.
Only on 6 January 1750 was a new pastor at Britswerd/Wieuwerd freed from the obligation of making a sworn declaration of dissociation from Labadist tenets. S. Cuperus, Kerkelijk leven... in Friesland, p. 173, Leeuwarden, 1916.
U. Birch, Anna van Schurman, 1909, reproduces a self-portrait by Anna, at the end of her life, wearing just such a habit.
W.K. van der Veen, Uit de geschiedenis van de grietenij Ferwerderadeel, p. 75, Leeuwarden, 1958.
M. Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens, II, 385. Koblenz, 1852.
More details in J. Wesseling, De afscheiding van 1834 in Friesland, Groningen, 1980.
Cited by A. Sieders in ‘Van haten en minnen, van honing en gal’, Theologische Studiën, vijfjaarlijks tijdschrift (Leiden), Leiden, 1981, p. 16.
Gerard Croese, The General History of the Quakers, London, 1696, pp. 221–222.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Saxby, T.J. (1987). Twilight of an Era. The Final Years in Friesland, 1692–1744. In: The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610–1744. Archives internationales d’histoire des idees/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 115. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3567-9_14
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