Alongside Helmar Junghans, Siegfried Bräuer was the most distinguished church historian and theologian in the years of the German Democratic Republic. His scholarly output is all the more remarkable since until his retirement in 1995 he held no academic post, but rather pursued a career in the service of the Lutheran Church, notably as theological director of the Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. Only after 1999 did he become supernumerary professor of theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Bräuer's scholarly interests have ranged widely, but their cantus firmus has been a preoccupation with Thomas Müntzer, culminating in his edition (with Manfred Kobuch) of Müntzer's correspondence in 2010, which set new scholarly standards. It is therefore appropriate that the essays in this volume celebrating his eightieth birthday focus on Müntzer, his contemporaries and his legacy. For readers of this Journal the most useful are likely to be: (1.) Hans-Jürgen Goertz's reflections on the problematic nature of the terms ‘radical’ and indeed ‘Reformation’, which he regards as being shaped by a continual discourse (very much echoing the approach of Bob Scribner); (2.) Thomas Kaufmann's meticulous analysis of the various interpretations of the ‘priesthood of all believers’, where Luther's understanding, grounded in baptism and faith, differed from Karlstadt's emphasis on the need for educated layfolk who could study the Bible for themselves, a humanist strain also observable in several anonymous pamphlets from presses in Basle (probably composed by Johann Eberlin von Günzburg or Konrad Pellikan); (3.) This point is carried forward in Helmar Junghans's sovereign overview of Thomas Müntzer's stay in Zwickau in 1520/21, which plays down the supposed influence of Nikolaus Storch and his circle of so-called ‘Zwickau prophets’ on Müntzer, but affirms their common concern for an educated laity and the role of lay preaching; (4.) Günter Vogler's examination of Georg Witzel's admonition to Müntzer in March 1525 to refrain from incendiary preaching, which did him no good at all in the years after the Peasants’ War, since Witzel's return to the Catholic fold brought down upon him from Lutherans accusations of fanaticism and betrayal no less vehement than those they showered upon Müntzer; (5.) In a similar vein, Marion Kobelt-Groch's review of printed funeral sermons between 1550 and 1750 (over 250,000 have survived) shows that the bulk of Lutheran preachers did not hesitate to lump Catholics, Jesuits, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Jews and Turks together as enemies of Christendom, though Müntzer himself was rarely denounced, presumably because he founded neither a movement nor a Church; (6.) Gerlinde Strohmaier-Wiederanders's observations on Werner Tübke's huge and remarkable panorama of the Peasants’ War in the museum at Bad Frankenhausen. Tübke sought, somewhat athwart the intentions of the GDR hierarchy in commissioning a heroising depiction of the popular uprising taken to legitimise their socialist republic, to convey the multifaceted nature of historical events and deployed a pictorial style heavily indebted to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian and German masters, with symbols and allegories as far removed as possible from the canons of socialist realism. Influenced by Ernst Bloch, Tübke regarded his panorama as a Christian image, though, in a delicious twist, it was the Marxist historians Manfred Bensing and Siegfried Hoyer who persuaded him at the last minute to include Luther in place of Willibald Pirckheimer. A bibliography of Bräuer's writings on Müntzer (sixty-six items by 2010) rounds off this fine tribute to a distinguished scholar.