The Mennonite people have always been richly endowed with gifted thinkers and writers. The seminal leaders in Reformation-times compiled treatises, polemics and learned discourses while the martyrs wrote hymns, poetic elegies and inspirational epistles. During the second half of the 16th century Flemish and Dutch writers (the ancestors of the conservative Mennonites in North and South America), brought forth a rich flowering of devotional, theological and historical writings, coinciding with a Dutch “Golden Age”–thousands of books and other writings, mostly unknown today.