Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation. By Werner O. Packull. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xi + 440 pp. $59.95.

Abstract

But at the heart of this remarkable analysis is the duplicitous continuum of evil, the rehearsal, as it were, for Judgment itself, that the Rule formally and associatively expounds. In chapter 4 ("The Rule of Antichrist. Form, Content, Affinities"), in a succinct and plausible reading, Riess shows how the humanoid Antichrist and his effective opponents, the Orders, manifest the dichotomy of false prophecy and true vision, and how Signorelli portrays the interwoven themes of the threat of Islam and Judaism. Riess's illuminating discussion of St. Antonius, Annio da Viterbo and, most crucially, of the sermons of St. Vincent Ferrer, is central in his explication of Dominican tenets and the program's overall meaning. Remarkably, a connection between Annio's thought and the frescoes has never been made, despite the fact that his popular De futuris christianorum triumphis in Saracenos (1480) is the most comprehensive fifteenthcentury work on Antichrist. Riess shows, ultimately, how a work of art can itself promulgate ideologies, and how the visual image, by its nature instantaneous, incontrovertible, and explicit, can embrace its viewers even as it surreptitiously converts them.