Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War
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.
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Hardly any scholar has a more detailed understanding of Germany in 1525 than Ms. Roper, and this book emerges as a natural extension of the author’s recent work on Martin Luther ... What Luther may have failed to anticipate, and what Ms. Roper describes in wonderful detail, is the power of the pulpit in a theocracy ... Ms. Roper’s book works from a wide angle and gathers a kaleidoscope of images, roving high about the topography.
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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.
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