Apparently my three MennoFolk books represent the largest, fullest study in print of Mennonite/Anabaptist folklore—that is, oral traditional literature—although the set focuses mostly on Swiss Anabaptist cultures in America. The first MennoFolk (2004), is a collection of essays that analyze Mennonite and Amish traditions. MennoFolk2 (2005) is a collection of studies by my students at Goshen College, emphasizing how folklore performances convey a sense of cultural and religious identity for individuals and groups.
MennoFolk3: Puns, Riddles, Tales, Legends (2022) is not a joke book but a collection of verbal items by folk genre, all of which reveal cultural and religious values. Some are very old narratives still circulating; others are very contemporary. The book includes trickster narratives, Amish slurs, dialect stories, bawdy tales, anecdotes about George Brunk, Sr., many other personal legends, and analysis of legend formation.
A legend recently shared with me, but not in the book, will communicate something of the book’s nature. A professor at Eastern Mennonite College came to class one day wearing a new “lapel” coat that he had bought on the market. He apologized for its not being a regulation “plain” coat, telling his students that it had “not yet been circumcised.”
I am grateful to Ann Hostetler, Julia Kasdorf and Phil Ruth for their labor of love in producing MennoFolk3, available via Amazon, for Painted Glass Press. The two earlier MennoFolk books are out of print, but available at low cost online at Abe Books.