At the time there was a lack of accessibility to historian's work from East of the Berlin Wall. This collection provided a small sample among work from Western historians. The editors are careful though to argue that the collection should not "be judged by the standard of whether it contributes any definitive judgements on the Peasant War... rather we wish it to stimulate discussion on its relation to wider problems of historiography." Their introduction is also a useful overview of contemporary scholarship on the Peasant War.
What of the collection itself. All of the essays in it contain useful nuggets. Some of them cover rarer aspects of the period. Heide Wunder's article on The Mentality of Rebellious Peasants takes as its case study events in Samland. Then part of Germany and now part of the greater Russia, it was the most separate part of the rebellion in time and space. Sadly the author includes little detail of the struggle in this location, preferring to focus on the interaction between Prussian peasant, German peasant and local nobles. That said it is an interesting engagement.
Several essays stand out for their discussion of specifics of the War. I was much taken by Siegfried Hoyer's account of Arms and Military organisation of the Peasants. One fascinating aspect to this was the way that the rebels organised rotations to ensure that some peasants could return home to work on the land/harvest etc, but it was in turn a weakness. As Hoyer explains:
This system was dictated by the role of each peasant in production, and so probably could not be avoided. There is no doubt that individuals could gain little military experience by this short-term rotation. This defect, grounded in the historical situation, was first overcome during the later bourgeois revolutions, when the mass of the popular armies were composed of the urban classes.
Another excellent study by Siegfried Hoyer looks in detail at a neglected (and anonymous) pamphlet that he describes as one of the "very few" from the "left wing of the movement": To the Assembly of common peasantry who have angrily and defiantly risen up in Upper Germany and many other places. Continuing the tradition of Reformation and Peasant War pamphlets having very long titles, this one is a defence of the right to rebel and an argument for the rebellion. Sadly it is not printed here, but extracts can be found in Tom Scott and Bob Scribner's collection of documents. Hoyer concludes that the pamphlet is not revolutionary as its author "polemicised against a fundamental overthrow of feudal property", but that the demands place the pamphlet close to the most radical thinkers. Peter Blickle discusses his "Common Man" thesis of revolution. Heiko Oberman offers a interesting discussion of how the War has been interpreted, even in its immediate aftermath, though he points out that the description "War" is an "overdramatisation that distorts our historical perspective and tends to isolate the events of 1525". He concludes:
The main thrust of present research is oriented towards economic and social history, hence providing an insight into a large number of elements that go into the making of history. Yet this should not tempt us to permit biblical ideas, Christian apocalyptic ferment and the horizon of religious expectation on the part of the rebels to be relegated to the background, since it is only through these means that the birth and spread of the Peasants War are to be understood.
It's a nuanced view and one that these articles taken together do justice to, even if the various authors tend to come down on one specific emphasis or the other. By including "Marxist" historians from the former Eastern bloc in the collection, those of us who class themselves as Marxists today have an opportunity to engage with how those thinkers approached historical questions. This is epitomised perhaps by Max Steinmetz's Theses on the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany, which tries (only part successfully) to frame the War in Marxist terms. He quotes from Lenin, Stalin and Engels to bolster his theses, and makes some interesting points:
An increasingly sharpening of class conflict was the necessary outcome of this ever more apparent clash between the development of the material forces of production within society and the traditional relations of production, which had long since become shackles of productive forces, rather than forms of their development.
He also notes that the "second serfdom" in Germany helped enable capitalist development, despite hampering the development of a class of wage labourers as happened in England. While this can come across as dogmatic, Steinmetz does not ignore the ideological context of the Reformation, meaning that while his contribution reads somewhat stilted as a list of "theses" it can encourage further thought about the Bourgeois Revolution in the context of the 16th century. Certainly a collection of essays to be read and inspire further debate.
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