Martyrs Mirror (1685 Edition, Jan Luyken Engravings)

Thieleman J. van Braght published his martyrology under a title that promised exactly what it delivered, Het Bloedigh Tooneel, the Bloody Theater, a systematic account of Christian martyrdom running from the early church all the way through the Anabaptist martyrs of the sixteenth century Reformation. That was 1660. Van Braght himself died in 1664, four years later, without ever seeing what his book would become.

The transformation came in 1685, at Amsterdam, when a group of publishers issued a second edition under editors van Braght never worked with. They gave the book the title history remembers it by, Martyrs Mirror, and they commissioned the prolific Dutch printmaker Jan Luyken to illustrate it, 104 copper engravings in total, 49 for the first part and 55 for the second. Van Braght had written the record of what happened to these martyrs. Luyken, working entirely after the author's death, gave later generations a way to see it, and it is that illustrated 1685 edition, not the plainer 1660 original, that Mennonite and Amish communities have carried forward and continued to read ever since.

The gap between the two editions is worth pausing on. A publisher issuing a dead author's book with substantial new material added, an illustration program the author never approved and could not have approved, is doing something more editorially assertive than a simple reprint. The 1685 publishers took that risk anyway, betting that images would carry van Braght's record further than his prose alone had managed in its first quarter century in circulation. Three and a half centuries of continuous use by the communities the book was written for suggests the bet paid off.

Within Mennonite and Amish communities, the Martyrs Mirror carries a description that gets used about very few books anywhere: second only to the Bible in its importance to the tradition's own thought and self understanding. That is not a casual compliment. It reflects centuries of the book being read, referenced and passed down as a working account of what earlier generations of Anabaptists actually suffered for holding to believer's baptism and nonresistance, the two commitments the movement was founded on and the two the book's martyr accounts most consistently illustrate.

Jan Luyken's engravings did as much as van Braght's prose to make that account stick in memory. Art historians describe his 104 images as having shaped an entire visual iconography of suffering, a way of picturing martyrdom that Anabaptist communities carried forward independently of the text itself, recognizable even to someone who has never read a page of van Braght's original account. A book that began as one author's historical record became, through an illustrated edition he never saw, something closer to a shared visual and textual inheritance, still read aloud and still referenced wherever Mennonite and Amish communities gather to remember why their movement exists at all.