In this “extraordinary and brilliant book” (Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves), a prize-winning historian offers the definitive account of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months.
In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Fire and Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world.
Download and start listening now!
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Lyndal Roper, the first woman to hold the prestigious Regius Chair at Oxford University, is one of the most respected scholars of early modern history on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the winner of the 2016 Gerda Henkel Prize. Her books include Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasyin Baroque Germany; Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Religion, and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe; The Witch in the Western Imagination; and The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg.