RHN 173/2024 | Call, EURHO
Organisers: Antoni Furió (Universitat de València)
Session at Rural History 2025, 9–12 September 2025, Coimbra, Portugal
For further details please contact the organiser.
Call for Papers:
The countryside at war. Peasant revolts and struggles in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Session S13 at Rural History 2025
The year 2025 will mark the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ Wars in Germany, a historical phenomenon that has been widely highlighted and studied by historiography since the time of Karl Marx and, above all, Friedrich Engels, who devoted particular attention to it. On the other hand, the Peasants’ Wars of 1525 not only close the Middle Ages and inaugurate Early Modern Times, but also allow us to delve into their nature as either revolt or revolution. Moreover, the Peasants‘ Wars in Germany do not constitute a single, isolated episode, but are part of a cycle of popular insurrections throughout Europe, from the French jacqueries in the second half of the 14th century and the English uprising of 1381 to the remensa wars in Catalonia, the peasant struggles in Majorca, the Irmandinhas revolts in Galicia, all in the 15th century, and the Germanies of Valencia and Majorca in the first quarter of the 16th century, coeval with the Peasants’ Wars in Germany.
This session aims to explore the nature and motivations of peasant revolts and struggles in late medieval and early modern Europe, their protagonists (serfs, free peasants) and demands, based on the cases of Catalonia, Mallorca, Valencia, and the German region of Rheingau. The choice of these four observatories – but the session is open to other more –will make it possible to compare both the social composition of the insurgents and the different nature of their demands and ideology, as well as the balance of forces between the contenders, the scope of the revolt, its successes and, in most cases, its final crushing and subsequent repression.
If you wish to propose a contribution to the session, please send an email with a provisional title and a short abstract to the session organizer (antoni.furio@uv.es)
Conference Website: Call for Papers | International Conference Rural History 2025