"Peasant Fires" by Richard Wunderli, What Is History?

When I finally did start this book of the drummer in Germany, from the start I took a shine to it. Right up front the author Richard Wunderli lets us know how he sees his subject and reveals his process transparently and in that a useful one for others who might be historians. As good as any at hand, for right now. Nice to see a good example pop up out of another random book acquisition. A friend who has no interest in the subject gave it to me when he heard I was studying the medieval/renaissance period. Lucky for me, another gem falls into my reading windscreen. It just happens that way. Here he is,

"What I am about to tell is Hans' story, but it is also about how we think about Hans and history, how we make sense of the historical forces that shaped and molded his existence.... The young shepherd boy appears to me as a roughly cut jewel on which a beam of light is concentrated: its irregular facets break up the light to illuminate the surrounding darkness in beautiful and unexpected ways.

Today we have little evidence with which to reconstruct the story of Hans Behem and his pilgrimage to Niklashausen: a few documents and scattered bits of indirect information which were prepared by people with their own peculiar notions of reality. And we have modern historians with their own assumptions about reality who try to make sense of the evidence by using reason, knowledge and imagination. Historians interpret the documents; historians interpret each other; historians interpret themselves as a factor in other interpretations.

Throughout this book I have quoted extensively from the surviving documents in order to force readers to join with me in making sense of them, that is, to become inquisitive of the documents and of my interpretations.

The process of making sense out of the past is like describing an image as seen through a series of distorted mirrors: each mirror reflects the image into another distorted mirror as each mirror reshapes ''reality.'' Out of the puzzling set of reflections and refractions, we construct an idealized, coherent picture of what happened. To change the metaphor, we construct a narrative or melody line of events, joined with analytical accents or accompaniment to give the narrative depth and texture. The narrative, then, becomes our past reality. We impose coherence on chaos." pp. 5-6.

from Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992.

Just prior to this the author explains that to study history is to want to learn what it means to be human. I agree this is a primary motivation for me and my interest in history as well. "No barriers, no preconceived notions should stop us. We must comprehend the material world of climate, disease, production, and reproduction, as well as the mental world of myth, religion, fantasy, stories, and dreams."

It all goes in the big story. They are idealized notions and have to be because our picture is incomplete and necessarily shallow. We sift and verify data and evidence, continually comparing with known and unknown contexts. Then we go back and compare again with more context and background, asking questions all the while. Then we try to tell it as a story that people might listen or look at. The names were people, their cares were human, their losses and gains were personal.

The story was that a young peasant shepherd saw a vision of the virgin Mary early in 1476 who told him to renounce his goods - a drum and flute - and go to town and tell others there what she would then inspire him to say. He does and tells the villagers to throw out their worldly goods, renounce wealth of whatever kind and then accept that all the world is God's gift for all of us. Not just the property of landlords or the state or the church. After many visitations and preaching before the people and even a call to arms, Hans Behem was captured, tortured and burnt at the stake by the authorities in July.

These seem to be the facts of the story. But as far as we can tell these facts were assembled nearly forty years after they took place. Mostly by Johann Trithemius bishop of Sponheim. This is a problem right from the start and as Professor Wunderli points out we also don't know necessarily how Trithemius assembled his info. It's great that the author is so clear about all this as he then turns to the wealth of other contextual information about those times giving example after example showing how a peasant or clergy member or bishop might see things and how their world-view was constructed. This seems difficult but here is where the author succeeds best by being plain.

The book is structured as following the holy calendar from spring to summer, like most people did in that place and time, following the festival and holy days. From Shrove Tuesday, then through Lent, Easter, the local Walpurgisknacht - a summer feast, Corpus Christi, the feast of Assumption and the feast of St Margaret. Each holiday, interrupting the constant work of spring and summer, for peasants was a welcome one. Each holiday was another step in Hans Behem's success and popularity. Each step you learn a little more about this or that aspect or inhabitant of their world. Each step is shown how different people must have had different take-away's, different understandings and different choices and responses to what they saw or heard. These in turn were interpreted differently and so on. By the end of this little book we are shown how the story of Hans Behem as a whole was explained differently at different times for different audiences. But all the while you feel pulled into that world, each local example of how they did things or saw things becomes a glimpse of another avenue to look down and explore further.

But then the book is done and I was left with a bad taste for the church officials and a greater sense of identification or even, a virtual pain precisely because the peasant is all of us who has little left to defend themselves by or with or on. Except sometimes in history.