An account of 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.
One of the many merits of Summer of Fire and Blood is how Roper — despite being the author of a luminous biography of Luther — shifts the focus away from the face-off between Luther and Müntzer and back onto the peasants themselves, dealing resourcefully with the fact that few of them left any written record of their time in the sun ... For Roper, who lived in Berlin in the years after the wall fell, the history of the German Peasants’ War became, if anything, only more urgent in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, when the communist system of Eastern Europe collapsed. Whether “the people” of those revolutions ended up as beneficiaries, and were even the revolution’s prime movers, or whether the gains redounded to a new set of modern princes — in the form of oligarchs — depends on whom you ask.
Roper’s close reading of the texts presents a rich, multidirectional history of an important historical period. And she writes like a dream. An exciting history book that’s likely to be the go-to study for years to come.
