Title: Armed memory : agency and peasant revolts in Central and Southern Europe (1450-1700) /
Authors: Erdélyi, Gabriella,; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Year: 2016
Subjects: Peasant uprisings Europe History Congresses.; Revolutions Europe History Congresses.; Europe Social conditions Congresses.; Europe Social conditions Congresses.; Europe Social conditions Congresses.; Europe History Congresses.
Abstract: The edited volume aims to re-contextualize revolts in early modern Central and Southern Europe (Hungary, Croatia, Czech Lands, Austria, Germany, Italy) by adopting the interdisciplinary and comparative methods of social and cultural history. Instead of structural explanations like the model of state-building versus popular resistance, it wishes to put back the peasants themselves to the historical narratives of revolts. Peasants appear in the book as active agents fighting or bargaining for freedom, which was a practical issue for them. Nonetheless, the language of lord-peasant negotiation was that of religion, just as official punishments used Christian symbols. The approach of revolts as the events of collective violence also highlights the experiences and memories of participants. How did individuals and groups use remembering and forgetting as a means of forging an identity for themselves? Instead of the narratives of the powerful that became the normative stories of history, the perspective of the rebels uncovers the everyday faces of revolts more forcibly. Finally, contributors examine how later narrators used the rebels for their own purposes, in other words the subsequent representation of the revolts and their leaders in image, literature and historiography comes to the fore. The volume aims to overcome disciplinary boundaries by bringing together historians and scholars of related disciplines including the history of literature, the visual arts and anthropology. The central contention of the volume the cultural imprint of peasant revolts is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.--
Contents: Part I. Revolt territories: European and transnational contexts. Revolten in Europa 1200-1800 / Peter Blickle -- The other way: negotiating freedom in a Gutsherrschaft country, the Kingdom of Hungary, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Katalin Péter -- In search of the Italian "common man": rethinking the 1462 peasant uprising in the territory of Piacenza / Marco Gentile -- Part II. Utopia and vision: religious radicalism. Institutionalisierte Rebellion: Aufsässige Praktiken der Hutterischen Täufer in Mähren / Martin Rothkegel -- Falsorum fratrum rebellio: Jenő Szűcs's essays on the peasant revolt of György Dózsa 40 years later / Pál Ács -- Bund, Bundschuh, Verbundenheit: Radikales Gemeinschaftsprinzip in der frühen Reformation Ungarns / Zoltán Csepregi -- Part III. Unfinished pasts: early modern narratives of revolts. Ambiguity and paradox in the humanistic literature of the Jagiellonian Age / Farkas Gábor Kiss --^