Lost Word Of The Day (71)

Bernhard Knipperdolling was a prominent Anabaptist who was involved in establishing the short-lived and ill-fated religious kingdom of Munster in 1534. When the rebellion was crushed, he and the other leaders, Jan van Leyden and Bernhard Kretching, were cruelly tortured to death on January 23, 1536.

Anabaptists advocated that, inter alia, baptism and membership of the Church was only the preserve of adults, a point of view that the Church establishment found heretical. Knipperdolling gave his name to a pejorative term for Anabaptists, but over time it morphed into a term of abuse describing any religious fanatic.

A sense of its use can be gleamed from J G’s The Sage Senator Delineated from 1660. “There starts up another Government”, he wrote, “hatch’d by a Committee of Safety; (of slavery, they meant) who were a rude rabble of Factious, Illiterate, Phanatick, Disloyal Rebels; a knot of Knipperdolings; of the same stamp with that German Botcher, Jack-a-Leyden: the very merdaille and excrementitious offscouring of the Nation”.