Waite's biography of Joris concentrates on his career as a DutchAnabaptist instead of his later, better-known activity as a Spiritualistin Basel. Waite argues convincingly that, from 1536 to 1539, Joris wasthe most influential Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands. Adopting amiddle path between the revolutionary chiliasm of the M?nsterAnabaptist kingdom and the radical separatism of Menno Simons and hisflock, Joris sought to unite the splintered Melchiorite movement underhis leadership. However, as Waite notes, history has been unkind to Joris: largelyignored by historians (the last book-length.

During the upheavals of the Reformation, one of the most significant of the radical Protestant movements emerged — that of the Anabaptist movement. Profiles of Anabaptist Women provides lively, well-researched profiles of the courageous women who chose to risk prosecution and martyrdom to pursue this unsanctioned religion — a religion that, unlike the established religions of the day, initially offered them opportunity and encouragement to proselytize. Derived from sixteenth-century government records and court testimonies, hymns, songs and poems, these profiles provide a panorama of life and faith experiences of women from Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Austria. These personal stories of courage, faith, commitment and resourcefulness interweave women’s lives into the greater milieu, relating them to the dominant male context and the socio-political background of the Reformation. Taken together, these sketches will give readers an appreciation for the central role played by Anabaptist women in the emergence and persistence of this radical branch of Protestantism.

This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of current scholarship on Anabaptist and Spiritualist history and theology from 1521 to 1700. Since the last half of the twentieth century, the historiography of the Radical Reformation has been the focus of vigorous and creative debate. The volume–broadly cast in terms of geographic scope and topical coverage–carefully untangles the fluid boundaries of Spiritualism and Anabaptism in Early Modern European history. In addition to a narrative summary, each chapter also provides a bibliography of sources and current scholarship, and concludes with suggestions for future research. This handbook will serve a generation of students as the standard reference work on Anabaptism and Spiritualism. Contributors include: Geoffrey Dipple, Michael Driedger, Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Brad Gregory, Sigrun Haude, Ralf Klötzer, John D. Rempel, John D. Roth, Martin Rothkegel, C. Arnold Snyder, James Stayer, Piet Visser, and R. Emmet McLaughlin. Originally published in hardcover.

By utilizing the contributions of a variety of scholars – theologians, historians, and biblical scholars – this book makes the complex and sometimes disparate Anabaptist movement more easily accessible. It does this by outlining Anabaptism's early history during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, its varied and distinctive theological convictions, and its ongoing challenges to and influence on contemporary Christianity. T&T Clark Handbook of Anabaptism comprises four sections: 1) Origins, 2) Doctrine, 3) Influences on Anabaptism, and 4) Contemporary Anabaptism and Relationship to Others. The volume concludes with a chapter on how contemporary Anabaptists interact with the wider Church in all its variety. While some of the authorities within the volume will disagree even with one another regarding Anabaptist origins, emphases on doctrine, and influence in the contemporary world, such differences represent the diversity that constitutes the history of this movement.

David Joris (c. 1501-1556) is one of the least understood leaders in the 16th-century Anabaptist movement. Yet during his era he was one of the most important Anabaptist leaders in the Low Countries of Europe. Even before the fall of Munster in June 1535, Joris was a consistent advocate of Anabaptist nonviolence, and well into the 1540s he competed successfully with Menno Simons for followers.

This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about— preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that an awareness and understanding of the nature and capabilities of spirits—whether benevolent or malevolent—was fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750. This is, therefore, a book about how epistemological and experiential knowledge of spirits persisted and evolved in concert with the wider intellectual changes of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

Witchcraft and magical beliefs have captivated historians and artists for millennia, and stimulated an extraordinary amount of research among scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This new collection, from the editor of the highly acclaimed 1992 set, Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology , extends the earlier volumes by bringing together the most important articles of the past twenty years and covering the profound changes in scholarly perspective over the past two decades. Featuring thematically organized papers from a broad spectrum of publications, the volumes in this set encompass the key issues and approaches to witchcraft research in fields such as gender studies, anthropology, sociology, literature, history, psychology, and law. This new collection provides students and researchers with an invaluable resource, comprising the most important and influential discussions on this topic. A useful introductory essay written by the editor precedes each volume.

This is the first extensive study of Strasbourg's diverse religious nonconformists beyond 1543, and the first to explore their continuities and discontinuities over two generations. Based on vast archival records in Strasbourg and secondary sources, it moves beyond the political and theological emphases of earlier works to include social history, portraits of village life, and the second generation to 1570. Derksen finds that second generation nonconformists were substantially different from the first. Their social profile changed; from an urban mix of leaders, intellectuals and artisans, they became largely rural folk composed of lower class artisans. Further, in outlook their view narrowed from "radicals" who sought to change church and society at its root to dissenters concerned mainly to survive. At the same time there were continuities. When the revolts of the 1525 Peasants' War were crushed, dissident ideals found new expression in spiritualist, sectarian and apocalyptic streams. In these streams, into the 1560s and beyond, nonconformists continued their call for social and economic justice and meaningful participation in religion. The book will be of interest to historians of the Early Modern period, the Reformation's radicals, popular religion, sixteenth-century society and Strasbourg, and to those interested in the free church tradition.

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.

The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God's will was to be 'saved'. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas. Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.