This work brings together a variety of writings — published and unpublished tracts, letters, declarations, and lists of articles-illustrative of both the rich diversity and the fragile unity that existed in the political thinking of some major radical reformers of the early Reformation in Germany. To give the volume a coherent focus, the texts selected for translation have been drawn from a single decade, the 1520s. They concern the central event of that decade for German society, the Peasants’ War of 1524–26, the most massive European popular upheaval before the French Revolution. During the period 1521–27, as Reformation radicals confronted the issue of revolution, and subsequently had to deal with the reality of a failed revolt, the basic patterns of the radicals' thought about society and politics were established.

Politics for the radical reformers was inseparable from religion, as it was for the vast majority of sixteenth-century Europeans. The texts assembled here are “premodern” in the sense that their criticisms of existing social and political arrangements, their legitimations of change, and their visions of an alternative society’ are animated by Christian ideas and values. But rather than attempting to categorize the writings in terms of a theological typology (Anabaptist, Spiritualist, etc.), I have presented them in roughly chronological order. This arrangement is appropriate to the inchoate nature of Reformation radicalism during the 1520s and to the evolution that radical thought underwent over the decade. Before 1525 no radical aimed at establishing a separatist church or “sect.” This alternative emerged only after the failure of the Peasants’ War.