Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War

Roper, Lyndal

ISBN 10: 154164705X / ISBN 13: 9781541647053

Published by Basic Books, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781541647053

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 154164705X
• ISBN 13: 9781541647053
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the Cundill Prize

From a prize-winning historian, the definitive account of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe

“A balanced, comprehensive survey of the uprising, gripping in its narrative and perceptive in its assessments, making it easily the most accessible study in English for a general readership.” ―Financial Times

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year 

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months. 
 
In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to make good on the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation. By recovering what the people themselves felt and believed, Summer of Fire and Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world. 

About the Author

Lyndal Roper is Emeritus Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Martin Luther and Witch Craze. She is a Holberg Prize Laureate and a fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. She lives in Oxford, South Wales, and Berlin.