Thomas Adam. JoÖŸ Fritz--das verborgene Feuer der Revolution: Bundschuhbewegung und Bauernkrieg am Oberrhein im frÖ¼hen 16. Jahrhundert. Ubstadt-Weiher: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2002. 319 pp. EUR 17.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-89735-192-9.
Peter Blickle, Thomas Adam, eds. Bundschuh: Untergrombach 1502, das unruhige Reich und die Revolutionierbarkeit Europas. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. 296 pp. EUR 56.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-07761-3.
Reviewed by R. Emmet McLaughlin (Department of History, Villanova University)
Published on H-German (October, 2005)
Much Ado about the Bundschuh
The two books under review are linked both by their topics and by the person of Thomas Adam, archivist in Bruchsal, as an editor of the first and author of the second. The first volume comprises revised and expanded versions of papers offered at a conference held in Bruchsal in April, 2002. Peter Blickle organized the program, and the resulting papers are focused and fairly even in quality. Since many of the same topics and figures appear in a number of papers, an index would have been a valuable addition. The twelve contributions are divided into an introduction and three sections. The first group includes five papers on the Bundschuh proper. The second contains three papers on other Upper German and Swiss movements. While the three papers in the third cast a wider geographical and theoretical net. Blickle's introductory essay is contradicted at points by the other authors. A more serious challenge is raised by those papers, which reflect the "literary turn" and question the value of the surviving sources for determining what the peasants believed, planned, or accomplished. Neither Blickle nor the other social historians address or even take cognizance of the cultural historical critique.
After a brief rehearsal of the history of the Bundschuh in 1502, 1513, and 1517, Blickle distills the traditional view of what distinguished the Bundschuh from other peasant uprisings: their ability to transcend the boundaries of feudal lordships, their conspiratorial character, and their programmatic application of the concept of göttliche Gerechtigkeit. Blickle rejects the second and third characteristics because uprisings everywhere were conspiratorial and other rebellions appealed to "göttliche Gerechtigkeit." Late medieval peasant revolts throughout Europe were all products of the clash between traditional structures of feudal lordship and economic/social changes affecting the peasantry (read "communalization") in the last two centuries of the Middle Ages. In this reading, the Bundschuh of 1502 did indeed constitute a milestone. Not in itself since it was highly traditional, but because the ecclesiastical and lay ruling classes reclaimed interpretation of göttliche Gerechtigkeit by branding peasant appeals to divine law as Hochverrat, that is, as high treason not merely against one's sworn lord, but against the entire divinely sanctioned social order.
Claudia Ulbrich is the author of "Der Untergrombacher Bundschuh 1502." Ulbrich concentrates on the limited documentary base for this Bundschuh and concludes that we can know very little about what the revolutionaries hoped to accomplish. The written evidence tells us more about the political constellation in the Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In so far as the documents reveal the self-understanding of the peasants involved in the Bundschuh, they seem to have thought themselves part of the late medieval communal Bund tradition of seeking redress from the Obrigkeit in pursuit of Gerechtigkeit. The failed Bundschuh had enduring effects: an imperial decree, which categorized conspiracies such as the Bundschuh as high treason (Verrätherey) and which prescribed punishments even for those who did not participate but who had knowledge of the conspiracy and had failed to warn the Obrigkeit. The second effect was the foundation of a tradition of resistance to which later generations would appeal.
Georges Bischoff's essay, "Le Bundschuh de l'Ungersberg (1493), ses acteurs et son environment," treats the earliest Bundschuh dealt with in this collection, although it, like all the others, was forestalled by swift government action, marked a turning point in the history of late medieval peasant Bunds not in its demands, or even its self-conception, but through the means it envisioned (pace Blickle): clandestine meetings, oaths, and the use of violence to seize power. In effect, the peasants demanded a seat at the table of power. They sought to become actors rather than merely the objects of the actions of their betters. The result, however, was to be excluded completely from the political nation.
Horst Buszello offers an essay on "Joß Fritz und der Bundschuh zu Lehen 1513." As with the other Bundschuh, all of the documentation for the 1513 conspiracy derives from government sources. The sources consistently set out to portray those involved as misguided, unimportant people deserving of moral condemnation. Buszello emphasizes the dominant role played by Joß Fritz, the charismatic leader who conjured up the Bundschuh. By this time, Joß had developed a fairly sophisticated revolutionary ideology that transcended the local complaints of individual Herrschaften. Nonetheless, Fritz had not moved on to the position espoused in the Peasants' War that set Divine Law against Old Law. Rather, Fritz and his followers appealed to Scripture, human reason, and tradition. It is also unclear whether the Bundschuher dreamed of a world in which the peasantry still recognized the Pope and the Emperor as their lords while denying all intermediary levels of lordship. Furthermore, the demands concerning the church remained purely economic, not theological. All in all, the Bundschuh of 1513 was considerably less radical than some have imagined.
Rolf Köhn's contribution is entitled "Der Bundschuh von 1517--kein Auftandsversuch des Gemeinen Mannes auf dem Lande?" In comparison to the Bundschuhe of 1502 and 1513, almost nothing is known about the demands and goals of the 1517 conspiracy. On the other hand, there is more evidence about the organization, recruiters, and followers, as well as the geographical spread for this Bundschuh than for any other. Unfortunately, the sources are very limited, fragmentary, and tendentious. Primarily, any reconstruction is dependent upon the confessions of three participants. The author sees the central question at issue to be whether the Bundschuh of 1517 was merely a conspiracy of beggars, performers, mustered out Landsknechte, and wandering day laborers as Albert Rosenkranz had argued. Or was it to be an uprising of the rural population that paid rent and taxes, and swore allegiance to a lord? Köhn concludes that the latter was surely the case. Although the three confessions offer extensive lists of participants and leaders, both investigations by the city of Strasbourg and by modern historians have shown that those lists are in many ways unreliable. In fact, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they include conscious distortion and misleading information. The little that can be determined concerning the demands and goals of the Bundschuher makes clear that there was little or no continuity with earlier conspiracies. For example, it lacked any concern to reform the church or the clergy. Instead, social, economic, and political goals dominate. Nor is there any evidence for a connection to any other contemporary social clashes or literary reform programs, for example, the "Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine."
The four papers dealing with individual conspiracies impress most by their emphasis upon how little we can really know about these Bundschuhe. Given that none of them actually got to the stage of violent action, that all were betrayed at an early stage of planning, that the numbers involved were small and scattered, and that they left little reliable evidence, the importance ascribed to them is in some ways surprising.
Klaus H. Lauterbach provides an essay on "Der 'Oberrheinische Revolutionär'--der Theoretiker aufständischer Bauern?" When Herman Haupt published excerpts from a "Revolutionsschrift" in 1893, he was determined to prove unfounded Catholic claims that the Reformation cut short a flourishing era and caused social revolution, i.e., the Peasants' War. Lauterbach concludes that Haupt was both right and wrong. The Reformation in Germany did throttle an age in which peasants and intellectuals possessed the political and religious resources to argue for wider participation in politics, even if only to rein in tyrannical overlords. However, the Reformation did not open the door for social revolution. Rather, by denying any religious support for political resistance the Reformers, Luther above all, paved the way for an incipient absolutism that suppressed peasant movements as threats to the divinely ordained Obrigkeit. Lauterbach argues his case by an analysis of the "Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine" that takes into account the theological and legal traditions upon which the author drew, as well as the demands and goals of peasant groups, both revolutionary and peaceful. He denies that the "Revolutionary" drew upon Bundschuh ideology or exercised an influence upon the Bundschuh and later revolts, in particular the Peasants War. However, Lauterbach asserts that the "Revolutionary" reflected and reflected upon the popular movements of his time. As a result, the historian can flesh out the laconic peasant sources by setting them in the late medieval theological and legal context. Along the way, Lauterbach paints a portrait of the "Revolutionary" few scholars would recognize: incredibly well read in Roman, Canon, and German customary law, balanced and sober in the application of his reading, and well within the mainstream of medieval traditions of divine law and social justice. By comparison, Luther's two kingdoms theory seems both naive and irresponsible. Herman Haupt would not be pleased.
Andreas Schmauder's essay is entitled, "Der Arme Konrad in Württemberg und im badischen Bühl." In some ways the Arme Konrad was very close to the Bundschuh of Joß Fritz. Neither the rural Gemeinde nor the village elites provided the driving force behind the movement. Instead a trans-regional resistance movement that carefully planned a mass uprising set the goal as the destruction of the political and social order. It was therefore not merely a reaction to concrete misdeeds of the ruling classes, but rather a carefully thought-out campaign to achieve political and economic participation by the peasantry. Interestingly enough, the real enemy proved not to be Duke Ulrich, but urban elites who were intent on excluding the rural population from the councils of power. And in a way not seen in any of the other uprisings or planned revolts, the Arme Konrad proved itself politically able in its negotiations with the duke. Unfortunately the urban elites outmaneuvered the peasantry by offering Ulrich a way out of his financial troubles.
Andreas Würgler's essay, "Vom Kolbenbanner zum Saubanner. Die historiographische Entpolitisierung einer Protestaktion aus der spätmittelalterlichen Eidgenossenschaft," dismantles the historiography of a little-known Swiss occurrence, the so-called "Saubanner" of 1477. The standard Swiss histories still accept the tendentious fifteenth-century chronicles' account of a rowdy march hatched out of Fastnacht revelry by young men from the inner Swiss cantons in order to collect monies owed to the Swiss Confederation by the city of Geneva. The motley crew made it all the way to Geneva before being pacified by Geneva's payment, and free-flowing wine. In fact the urban chronicles, reflecting the interests of the proto-patriciate, completely and consciously misrepresented the entire episode, beginning with the name of the movement itself and continuing through its goals and effectiveness. All told, Würgler offers a cautionary tale concerning the sorts of documents upon which all of the other articles in this collection drew.
In Claudius Sieber-Lehmann's "'Im Hinterland rumort es'. Konflikte in eidgenössischen Stadstaaten," the author addresses himself to four conflicts from 1489 and 1513. All four shared certain characteristics. Reacting to obrigkeitliche Erlasse, the rural population marched against the cities. The city governments gave way, rescinded unpopular measures, punished a few unpopular figures, and ratified the traditional rights of the rural communities. However, the city government maintained its lordship over the rural territories surrounding the city. The peasants were satisfied with this solution, and happily little blood was shed. Downplaying the supposedly democratic character of Swiss society as more myth than reality, Sieber-Lehmann accepts that in Switzerland a greater number and variety of persons were free to express their opinions and sometimes to get their own way. On the other hand, fueled by the "pensions" paid to the upper classes by foreign powers as well as by the profits made from the mercenary trade, the power of the urban patriciate and of a centralizing early modern state in the Swiss cities continued unabated. In any event, the ruling groups in control of the city had no more sympathy for rebelling German peasants then for their own obstreperous subjects, as many unfortunate fugitives from the North would discover.
Steven Justice provides a comparative example in his essay, "The Afterlife of Late-Medieval Rebellions in France and England." Justice reviews recent literature on French and English peasant rebellions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Disagreeing with Blickle, he concludes that what once appeared as a fairly homogenous European-wide phenomenon, is now viewed as deeply rooted in local conditions and growing out of local histories. The discontinuities between rebellions in different nations highlight some unusual continuities within national borders. For example, the Parisian rebellion of 1382 may have consciously patterned itself on the Jacquerie of 1358. And Cade's Rebellion (1450) in England seems to have appealed to the tradition of the peasants' revolt of 1381, although Cade and his lot were anything but peasants themselves, in order to claim to speak for the whole community. And as with many of the German revolts, the leaders of the 1450 rebellion thought of their actions as a continuation of politics by other means.
Guy P. Marchal's "Karsthans, Bundschuh und Eidgenossen: Metaphern für den Bauern - der Bauer als Metapher" addresses the complex of issues surrounding early-sixteenth-century peasant unrest, in particular the 1513 Bundschuh, and the role of the Swiss in the political imagination of the early sixteenth century. This is a study of discourses about the peasants, not a study of the peasants themselves. Marchal pursues three: the discourse of reform drawing upon the Reformatio Sigismundi and the "Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine," the discourse of revolution explaining the 1513 Bundschuh, and a discourse of identity conducted in Switzerland in the early sixteenth century. All accepted a hierarchical vision of society, but prescribed a reversal of upper and lower. The discourses invoked three metaphors: the reform metaphor of hope, the revolutionary metaphor of menace, and the metaphor of identity. The reform discourse resulted in utopian hopes placed in the common man and accepted violence as unavoidable. The revolutionary discourse issued not from the peasants themselves, who were often silent or silenced, but from the authorities and in particular the city council of Freiburg who refused to acknowledge the actual complaints and goals of the Bundschuh and preferred to view it as a manifestation of evil spawned by an irrational and self-serving peasantry. So, rather than being the embodiment of utopian hope as in the reform discourse, the peasantry became the nightmare of the urban patriciate. The Swiss identity discourse equated the Swiss with a liberated peasantry and a commitment to the common good although in Switzerland the status of the peasantry differed only in degree from that in the Empire. The conscious misrepresentation of the 1513 Bundschuh by Freiburg reveals that the city's rulers knew they were dealing with discourses as factors that molded reality even if it did not reflect it. Hence their joy at Basel's execution of two Bundschuher since it undermined the illusory hopes that German peasants placed in Switzerland.
In his essay "Vom Bundschuh zum Bauernkrieg. Von der revolutionÀren Verschwörung zur Revolution des gemeinen Mannes," Tom Scott also appeals to the role played by an imaginary Switzerland in the hopes and aspirations of early sixteenth-century German peasants. But he adds a second motive, the evangelical peasant Karsthans as both a literary figure and a real-life pseudonym, as a bridge between Bundschuh and Peasants' War. Although the literature has tended to emphasize the novelty of the evangelical Karsthans, that is, a peasant viewed not as foolish and backward but as wise and progressive, Scott outlines the fifteenth-century development of the figure. He also argues that the live Karsthans, an early Protestant preacher among the peasantry, consciously drew upon the figure of Joß Fritz. The result was a symbolic Karsthans that joined evangelical freedom and republicanism. However, as a symbolic figure Karsthans was not in currency among the peasants themselves but rather among the learned reformers such as Zwingli and Christopher Schappeler, the Memmingen preacher who provided the religious framing to the Twelve Articles.
By contrast to the conference papers contained in the first volume under review, Thomas Adam's book on Joß is not a work directed at scholars, but rather at a literate German audience. Nonetheless, it may prove useful to scholars. Because so very little is known about Joß Fritz himself, most of the book provides context. In other words, this is very much a history of the Bundschuh. And a very good history it is, even though it lacks the footnote and apparatus that would have made it even more useful. Adam does an especially good job of making concrete the situation of the peasantry, the development of the early modern state in the German principalities, and the appeal that the Bundschuh had for the German peasants in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Were it in English, parts could be assigned to undergraduates. As it is, professors not expert in the field would profit from a reading of it. The extensive bibliographies, almost exclusively in German, will be especially useful to graduate students. The book's greatest value, however, rests in its treatment of Joß Fritz and the Bundschuh in modern historiography and literature. One can chart the ideological ebb and flow of two centuries of German history by the ways in which the revolutionary and his failed revolutions were portrayed. For it is clear that neither the man nor the movement escaped the gravitational fields of political commitment, social engagement, and debates concerning German national identity. Adam's analysis of earlier periods makes the continuing fascination of Fritz and the Bundschuh for post-1989 historians all the more intriguing.
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Citation:
R. Emmet McLaughlin. Review of Adam, Thomas, JoÖŸ Fritz--das verborgene Feuer der Revolution: Bundschuhbewegung und Bauernkrieg am Oberrhein im frÖ¼hen 16. Jahrhundert and
Blickle, Peter; Adam, Thomas, eds., Bundschuh: Untergrombach 1502, das unruhige Reich und die Revolutionierbarkeit Europas.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11188
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