Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reeds, a Jakubin podcast where we look in depth at political

topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn, on the Feitches editor here at Jacobin, and

I'll be presenting the show. Last year, Martin Empson joined us to speak about the German

Peasants War, Europe's biggest social revolt before the French Revolution.

Martin joins us again for this week's episode to talk about what happened next.

After the revolt was crushed, radical religious tendencies became a vehicle for social discontent.

The most famous of those tendencies was known as Anabaptism.

A group of religious radicals, inspired by Anabaptist ideas, even took power in the German town of Munster.

After the bloody repression of the Munster rebels, the very idea of Anabaptism became a sinister bogeyman for Europe's ruling classes.

Martin's book, The Time of the Harvest Has Come, Revolution, Reformation and the German Peasants

War will be published later this year.

Martin, thanks for joining us again.

The last time we were speaking, it was about the Peasants' War of 1524-25 and its aftermath.

Could you talk us through the emergence in the wake of the Peasants' War of Anabaptism as a distinct religious tendency and the general picture of what became known as

the radical reformation in countries like Germany? So anabaptism arises, I would argue, out of

two linked processes, the peasant war and the defeat of the peasants war in 1525.

And associated with that, and of course linked with that is the Reformation itself,

which had begun in 1517 with Martin Luther in Wittenberg.

And almost as soon as the Reformation started, all sorts of people began to discuss and debate what the Reformation meant for them personally, for their religious practice, and so on.

And there was a real bubbling of radical and unique religious ideas that took place.

And at the start of the Reformation, Anabaptism, as it was to become,

couldn't really be distinguished from a myriad of other radical individual

...