Lyndal Roper

It's a complete coincidence that I finished this on Reformation Day, as I'm neither Lutheran nor a huge Luther fan girl (and rather less a fan after reading this), but there it is. Luther was an authoritarian and a bully, and he could be a spiteful, crude, vicious hypocrite, spewing hate at Catholics, Jews, and fellow Evangelicals who failed to accept his doctrines as “gospel,” but there's no denying the lasting significance of the religious reform movement that he so powerfully and show more effectively put in motion. And it seems plausible that putting reform in motion required a passionate, stubborn, even a pig-headed man.

Lyndal Roper's long research has produced a detailed, nuanced study of her complex and often contradictory subject. While I found his misogyny, social conservatism, and antisemitism repugnant, his religious insights and convictions, hard won and deeply considered, offered an emphasis that was sorely needed at the time. Roper only brushes on one of Luther's contributions which I value very highly indeed – his emphasis on hymns and congregational singing – but she spends more time on another that I think he “nails” – his insistence (in contrast and in conflict with Zwingli's followers) on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

It seemed to me that Roper did a fine job of balancing her presentation, providing a rich but not overwhelming level of detail about Luther's family and cultural background, personal history, political context, and religious controversies, and not going overboard with ideas about his “psychological” motivations. I finished this with a far better appreciation of Luther's contributions to the Reformation, both positive and negative, and to the doctrines of Anglicanism, my branch of the church, than I began with, and enjoyed Roper's ability to create an engaging study of her prickly and combative subject. show less

This biography was very interesting and remarkably detailed. Although it was somewhat long, it kept me turning pages until the very end. This book was more than a decade in the making, and that shows in the care taken with the in-depth exploration of Luther's life. This well-illustrated biography delves into Luther's childhood, his formative years, and different stages of his life's work. It focuses on Luther himself, a complex individual, and analyzes him in the context of 16th-century show more Germany, with its particular social customs, politics, and culture. This book shows Luther's humanity, even his faults, and it does not present a flawless image of perfection.

However, in trying to demonstrate Luther's flaws as well as his strengths, I think that Roper sacrificed objectivity. For example, when Luther was isolated from both his family and the Reformation movement, he received word that his father had died. Alone, grieving, he sent his friend Melanchthon a somewhat rude and impatient letter, which is explored in depth in this book. However, the close friendship they shared is downplayed, and even naming him godfather to his kids is mentioned only in the notes in the back of the book, after the main text is finished. Luther often reacted with strong emotion, and even over-reacted, but while I have read in other books that Luther himself admitted that "indiscretion" was "my greatest fault," neither that quote nor Luther's own self-awareness comes through in this biography. Instead, we are left with a portrait of a man who is uncontrolled, paranoid, violent . . . and completely clueless as to why this is a problem. But this image of Luther isn't borne out by history. He had his moments of extremism, to be sure, but taking a few extremes out of their larger context and avoiding the rest takes a powerful reformer and turns him into an unstable bumbler.

Last point, I promise! In this Luther biography, Roper criticizes the Lutheran composer J. S. Bach: "In The St. Matthew Passion the angular melodic line spares the listener nothing of the viciousness of the Jews' shouts of "Lass ihn kreuzigen" ("Let him be crucified"), and follows this with heartfelt individual meditations on Christ's suffering; the implicit anti-Semitism of the glorious music can be hard to take" (Roper, p. 403). Excuse me? Bach is anti-Semitic because he used strident music to portray some specific angry individuals from history? This is the same St. Matthew Passion that (1) shows that Romans, not Jews, killed Jesus (2) shows that Jesus and all his disciples WERE Jews (3) that uses beautiful instrumentation and choir to show the suffering of Jesus (4) showed the human conflict in Peter as he denied him, and (5) used a variety of melodic lines, vocal recitatives, choral harmony, and instrumentation to depict all sorts of emotions from all sorts of people. Arguably the strongest angriest music from the entire production is directed not at the Jewish high priests, but at Judas Iscariot; this passage features an adult choir, a children's choir, rapid angry orchestration, and an echoy grand pause. The words are equally chilling: "Are lightning and thunder vanished in clouds? Open up the fiery bottomless pit, oh hell! Smash, ruin, swallow up, break to pieces with sudden fury this false betrayer, this murderous blood." And Roper ignores all this human drama to say a few individuals in a different section prove Bach is prejudiced? Why is a Luther biography even so concerned with music of the Baroque period, 200 years later? One line in one song that directly quotes another source anyway doesn't prove a thing about Bach. But the fact that Roper would try to build this up into an argument makes me question her reliability as an objective witness to history.

It's really too bad because there is so much in this book that is valid, and interesting, and important to know, for both positive and negative. As you read it, be aware of what's in it, but also be aware of what is left out. show less

I'll be honest, I knew very little of the German Peasants' War when I started. Now, I still feel like I only know the basic facts, and that's a problem. I took notes as a read, but I had to Google several names and places for history and context. To keep up with this book you will need a map of Germany at your side and a Wiki intro of the peasant leaders and belligerents. I understand that the level of participation varies from village to village but there are ways to keep the reader on show more track. Books I've read on large-scale German witch hunts accomplish this without losing the narrative.

One major source were the philosophies of Martin Luther vs. Thomas Muntzer. However I think Roper focused on this and religious oaths far too much. Luther did not support the Peasants' War at all it turns out. I kept referring to my googled timeline to see what was happening as the War disappeared into the background. I would've liked to learn more about peasant life, their organizations, peasant leaders, the prior role of religion, the German feudal system, and esp. the Poor Conrad rebellion that occurred only 10 yrs earlier. Why were peasant women largely ignored vs the Nunneries the men so eagerly attacked? What were the root causes of known Antisemitic acts? In the end, the War was over before it really began, and I have more questions than answers. show less

Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford, is undoubtedly a very fine historian. The amount of research, evidenced by the notes (which are remarkably full with additional detailed commentary) and bibliography, is staggering. The history might be regarded as close to definitive.

I had two problems with the book, one more important than the other. The narrative was buried in detail: this made it a dull, frustrating and not always clear read. A brilliant critique of past show more interpretations also failed to stop her from getting drawn into today's historiographical fashions.

The illustrations are good although on the wrong paper stock for clarity but she was not well served in one important respect - mapping. We have a barely intelligible map at the beginning which forced me to go off to the Atlas Edition of the New CMH to understand what was going on.

My impression was of a monograph immediately comprehensible to those who were already familiar with the literature and geography of the German Protestant Reformation but which did little to build an adequate picture of the war for the general reader. And yet it was being sold to the latter.

What did I learn from ploughing through the detail? Less than I would have hoped because the author does not contextualise the peasant revolt very far back in time although there is much useful stuff on the religious and social context. There is an air of the anecdotal about the book.

It also ends abruptly with the end of the revolt which is fine because the book is about that revolt and not what happened afterwards yet any link (even no link) with the rise of Anabaptism would strike me as a reasonable addition to the story because it happens so close in time to the bloodletting.

Having said all that, if you can connect the dots yourself, you can build a story out of the detail while there is an invaluable concluding, largely historiographical, chapter, albeit that one senses that mildly feminist and ecopolitical concerns have, once again, intruded unnecessarily.

My reading of the data ends up not entirely consonant with Roper's. I would meet the Marxists half way. The key issue is how to balance the way revolt is expressed (the 'ideology') with the particular discontents that allowed people to combine into revolt.

It is a question of importance today when there are widespread discontents emerging within the liberal West yet it is unclear what shared form of expression might emerge to turn this discontent into something more politically dynamic. Populism is obviously one candidate but there may be others.

In this case, Roper strikes me as absolutely correct to emphasise the emotional force of the Lutheran revolution in creating a language (regardless of Luther's intentions) which could combine forces into a 'brotherhood' with a platform that gave form to fundamental discontents.

There is a significant difference between this revolt and previous peasant revolts (although we should not underestimate the potential within such forces as Lollardy and Hussitism) and that difference lies in documents like the '12 Articles' and the role of passionate evangelical intellectuals.

Not that the intellectuals should be regarded as leaders of revolt but rather that they became enablers of it by assisting in the formulation of a language for revolt. The language derived not only from Luther's challenge to the Church but from direct listening (probably more than reading) of the Bible.

But the emotional enabling and framing of revolt should not be distanced too much from the more basic material resentments which were essentially those of felt injustice about specific rights and awareness that the lordly and clerical structures were not fulfilling their functions honestly.

In effect, a massive infrastructure of monasteries and minor lordships was accumulating wealth without appearing to give anything in return. Once the spiritual gift exchange system had been changed by Luther, this disparity between wealth and value to the community became salient.

This helps to explain (in my view) a lot of confusions and contradictions because where the system was fair and honest then it would not be challenged yet it is clear that the accumulated wealth of the monastic system as a dumping ground for the useless bits of the ruling order had become an issue.

Either the peasantry would have had to reject Lutheran evangelism because the Church delivered not only spiritual but welfare services or the peasantry would be forced to take the assets of the Church to rectify injustices affecting their material condition.

This is interesting because it could be argued that the modern State as provider of welfare services is beginning to withdraw its capacity to do so and yet accumulates wealth to maintain its own bureaucracy as the home for otherwise unemployable graduates.

History does not repeat but it rhymes so that the populist revolt today is what appears when the system fails to deliver a balance of goods to match its exactions. One of three things must happen - balance is restored, the subjects of the system revolt or the system imposes itself by brute force.

Roper is very specific about emerging discontents in the 1520s - one of the reasons the book is so detailed and 'anecdotal' - so we get a decent picture of how particular discontents were negotiated into platforms through appropriations of emergent religious language.

There are no angels when history turns violent. The peasants were occasionally as brutal as the lords were to be. Lords occasionally (in the early days) were the seekers of accommodation and a restoration of balance in relations between communities.

The deeply unpleasant and unchristian (by our standards) response to the events of Martin Luther himself is an object lesson in elite sociopathy but then it is little known that the Church never condemned slavery during the first 1,500 years of its history and then only a little.

Religion is always simultaneously a private and spiritual matter and a guarantor of social order within the human hive. Luther's egocentric demand for purity first disrupted a broken system and then demanded that this broken system be restored on his terms. Those terms included blood-letting.

And, of course, as Roper makes clear, things deteriorated as they always do when world views clash over material rights. She explains why miners did not revolt because they did not need to but also how bits of both sides steadily descended into various fanaticisms and brutalities.

The defeat of the peasants now looks inevitable if only because of the lack, in the ideology of revolt, of the organisational aspects of later revolutionary cadres centred on the Marxist-Leninist Party (perhaps) but primarily because the lordly side retained technologically superior armed forces.

It is hard to know just how many peasants were slaughtered in the end. I have my own doubts about the higher numbers simply for practical reasons since the business of killing is a time-consuming business before modern industrial methods of slaughter but the effects were profound.

There was another round of violence with the Anabaptists but essentially the war helped power to consolidate itself. Later the Thirty Years War, a far more devastating business, was a matter of professional armies plundering central Europe with little chance of resistance.

Peasant revolts were frequent in European history. Few seem to have developed the same level of ideological fervour (although French country resistance against the Revolution centred on Catholicism might be an exception) until the emergence of anarchisms, nationalisms and communisms.

This is what makes the historiography so interesting. The Peasants' War of 1524-1525 provided a type case for appropriation by subsequent ideologies. Roper draws it out of the territory of appropriation to see it as an event to be studied in its own right and on its own terms. If only it was done more clearly. show less