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 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.

For over 30 years 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, this book is without peer. Now available in paperback, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for an college or university-level course on the Reformation.

Michael Sattler was born sometime around 1490 at Stauffen in Breisgau. He entered the Benedictine Monastery of St. Peter's, northeast of Freiburg, where he became, by way of Lutheran and Zwinglian ides, to forsake the monastery and to marry, and by March, 1525, had become a member of the Anabaptist movement which had just begun at Zurich two months before.

An important volume of scholarship, this book presents a collection of documents previously little known and inaccessible to the English-speaking world. This volume includes writings of the Radical Reformation--Anabaptist and Spiritualist--as well as three treatises by Juan de Valdes as a representative of Evangelical Catholicism. Long recognized for the quality of its translations, introductions, explanatory notes, and indexes, the Library of Christian Classics provides scholars and students with modern English translations of some of the most significant Christian theological texts in history. Through these works--each written prior to the end of the sixteenth century--contemporary readers are able to engage the ideas that have shaped Christian theology and the church through the centuries.

A fully revised and updated version of this authoritative account of the birth of the Protestant traditions in sixteenth-century Europe, providing a clear and comprehensive narrative of these complex and many-stranded events.

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation is the story of one of the truly epochal events in world history -- and how it helped create the world we live in today

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.