The Fifteen Confederates was published anonymously in the fall of 1521, shortly after Martin Luther's hearing at the Diet of Worms and subsequent disappearance. The fifteen pamphlets that make up the book address religious, social, economic, and political challenges facing the German people. Their author, Johann Eberlin von Gunzburg, subsequently became one of the most prolific and popular pamphleteers of the German Reformation. As an important contribution to the pamphlet war that accompanied the beginnings of the Reformation in Germany, The Fifteen Confederates provides us a valuable window...

The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the...