A historian gets excited!

Well, what a difference a word can make. In my investigations of the Anabaptists in Sobotište in the seventeenth century I had always been looking for reference to the Haban, as they were usually called (probably from ‘haushaben’). However, on our recent visit to the Anabaptist house in Sobotište we were able to go into a museum where we were given literature that consistently referred to the ‘Hutterites’ in the area (Anabaptists named after Jacob Hutter). I have studied the Hutterites and their interest in communal living, but some digging around in the last day or two, especially reading what Robert Friedmann (the Mennonite historian) has written, revealed a story…