The Rise and Fall of Anabaptism in Munster

Last year, Martin Empson joined Long Reads to speak about the German Peasants’ War, Europe’s biggest social revolt before the French Revolution. Martin returns 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 Münster. 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.

Read Martin’s Jacobin article, “Anabaptism Was the Revolutionary Face of Reformation Europe,” here: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/anabaptism-reformation-europe-peasants-revolution

Long Reads is a Jacobin podcast looking in-depth at political topics and thinkers, both contemporary and historical, with the magazine’s longform writers. Hosted by features editor Daniel Finn. Produced by Conor Gillies with music by Knxwledge.