Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen is a microhistory aimed at a general audience and published by Richard Wunderli in 1992. Wunderli examines the case of Hans Behem, a German peasant who worked as a herder and who was known for drumming and singing folk music during times of revelry. During the spring and summer of 1476, Behem claimed to have visions of the Virgin Mary, who told him to encourage pilgrims to journey to her shrine at the church in the village of Niklashausen. There he preached sermons, in which he recounted the Virgin’s message from God: that the peasants of Germany must revolt against corrupt clerics and that a new day of social equality was coming in which elite clerics and the nobility would no longer control and exploit land, resources, and peasant labor.

Wunderli uses a variety of (sometimes scant) medieval primary sources, that is, documents produced during the period. These documents include contemporary letters, town council records, and some accounts written in the decades after Behem’s execution that draw on earlier sources and surviving memory. Many of these sources are biased if not hostile toward Behem, his teachings, and the pilgrims who followed him. Wunderli also draws on anthropological studies of modern peasant cultures to better understand past practices.

Plot Summary

The long, harsh winter of 1476 negatively impacted the agricultural economy and the lives of peasants already struggling to survive. It is in this context that Hans Behem, a serf and folk musician, had his visions of the Virgin Mary. Though Behem left no surviving firsthand accounts of his mystical experiences, Wunderli uses existing sources to reconstruct what Behem’s experience might have been and to recreate sermons in which he railed against elites, both secular and religious. Peasant rebellions were not uncommon in the late Middle Ages, and the pilgrims who came to Niklashausen to hear Behem’s message were already primed for unrest. The clerics themselves recognized corruption within the Church and the necessity of reform, but their efforts, exemplified by Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg of Würzburg, maintained the Church hierarchy that Behem attempted to upend.

Wunderli reconstructs this history in eight chapters centered around important festivals in the Catholic liturgical calendar. These festivals, seasons, and feast days are important points in Behem’s movement because they were periods during which social norms were either reversed or reinforced, highlighting Behem’s anticlerical, anti-elitist message.

Though Church authorities executed Behem, he was not immediately forgotten. The Church where he had given sermons became a sacred site for the pilgrims who followed him, eventually leading the archbishop of Mainz to level it. In the years that followed, however, the Niklashausen saga grew more remote from people’s minds, the story becoming somehow both mythologized and historiographically diminished. Decades later, the church was rebuilt, and by the dawn of the Protestant Reformation, the drummer seemed a bygone fiction if not altogether lost to memory. Behem’s story is not an insignificant one, for it serves as a window into the minds of late medieval German peasants and prefigures the Reformation’s critique of clerical corruption.