This book presents a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen’. Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, ‘may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen’. However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next twnety-five years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation—and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation—no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549.
whole the craftsmen had no automatic right to representation on the city council. This was dominated by an 4 WITCHCRAFT NARRATIVES IN GERMANY urban patriciate which made its money chiefly from land-rents rather than trade and which became increasingly exclusive during the early modern period, particularly after 1650. The tension between the urban patriciate and craftsmen over the question of access to political power periodically reached breaking point in Rothenburg.5 This occurred most spectacularly during the Peasants’ War of 1525, when the craftsmen seized the
describes the flight up the Rhine of Tyndale and his collaborator, William Roy, to the Lutheran sanctuary of Worms where they finally completed their monumental work. Introduction 3 Cochlaeus was an eyewitness when the Diets of Nuremberg (1522–3) abrogated the Emperor’s edict suppressing the reformers and demanded a national German council. At the outbreak of the Peasants’ War in 1524–5 Cochlaeus barely escaped with his life; his account of the savagery on both sides is still harrowing. In 1526 he was present when the Diet of Speyer laid the foundation for reformed
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
Christian ruler, could choose disorder over order. The Peasants’ War gave the first indications that the danger posed by the Reformers’ teachings extended beyond religious practice. For Cochlaeus, as for other polemicists, it hardly mattered that the person they held responsible for the Reformation was not directly the instigator of the 1525 rebellion.32 Luther was widely depicted as the patron of disobedience, and his repudiation of the peasants’ insurrection seemed all the greater proof of his responsibility. And the horrific casualty figures of the Peasants’ War were only
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
dynamics of the Wat Tyler, Bundschuh or Peasants’ War were. We can as historians acknowledge their existence and try to study them without betraying our subjects; but we must also be sympathetically aware of notions of miasma and estates to make sense of what they were up to in their terms. The latter concern has come far too short in the mainstream practice of history these last sixty or so years. Then there are the complex cross
never seen or heard anything of Paulus and Barbara which would connect them with witchcraft and confirmed that the couple had behaved in a neighbourly fashion in Wettringen during the twelve years of their marriage. Since the time of the Peasants’ War (1525), however, it had been rumoured in the village that Veit and Elisabeth Brosam, and Veit’s brother Hans, were workers of sorcery.15 Leonhart Immell had once publicly accused Hans Brosam of this, but had been fined after Hans had pursued a slander suit against him successfully at the village court in Wettringen.16
of power for the councillors at this time may also have reminded them of another threatening force – that of popular discontent – to which they could hardly afford to remain impervious: the events of the Peasants’ War of 1525, when the patrician oligarchy had been ousted from government of the city on a tide of social and religious unrest, was hardly such a distant memory.32 God was the third and most powerful force with which Margaretha threatened the council. Through the threat of the dysentery epidemic if the council failed to wield the sword of justice properly
them’. 34 Harbi and Meynier (eds), FLN: Documents, 193–4, 444–6. 35 Ibid., 289–90. 36 Ibid., 425–6. 37 Ibid., 424–5. 38 Feraoun, Journal, 67–8. 39 Launay, Paysans algériens, 176, 371, 396–9. 40 Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century [1971] (London: Faber and Faber, 1973 edn), 290–2. 41 See Quandt, Revolution and Political Leadership. 42 Charrad, States and Women’s Rights, 179–82; for a similar analysis in relation to legal reform in Iraq and South Yemen, see Mervat F. Hatem, ‘Modernization, the State and the Family in Middle East Women’s Studies’, in