The third book deals with what I would describe as the final act of the radical Reformation in Germany, the rise of the Anabaptist movement and the siege of Münster. In 1534 a growing and confident anabaptist movement took control of this important town in North-West Germany, and after expelling many opponents they set about constructing, from the top town, a form of communal living. Bax's book tells the story of the Anabaptists, linking their evolution to the most radical thinkers of the Reformation and the most radical aspects of the German Peasant War.
Despite extreme hostility and a military siege, Anabaptist Münster survived for almost 18 months. During these months there were some notable experiments involving communal living, such as collective kitchens and the redistribution of property and wealth. While this was a top down movement, it seems that it was met, at least in the early stages with support from most of those who remained. However as the siege continued, deprivation and violence against the town saw cracks develop and eventually one John of Leiden declared himself king. He lived in opulence, while around him their was hunger and desperation. Eventually refugees let the enemy in, and Anabaptist Münster was destroyed in the most violent of revenge. With hundreds, perhaps thousands killed.
Bax's book is itself a relatively easy read that covers most of the main sources then known and tells the story of the Anabaptists and Münster well. His sympathies are clear, declaring Münster to be a "genuine attempt to carry out logically, principles of the Gospel-teaching and the idea of a return to a supposed primitive Christianity." But there are two aspects that I felt worth exploring further.
The first relates to one of the significant changes implemented by the Anabaptists in Münster later on. This is the question of polygamy. Because many of the men had fled the siege, leaving behind their wives to oversee businesses and wealth, there were something like three women to every man in the town. John of Leiden implemented polygamy (really polygyny) and took sixteen wives. Bax argues that the polygamy introduced was "unique in the history of medieval socio-religious movements" because it was not "a community of wives or free love", but retained the sacred nature of marriage. While Bax is right to charge conventional historians with "hypocrisy" over this, he fails really to explore whether or not this was something that the "women" of Münster wanted. Certainly they could not take multiple husbands. The problem was that "no woman, old or young, should remain outside the marital relation". In other words it was enforced polygyny. It was, in no way, liberating for the women - even if it might have provided some security. I suggest that Bax's anti-feminism is central to his account of the women of Münster. His politics are, using the language of today, distinctly sexist or misogynist.
The second problem is that Bax attempts to draw very close parallels between the siege of Münster and later revolutionary movements. There are, of course, similarities between Münster and the Paris Commune. Bax was writing in the aftermath of that great revolution, but it is wrong to draw too many parallels. What distinguishes the Paris Commune was its mass participatory democracy and workers' power. This was not part of Münster's experience, which was rather more a top down process of reform. Nonetheless the parallels are interesting, as is the counter-revolutionary violence used in both Paris and Münster 350 years earlier. Bax does, of course, know this. But he cannot help himself with his analogies. Despite this, his conclusions are useful:
The dream of the impoverished townsman of a millennial kingdom, based on medieval domestic communism and animated by the ideasl of the small artificer of the time, was in itself as hopeless as the corresponding dream of the peasant ten years before, which also aimed at harking back to an idealised form of a condition of a things that had passed away. The lines of social development were moving in quite another direction.
Bax is right to point out that this was the communism of distribution, not of production, which would not become possible until the working class developed and capitalist production developed.
Does Bax's work have any relevance today? All three books are dated and suffer as a result. Bax's flawed politics and his crude parallels between medieval and modern struggles are frustrating and lead to errors of judgement. Bax's anti-feminism also means that he dismisses and ignores the role of women, and seriously misjudges events in Münster. Writing from the general left, he does have some insights. He notes, for instance,
The conventional historian, in his conventional hatred of the old militant Anabaptism with its communisitc tendencies, and writing as he does in the interest of the possessing classes of his own day, has been found not ashamed to condone, or even to justify, this fiendish and atrocious crime perpetrated by the dominant classes of a bygone age.
I suspect that few people will read Bax today. I'm not sure I would encourage them, as there are other, more useful histories available, though tragically too few by genuine Marxists.
Related Reviews
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Bax - German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages
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