ResoluteReader: Peter Blickle - Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany

What was the Reformation? A simple explanation would be that it was the movement of reform inititated within the Catholic Church by Martin Luther's 1517 criticisms of the Church's sale of indulegences. A movement of Reform that led to a schism and essentially resulted in two distinct branches of Christianity. None of this is inaccurate. But it doesn't really explain what the Reformation was in terms of a movement. How did it manifest itself and propagate, and why did it actually take off in 1517?

Today the historian Peter Blickle is best remembered (when he is remembered at all) for his controversial description of the German Peasants' War as a "Revolution of the Common Man". His book Communal Reformation takes the analysis he laid out earlier and applies it to the Reformation. What results is a much bigger imaginging of these periods of rebellion and reform as an interlinked, and reinforcing process. In particular he makes the strong argument that the Reformation could not have taken place without a longer historical process of class struggle that culminates in the Peasants' War, and indeed the Peasants' War fundamentally transforms the Reformation itself.

For Blickle, it was the struggle of "communal organistation" for self-identity and emancipation that led the lowest orders to drive forward change in town and country. As he writes, "with the help of communal organisation - and only in this way - did peasants and the burghers learn to say no, ro protest, to question the demands of lordship and the claims of the authorities. The protest of the faithful against the church in Rome was rehearsed in the protest of the subjects against their lords."

This insight is important. It makes the Reformation and extension, as well as an expression, of the class struggle against the ruling orders. Obviously it was intensely ideological. The criticisms of the Church unleashed by Luther were taken up and extended into criticisms of the system itself, as well as the established church. But as Blickle says "the common people... developed concepts of the reofrmation that were identical to their basic principles". He continues:

The common people in country and city listened to the reformers when they talked about the people in country and citiy and listened to the reformers when they talked about the realisation of ecclesia, they listened to the southern German reofmrers when they talked about the realisation of the hospel, but they wer enot merely imitators. Their struggle for the Christian Republic was a the qualitative leap from the throry of the intellectuals, who shied away from responsiblity, to the concrete day-to-day practice of the ocmmon peple. And this practice was not nourished by religious faith; tather, its explanation lies in the acutal living conditions, in the village and the city, in the political culture of the late Middle Ages.

These practical demands manifested in all sorts of ways, but particulary in what I would call a democratic impulse to extend control over aspects of village life, particularly the role of priests who were those who propogated the gospel, as well as the ruling classes' ideas. One revealing example of this comes from the Franconian village of Wendelstein, in late 1524, the earliest time of the peasant uprising. The community told their priest his duties and role:

Thus we shall not recognise you as a lord, but simply as a servant of the parish. You do not command us, but we command you. And we order you henceforth faithfully to preach to us the gospel and the Word of God, pure and honest in accordance with the truth (untarnished and unobscured by human doctrine).

The demand for communities to elect their own pastors or priests, was a central part of the Reformation, and one supported by Luther at the start. It was the "essence" says Blickle, of the peasant conception of the reformation. But even in this early period of the Peasant War one gets a sense of a much more powerful impulse coming from the community. It certainly feels like a group of people seeing their priest as an instrument of their community, not an authority figure to be obeyed at any cost. It is, as Blickle points out, precisely why Luther's Reformation buckled and strained under the enormous impact of the Peasant War, and why the Reformation became, after 1525, a Reformation of the princes and not the masses. And also why the slaughter of the peasants by the nobility at the end of the Uprising saw the "end of the Reformation in the countryside". The people who carried the Reformation through were broken and destroyed in revenge for taking it too far. Blickle argues that this was driven through to the fullest extent:

Peasants and burghers voiced the demand - an uncompromising demand - that authority submit itself to the gospel. All incidents of rebelliousness in city and countryside, from the sacking of monasteries by the peasants to the expulsion of recalcitrantly Catholic councillors by the burghers, had no other purpose than to push through this demand. Submission to the gospel became the stamp of legitimacy. Lordship as such meant nothing... The communal reformation posed a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of political authority.. This was a significant by-product of the communal reformation.... the rebellions in city and countryside were also much more fundamental and deep reaching than ever before... Where the authorities were deaf to the gospel, peasants' and burghers' reformations could merge into a revolutionary movement.

But what does "communal" and "community" mean in this context? Here Blickle is a little unclear. Firstly it is not clear to me that he includes women in this. He explores the meaning of "community" (Germeinde in German) as it is reflected by Luther - the "Christian community". But what I am interested in is how does this manifest itself on the ground. What was the community of Wendelstein who so admonished their new priest in 1524? Note that it included the mayor. Blickle explores how groups of leaders were selected and chosen from within the village/town to represent, decide and collective approach their lords. But this was not democracy in a mass sense. The "community" that Blickle argues drives the Reformation forward "had no real place in the political structure o f estates or their theoretical underpinnings". But the Reformation gave it a "theological justification".

Essentially "community" for Blickle means all the people in a village or town who acted and lived together, and shared common interests - expressed he says "in the analogous uses in 'common Christendom' and 'common weal'." Its nebulosity comes, I think, from Blickle's particular interpretation of "common man" which he uses as "a general term for townsmen and villagers". But did not include "male and female servants, mercenaries, beggars and vagrants". It is a class term, but only by exclusion, "above the common man were the lords, lay and clerical, and below him were the lower social classes and those groups entirely ouside the hierarchy of social estates." It was, Blickle says, by the later half of the sixteenth century, a term interchangeable with "peasant" and "subject". It is noteworthy that never discusses whether or not "Common Men" includes women.

Does this help us understand the Reformation and the Peasant War? I think it does, in as much as we have to recognise the difficulties of understanding rural peasant communities as essentially being an amorphous mass. Marx wrote that the French peasantry was a "simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes". Its a helpful, if rude, metaphor, that recognises that the peasantry was a varied collection of wealthier and poorer households.

The differences between these peasants in wealth and consequent class interests would plague latter day revolutionaries from Marx to Lenin. But in the sixteenth century, these interests were close enough not to matter. To discuss a Communal Reformation and Revolution then, is to recognise that the vast majority of the subject classes in Germany at the time, had a collective interest in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and fighting for control over their own villages and their wider society. It was a powerful movement that terrified the older order and those whose interests were tied up with the status quo. It explains why the enemies of the peasantry who slaughtered them on the fields of Böblingen and Frankenhausen, were from both sides of the Reformation debate.

As I wrote in my review of his book on the Peasants' War, Blickle's ambguity over the "Common Man" means that he has an ambguity over the nature of revolution itself. Nonetheless the insights in Communal Reformation give us a real sense of the Reformation being a social movement driven from below, whose initators struggled to control until they broke from it and forced through a Reformation from above.