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The Radical Reformation. Edited and translated by MICHAEL G. BAYLOR. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xxxvii + 295 pp. $44.50 cloth; $14.95 paper.
These thirteen substantially annotated documents illustrative of the Radical Reformation, from 1521 to 1527, constitute a valuable collection, several of them never before accessible in English. They are supplemented in an appendix by six documents of the Peasants' War, ranging from the 11 Muhlhausen Articles of September 1524 to Michael Gaismaier's Territorial Constitution for the County of Tyrol in 1526. These religio-political texts are arranged in the unexpected context of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought--in a comprehensive series from Aristotle to Bakunin.
The florilegium covers developments exclusively in Germany and Switzerland (except for the Manifesto of Thomas Muntzer in Prague of 1521) and includes On the New Transformation of the Christian Life of 1527 of Hans Hergot and On the Sword of Balthasar Hubmaier, composed a year before his execution in Vienna in 1528. Although all but two of the documents have been accessible in annotated English, the fresh translations and their intensity exert a fresh power on the reader, who is encouraged to dispense with biographical detail except for the succinct identifications of the selected authors and a few others (Westerburg, Pfeiffer, Lotzer, Gaismaier, Wappler) in the biographical notes (pp. 267-271).
It is Baylor's historical conviction that this religio-social movement over roughly six years represented a distinct opening in German society that was sustained by the hope that a "Revolution of the Common Man" might be widely successful as carried forward by...