Volume 28, Number 17 · November 5, 1981
Closet Believers
By D.P. Walker
The Family of Love
by Alastair Hamilton
James Clarke & Co. (Cambridge, England), 177 pp., £15
The Family of Love was a mystical sect or society founded in about 1540 by a wealthy German merchant, Hendrik Niclaes. It was Nicodemite, that is to say, systematically secret, encouraging its members to conform outwardly to whatever religion prevailed around them. It aimed at a personal inward religion for which all ceremonies and outward forms of worship were a matter of indifference; it thus continues the tradition of earlier sixteenth-century Nicodemites described in Carlo Ginzburg's Il Nicodemismo (see NYR, September 23, 1971).
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