For contemporary Mennonites, it seems that no story is more emblematic of Mennonite convictions than that of Dirk Willems. When asked to provide an elaboration of their faith, Mennonites are quick to point to the iconic image of Dirk turning around to rescue his pursuer who had fallen into the ice-covered waters on the outskirts of the small Dutch town of Asperen. But according to David Weaver-Zercher, the author of a history of the Martyrs Mirror, it is only a relatively recent phenomenon that Dirk gained this prominent status. “References to Dirk outside of Martyrs Mirror,” he notes, “are practically nonexistent in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Anabaptist sources.”¹ It was in the second half of the twentieth century that he suddenly shot to fame, and this occurred primarily among Mennonites in North America. Moreover, it seems that this tendency to zero in on the story of Dirk Willems happened alongside of, and perhaps even because of, an increasing unfamiliarity of Mennonites with the broader martyrological tradition to which Dirk belongs. As Weaver-Zercher puts it, “the rise of Dirk as a prominent symbol in North American Anabaptist life is inversely correlated with knowledge about the book as a whole. Although most Anabaptists in contemporary North America have heard of Martyrs Mirror, few are intimately acquainted with its contents.”²

I think Weaver-Zercher is right to identify a kind of knowledge problem with respect to the Martyrs Mirror, but I am inclined to frame the problem somewhat differently than he does. I believe that the relative ignorance to which Weaver-Zercher points is the result of a more profound sense of illiteracy. In other words, it is not simply that there is a lack of knowledge about what is contained within the Martyrs Mirror, but rather that we do not know how to read a text like this in the first place. This is because we do not understand how martyr stories work as a form of literature. The way Dirk Willems features in the collective consciousness of contemporary Mennonite life and thought is, I think, partly the result of this form of illiteracy. In the brief reflection that follows, I hope to respond to this situation by offering some instructions on how to read a martyr story. This will in turn help to identify elements in the story of Dirk Willems that are missing from the way it is commonly told.

Let me begin by pointing to historian Daniel Boyarin’s suggestion that martyrdom is not so much an event as a discourse. Boyarin puts the matter succinctly: “Being killed is an event. Martyrdom is a literary form, a genre.”³ This important distinction is echoed by literary scholar Alice Dailey, who suggests that “the martyr is a retrospectively constructed figure created in and through literature.”⁴ These contemporary scholars of martyrdom are suggesting that the story of a martyr does not simply provide a straightforward empirical recounting of the moments culminating in their death. Rather, a martyr story is in some respects a literary fabrication that involves an elaborately stylized and highly refined narration of a death. This is not to suggest that stories of martyrs are entirely fictitious rather than factual. Rather, Boyarin and Daily are pointing out that the specific contents of these stories are intimately connected to the form in and through which they are expressed. We might say that the point of identifying someone as a martyr is to situate their life and death within a larger genre so that it can be bound, through a series of allusions and echoes, to other lives and deaths. In a Christian context, the genre of martyrdom works to place certain individuals in a special relation to the life and death of Christ. It is as much a work of literature as of history. And the connections are often made through symbolic associations and literary echoes rather than straightforward descriptive claims. This is what Mennonites tend to miss in the story of Dirk Willems and the Martyrs Mirror. They are inclined to read them as a record of history rather than a form of literature. As a result, there are some important elements of the story that fall through the cracks.

I hope to draw attention to some of the things that are missed by placing the story of Dirk Willems alongside two other stories from the wider Christian martyrological tradition. I will begin with Nicholas Ridley, a prominent Anglican martyr, whose story shares some striking similarities with that of Dirk Willems. I will then jump back in time to consider how the account of Ridley’s martyrdom relates to one of the most well-known early Christian martyrs, Polycarp, and make a few observations about the role of allegorical symbolism in the discourse of Christian martyrdom more generally. And then I will return to the Mennonite martyrological tradition to suggest some new ways of reading the story of Dirk Willems.

According to some accounts, my genealogy includes a man named Christopher Ridley. If these accounts are correct, he would be my thirteenth great-grandfather. Ridley was born in 1475 just west of Newcastle, England. It is said that he was a close associate of the infamous King Henry VIII, and that he was one of the very few people whom Henry regarded as a friend. Among Christopher’s children were two sons named Hugh and Nicholas. Hugh in turn had a son named Baldwin, who relocated from England to the Dutch province of Zeeland, where he served as a minister and was eventually appointed as a bishop in the growing community of English Protestants that were settling in that region. It was Baldwin’s daughter Apollonia who got mixed up with Anabaptists when she married a man named Daniel Thijssen.⁵ He and his family fled north to Vlissingen from Ghent to escape the fierce spate of persecutions known as the Spanish Fury, which were raging in Flanders at the time. But it was Baldwin’s uncle and Hugh’s brother Nicholas who went on to become the most well-known member of the family.

Nicholas Ridley became a chaplain in the Church of England during the tumultuous years when it was separating from the Roman Catholic Church. He was a close associate of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and they worked together on the Book of Common Prayer. He was eventually appointed as the bishop of London. But when Mary I became queen and sought to return England to Catholicism, Ridley and other Anglican leaders were rounded up and charged with heresy. Ridley was sentenced to death by being burned at the stake. His execution, alongside that of his close friend Hugh Latimer, took place on October 16 in front of Balliol College in Oxford. These and other details of the trial, execution, and legacy of the Oxford Martyrs comprise some the key moments in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, one of the defining martyrologies of the early modern period, which was first published in 1563. The scene is illustrated in a well-known woodcut. Here I will simply highlight two important elements of the drama of Ridley’s martyrdom as it is presented by Foxe.

When the pyre was lit and the flames began to hiss and pop near Ridley’s feet, Latimer offered him encouragement by saying, “Be of good comfort master Ridley, and play the man.”⁶ Even though he is said to have “desired for Christ’s sake to let the fire come unto him,” Foxe emphasizes that Ridley was slow to burn. It seems the executioners had violated one of the basic rules of fire-building. They piled too many logs at the base of the stake. Noticing this, Ridley’s brother-in-law George Shipside attempted to fuel the fire by throwing more sticks onto the pile of logs. This “made the fire more vehement beneath, [so] that it burned clean all his nether parts before it once touched the upper, and that made him leap up and down.” Ridley cried out, “Lord have mercy upon me, . . . let the fire come unto me,” before lamenting, “I can not burn.” Eventually another bystander intervened and helped the flames reach high enough to ignite the bag of gunpowder that was tied to Ridley’s neck. With this he slumped down low enough that he was finally consumed by the flames.

Readers familiar with the Christian martyrological tradition will recognize that these two points of emphasis in Foxe’s account of Ridley’s martyrdom – his encouragement to “play the man” and his seeming inability to burn – are allusions to the story of the early Christian martyr Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, who was put to death in the year 155 for his refusal to swear allegiance and offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. When Polycarp was being led into the amphitheatre to be burned at the stake, the Christians in the crowd heard a voice from heaven calling out, “Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man.” And later, when he was bound to the stake and the fire was raging, those who were present witnessed a miracle. The account of his martyrdom states that the flames “formed into the shape of a vault and thus surrounded the martyr’s body as with a wall. And he was within it not as burning flesh but rather as bread being baked, or like gold and silver being purified in a smelting-furnace. And from it we perceived such a delightful fragrance as though it were smoking incense or some other costly perfume.”⁷ Not only was Polycarp allegedly resistant to the fire, it apparently had no effect on him whatsoever.⁸ Quoting once again from “The Martyrdom of Polycarp”: “At last when these vicious men realized that his body could not be consumed by the fire they ordered a confector [executioner] to go up and plunge a dagger into the body. When he did this there came out such a quantity of blood that the flames were extinguished, and even the crowd marvelled that there should be such a difference between the unbelievers and the elect.”⁹

These sorts of allegorical and symbolic references are strewn throughout traditional martyr stories. They are especially common in portrayals of a martyr’s death. In early Christian and medieval martyr stories, Roman emperors tried to kill Christian martyrs by burning or drowning them, but these efforts almost always failed in spectacular fashion as they were interrupted by miraculous interventions. This was a way of emphasizing that these were the deaths of exemplary Christian people. Take the example of water. The Bible is full of stories and references that equate holiness with an apparent capacity to be unharmed by water – think about Noah’s Ark, the Red Sea, Jonah, Jesus walking on water, and Peter starting to sink when his faith is weakened. All of these images are taken up into the central Christian rite of baptism. There is a similar range of biblical images of fire: the voice of God speaking from the unburnt bush, the three holy youths in the book of Daniel, the fire of Pentecost, and numerous references to purifying fire. Fire was also symbolic of forgetting. It is just as important to note how they did eventually die. Instead of burning or drowning, Christian martyrs typically died by the sword or crucifixion. Here again, there is a biblical precedent. John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul were both put to death by the sword. And the crucifixion of Jesus is, of course, the model for all Christian reflection on death.

Stated simply, fire and water are problematic forms of death from a biblical perspective. It is for this same reason that burning and drowning came to be established as the punishments for the crime of heresy. Both of these sensibilities are reflected in the story of Ridley: On the one hand, he is sentenced to be burned at the stake because he was accused of heresy. But on the other hand, he is depicted as burning slowly because Foxe is trying to demonstrate that he is not, in fact, a heretic but an exemplary Christian like Polycarp.

Because there is so much literal burning in early modern martyr stories, and so few spectacular miracles of the sort we see in the story of Polycarp, it sometimes seems as if they represent a new form of martyrological discourse. And there is a sense in which I think this is true. But it is only partly true. On the one hand, these stories sometimes seem to shift away from a straightforward allegorical style and suggest the emergence of a new, more factual and empirical one where the deaths by burning are taken at face value and reported on as such. But Foxe’s emphasis on Ridley’s being slow to burn demonstrates that there are traces of the early Christian allegorical sensibility that remain. Even so, they are given a new twist in that they tend to be expressed in ways that are less explicitly miraculous and more naturalistic. Where Polycarp’s not-burning implies the direct miraculous intervention of God, Ridley’s failure to burn is attributed to the fact that the logs were poorly distributed.

This twist adds a level of nuance that captures the two-sided character of biblical fire imagery. Ridley is shown to desire one kind of fire – call it the good spiritual fire of purification or holiness. This is the fire of God that does not consume or destroy, like that of the unburnt bush. But this is juxtaposed with what we may rather crudely describe as a bad kind of fire – the fire associated with hell and forgetting. Foxe’s account emphasizes Ridley’s desire for the good kind of fire while demonstrating that the bad kind of fire fails to have any effect on him.

Through this play of images and through some of the words that are inserted into the mouths of martyrs, it is important to notice that stories of martyrs are knit together and to the Bible by a series of allusions and echoes. They work by mapping a specific story onto other stories.

With all of this in the background, let us return to the story of Dirk Willems. Dirk was arrested and imprisoned in 1569 for hosting meetings in his home that drew together a group of people referred to as Anabaptists. He managed to escape and attempted to flee by running across the ice that had formed overnight on a nearby pond. Though he safely made it across to the other side, a thief-catcher who was chasing him was not so lucky and broke through the ice. Noticing what had happened, Dirk turned around and went back to rescue the man who was pursuing him. The thief-catcher pled with the authorities that Dirk’s life should be spared. But he was nevertheless recaptured and sentenced to die by burning.

The story of Dirk Willems is beloved by contemporary Mennonites for its example of Christlike love and forgiveness. But it also includes a series of allegorical and allusive elements that tend to go unrecognized. Like Nicholas Ridley, the story of Dirk Willems also emphasizes that he was slow to burn. And again like Ridley, this is also given a kind of naturalistic explanation: “A strong east wind was blowing that day, [so] the kindled fire was much driven away from the upper part of his body, as he stood at the stake; in consequence of which this good man suffered a lingering death.”¹⁰ In the end, the writer of this story says, “how or in what manner the executioner . . . dealt with this pious witness of Jesus, I have not been able to learn, except only that he was consumed by the fire, and that he passed through the conflict with great steadfastness, having commended his soul into the hands of God.” In all the ink that has been spilled by contemporary Mennonites reflecting on the story of Dirk Willems, this reference to his being slow to burn is almost never mentioned. And when it is, it is usually interpreted as an illustration of the especially cruel and inhumane treatment he received.¹¹ I suspect, however, that this reflects a temptation on our part to read the story in an overly literal and factual way. To do so is to appreciate only half of the story. It is not simply a question of who does what to Dirk. The fire imagery is also important insofar as it serves to graft him into the larger family tree of Christian martyrs.

The traditional symbolism of water is arguably given an even more central place in the story. But it receives even less attention than the fire. Like Jesus, Dirk is portrayed as one who walks on the water. Conversely, the thief-catcher plunges through the ice and nearly drowns before Dirk rescues him, just like Peter and other biblical figures who are said to have lacked faith. Once again, there is a kind of naturalistic twist that serves as an explanation – a thin layer of ice had formed on top of the water. But the image still serves to situate Dirk in a long line of biblical figures who are unharmed by water. I wonder if there might also be a joke here that gets missed by the overly earnest reading habits of contemporary Mennonites – where the punchline is that Dirk performs a baptism on the papist thief-catcher who was pursuing him for performing illegal “re-baptisms.”

When we have lost the ability to appreciate the allegorical and allusive character of Dirk’s burning slowly and his walking on water, it is not surprising that we fail to register other symbolic associations and allusions that may also be relevant to the overall interpretation of this story. But there is an important allusion that is introduced in the etching of Dirk Willems made by the Mennonite artist Jan Luyken for the 1685 edition of the Martyrs Mirror. In Luyken’s illustration, Dirk is shown to be wearing a hat, while the hat worn by the thief-catcher evidently fell off when he plunged through the ice. I am not aware of a single discussion of the Dirk Willems story that mentions their hats. But I believe this is a clue to what is perhaps the most significant element of the story for the original viewers of this image. The historian Simon Schama notes that in and around 1570, the motif of hat-wearing grew to become an important element of Dutch political iconography. This had its roots in the Roman tradition of the liberty hat, where a freed slave would be given a hat to commemorate his release from captivity.¹² The iconographic significance of the hat can also be identified in the seventeenth-century tradition of Dutch portrait painting, where, as one Dutch art historian puts it, “the hat was an omnipresent symbol of Dutch liberty.”¹³

Against the background of these cultural references, it seems clear to me that Luyken’s depiction of Dirk’s ability to hold onto his hat and the thief-catcher’s evident loss of his make an important statement about the freedom of the martyr and the captivity of those who are deficient in their faith. This is not the place to develop an account of what this freedom looks like, but I suggest that it is the freedom of one whose life is not structured around strategic calculations about the potential consequences of one’s actions. Rather, it is a freedom that is modelled on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This turns the standard conception of freedom on its head by suggesting that it is the martyr who is the ultimate example of human freedom.

Chris Huebner is an associate professor of theology and philosophy at Canadian Mennonite University.

1. David L. Weaver-Zercher, Martyrs Mirror: A Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 265. ↩︎
2. Weaver-Zercher, Martyrs Mirror, 265. ↩︎
3. Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 116. ↩︎
4. Alice Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 2–3. ↩︎
5. Apollonia Ridley’s entry in the GRanDMA OnLine genealogical database is # 341196. She is my eleventh great-grandmother. ↩︎
6. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1583 ed., p. 1794, The Acts and Monuments Online, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/index.php?gotopage=1794&realm=text&edition=1583. All subsequent quotes from Foxe appear on the same page. ↩︎
7. “The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp,” in The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, ed. and trans. Herbert Musurillo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 15 ↩︎
8. See Jan Luyken’s illustration of Polycarp surrounded by flames from the 1685 edition of the Martyrs Mirror: https://archives.mhsc.ca/index.php/17-burning-of-polycarp-part-i-p-57-1685-ed. ↩︎
9. “The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp,” 15. ↩︎
10. Thieleman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater, or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians [. . .], trans. Joseph F. Sohm (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), 741–42. ↩︎
11. See, e.g., Kirsten Eve Beachy, “Me and the Martyrs,” in Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror, ed. Kirsten Eve Beachy (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2010), 37; and Weaver-Zercher, Martyrs Mirror, 266. ↩︎
12. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 70. ↩︎
13. Joris Oddens, “You Can Leave Your Hat On: Men’s Portraits, Power, and Identity in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic,” The Seventeenth Century 36, no. 5 (2021): 798. Later in the same essay, Oddens observes that “in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, male [portrait] sitters who wanted to display their identity of private citizen had themselves portrayed wearing their hats” in order to emphasize their “combination of ‘magnificence, dignity, and independence’” (813). Mennonites were also known to participate in this symbolic practice. See, e.g., the painting of the Mennonite pastor Dirck Jacobsz Leeuw by the Mennonite artist Govert Flinck: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Govert_Flinck_-_Portrait_of_Dirck_Jacobsz_Leeuw,_1636.jpg. ↩︎