Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History Oriel College, Oxford University
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest peasant uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. It happened at the height of Luther’s German Reformation. A traumatic event, perhaps a hundred thousand peasants died.
Contemporaries almost universally referred to the War as the ‘Aufruhr’, the turbulence. In his infamous condemnation of the Peasants, Luther used the word six times in the key paragraph. Aufruhr must be punished, he wrote, and those involved ‘slain like mad dogs’. This lecture examines movement patterns in the war to understand why contemporaries experienced the war as ‘turbulence’, exploring where, when and how peasants formed bands. It concludes with a discussion of the artist Albrecht Dürer’s Dream of 1525.
