New Directions in the Radical Reformation: “Thinking outside the Cages”(74 Studies in Central European Histories)

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction  Geoffrey Dipple and Kat Hill Part 1: Redefining Radical Religion in the Reformation 1 When Did Denck and Hätzer Cross the Line? Defining Heterodoxy in the Early Reformation  Geoffrey Dipple 2 “Worth as Much as Jeremiah and Isaiah” Melchior Hoffman and the Prophecies of Lienhard and Ursula Jost  Christina Moss 3 Whirlwinds, Sudden Death, and an Army of Toads Baptist Prodigies of the 1660s  Joshua Caleb Smith Part 2: Radical Religion and Social Change in the Reformation 4 Monster or Homo Divinus? Thomas Müntzer’s Testimony of the First Chapter of the Gospel of Luke  Christopher Martinuzzi 5 The Sword in the Ragged Sheath The Motif of the Peasant Radical in Sixteenth-Century Prints  Jonathan Trayner Part 3: On the Boundaries of Sectarianism: Rethinking the Social Location of Anabaptism 6 “He or She, Husband or Wife Should Have Escaped the City” Dispossession Narratives and Culpability after the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster  Jessica C. Lowe 7 Pragmatic Toleration of Anabaptists in the Electoral Palatinate, 1650–1664  Cory D. Davis 8 “As Far as the Records Dictate” Archival Logics in Anabaptist Source Collections  David Y. Neufeld Index

About the Author :
Geoffrey Dipple is Professor of History at the University of Alberta. His publications include Antifraternalism and Anticlericalism in the German Reformation: Johann Eberlin von Günzburg and the Campaign against the Friars (1996) and “Just as in the Time of the Apostles”: Uses of History in the Radical Reformation (2005). Kat Hill is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is a scholar of the Reformation and the legacies of religious change, specialising in the global histories of Mennonites.