Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The theft and burning of records during popular uprisings (especially the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381) has attracted significant attention. However, no devoted study has yet considered examples from the case of the Danish Peasants’ Revolt of 1438–1441. In this article the extent of violence against paperwork in the Danish uprising is recovered from a challenging source situation. Comparisons with England in 1381 are offered in order to suggest the Danish rebels’ motivations and their specific practices in destroying documents. The immolation of papers was sometimes an instrumentalist attempt to disturb administrative memory. Sometimes it was part of the theatre of insurrection. An Old Czech source which claims radical Hussite presence in fifteenth-century Denmark suggests that ideological, even chiliastic, antipathy towards the written word may have inspired some. Despite a relative shortage of sources from the Danish Peasants’ Revolt (at least, in comparison to its English predecessor), cases from Denmark are shown to have unusual features which contribute to a broader discussion of the ideologies and emotions which inspire violence against bureaucracy.
Source: Social History
Author: Richard Cole
Institution: Aarhus University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4410599190