| Summary: | In 16th-century Germany, the so-called Anabaptist ‘Schweiger’ (literally ‘the Silent Ones’) chose to observe silence towards society, refusing to communicate with people outside their religious community and declining to greet them on the street. Catholic (Florimond de Raemond), Protestant (Martin Bucer) and even non-conformist (Sebastian Franck, Caspar Schwenkfeld) authors denounced their muteness as antisocial and unchristian behaviour. But this politics of silence can also be understood as a non-verbal strategy of expressing dissent. For a lack of words, the voluntary relinquishment of language, helped to maintain the purity of this close-knit community of faith. It was also meant as a refusal of the linguistic practises which expressed relations of power, especially those employed to outlaw them as heretics. As I will show, the use of silence could simultaneously work as a sign of social distinction and as a mark of the invention of a new religious ethos.
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