Münster

Münster is described as a city under Anabaptist rule, besieged by its own prince-bishop and invoked by Thomas More as proof of where heresy can lead. In his exchange with Thomas Cromwell, reports of the city’s upheaval become a political argument about faith, order, and the dangers of rewriting the past.

A City in Rebellion

More recounts that Münster’s burgomasters have been driven from the council and replaced by thieves and people he calls lunatics, who proclaim the end times and demand that everyone be rebaptised. Dissenters are said to have been forced beyond the city walls, while the prince-bishop lays siege to the city in an effort to starve it into submission. The account makes Münster a place caught between rival claims to religious and political authority.

Rule and Rumour

The city’s defenders are reported to be chiefly women and children, living under the authority of a tailor named Bockelson, who has crowned himself King of Jerusalem. More’s account also includes rumours that Bockelson’s associates have instituted polygamy and that women have been killed rather than submit to rape justified in the name of biblical law. These reports present Münster not merely as a rebellion against established rule but as a society where religious claims are said to license coercion and violence.

More says that the new rulers have seized the houses of the rich, burned letters, damaged pictures, and destroyed fine embroidery. Most consequentially, they have shredded records of ownership so that the former order cannot be restored. To More, the destruction of documents turns social upheaval into an attempted erasure of history: the city’s material record of who owned what is being deliberately undone.

Münster as Political Warning

More compares the city to Thomas More’s imagined commonwealth, calling it Utopia, but the comparison is bitterly ironic. He tells Cromwell that Münster’s inhabitants are burning books from the city libraries, including works by Erasmus, and asks what kind of people would burn the gentle scholar’s writings. He expects the city eventually to be restored to order, perhaps through the intervention of Philip of Hesse and the prince-bishop’s forces, but imagines the opponents of heresy turning against one another in the process.

Cromwell predicts that someone within Münster will surrender the city. Their conversation makes the place a test of competing political judgments as well as a distant crisis: More reads it as evidence that religious dissent produces disorder, while Cromwell treats its outcome as a contest whose resolution may come from within. Münster’s destruction of records also resonates with the novel’s recurring concern that those who control power can edit the past, recast lives, and decide what remains of an earlier order.