This lecture explores the diverse and innovative ways 16th-century historians wrote about the German Peasants' War, contrasting them with contemporary trends in narrative history and advocating for more creative, critical, and varied approaches to historical writing.
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Writing this lecture has helped me think
about something that fascinated me as I
wrote my own history of the war. And
that is why is the contemporary history
writing of the war so remarkably rich?
Why is it moving, shocking,
unforgettable, immediate in ways that
historical writing from the time about
the Reformation mostly isn't to be
frank. So, I'm going to introduce you to
a range of different characters who
wrote about the war, each of whom
represent a different way of doing history.
history.
My goal is to ask questions about how we
write history, what narrative techniques
we use or don't use, how we employ
source material, in short, what is
involved in the writing of history. The
German peasants war had a remarkable
afterlife in history writing of later
centuries too. Engles wrote a history of
it. Atomos Muna his anti- Lutheran hero
became the poster child of the East
German regime. But that would be another
story. Tonight what I want to do is to
think about those people who lived
through the event and how they made
sense of it. An overwhelming tragedy. so
vast that it was universally known as
the of the stirring up or the
turbulence. A way that itself conveys
its force and its shapelessness.
But to turn to what this has to teach us
about how we write history, for the last
30 years, narrative has been the
dominant way of writing history. telling
a story at least so far as history with
a broad reach is concerned. I remember
reading an article by Lawrence Stone in
past and present on the return of
narrative when I was a postgraduate and
finding it mysterious.
Why would historians go back to narrative?
narrative?
At that time, narrative seemed
old-fashioned and dilotist. I thought
historians should be asking about
gender, about race, and about class,
rejecting the stories that we'd grown up
with because they were written from the
standpoint of white men. Instead of the
grand old narratives, my generation
wanted to go to the archives to answer
new questions, to analyze records
statistically, to uncover micro
histories that would challenge the
stories we thought we knew. History was
about argument and critical thinking.
40 years later, narrative now seems to
sweep all before it and becomes the
universal mode for writing history with
a wide audience. A popular history must
be a weighty tone that tells the reader
a clear chronological story of what
happened in irrefutable definitive
detail. a history, or so it sometimes
seems, that comforts rather than disturbs.
disturbs.
Now, that change may itself have come
full circle as Peter Brooks, one of the
earliest advocates of narrative, has
published a book decrying the ubiquity
of storytelling. Narrative, as he points
out, has become the universal way of
presenting complex information, whether
that be through advertising or through
how political ideas are communicated.
The story provides an explanation of why
a particular policy is needed or how a
product came to be.
Narrative is intended to create
participative listening on the part of
the audience because the audience is
presumed to want to know what happened
next while the logic of successive
events is supposed to supply the
explanation of what happened.
Storytelling also provides a kind of
speurious intimacy. My local coffee
roaster advertises the story of how
Lizzy and James spotted a tuktuk truck
and turned it into a mobile cafe, but
even cost a copy. Now, in fact, owned by
Coca-Cola does the same um with a
website that advertises what they call
our story. And I have to apologize but
inadvertently removed um the stories
there. It's really amazing. They are
almost identical. And yet this is our
local Oxford coffee maker and Matt Costa.
Costa.
But narrative is only one way of doing
history. This evening I want to go back
to the 16th century as a way of thinking
about how we do history.
And of course, this was a time when ways
of writing history weren't fixed, and
even the status of the event in question
itself, which was a peasant uprising
without heroes, wasn't a classical
subject for the writing of history. And
I'm going to consider seven different
examples of histories of the war that
all develop techniques of historical
writing that we still use today. And I
want to conclude by asking why it is
that we are currently enthralled to one
particular version of narrative history.
Narratives are of course also about
controlling the story from the start.
Lutheran tried to impose a narrative on
the war. Luther saw it as a battle
between himself and the devil in the
shape of Thomas Muna. He made sure to
publish Thomas Mun's final letters which
incriminated him as a rebel putting the
source material if you like into the
public domain.
Um and Luther's supporters immediately
produced histories which blamed Muna for
the war. Luther knew how important it
was to control the narrative for
conservatives were blaming him for
having caused the peasants war revolt
because he made all these demands for
freedom. After all, he had published the
freedom of a Christian in 1520 using the
word freedom that was itself in century
and soon would be on the peasants's
lips. So this huge event unprecedented
in the experience of those who wrote
about it came at a time when the study
of history was itself taking shape with
chronicles and individual or
institutional histories giving way to
something more like history as an
analytic sequence of events. Humanism
was suggesting new ways of writing
history for those educated by reading
Tacitus and Ovard. Town chronicles had
been compiled for a century or so and
were becoming a pastime amongst the
elites. But their form wasn't yet fixed.
While causation didn't always play a
role in their accounts, or not a strong
one. At the same time, it wasn't only
Luther who was trying to control the
narrative. People in authority were
starting to commission histories and
employing historians who had to write
their version of what happened. And as
government became more elaborate and the
numbers of officials increased,
so too archives became fuller and more
carefully kept.
The Peasants War was a huge
unprecedented event. Most wars in the
Holy Roman Empire were geographically
more limited and didn't involve deaths
on this scale. The narrative model for
revolts came from histories of Roman
uprisings against tyrants. But unlike
Florentine histories, previous revolts
in the Holy Roman Empire simply hadn't
been worthy of serious treatment. The
revolt, which was much more than the
local events which chronicers have
traditionally recorded, immediately
raised questions of geography.
Just making sense of it and how it had
spread across such a wide area was a
highly complex task. The event somehow
had to be shaped.
So my first person is Johannes Coleases.
The immediate problem that he faced is
making sense of such a vast dispersed
cataclysmic series of events and I think
he was the first to do so and he's also
Luther's most persistent antagonist.
Um he was nicknamed the snail on account
of his name which means spiral
and he sort of trailed slowly in
Luther's wake doggedly refuting each and
every work of the reformer and he spent
his entire life doing that. He would
wait till something came up and then he
would produce his reputation. Then the
next one would come another reputation.
So he spent his entire life. Luther's
supporters mocked him as the spoon,
which is another meaning of his name,
and derided him as a man in woman's
skirts. He was also one of the first to
warn that Luther's ideas and writings
would lead to peasant rebellion.
Naturally, his history of the peasants
war is the appendix to his reputation of
Luther's infamous against the robbing
and murdering hordes of peasants.
There's another edition
and there's his answer. You can see he
kind of loses on the impactful cover of
the statement.
But Kofles was no snail. He was a
trailblazer. In 1519, he'd written the
bravest description of Gmani in which he
had described Germany as a whole with
the nature and character of each area,
its soils, forests, geography,
agriculture, numbers of cities and the
kinds of people who lived there. This
was before the elaboration of maps that
would begin from mid-century onwards.
And it was one of the first attempts to
describe Germany as a unit. and he
placed Nuremberg in the center which
just happened to be the city where he
was and where he worked as a school
master. He'd been born nearby. He might
seem touchingly provincial to place
Nuremberg at the center though it was
indeed one of the most important cities
of the life. So the same interest in
geography then colored his attempt to
tell the story of the war. And it's a
remarkable achievement coming out the
same year the war concluded. He starts
with Kemp and Swayabia going up through
Alsasa Franconia to Ringia Mines and
Tuol before circling back to and the
Algoy and finally to Kemp where the
revolt began. So what he writes is less
of a narrative than a bird's eyee view.
And um I just sort of tried to trace it.
there would be a much better way of
rendering that. But just to give you a
sense of how he's trying to put it all
together and give you some kind of
sequence and something that's just
totally overwhelming
and it's interesting that he goes for
this sort of bird's eye perspective
because of course that's the way of
doing maps which is being developed at
precisely the same time. So here we have
Jüks bird's eyee view of Axbook seen
from the west uh from 1521 and you can
see how that way of doing the
perspective has become much more
well much less experimental much more
fixed in this version of the same city
from 1626 that's now how you do it.
So the map not the plot of the war and
not the individual figures who took part
is the story and he was also well aware
of the different issues in the different
areas of revolt that of course accorded
with their different economies. I like
to think that Kofas is prefiguring ways
of thinking that has since flowered in
the use of spatial analysis in history
as historians now make use of GIS
software to enable a kind of thinking
that allows them to see connections
between one event and another.
So my second example is the chronicler
Lawrence Fle who worked for the bishop
of Bulsborg and whose history of the
peasants war in the dasis of Bulsburg
was commissioned by his employer. He
wrote several other histories as well
and unlike Potes he was a historian as
well as a senior bureaucrat.
Priest had an absolutely wrecking young
to tell because Woods was one of the
chief centers of the war. The town
declared for the peasants and allowed
peasant soldiers into town so that for
months peasants were thronging the
streets and hanging about in the local
paths. They established their own
council next to the town councils on the
town square and there they met. While
the bishop Connor Fonturin cowed in his
massive castle which um there he is um
he he cowed in his massive castle which
still looms above the town. Uh he
actually scarped to the safety of H Highleberg.
Highleberg.
Wsborg became a beacon for peasants all
over Franconia. As in the climax of the
war, three separate armies converged on
the town to besiege the castle.
Somewhere between 15 and 23,000 men, but
the garrison, which was small and
wellarmed, managed to hold out. They are
also well trained. In the nick of time,
the troops of the Suabian League, the
bishop and other princes, including
Kazmir Brandenborg, finally set up for
Bzbbor, and the siege was lifted. They
defeated the peasants first at nearby
Kernix and witnesses described seeing
the roads leading into Rossborg as being
full of butchered peasants. Um, sorry,
that's um I'll come back to that one. Um
there you can see the butchered peasants
down in the bottom.
Um and the vineyards were full of
corpses. Wsburg itself was defeated.
Soldiers plundered the town and the
proud civic dignitaries had to cross the
bridge over the river to surrender at
the prince's camp. They were utterly
humiliated and several of them were
executed on the town square. Really
powerful politicians.
So how does freeze tell this story?
Well, he provides no less than three
different versions of the story, three
different points of view. The first is a
conventional narrative of the war that
tries to place Woodsburg within the war
as a whole. The second is a history from
the army's point of view. And the third
is a history arranged alphabetically
according to place so that every village
in town gets its own little story. And
of course that just totally corresponds
to how he normally thought as a
bureaucrat. And indeed uh we know he had
these these are his puppets so we can
He also mostly assues emotion and unlike
other chronicler from the town he
doesn't dramatize the events. Um and put
he's quite dispassionate.
um he is really caught between both
sides because he's an employee of the
bishop and yet he lives in the town and
has an office another office. He had two
offices and one of them was near the
town hall. So one's down in the town
hall and one's up near the castle.
Yet he often uses his own voice usually
with a ry detached sense of humor. So he
wasishly comments on the letter which
one of the peeasant bands sent to
another that this shows how little
solidarity they had or he mocks um Bill Helenburg's
