36 pages • 1 hour read
Richard M. WunderliPeasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Richard Wunderli, PhD
The author of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen, Wunderli is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Colorado. His first book was London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (1981). Wunderli intended Peasant Fires to be accessible to the general reading public, rather than exclusively to historians. He desired to “introduce them to late medieval Germany, to German scholarship, […] and to [his] process of thinking about history” (xi). With that goal in mind, the prose is free of overly specialized terminology, the chapters move chronologically through Behem’s life, and Wunderli includes maps at the beginning of the book for the reader’s reference.
Hans Behem
Hans Behem was a 15th-century German peasant and mystic who claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary, in which she instructed him and others to challenge social norms and the religious hierarchy of the late medieval Roman Catholic Church. Prior to his visions, Behem worked as a herder and was known for playing folk songs on a drum on the streets of Niklashausen during Carnival. He encouraged peasant-pilgrims to come to the Virgin’s shrine at Niklashausen, where he gave sermons critiquing the nobility and Church corruption. He reportedly encouraged pilgrims to kill corrupt priests and claimed a new day would arrive when the nobility worked like the peasantry and all land would be shared. His preaching garnered the attention and ire of the Church, which successfully mounted a campaign against him and his followers. Behem was eventually arrested in the summer of 1476, charged with heresy, and burned at the stake.
Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg of Würzburg
Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg was a Church reformer and one of Behem’s most significant persecutors. Church authorities elected him bishop of Würzburg in 1466, a position he held until his death in 1495. He sought to secure the diocese’s economic footing through a policy of austerity while also increasing clerical discipline and discouraging “the wild Carnival atmosphere that so often rocked Würzburg on feast and market days” (82-83). Though Behem and the bishop were adversaries, the two men “would have agreed that behind the individual actions of the supernatural beings was God’s great plan of history for the salvation and damnation of souls, carried to fruition by chosen humans” (149).
