Customer Reviews

The Radical Reformation (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies)

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Williams' life work is every bit as comprehensive, rich, detailed, and essential as the other reviews suggest. In its original 1962 edition, it has long been one of my favorite historical/theological monographs, especially notable for its ability to make a gripping and involving story out of a huge mass of detail and a hugely diffuse movement. But I would add three caveats: (1) this approach forces Williams into making facts fit the story a little better than perhaps they really do (a matter of some controversy); (2) such wide-ranging scope means that Williams is not necessarily as reliable or up-to-date in some details as one would like (he repeats, for example, some old-fashioned but generally discredited attributions for the Wycliffite version of the Bible)--such things should be checked elsewhere; and (3) the vastly expanded 1500-page third edition reads in places like a copy of the first edition with interleaved note cards. It could have used the services of an editor. Sentences are run on forever, or dropped abruptly; typographical errors abound; and the syntax is often so full of ill-punctuated qualifications and strange non-English habits (post-posited
adjectives, verbs deferred or widely separated from complements) as to defy easy reading and sometimes to slip away from idiomatic or intelligible English altogether. Note e.g. the first sentence on p. 1246 (intelligible in the 1st edition; broken in the 3rd), or the remarkable one-sentence paragraph on pp. 4-5 or the even larger two-sentence paragraph on p. 12. So: an immensely valuable book, but one to be used cautiously and enjoyed as much as an in-progress 'pardon our mess' scholarly jumble as a tidy finished work.

Professor George Huntston Williams invented the term "Radical Reformation", and The Radical Reformation is a text that is indispensable to anyone who is serious about understanding this most important and pivotal period in history. I assign this text for my courses, and expect that my students will find it a valuable reference tool as they go on to teaching -- and to ministry within a dissenting religious tradition. While I recognize that there is a recent interest in the Radical

Reformation, with much that is new, exciting and compelling in scholarship and inquiry, I don't know how one could begin to understand the complexities of this period without having Professor Williams's book on the subject. It would be comparable to trying to understand the World Wide Web without knowing anything about computers. All of us who care about The Radical Reformation are indebted to Professor Williams, who is currently the Hollis Professor Emeritus at Harvard.

As a comprehensive introduction and a terrific bibliographic resource for introductory through graduate level research, there is no finer text on this area. Furthermore, the changes in the new edition are terrific; they make the text more accessible and also, more coherent. This is a "must have" for any student of the Renaissance, Reformation, or liberal religious studies.

Without overlooking the somewhat troublesome typology that has resulted from Williams' classic study of this Reformation movement, this volume still stands as the best comprehesive work on the often neglected radical groups of the sixteenth century. There is very little that escapes Williams'purview, and consequently this volume should be sitting on every scholar's bookshelf.

In this seminal work, George Huntston Williams gives a comprehensive overview of the different movements involving the more radical elements of the Reformation. This work sets the bar for all others works related to Anabaptists and Spiritualists during the Protestant Reformation.