The Peasants' War
Lyndal Roper finds a new book on the German uprising essential reading
The Revolution of 1525 by Peter Blickle, translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and H.C. Erick Midelfort
xxvi + 246 pp. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)
This book is the first full length study of the Peasants' War to appear in English for many decades. Apart from the collections of articles edited by Kyle Sessions and, more recently, those edited by Janos Bak and Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke, little material was available to the non-German speaking public; and courses on Reformation history have tended to ignore the Peasants' War in favour of concentrating on theological controversies of the period.
Thus, this translation of Blickle's work will prove enormously helpful, for not only does it make one of the most provocative and stimulating of the recent German studies accessible to English readers, but it also provides a bibliography of materials on the Peasant War in English. The editors have included a concise account of the war and its historiography and they elucidate the specialist terms employed by Blickle.
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