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George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation, Third Edition. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992, xlvi + 1513 pp. (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies Volume 15), ISBN 0-940474-15-8, $125.
Williams' third edition of The Radical Reformation goes so far beyond his 1962 classic in the amount of information presented that libraries that own the first edition or the second (in Spanish) will need the third without question. Yet Williams remains true to his original conception of a Radical Reformation encompassing the broadest possible spectrum of diverse dissenters to the Magisterial Reformation of the sixteenth century. His book covers Europe in the period 1520-1579 from east to west, and he has criticized the more restricted use of the term that he coined, Radical Reformation, to refer only to those radicalities in Upper Germany from 1521 to 1526. (See George Williams' review of The Radical Reformation, edited and translated by Michael G. Baylor, in Church History, 63, 2 (June 1994, 275).
Williams divides the radicals into three main groups: Anabaptists, Spiritualists, and Evangelical Rationalists. He presents none of these three as a homogeneous whole. Each group is diverse. For instance, while stressing the differences between Swiss and Northern European Anabaptism, he considers the various theories of baptism of different Anabaptists, when and how they baptized. He covers Anabaptist attitudes toward property, war, and the state: the Hutterites, who, unlike most Anabaptists, pooled their belongings and rejected private property; Balthasar Hubmaier, who differed with many Anabaptists on the use of sword (334-47); and Waterlander Mennonites (from the Waterland area of North Holland) who accepted into their fellowship those banned from more rigorous factions (743, 1189-90).
Those whom Williams categorizes as Spiritualists are even more difficult than the Anabaptists to discuss under one heading. Thus Williams treats with particular sensitivity independent thinkers such as Casper Schwenckfeld, Thomas Miintzer, and Sebastian Franck. Schwcnckfeld, for instance, emerges as a sympathetic figure, living first with one family and then with another, moving around northern Europe and, in a non-coercive manner, spreading his message of peaceful spirituality (687-94).
In this mode, Williams...