Peter Marshall at Literary Review:
Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathes of southern and central Germany. There is no real earlier point of comparison, and Europe would see no equivalent outbreak of popular fury prior to the French Revolution.
In the end, the rebels were comprehensively defeated by their masters, the German princes and ecclesiastical lords; as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have been killed in a succession of one-sided battles and the pitiless retribution that followed. And yet, as Lyndal Roper argues in this hugely impressive study – the first comprehensive account of the events to appear in a generation – the uproar of 1524–5 fully deserves the designation ‘revolution’. In one sense, the rebels achieved none of their aims; in another, nothing was ever the same again.
more here.
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