You may recall Luther Blissett's Q from four or five years back. Well, because the Luther Blissett "shared name" is dead, the Italian anarchists who wrote Q under that moniker now write as Wu Ming. They have a new book out, called Manituana, following their earlier 54. More details about this via the Manituana website.
Readers Comments
Excellent news. Both Q & 54 were splendid novels. I learnt more about anabaptism from reading Q than I could ever have hoped to know...and yet, here it is, standing me in good stead, as I grapple with the various reformationist heterodoxies in mid-17th Century Amsterdam!
My learnings, limited as they are, in this fascinating area mostly come from "The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages" by Norman Cohn which is really wonderful...
Interestingly John Gray says that Cohn's book was the book that changed his life: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/02/norman-cohn-john-gray-world
I'm tempted to agree but almost for inverse reasons!
As I recall, Luther (!) depicted the anabaptists as proto-anarcho-communists. You could just about imagine Christopher Hill (had he too been the nom de guerre for a more or less mild mannered English syndicate of anarcho-commies) doing the same for Winstanley & his Diggers, with Parson Platt cast as the dastardly Q...but I don't suppose this is quite the line Cohn takes.
Actually David Caute kind of did that with his novel Comrade Jacob about the Diggers...