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Regius Valedictory Lecture: Telling Stories: History, Narrative, and the German Peasants’ War, 1525 | Faculty of History | University of Oxford | YouTubeToText
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Summary
Core Theme
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
Helenburg's
splendid promise to support the bishop
which fell in the ashes even before it
came to force and went no further than
paper and words.
So what Freeze does is he compiles a
collection of documents using materials
that he found in the peasants chancies
after the battles of Koenix and English
just near Lordsborg and from the
villages and the town hall in Lordsborg
and other materials he found in a
cupboard at Minist. But he also says, "I
have thrown away over half of what I
found because I did not find it
particularly useful for this history."
of course I think what you throw it away
but um in fact I think he does record
a a quite surprising amount of material
from those peasant chances even things
that that look on the face of it like
the thing you would assume he would
chuck in the bin.
So why did have three separate goals at
telling this story? Evidently, he was
dissatisfied with a conventional
chronicle form, which is why he wrote
the other two. And I'm particularly
interested in the version from the
peasant army's point of view, his
history of the builten band because it
suggests that he was trying to trace the
chaotic movement of armed bands.
Um, and the sheer unpredictability of
how they move, their apparently mand
their random journeys, their messy
formation, splitting and
reformationation, and just the complete
mess and complexity of all this. And I
think he couldn't capture that within a
standard narrative. And so he wrote the
second one, far shorter and less
successful, though I think more original
than the other two. This forced him to
think outside the administrative units
that were his bread and butter because
the armies didn't stick to territorial
boundaries, but followed the geography,
the roots of the rivers and valleys. In
this way was also preoccupied with the
issues that gripped there geography and
how the movement spread. And he also
devises a word called land art which I
think is a lovely word which means sort
of land art or re type of land or region
to describe the area that he's talking
about as he tries to capture the
distinctive locality which is not the
same thing as the administrative unit.
um and is not Franconia and is not
Swabia either. These terms just didn't
capture how the peasants created bands
that made sense for them in terms of
like-minded fighters. So Frieza's choice
here reveals how the war made people
reimagine customary political and
territorial boundaries and how
profoundly shocked someone like Freeze
was by peasants gathering in groups that
were no longer bounded by lordship as
they joined with peasants of different
lords to form these huge armed bands
So yeah, um that's just the wonderful covers.
covers.
When the war was over, each individual
place then had to resswear its oath of
loyalty to the bishop and the bishop or
his representative had personally to
travel to every place to receive
feelalty. At the same time, the bishop
or his representative also carried out
punishments of those who'd been involved
in the war.
Well, we know that Freeze himself went
on these journeys of retribution as part
of his duties and his name appears in
the documents recording the executions
next to many of the villages.
From these, it's clear that each morning
he would have woken knowing that he
would witness perhaps 10 executions that
day. These were more executions than he
would ever have seen. And they went on
day after day as he traveled the dasis
with the executioner, sometimes as the
bishop's representative.
He did not have to do them all, but he
was the official who did a fair
proportion. I wonder whether this
experience explains why he was driven to
write such a comprehensive history and
why he felt that the story couldn't be
captured within the bounds of a single narrative.
So he's the administrative historian if
you like but also the historian who's
thinking about space in a different way.
and he's more like the kind of history
that we generally write. So numbers
three is a visual chronicle. The Albert
adar Jacob Nura devised a different way
of writing history altogether. He
commissioned a visual chronicle which
remains one of the most informative
sources that we have and it's been
ubiquitous in the celebrations of the
peasants war because one of the very few
things that you can show and it's shown
absolutely everywhere.
So Mula decided what scene should be
depicted and there's a brief explanatory
commentary for each picture. Pictures
however are static and they lack the
dimensions of time and space. So what's
our artist do? He gets around the
problem by
um adopting the technique that was also
used of course on alter pieces um where
what you do is you do a series of
scenes. So you foreground one and then
you have scenes in the background and
that way you introduce the dimension of
time and space
and the viewer of course knows what the
story is and can fill that um in in the
case of the scent. So here for example
we see the peasants rising at Rapenfield
in the background while in the
foreground they walk to make their oath
and he does the same for the dimension
of space by showing here the villages
the abbey ruled from an imaginary
viewpoint high above um again it's just
so interesting how all these people are
thinking about space and how they're
thinking about how you represent that
what is your vantage point how do you
map it how how do you make sense of this.
this.
So um he he sketches in the roads that
links the villages and he shows the
waterways and ponds that were such a
source of argument and he even shows the
borton the messengers who were essential
to keeping regional control. So you can
see them um you can see them here um
you'll see them in the background
walking along the roads. So the order
the overarching narrative of the
monastery chronicle is one of order
restored of institutional continuity
despite threat. The story starts from
the peasants swearing allegiance to
their addict. So they're um they're
their uh um uh
they're there swearing allegiance to the abbott.
abbott.
And here they're swearing allegiance to
Stefan who is their leader
though in fact they probably swore
brotherhood to each other. And it finishes
finishes
um oh behem sorry be swearing um
allegiance with the bishop and it
finishes with this um here we've got
order um restored with the ambush having
the oath of feelalty given to him by the
peasants. And what you can't see and
isn't shown in the picture is that in
fact they were forced to do so by armed soldiers.
soldiers.
And the central piece of the of it and
it also shows the monks fleeing with the
valuables to the town of the Vensburg to
keep them all safe. So there they leave
the monastery and running away. Um, and
the central scene is this where the
peasants take over and it's the complete
disorder as the peasants uh managed to
just get into the monastery and take
everything over. And what they do is
they fight. Um, they draw blood. Uh,
they don't listen when someone tells
them peace, stop, put your arms down.
They just don't. They keep on fighting.
Um they fish out all the ponds and then
they raise the slle so that all the
water runs away. Um and uh it's it's
just a very um vivid description of it
all. um having more of a fun and sto for
them um taking over uh from the monks
and uh what that doesn't however show is
it doesn't give the name of Vetsler who
was the peasant who replaced the abbot
and ruled it in hisstead and so they
deny him a place in the monastery's chronicle.
chronicle.
So this visual narrative allows us to
see details which written chronicles
don't reveal. How exactly the oaths were
sworn where people stood to do it. Um it
provides the perspective of the
monastery's understanding of events of
order disrupted and then reimposed of
danger faced and survived. It reveals
the monastery's perception of the space
and territory it ruled as it presents
visually how the peasants rose up in one
village and then in another. And of
course it can be read by the non-literate.
non-literate.
And it's vivid in ways a text cannot be
as it captures the terrifying experience
of individual monks and shapes it into
this collective institutional memory.
Like the TV history of our own day, it
seeks to engage the viewer by tracing
the stories of actors with whom we
identify as the later monks for whom it
was intended of course would have done.
By contrast, the fourth history that I
want to discuss was written by a nun
from the convent of Hegba and there are
many some people in the audience who
know more about this wonderful than I
do. So forgive me. It doesn't seek to
provide an overall or even a regional
narrative of the war is chronicled, but
it traces the convent's experience,
naming individual nuns and describing
how they later became prior's or others.
It's a book of memory for the convent
written uh and there it is written after
the event. The stories are wellshaped as
if they've been told many times. So we
read of how the nuns in a panic had
their goods secretly transferred to the
nearby town of Bavar just like the monks
had done. But as their servants carried
a huge sack of felt shoes across the
market square, three of them fell out. A
large crowd gathered and everybody
laughed. Every shoe was returned and
nothing was taken. The chronicler tells
us because everyone was wellincclined
towards us which their um their uh
common servant ensured would be the case
by tipping them well and not the least
thing was lost or ruined. So repeatedly
what the nuns do this nun does is
provide anecdotes to prove the affection
in which locals held them. But her
anxiety to do so and the anecdotes
themselves, as in this case, suggest
that their support was limited. Why else
had they been so careful to transfer
their goods and food supplies in secret
using no fewer than 30 servants? So
underneath the superficial optimism of
her account, another story emerges. The
nuns were the targets of insults from
local women who threatened that they
would swap places with them and they
would have a taste of the pains of
childbirth. While another revealing
anecdote describes how a nun reacted
badly when, as their confessor put it,
hearing one man scream, "Ah, God, she's
in such a bad way because she will have
to be a peasant." And she is one because
the red cross has been painted on the
door. That was the sign that the
peasants had put above the common door.
So the nuns in their closed community
emerge as scarcely able to deal with the
external world and ignorant of the lives
of the peasants around them. The hero of
the story is the Holfmeister of blessed
memory who saves the convent from
destruction by entering the peasant army
and negotiating personally with the
peasant leader who happened to be one of
the servants of the convent.
The nun's perspective is the narrowest
of all the chronicles I will discuss. So
for example, the narrative begins by
describing how the peasant army met
weekly to discuss how they wanted to
take all the goods of the monasteries
and nobles and drive monks and nuns out
of the monasteries. And they wanted to
begin with
as if the convent were the chief actor
in all of this which he was. When the
chronicle comes to describe the most
famous peasant atrocity of the war, the
Vinesburg massacre in which 24 nobles
and their followers were forced to run
the gauntlet. It describes only how the
peasants having finally departed from
the Hecbar conic did great murders of
the young nobility also the young count.
They penned them in a ring and hunted
them over naked swords and treated the
old count dreadfully until he died. So
that is a completely garbled version of
events, but it's one of the most famous
stories of the whole peasants war.
Everybody tells it and everybody else
gets it right.
So instead, the narrative is framed as a
memorial that commemorates lurggical
time and the actions of individual nuns.
It's a form of necrology that can be
remembered through anecdote. um and one
lengthy passage with counts how one of
the nuns refused to leave the convent
and remained in the chapel determined to
risk the peasant invasion and so forth
and so on.
Uh and another story leads up to a
wonderful comic evocation of how the
fleeing nuns dressed in all their
clothes, furs and pettic coats and once
they put them on they were so big that
they could hardly fit through the door.
So for the nuns of Hebach, the peasants
war was an adventure, an interruption
into an otherwise uneventful
institutional history. The chronicle's
narrow focus and lack of interest in the
peasants reflects the nuns inability to
recognize their own privilege or how
they had alienated those who ruled. It
is also of course a gendered perspective
because the chronicles author was a
profoundly talented writer who couldn't
venture to write a history based beyond
her comic walls.
So um and there it is seen from the air.
So now I want to come to Johannes
Kesler's Sabata written between 1523 and
1539 by a single preacher Philip Thalum.
These are stories to be read to while
away Sabbath time and they're mostly
little more than a paragraph long.
They're designed with a clear point and
they're meant to entertain. But the
section on the peasants war adopts a
different narrative strategy altogether.
a sustained account of the war. It
covers 30 or so folios and begins with
an analysis of the event as a whole.
But as this account proceeds, it becomes
much more nuanced and more sympathetic
to the peasants and especially so as he
describes the baling environment and
what happens at Ningham. He provides
transcripts of conversations
as ormitt the peasant leader insists
that he is taking on the job as someone
subject to no lord and so not out of
self-interest but as a mediator
and and those are the words he uses. He
says as a mediator or he describes how
Sebastian Lzer when asked to become
secretary to the Boxing band said to the
peasant commander,
"Dear Olish, it is not unknown to you
that you are the leader of a great
peasant army, which is why you need
especially talented learned men." But
I'm a simple common tradesman. I've
never practiced in any court or in any
chancellory or even substituted for any
notary. So considering the seriousness
of your business, you won't be well
served with me.
Lots finally agreed to do so. So far as
they should be satisfied with his
industry and seriousness, he refused to
take any pay.
Indeed, like the nuns chronicle, Keslas
is an oral story in many senses. He
personally knew the preacher Kristoff
Chapel, the pamphlet Sebastian Lotser,
the peasant leader or Wishmet and
others, and they all fled to St. Gan
where he was, and he acted as an oral
historian recording their testimony. The
mode in which he writes is also
profoundly oral, shaped around the fact
that each paragraph has a narrative
point which is meant to be read aloud on
a Sabbath. It's an oral history in the
sense that where Frieza's account is
driven by the written documents that he
collected and then transcribed, Kesler
often moves from one dramatic
conversation to the next.
After all, um, uh, we hear their oral
testimony no matter how inventive the
speech is that, uh, authenticate his account.
account.
Like many practitioners of oral history
today, and I was reminded of St's Turk
or of Robert's oral history of the minor
strike, Kesler allows his sources to
speak and he uses the drama of their
words to give his account color. He lets
them emerge as individuals to have their
say even when that doesn't fit with his
ostensible interpretation.
He is the one source who gives us a
sense of the emotion behind the
documents, the bitter divisions between
members of the Christian Union who
favored military action and those who
insisted that using force against the
authorities was always wrong. as he
describes their um their unbounded heat
urgency and how the idealists of the
spring were um how they cried um when
they argued and threatened to leave. And
he adds a fascinating detail that there
was still no agreement and it was time
for dinner. Only over dinner did the
Lake and the Algoy bands finally agreed
terms. They offered each other the hand
and then they shook on it and became
friends. Here we see the capacity of
oral history to present what it felt
like to be involved in events to convey
the importance of circumstances like
dinner time to creating a resolution um
of a conflict. [Music]
[Music]
So my next chronicle
does not exist.
Sean Troutenbuck's history of the German
peasant war was in fact written by Steon
Hoffman a close associate of Thomas
Mitser. high time we saw Thomas Mer again
again
and it would have provided the only
account of the war from the peasant side
from a participant in the battle of
Frankenhe in which peasants were
comprehensively defeated and perhaps
6,000 died and which we commemorate today.
today.
Hoffman had started as a Lutheran and
had preached without a post in Elford.
And he was imprisoned in 1523 there and
tortured an experience which probably
radicalized him as he experienced in his
own body the power of the lords, the
rich, those in power. He now preached
more in rural areas and then found his
way to Funkenhousen. and he apparently
modeled his style on M's own writing a
blood curdling letter to Airford asking
for their military assistance. He
couldn't have known that the town was
now on the side of the princes and the
letter which was addressed to the
council but big mistake not to the town
was never delivered. The messenger
returned was told to get it properly
addressed and of course by then it was
too late.
He lend us the tyranny of the cruel
raging tyrants and regions and of how
the godless fear a single leaf. The just
fear not even an army of a 100,000. And
of course that's the situation that they
were about to face.
Identifying himself with the Christian
army of Frankenhausen he insists that
God has awakened his word judgment and
justice. And he calls on Elford to join
with us so that those with the upper
hand, the princes, counts, nobles and
non- nobles can be put on the same level
as us.
So what might his history have been
like? Would he have seen the war in
apocalyptic terms as the arrival of the
end of time? Or would he have seen it as
the cause of the godly against the
tyrants leading to a more equitable
society here on earth? How would he have
explained their defeat? Would he, like
Muna, have argued that they failed
because each sought their own
self-interest rather than the salvation
of all Christians? That explanation of
Muna and it's a terrible explanation is
really sad. That is um the one that he
makes in his final letter to his
congregation of Mulhansson and it was
written when he was in in captivity
Would Hoffman, who would have been free
to express his own view, have blamed his
followers as Muna did? Or would he have
seen the lost battles as a temporary
setback, the first phase of an ongoing
struggle against the top dogs, the Rosa
Hansen? Whatever his narrative choice,
we can be certain that he would have
framed the conflict not as a series of
local uprisings, nor as a set of
charming anecdotes. Indeed, the
Nuremberg Council condemnation describes
it as a as an an orgish I don't an
unfortunate an unwise account of the
attacks of the princes um uh and um and
and rejects and rejects it um and and
And finally
um there's Milton and there's Nuremberg
where there see Montelton cuts history
A seventh way of writing history the
landscape itself here is the winner the
blood gully that runs down from the
battlefield at Frankenhausen into town
on which many of us here have seen and
walked down.
And that was the escape route in which
so many died. It hasn't been forgotten
even in the centuries when the war was
not talked about. And it tells a
worthless story of its own. So
So
I can do it.
My seven narrators then each represent
different ways of writing a history of
the peasants war, different ways of
doing history and different kinds of
narrative. Kofus maps the event, tracing
how the war spread and seeking to
establish its extent in time and place.
His is a geographer's view and he's not
primarily interested in cause and effect
because his primary purpose is to build
a root and branch theological reputation
of Luther. Fice, a historian by nature
and training, aimed to write an
objective history of war in the bishop
where he lived and worked. That would be
based entirely on documents and he
produces them all. As he tells it in the
first narrative, paper does the work.
Each letter or document he reproduces
causes another event. and his story is a
causal chain of written records divided
into short chapters based around a
single event. Typically their titles
read what the cathedral provos
negotiated with his brother or how the
bishop of sought help from the counter
of the Latin. But Freeze was also
acutely aware of the narrative choices
he had made and he knew that the frame
he chose for the story affects what the
story is. And that's why he wrote three
differently organized narratives from
three different perspectives and why he
was driven to write one moment
movementdriven narrative where the army
and its passage through the countryside
are the plot and another static version
where he traced the war in each tiny
administrative unit of his bishop.
The vice cornic, the visual one,
resembles a cartoon history of the war
from Mark's point of view. A visual
narrative structured around the
breakdown and reimposition of order and
the peasants are a barely characterized mass.
mass.
The nuns chronicle by convent by
contrast is a series of well-crafted
engaging anecdotes and it doesn't
mention a wider explanation.
However, her account has the vividness
of micro history and it re recreates the
fears and excitements of those years, it
also has microis's limitations.
Kesler's oral history brings to life the
voices of the past. And even if he may
occasionally have invented the speeches,
he was engaged in collecting the words
of those who participated on what they
said they had said. We will never know
how Steven Hoffman might have written
his history, but it could have told us
so much about what motivated the men who
gathered on the hill outside
Funkenhausen to fight the Lords. I'm
drawn to these chronicles because I love
them as pieces of writing. I love their
vividness, their emotionality, and their
variety. And I could have chosen many of
many more. And in each of them, the
writer emerges as a character and a
personality in the events. And I also
greatly admire them because having
written my own history of the war, boy,
what they did was amazing. It's just so
hard to do. The richness of their varied
storytelling suggests to how narrow our
own understanding of narrative has
become. These days, it seems the
historian has to tell a story and follow
a straight chronological path if he or
she is to reach a wider public. The
reader can't be let in on the choices
that underpin the narrative or on how
the story could have been told
differently for that is inappropriate
for a popular audience. We can't, for
instance, unpick for the general reader
how male or how ethnically specific most
of these accounts are.
Ideas and arguments are often second to
story. And it's hard to imagine now that
a book like EP Thompson's The Making of
the English Working Class would be
acceptable popular history. Now, even
our old history has to be packaged so
that there's little space to lift the
curtain on the process of the interview.
We no longer include the documents in
full as Free did. We don't provide a
stream of narratives.
We remain locked in a chronological
carropase when as the writers of the
histories I've discussed this evening
all knew sometimes stories need to be
told out of sequence. Some frame their
histories in local time others in
relation to reformation history and yet
others in terms of divine time. The
choice Simon Hoffman surely would have
made. Indeed, perhaps it's time to ask
what intellectual function telling a
story serves. A story has a shape with a
beginning, middle, and end. It lends
itself to being told and heard, as these
16th century examples show. It's people
with individuals with whom we're
supposed to identify. It often uses
suspense, and it presents causal links
by creating a line of events as if the
connections between them were
self-evident when they aren't. It
assumes that time is linear when often
the significance of particular events
becomes apparent only later and shifts
More fundamentally, we need to ask what
it is that we know when we've
constructed a story and what we've
forgotten. We need more than stories. We
also need to include the detail of
social history, material culture,
complex human motivation and geography.
And that can't always be coralled into a
simple narrative. Ironically, as the
possibilities of AI for history become
evident, be they what can be done with
GIS mapping linking different data sets
or with transit
allowing us to analyze vast numbers of
documents because we can read them
easily and analyze them or their
historical avatars. You can now meet in
exhibitions on the peasants wall and
explain all of our knowledge to you. Our
historical explanations are becoming
more simple and further removed from
research. But we need now to nourish
critical and imaginative history.
Because if there's one thing that AI
does well, it is to produce synthesis
narratives that sound authoritative but
don't allow for critical interrogation
of the relationship between argument and
evidence. And indeed, as we all know,
sometimes AI will simply invent the
evidence. that leads to the story. So I
hope that the sheer ingenuity of the
16th century historians writing, the way
they grapple with evidence, their
vividness, their author's presence in
their chronicles even when they avoid
the eye form can inspire us towards
attempting more creative, less uniform,
more critical and richer forms of
writing history. So finally I want to
reflect on women as writers of history
and on what it has been like to be the
first woman registers professor of
history. When I first came to the
University of Oxford, I was the only
woman in my senior common room. Here I
am sitting on the edge trying
desperately to fit in and failing as you
can see from my entirely inappropriate clothing.
That is that skirt, red blouse and
boots. What was I thinking? When I was
Cambridge's professor here in the
history faculty, I was the only woman
professor and in many meetings the
minute taker and I were the only women
in the room. I walk up to my office in
the faculty each day passed a line of
photographs of my predecessors um all of
whom were men and when I arrived there
wasn't a single picture of a woman in
the building. Now I hear that in the new
um flatland center the regresses will be
put into storage and I'm not sure what I feel
this book on the German peasants war is
the most conventional of all the books
I've written but it was structured
around the seasons not around events and
so my UK publisher would not accept it
and in the end I had to break the contract.
contract.
The regist professors of professor of
history is appointed by the monarch and
speaks for history to the nation. But I
was never happy being an authoritative
historian and I had to find a different
voice. That hasn't meant that I haven't
done public speaking or haven't engaged
politically quite the opposite. And I
know that my successor will find their
own way of doing the role and developing
it. I'm delighted by how much things
have changed over the last 20 years.
Now, we have many different voices from
queer history, gender and women's
history, the history of race, and the
territory of the historian has hugely
expanded to include the environment, the
anthroposine, dreams, motherhood, and
the complex overturning of national
narratives that the new history of
slavery has accomplished.
I don't think that the coming generation
of women and men historians will have
the same queasiness about authority that
I had or the constant urge to appease
that you can see in that photograph.
That ambivalence about authoritiveness,
however, in how we write was not just a
bad thing because it reminds us of the
contested nature of any story and the
potential of history to be a critical discipline.
discipline.
I've loved being Regis and standing for
history amongst fabulous colleagues,
academics, administrators, members of
staff and students.
Every paragraph in this lecture has come
out of discussion with people here. All
those conversations were in my mind as I
wrote. What I love about our faculty is
its commitment to intellectual
creativity to the sheer pleasure of
doing and writing history and to
teaching. If the last few months have
taught me anything, it is that
institutions which safeguard freedom of
discussion, multiple voices, looking at
the evidence and openness to the outside
world are truly precious. It has also
taught me how easily such institutions
can be destroyed.
I would like to thank you all for making
this such a vigorous and supportive
place to do history and such a fantastic
intellectual community and I look
forward to seeing where the coming
generation will take the writing of history.
history.
Thank you. [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
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