Peasant Politics in Early Modern Europe. A Review Article

Abstract

In the past decade there has been a remarkable efflorescence of studies on the peasantry of central Europe in the early modern period. The upsurge of interest was signalled, not as is commonly assumed by the celebration of the 450th anniversary of the German Peasants' War in 1975, but in a 1972 conference held in Budapest to commemorate the 500th birthday of Gy6rgy Dozsa, the leader of the 1514 Dozsa revolt in Hungary. More than fifty scholars from ten countries gave papers on various aspects of east-central European peasant movements in a time span from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. It would have caused no surprise in 1972 that the bulk of the contributions came from Eastern European scholars, especially the Hungarians, with only one participant each from France, Austria, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Peasant studies were a matter of interest largely to Marxian scholars or to the French, and few West German historians were willing to devote their attention to them. For a whole generation following World War II, the only West German scholars with an international reputation in this field were Wilhelm Abel and Giinther Franz.