ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines Hutterite communitarianism from the perspective of a utopian experiment. It addresses the lacuna in Augsburg’s Anabaptist history in the context of the political, religious milieu of the early 1530s. The book argues that the Reformation involved not so much a process of radicalization from an initial, moderate Lutheran reform programme, but a process of moderating the initial, radical impetus by magisterial Reformers. The relationship between the magisterial Reformation and the Radical is probed by William McNiel’s examination of the thought of Luther’s erstwhile colleague at Wittenberg, and later radical opponent, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. The book focuses on the paradigmatic assumptions that underlie the interpretation of the history of Anabaptism and the Radical Reformation. It also examines one of the most insightful general interpretations of Anabaptist histories in Jonathan Israel’s European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism.
