George Williams' monumental The Radical Reformation has been an essential reference work for historians of early modern Europe, narrating in rich, interpretative detail the interconnected stories of radical groups operating at the margins of the mainline Reformation. In its scope--spanning all of Europe from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy--and its erudition, The Radical Reformation is without peer. Now in paperback format, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for any university-level course on the Reformation.

Radicalizing Reformation provides critical perspectives from North American theologians involved in the international project, "Radicalizing Reformation - Provoked by the Bible and Today's Crises." This project explores the radical roots of what was ignited 500 years ago in order to bring more attention to the systemic challenges that must be addressed today, drawing from both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Reformation legacy. Authors in this all-English volume include: Brigitte Kahl, Paul S. Chung, Samuel Torvend, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Craig L. Nessan, Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Charles Amjad-Ali, Karl Koop, Wanda Deifelt, Vitor Westhelle, and Karen L. Bloomquist. Each article has been published in one of the previous five volumes. This volume also includes background on the overall project, the 94 theses, and a guide for discussion in local contexts. (Series: Radicalizing Reformation / Die Reformation Radikalisieren, Vol. 6) [Subject: Religious Studies]

This 1991 collection of writings by early Reformation radicals illustrates both the diversity and the areas of agreement in their political thinking.

In The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe, Mario Biagioni presents an account of the lives and thoughts of some radical reformers of the sixteenth century (Bernardino Ochino, Francesco Pucci, Fausto Sozzini, and Christian Francken), showing that the Radical Reformation was not merely a subplot of heretical history within the larger narrative of the Magisterial Reformation. Religious radicalism was primarily an extraordinary laboratory of ideas, which played a pivotal role in the rise of modern Europe: it influenced the intellectual process leading to the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment. Secularism, toleration, and rationalism ― three basic principles of Western civilization ― are part of its cultural heritage.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.

George Williams' monumental The Radical Reformation has been an essential reference work for historians of early modern Europe, narrating in rich, interpretative detail the interconnected stories of radical groups operating at the margins of the mainline Reformation. In its scope—spanning all of Europe from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy—and its erudition, The Radical Reformation is without peer. Now in paperback format, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for any university-level course on the Reformation.

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.

Radical Protestant Christianity became widespread in rural parts of southern Russia and Ukraine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917, studies the origins and evolution of the theology and practices of these radicals and their contribution to an alternative culture in the region. Arising from a confluence of immigrant Anabaptists from central Europe and native Russian religious dissident movements, the new sects shared characteristics with both their antecedents in Europe and their contemporaries in the Shaker and Quaker movements on the American frontier. The radicals' lives showed energy and initiative reminiscent of Max Weber's famous paradigm in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. And women participated in congregations no less than men and often led them. The radicals criticized the existing social and political order, created their own educational system, and in some cases engaged in radical politics. Their contributions, argues Zhuk, help explain the receptiveness of peasants in this region to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

This review brings together new research in three areas of Anabaptist studies and the Radical Reformation. Part One focuses on sixteenth-century Anabaptism, re-examining the ’polygenesis model’ of Anabaptism articulated by Stayer, Packull and Depperman. Part Two deals with the connections between Anabaptists and other Reformation dissenters, their marginalisation as social groups and their relations with the intellectual movements of the age. The final section addresses historiographic and comparative issues of writing the history of marginalised groups, investigating some preconceptions which influence historians’ approaches to Anabaptism and their implications for understanding other religious groups.