This volume of essays explores the themes of radicalism and dissent within Protestantism. The comparisons highlight the contingent nature of particular settlements and narratives, and reveal the extent to which the definition of religious radicalism was dependent upon immediate context and show that radicalism and dissent were truly transnational phenomena. The historiography of the so-called radical reformation has been unduly shaped by the hostile categories imposed by mainstream or magisterial reformers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume argues that scholars should adopt an open-ended understanding of evangelical reform, and recognize that the boundaries between radicalism and its opposite were not always firmly drawn. The distinction between the two is an inheritance of the Lutheran Reformation of the 1520s, which shaped not only the later course of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire but also attitudes towards and writings on religious dissent in the Netherlands and England. Radical critique is immanent within mainstream Protestantism, in a faith that emphasizes the power of the gospel with its unrelenting demands.

This volume of essays explores the themes of radicalism and dissent within Protestantism. The comparisons highlight the contingent nature of particular settlements and narratives, and reveal the extent to which the definition of religious radicalism was dependent upon immediate context and show that radicalism and dissent were truly transnational phenomena. The historiography of the so-called radical reformation has been unduly shaped by the hostile categories imposed by mainstream or magisterial reformers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This volume argues that scholars should adopt an open-ended understanding of evangelical reform, and recognize that the boundaries between radicalism and its opposite were not always firmly drawn. The distinction between the two is an inheritance of the Lutheran Reformation of the 1520s, which shaped not only the later course of the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire but also attitudes towards and writings on religious dissent in the Netherlands and England. Radical critique is immanent within mainstream Protestantism, in a faith that emphasizes the power of the gospel with its unrelenting demands.

This 1991 book is a collection of writings by early Reformation radicals which illustrates both the diversity and the areas of agreement in their political thinking. The texts are drawn from the period 1521–7, centring on the German Peasants' War of 1524–6. The thinkers represented - Muntzer, Karlstadt, Grebel, Hut, Denck, and others - differed on important theological issues, yet all rejected the magistral reformation as serving the interests of society's elites. They advocated a strategy of Reformation from below, a sweeping transformation of society to the benefit of the lay commoner and the local community. With the start of the Peasants' War, radicals divided over the issue of the legitimacy of force. This division shaped the ways in which they confronted the failure of the Peasants' War and the alternate strategies for survival developed in its aftermath. Appended to the texts are a number of political programmes of the Peasants' War. These documents illustrate ways in which the radicals contributed to the uprising, and how the war itself led to greater clarity in the political theory of the radical Reformation.

Dieses Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung enthält Vorträge, die auf einer Tagung des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte und der American Society for Reformation Research im August 1999 in Wittenberg zu 'Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert' gehalten wurden. Thomas Müntzer, die Täufer und die Spiritualisten waren die typischen Vertreter einer 'radikalen Reformation'. Sie werden in diesem zweisprachigen Band mit Konzepten von Radikalität, Dissent und Nonkonformismus konfrontiert, die nach einer bewegten Forschungsgeschichte noch einmal der Klärung unterzogen und mit der Radikalität des reformatorischen Aufbruchs allgemein vermittelt werden. Stärker als bisher sind die Begriffe der Radikalität und des Dissents als historische Kategorien zur Deutung der Frühen Neuzeit überprüft und geschärft worden. Aufgenommen wurden in diesen Band schließlich Beiträge, die nicht nur radikale Äußerungen in überwiegend religiös bestimmten Bewegungen des 16. Jahrhunderts behandeln, sondern auch Züge gesellschaftsverändernden Verhaltens in volkstümlicheren Gesten der Verweigerung oder des Widerstands sowie Zeichen offener oder heimlicher Solidarität des 'gemeinen Mannes' mit den verfolgten Täufern aufspüren.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England—in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

Dieses Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung enthält Vorträge, die auf einer Tagung des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte und der American Society for Reformation Research im August 1999 in Wittenberg zu 'Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert' gehalten wurden. Thomas Müntzer, die Täufer und die Spiritualisten waren die typischen Vertreter einer 'radikalen Reformation'. Sie werden in diesem zweisprachigen Band mit Konzepten von Radikalität, Dissent und Nonkonformismus konfrontiert, die nach einer bewegten Forschungsgeschichte noch einmal der Klärung unterzogen und mit der Radikalität des reformatorischen Aufbruchs allgemein vermittelt werden. Stärker als bisher sind die Begriffe der Radikalität und des Dissents als historische Kategorien zur Deutung der Frühen Neuzeit überprüft und geschärft worden. Aufgenommen wurden in diesen Band schließlich Beiträge, die nicht nur radikale Äußerungen in überwiegend religiös bestimmten Bewegungen des 16. Jahrhunderts behandeln, sondern auch Züge gesellschaftsverändernden Verhaltens in volkstümlicheren Gesten der Verweigerung oder des Widerstands sowie Zeichen offener oder heimlicher Solidarität des 'gemeinen Mannes' mit den verfolgten Täufern aufspüren.

This book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology.

This groundbreaking study offers fresh insight into the relationship between radical theology and gender radicalism in the seventeenth-century English Revolution. Examining published works and previously unexplored archival material, Sarah Apetrei shows the transformative role that women played in religious reform during the period.

During the mid-seventeenth century, Baptists existed on the fringes of religious life in England. Matthew C. Bingham examines this early group and argues that they did not see themselves as a part of a larger, all-encompassing Baptist movement. Rather, their rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans. Orthodox Radicals is a much needed complication of our understanding of Baptist identity, setting the early English Baptists in the cultural, political, and theological context of the wider puritan milieu out of which they arose.

Ontologies of Violence provides a new paradigm for understanding the concept of violence through comparative interpretations of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, philosophical theologians in the Mennonite pacifist tradition, and Grace M. Jantzen’s feminist philosophy of religion. By drawing out and challenging the remarkably similar priorities shared by its three sources, and by challenging the assumption that differences necessarily lead to displacement, Ontologies of Violence provides a critical theory of violence by treating it as a diagnostic concept that implies the violation of value-laden boundaries.