In this volume, Tom Scott, Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews, offers a series of carefully-researched and impeccably presented studies of the social impact of the early Reformation. Made up of ten essays (seven of which were previously published between 2001 and 2011) and an afterword presenting the experiences of western church historians of the Reformation who were granted permission to carry out research in the German Democratic Republic, the collection engages with what Scott views as unfinished business remaining in research into the early Reformation, particularly relating to its social and political context and to the place of radicals within these movements.

Scott opens with a useful survey of the historiography of the early German Reformation, identifying its contrasting conclusions: the image of ‘a long, slow and difficult Reformation, in which it was sometimes hard work and always thankless, to make people Protestants’ sits uneasily in the literature alongside that of ‘a short and violent upsurge of enthusiasm for the new doctrines, marked by a flood of pamphlets, street demonstrations, and, not least, image-breaking’ (p. 9). Part of Scott's interest in the remaining essays is to show how these two, apparently irreconcilable, conclusions intertwine with and inform one another, as initial enthusiasm was transmuted into the slog of devising and imposing new orders in Church and Society.

Under the heading ‘social and political aspects of the early Reformation’, Scott offers first a comparison of the place of political economy in the writings of Martin Luther and Michael Gaismair, identifying shared aspects of their thought which, he argues, are congruent with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century successors such as Pierre le Pesant and Adam Smith, and in particular ‘their common assumption that the true source of a nation's prosperity lay in the land’ (p. 67). The next chapter, a critical assessment of Peter Blickle's contention that the origins of the German Peasants’ War lay in a ‘crisis of feudalism’, which offers an exploration of patterns of feudalism across Western Europe, is followed by a comparative study of the German Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century and the English Peasants’ Revolt of the fourteenth; I would have expected here a more critical engagement with the misleading term ‘peasant’ in the former case. A consideration of the defence of evangelical preachers by groups of women in four small south German towns in the 1520s offers some fascinating insights into the local situation of the early Reformation preachers in this period, but also illustrates the difficulties of assessing local collective responses, and particularly their gendered components. The section closes with a detailed and fascinating study (first published in this volume) of the reasons why there was no Reformation in Freiburg-im- Breisgau. Although a group of significant Reformers – including Balthasar Hubmaaier, Wolfgang Capito and Matthias Zell – received their university education in Freiburg, all went on to exercise this ministry elsewhere. Scott concludes that ‘loyalty to Austria, to the imperial cause, and to Catholicism fused in Freiburg to form an unbreakable bond’ (p. 168).

The second section focuses on ‘Radicals in the Reformation’. It opens with another new essay in which Scott explores the problem of heresy, showing the reluctance of Reformers to use the term (an assessment which required the death penalty) except in some cases in connection with radicals, and particularly Anabaptists. Scott then turns to consider the views of Balthasar Hubmaier, Christoph Schappeler and Hans Hergot regarding social revolution, and in particular its legitimation through ‘the prism of radical Christianity’ (p. 224). The volume concludes with a discussion of the difficulties presented by Johannes Agricola's Ein nutzlicher Dialogus as a historical source for the Peasants’ War, and with the third new essay, a presentation of Thomas Müntzer's highly original exposition of Christ's example of the mustard seed (Matthew xvii.19–20/Luke xvii.5–6), which Scott sees as reflecting not only Müntzer's knowledge of exegesis, but also his pastoral experiences and frustrations.

Despite the undoubted interest of this collection, the decision to republish articles which appeared in major journals as recently as 2008 and 2011 seems somewhat odd, and £65 seems quite a steep price to pay for three new essays totalling under sixty pages of text. None the less, this volume brings together a valuable set of essays and will be valuable to any student of the early – and particularly of the radical – Reformation.