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From International Socialism, No.13, Summer 1963, p.37.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Radical Reformation
George H. Williams
Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 70s.
The interrelationship of movements of social protest and religious belief is not a new subject, and any socialist interested in the development of primitive proletariat or peasant protest in the Middle Ages must of necessity plunge into the complex details of heresy and the doctrinal roots of the Reformation. Orthodox Christian history is concerned largely with the development of the two great camps of Europe. Catholicism and the Reformation, engaged intermittently in both cold and hot Wars. Now Dr Williams has traced with masterly skill the doctrinal development of a Third Force which rejected both sides, which promised to develop into a broad subterranean movement with revolutionary undertones but which was broken by (he combined opposition of the two major powers and by the development of sectarian disintegration. From this wide and fertile source, most of the subsequent radical movements developed – including the sects represented in the British Civil War. The subject until now has been shrouded, since it has been dealt almost entirely from the viewpoint of one or other of the two major orthodoxies and as a phenomenon subordinate to and parasitic upon those orthodoxies. Now Dr Williams has gathered up all the diverse strands of religious revolt and knit them into a continuing exploration – ranging from the crypto-orthodoxies to communist, anarchist and revolutionary groups. Sadly, he is wholly concerned with doctrinal relationships (the sheer size of this book virtually prohibits wider speculation), rather than the social and economic context in which particular sorts of heresy were generated, but in particular cases (notably, for example, the Great Peasant War of 1524), the complexity of development and its relationship, through particular biographies, with the wider religious ferment, is recounted with great skill. This pioneering work was greatly needed as the first step in comprehending the ways sought for challenge to the status quo by the oppressed during the renaissance. Dr Williams approaches his subject from the viewpoint of a deeply sympathetic radical Christian, and dedicated his book to one ‘whose prophetic sermons opened for me the vision of that world where thrones are crumbled and where kings are dust’. It is a vision no sectarian atheism should sour.
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