Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants’ War at 500 years

The year 2025 marks the five hundredth anniversary of the end of the German Peasants’ War. This special issue addresses the conflict’s variegated and still-evolving inheritance, with a focus on Thomas Müntzer’s significance for the past, present, and future. Bringing together new essays from an international group of scholars, seminal accounts of Müntzer that appear here for the first time in English, and excerpts from a recent award-winning novelization of his life, it provides a timely treatment of this enigmatic yet hugely consequential figure, the battles he fought, and the complicated legacy of his time and place.

Contributors: Ernst Bloch, Loren Goldman, Andrea Messner, Anne Norton, O. L. Silverman, Massimilano Tomba, Éric Vuillard, Alejandro Zorzin