In this French translation of La Riforma radicale nell'Europa del Cinquecento (2012), Mario Biagioni and Lucia Felici offer a new synthesis of the radical Reformation, centered on four themes that constitute the core chapters of the book: “Baptism” (chapter 2), “The Spirit and the Letter” (chapter 3), “Universalism and Tolerance” (chapter 4), and “The Trinity” (chapter 5). By doing so, the authors hope to move beyond George Hunston Williams's theologically based division of radicals into Anabaptists, spiritualists, and anti-Trinitarians. They also attempt to broaden both the geographic and chronological scope of the radical Reformation by reaching back to its humanist forerunners and by covering all of Europe, fully incorporating Italians and Poles, for example, alongside the more commonly treated Germans, Swiss, and Dutch.
In chapter 1, the authors present the backgrounds to the radical Reformation, discussing medieval devotional and heretical groups, as well as humanist Reformers, especially Erasmus and Juan de Valdés. These forerunners emphasized themes that later radicals would adopt, notably the imitation of Christ, the personal reading of scripture, the internal regenerative action of the Holy Spirit, and the criticism of the church's worldliness. The second chapter explores the most familiar ground of the radical Reformation—namely, the Anabaptists. The authors lead us from the Zwickau prophets to Conrad Grebel and the Zurich Anabaptists, through Thomas Müntzer and the Peasants’ War to Münster, the Hutterites, and the Mennonites. Less familiar to many will be the discussion of the link between Anabaptism and anti-Trinitarianism in Italy.
Chapter 3 explores spiritualism in the Reformation, which the authors describe as “individualistic, tolerant, and tending towards Nicodemism” (66). For Biagioni and Felici, the spiritualists included all who believed that true religious experience was the internal spiritual regeneration of the individual. This chapter starts with Andreas Karlstadt and works through the radical figures in Strasbourg and Basel, the Low Countries, and Italy, and ends with a discussion of Nicodemism in Europe. In chapter 4, the authors introduce religious toleration and universal salvation as core themes of the radical Reformation. From Sebastian Castellio's criticism of the burning of Servetus in Geneva, the authors move to the ideas of universal salvation embraced by thinkers such as Theodor Bibliander in Zurich and Celio Secondo Curione in Basel, and, finally, to a discussion of the debates over predestination in the second half of the century. Finally, the authors address the anti-Trinitarians, in chapter 5. They start with Servetus and his influence on Italians in exile and move on to discuss the development of anti-Trinitarian churches in Eastern Europe, first under the leadership Giorgio Biandrata, and later through the influence of Lelio and Fausto Sozzini.
Biagioni and Felici have successfully put together a meaningful and accessible survey of the radical Reformation that covers much ground in a relatively short book. Their work is particularly useful for tying together the Italian radicals with their Northern neighbors. Perhaps more importantly, they seem to have made the radical Reformation a little less radical by placing the movement in a context that shows how closely connected many radical thinkers were to mainstream Reformers. These were not, in general, isolated, wild-eyed visionaries, but intellectuals based in Zurich, Geneva, Strasbourg, and especially Basel, and nearly all traced their roots back in some way to Erasmus.
The book does have some drawbacks, however, the most important of which for English-speaking academics is the lack of footnotes. Without them, the book is essentially a survey, but one that, because of the foreign language, will not be useful for most classes. There are also a number of factual errors in the book: Luther was excommunicated in 1521, not 1520 (32); Zurich abolished the Mass in 1525, not 1523 (34); Castellio moved from Geneva to Basel in 1544, not 1543 (89); and the adult baptism administered by Grebel in Zurich is described as “the first new baptism in history” (44), ignoring the Donatists’ rebaptisms a thousand years earlier that made the practice a capital crime in the first place.
Despite its flaws, the book should help move Reformation studies away from an approach that tacks the radicals on as an appendix to the main event, and toward their fuller integration into the mainstream. One way the authors seek to do this is to show how the radical Reformation influenced modern thought, a theme Biagioni has recently explored more fully in The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe (2017).
