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Kenneth G.Appold: Luther & the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, & the Revolt of 1525. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025; pp. 224.

Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: The five-hundredth anniversary of the Peasants' War has been marked by several new publications.Some of them are genuinely innovative, and Kenneth G. Appold's Luther & the Peasants: Religion, Ritual, & the Revolt of 1525 is certainly among the most original.It is a book that pardons nothing in Luther or the princes, but instead seeks to understand the peasants' own reasons, their religion, rituals, conceptions of peace and ways of life grounded in custom and practice.Appold offers a possible and persuasive path into the peasants' point of view.One example illustrates his approach particularly well: the story of the Weinsberger Bluttat.Appearing at the very centre of Appold's book, it provides an excellent starting point for introducing the innovative character of his work.It is not that this episode had never been described or analysed before; rather, Appold situates it within a cultural context rich with implications that extend across all the analytical threads of the book.For this reason, the Weinsberger Bluttat, placed at the structural midpoint of the volume, may rightly be taken as its decisive and organizing centre.This is the story.In March 1525, the peasants occupied the monastery of Schöntal and seized the castle of Neuenstein.Some princes accepted the Twelve Articles, but others, like the governor of Weinsberg, Count Ludwig von Helfenstein, opened hostilities against the "murdering hordes of peasants" (p.96), launching raids and threatening the families of suspected rebels.On 16 April 1525, peasants led by Jakob Rohrbach attacked and captured Weinsberg.There the famous "massacre" occurred: The nobles, Helfenstein among them, were forced to run a gauntlet of pikes.When the lords regrouped, their revenge was brutal.Rohrbach was roasted alive, and the Swabian League commander, Jörg Truchsess, "burned the entire city down, many residents inside" (p.97).What makes this episode noteworthy is not the intensity of violence but its meaning.To the lords, the peasants were animals driven by a "terrible, irrational, and even diabolical force" (p.96).The gauntlet shocked nobles not because it was unfamiliar but because it was reserved for common soldiers, not for their own class, though, as Appold notes, it had "well-established precedents" in Germanic legal culture.What was intolerable was its use against the lords.And because the peasants dared challenge servitude and assert control over their own lives, their actions were cast as irrational and demonic, even though, from the peasants' perspective, it was the lords who had violated the social order grounded in reciprocal obligations.The opposition is not simply between the peasants' seizure of the city and the nobles' revenge.As Appold shows, it is a conflict between incompatible worldviews and forms of rationality, as well as a clash between legal orders and religious sensibilities that cannot be reconciled.The history of the conflict between opposing legal systems is well known: on one side, customary forms, local selfgovernment, common possession, communal rights and peasant communalism; on the other side, a new legal order shaped by refashioned Roman law, the emerging territorial state and property relations grounded in individual rights.To this familiar contrast, Appold adds another, less studied but equally crucial: the opposition between two modes of religious experience-the conceptual and interiorized religiosity rooted in humanism and developed by Luther (p.131), and the pre-conceptual, ritual, symbolic, communicative, material and bodily forms practiced by the peasants.However, "untranslatable into rational discourse" these practices may appear, Appold notes that they 1
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.70050
Language: English
Subfield: History
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7125968178
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