The German Peasant's War of 1524-26 was the greatest popular uprising in European history before the French Revolution. Its significance is heightened by the contemporary struggle for religious renewal in the Reformation, which had a decisive influence on its course. Yet relatively little writing in English has discussed the Peasant's War in detail. This volume analyzes the War through contemporary documents, both published and original, presented here in translation. Accompanying the selection of 162 documents is an extended introduction which traces the main issues facing historians in seeking to understand the revolt.

This book, first published in 1979, presents a series of important investigations into the German Peasant War of 1525 – the last great peasant revolt and the first modern revolution. Previously under-studied by English-speaking historians, these essays provide a valuable analysis of the aims and extent of the Peasant War, and are representative of the various elements in the historiographical debate.

"A major book that scholars will want to study closely, both for its provocative treatment of the interaction of economic and social pressures with politics and ideology and for its many revisions of Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations... [Blickle's] book will influence scholarship for some time to come."-- Journal of Modern History.

This book, first published in 1976, re-examines many aspects of the German Peasant War of 1525, important as the first national peasant revolt in Germany and because of the influence of Engels’ work on the subject. With one contributor noting the similarities between the organisation, demands and action of the Swabian peasants and those of the Zapatas of Mexico four centuries later, these essays provide remarkable insights and analyses into the enduring importance of the German Peasant War.

This book, first published in 1986, surveys the history of rural society in Germany from the eighteenth century to the present day. The contributions include studies of Junker estates and small farming communities, serfs and landless labourers, maidservants and worker-peasants. They demonstrate the variety and complexity of the social division that structures the rural economy. Throughout the book there is an emphasis on the conflicts that divided rural society, and the ways and means in which these were expressed, whether in serf strikes in eighteenth-century Brandenburg, village gossip in early twentieth-century Hesse, or factional struggles over planning permission in present-day Swabia. The rural world emerges not as traditional, passive and undifferentiated , but as actively participating in its own making; not only responding to the changes going on around it, but exploiting them for its own purposes and influencing them in its own way. This book is ideal for students of history, particularly German history.

Translated from the German by Moissaye J. Olgin.

Until late in the eighteenth century, the peasantry of the German states had been dismissed contemptuously by the aristocracy and middle classes as brutish and virtually subhuman. With the advent of organized movements for peasant emancipation and agrarian reform, however, many German writers and publicists began also to reassess the role of the peasant in society. Within less than a century, the public image of the German peasant had been completely changed. Where formerly he had been scorned as untermenschlich, by 1840 he was firmly established in the public mind as an embodiment of the highest national virtues—a patriotic citizen with special qualities of singular importance to the fatherland. Mr. Gagliardo's study is a suggestive inquiry into the origins and development of a modern rural ideology and its relationship to German doctrines of nationality.

Translated from the German by Moissaye J. Olgin.