M Y interest in the subjects with which this book deals was
first aroused some years ago by Professor Ambrogio
Donini of Rome, who told me something about the
Tuscan Lazzarettists and the sectarians of Southern Italy. Professor
Max Gluckman arranged for me to be invited in 1956 to give three
Simon Lectures on them at the University of Manchester, and I
was fortunate enough on that occasion to be able to discuss the
subject with him and with a group of anthropologists, historians,
economists and political scientists, including such experts on
millenarian movements as Dr. Peter Worsley and Professor
Norman Cohn. The present book is an expansion of these lectures,
but contains additional chapters on some topics I had intended to
include in the original lectures, but could not. I am grateful to the
University of Manchester, and especially to Professor Gluckman
without whose encouragement this book would certainly not have
been written.

Those whose brains I have picked are too numerous to acknow-
ledge individually. I have tried, where necessary, to do so in foot-
notes. These also show on which books I have drawn particularly
heavily. I should like to thank also the library staffs of the British
Museum, the Cambridge University Library, the British Library
of Political Science, the London Library, the Feltrinelli Library,
Milan, the University Library of Granada, the International
Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, the Giustino Fortunato
Library, Rome, and the Municipal Libraries of Cadiz, Spain, and
Cosenza, Italy, for their kindness to a foreign student.

A subject such as this cannot be studied from documents alone.
Some personal contact, however slight, with the people and even
the places about which the historian writes, is essential if he is to
understand problems which are exceedingly remote from the
normal life of the British university teacher. Every reader of that
classic study of primitive social rebellion, Euclides da Cunha
Rebellion in the Backlands, will be aware of how much that great
work owes to the author's first-hand knowledge of, and 'feel' for,
the Brazilian backwoodsmen and their world. Whether I have
succeeded in understanding the places and people in this book

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