Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War

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

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In spring 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as thousands of people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and one 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 rebellion’s far-reaching ramifications. Though the war’s victors portrayed the uprising as naive and inchoate, Roper reveals a mass movement that sought to manifest the radical potential of the Protestant Reformation.

Through the stories of the people themselves, Summer of Fire and Blood reconstructs the thrilling, tragic saga of the peasants’ fight to change the world.

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.