The violent Reformation

When most of us think about the Reformation, we probably see Martin Luther defiantly standing before Charles V at the Diet of Worms declaring his commitment to Scripture as his final authority or John Calvin thundering forth from his majestic pulpit in Geneva. Just as important to understanding the Reformation, though, is looking at its impact upon those in the pews and the streets—especially those who decided to take matters into their own hands when it came to what exactly needed reforming.

In Summer of Fire and Blood (Basic Books, 544 pp.), Lyndal Roper hopes to recapture “the Reformation we have lost sight of,” not merely a movement taken up with the sayings and doings of elites but also the cause behind “the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution,” the German Peasants’ War (1524–1525).

Roper, current holder of the prestigious Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford and a renowned historian of the German Reformation and witchcraft in early modern Europe, is certainly within her rights to make the case. Rather than focusing solely on theology or leading radicals like Thomas Müntzer, she clearly and confidently reconstructs the variety of social, political, and economic factors that coalesced to urge poor laboring men and women to take a militant stand against their feudal and ecclesiastical overlords.

Taking place primarily in southwestern Germany, the Peasants’ War sought to usher in a far more egalitarian organization for society based upon an intimate connection with the land the peasants worked and depended upon—what Roper designates as “creation theology.” But the world of the Reformation was one still built around hierarchy, and despite Luther’s strong support of spiritual freedom, he did not believe the actions of the peasants were justified and publicly called for them to be brutally suppressed by the authorities. This illustrates the profound tensions and paradoxes within early Protestant theology as it struggled to determine how much of the old order of Catholicism ought to be jettisoned in favor of Scriptural purity. Roper highlights the role played by “brotherhood,” cemented through fraternal pledges that caused people to conceive of themselves as dependent upon and responsible for each other in their common cause.

Roper writes that the eventual defeat of the peasants “transformed the Reformation from a movement that challenged the social order into one that supported the existing authorities.” The German Peasants’ War forces us to realize that not everyone agreed to what extent the Biblical gospel demanded Western Christendom change.

The inherent populism of the Peasants’ War appears to lead Roper to depict it as a proto-civil rights battle. Her insistence upon seeing the Peasants’ War as an abortive “socially radical Reformation” attempted in the face of “a world where only profit mattered” smacks a bit of retrojection of modern liberal ideation. These scholarly indulgences aside, Roper admirably keeps religion center stage throughout her account. Regardless of whether one feels that the peasants’ belligerence was wholly justified or not, this is a very well-written and well-defended account of an episode often marginalized within popular conceptions of what properly counts as “Reformation” history.