On 22 January 1536, the body of Jan van Leiden, the Anabaptist king of Münster, and those of two of his compatriots were hung in cages from a church tower to remind residents of the extreme heresy that had rocked their city in the previous couple of years and to ensure that Anabaptists would be remembered as radical, seditious, mad and dangerous. In a 2018 article, Michael Driedger observed that this reputational stain has indeed endured in the centuries of historiography since, in essence ‘caging’ the thinking of historians into using the sixteenth-century polemical categories of ‘mainstream’ versus ‘radical’ reform. Even when in 1962 George H. Williams gave these categories a positive spin in his famous The radical Reformation, Driedger argued that the terminology could not be entirely divorced from the taint of extremism. The goal of Geoffrey Dipple and Kat Hill, editors of New directions in the radical Reformation, is to break free from those Münster cages so as to perceive the full complexity of the era's religious scene. In this they have succeeded marvellously.

I write this review as one of those ‘older generation’ scholars trained in the 1980s in the ‘radical reformation’ by Werner Packull and James Stayer. As the editors observe, those were heady days of using social history to comprehend the motivations and experiences of dissenters from the state Churches. Like other scholars in the field, I subsequently moved in other directions, thinking that we were ‘done’ with the early ‘radical’ phase of the Reformation. A newer generation of scholars, such as those gathered in this volume, have proved us wrong.

They have done so by approaching ‘the subject from new perspectives and with new methodologies’. The contributors’ reorientation of the field has been organised in three sections: in the first, they problematise the very concept of ‘radical reform’; in the second, they reinvestigate the ‘relationship between religious radicalism and socio-political change’ (p. 2); and in the third, they take a longer chronological perspective on these questions. The result supports Driedger's critique of the categories of ‘radical’ and ‘magisterial’, as well as offering new research on the malleability of religious identity. While some Anabaptists did fully identify with the developing credal Anabaptism, many others did not. Even condemning someone for rebaptism was not easy for judges if there were no credible eyewitnesses to the act. Some Anabaptists, we discover here, may have associated with the movement only through family or neighbour networks, not fully comprehending what it meant. Further complicating matters, many of the so-called radicals pursued the Reformed emphasis on the inner significance of religion to the extreme of depreciating external rituals, dogma and the letter of Scripture. Some moved back and forth across this Anabaptist-Spiritualist spectrum.

This becomes particularly clear in the first essay in the volume by Dipple, on two of the slipperiest Anabaptists to pin down: Hans Denck and Ludwig Hätzer, who in George Williams's categorisation have been labelled as ‘spiritualistic Anabaptists’, implying that this was a clearly defined subcategory of Anabaptism. Yet, in Dipple's very careful review of the activities of these two well-educated reformers, he observes that at times both were more Spiritualist than Anabaptist, and had been seeking, unsuccessfully, to move back into the Reformed network. Dipple concludes that ‘Denck and Hätzer did not set out to become Anabaptists or Spiritualists but to carry forward a Reformation that had already begun in Zurich, Basel and Strasbourg. By accepting the labels their opponents applied to them, no less than those devised by scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are no more able to think outside the cage than were our predecessors’ (p. 53).

Next up is Christina Moss's study of the relationship between the Anabaptist prophet Melchior Hoffman and the illiterate visionaries of Strasbourg, Lienhard and Ursula Jost, which sheds fascinating new light on the personal motivations and dynamics of these individuals. The Josts’ visions were, as Moss reveals, ambiguous and disturbing, but when Hoffman published their visions, he gave the couple a much wider audience and enhanced the apocalyptical element of his Anabaptist movement. While the illiterate Ursula was asserting a form of religious authority for women by speaking directly from God, when Hoffman published his interpretation of the visions, he was in effect reasserting male dominance over them.

The final essay of part i takes the reader across the Channel and into the next century, with Joshua Caleb Smith's fascinating analysis of prodigy literature produced by English Baptists. While such literature of apocalyptical armies of frogs and the like was commonplace among dissenter circles during the tumultuous Civil War and Interregnum, with the Restoration in 1660, only one Baptist writer, the intriguing Henry Jessey, composed such a work, The Lords loud call to England. While Jessey here was hoping to unify dissenters against the restoration of a compulsory state Church, other Baptists avoided the prodigy genre, not even contributing to the interpretation of the portentous events of the 1665 plague and the 1666 Great Fire of London. Smith plausibly suggests that they did so to avoid association with the persecuted Quakers and Fifth Monarchists, as well as from disappointment with the failures of the earlier predictions.

The second part of the collection begins with a truly ‘radical’ overturning of a long-cherished perspective on the German preacher Thomas Müntzer, who died with thousands of rebellious peasants at the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. Christopher Martinuzzi's goal is to rebut the centuries of polemical descriptions of Müntzer as an apocalyptical revolutionary or ‘madman’, as Luther had it. Instead, carefully analysing the preacher's 1524 Testimony of the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Martinuzzi reveals Müntzer to be more of a universalistic Spiritualist who critiqued reliance on the ‘dead letter’ and who promoted a ‘universalistic program of spiritual renewal’ (p. 139). In Martinuzzi's reading, the correspondence sent by the early Swiss Anabaptist Conrad Grebel praising Müntzer makes a great deal more sense. While Müntzer did join with the peasant rebels, his final months should not cause us to reinterpret his original reform perspective, which proved influential for many of the spiritualistic nonconformists who followed.

The fifth essay, by Jonathan Trayner, provides an intriguing analysis of a single iconographic element in sixteenth-century woodcut prints – the sword in a ragged sheath. Trayner subtly reveals that the motif transitioned from a ‘symbol of peasant licentiousness’ to one of the peasant as a heroic supporter of Evangelical reform, following a broader trend noted earlier by Bob Scribner and Werner Packull. Trayner also observes how, during the Peasants’ War, and its immediate predecessor, the Bundschuh, the motif had a political dimension distinguishing peasants as distinct from their lords. By the later sixteenth century, however, the ragged sheath had returned to its negative connotations in carnivalesque satires and in portrayals of German mercenaries.

Part iii, on the ‘Social Location’ of Anabaptism, begins with Jessica C. Lowe's amazing analysis of the legal experiences of Anabaptists and their heirs seeking to regain property confiscated and sold after the capture of Münster in June 1535. Lowe analyses how these litigants negotiated the ‘seditious’ Anabaptist identity of parents and other relations, using shifting ‘discursive strategies’ to get around the taint of the ‘cages’. The level of personal detail that Lowe's analysis of court records reveals is impressive, as litigants fought for decades not only to regain property, but also to restore their family honour.

The seventh chapter is Cory D. Davis's case study of toleration granted Anabaptists in the Electoral Palatinate around the middle of the seventeenth century. Beginning with the 1664 ‘General Concession’ issued by Elector Karl i Ludwig, he argues that this decree was not the cause of toleration, but a formalisation of the pragmatic toleration already accorded Swiss Anabaptists who were repopulating the region after the Thirty Years’ War. Demonstrating economic utility and using the name ‘Mennist’ instead of Anabaptist made it easier for the Elector to allow these dissenters to practise their faith despite the open hostility of the local Reformed consistory.

The collection concludes with David Y. Neufeld's important discussion of ‘archival logistics’ in the organising and publishing of Anabaptist sources. Those of us who have worked through the published Täuferakten – multi-volume editions of archival records relating to Anabaptism in specific regions – are profoundly thankful for them, yet the logic behind which sources to include has never been entirely clear until now. The fact that the Täuferakten records are removed from their judicial contexts should make us cautious when comparing Anabaptist prosecution with other crimes. Neufeld moreover observes that such court records necessarily overemphasise ‘the stability of boundaries dividing Anabaptists from majorities’; historians need therefore to utilise synodal protocols or morals court records to appreciate the ‘ongoing social embeddedness’ of Anabaptists in their communities (p. 286). Neufeld's discussion of the history and implications of archival organisation is thus valuable for all historians.

Dipple and Hill deserve enormous praise for putting together such an original collection of essays that successfully thinks ‘outside the cages’ of Anabaptist historiography. Their methodological and analytical innovation is proof that Anabaptist and dissenter scholarship is not only healthy but is at the forefront of innovative research of the Reformation era.