Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

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 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.