In this episode of Drafting the Past, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian Dr. Lyndal Roper. Lyndal is a professor at the University of Oxford and the author of six books on gender, religion, witchcraft, and German history. Her newest book out this year is a history of the sixteenth-century German Peasants’ War titled Summer of Fire and Blood. The book follows the movement, beliefs, hopes, and actions of the peasants in this mass uprising. I loved the opportunity to talk with Lyndal about how she wrote about such a massive and relatively obscure event for a general audience, the way her own movement across the land shaped her work, why she prefers the screen to the handwritten page, and much more.
Mentioned in this episode
- Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War, Lyndal Roper
- Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy, Lyndal Roper
- Witch Craze: Women and Evil in Baroque Germany, Lyndal Roper
- Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, Lyndal Roper
- The Witch in the Western Imagination, Lyndal Roper
- The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg, Lyndal Roper
- Dr. Roper's first article in Past and Present, "'Evil imaginings and fantasies”’: Child-witches and the end of the Witch-craze’”
- Natalie Zemon Davis
- By Night Under the Stone Bridge, Leo Perutz
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Kate, this is drafting the past, a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host. Kate Carpenter, today I'm thrilled to be joined by historian Dr Lyndal Roper,
Lyndal Roper 0:10
thank you very much for inviting me, Kate. It's lovely to be here. Lyndal is
Kate Carpenter 0:14
a professor at the University of Oxford and the author of six books on gender, religion, witchcraft in German history. Her newest book out this year is a history of the 16th century German peasants war. It's titled Summer of Fire and Blood. The book follows the movements, beliefs, hopes and actions of the peasants in this mass uprising. I loved the opportunity to talk with Lyndal about how she wrote about such a massive and relatively obscure event for a general audience, the way her own movement across the land shaped her work, why she prefers the screen to the handwritten page. And much more, enjoy my conversation with Dr Lyndal Roper,
Lyndal Roper 0:52
I guess the first long piece of writing that I did, the first piece that I published, was an article in past and present, which is a very famous historical journal, and not one to which I ever would have submitted an article I would have been way too shy to do so. So I hadn't submitted this article, but I had given a lecture or a paper in a seminar series in London, and all the papers from that series were going to be published. So the editors were looking for a publisher that might take the collection, and every publishing house turned them down. So finally, they approached past and present and said, Well, we know you have a publishing series. Would you publish this collection which was on ritual and past and present? Said, No. But then past and present wrote to all the contributors separately, saying, Would you like to submit your article to the journal past and present. I think there were only two or three people they didn't write to. So I was one of the people. I was a graduate student. I hadn't published anything. Imagine getting a letter from past and present that says you submit your article to past and present. So of course, I did much to the fury of the editors of this collection, who, of course, now had no collection because all the essays had been asked for by the journal. So I gave this essay as a paper, and every time I would give, it would be question time, and people would say, this article seems functionalist. And I would think, Oh, functionalist. That's really bad. I know I've got to do something about that, but I couldn't work out what to do. So there I was. I had this article, then I ran out of money, and I had to apply for a junior research fellowship. I'd never been to Oxford or Cambridge, but they were the only places that were offering these fellowships. So I applied, and I got an interview, and the awful thing was, I knew I had got the interview because I could say I would be invited to submit an article for past and present. So as it happened, I got a junior research fellowship, but I still hadn't finished the article, and I knew that it wasn't okay, and I spent ages trying to fix this article, and I got writer's block, and every day I had to walk past the offices of the COVID past and present, and I knew that I couldn't write the article, and I was just dreading the day when the college would say, well, this article that You said you had coming out and past and present, it doesn't exist, and so we will ban you from the college and from Oxford. And that certainly didn't help me to write. And eventually I did finish the article, and it did come out in past and present. And then one of my friends dropped by, and I was very excited to come out, and he said, Congratulations. And then he said, but I can't work out what the argument is. And I think that's true. There isn't much of an argument in that article, but it isn't functionalist.
Kate Carpenter 4:39
How did you continue to see yourself as a writer once you got past that early episode of writer's block.
Lyndal Roper 4:45
Once I got past that, and I did find it very, very scary, I began to find it easier to write. And the thing that made the big difference for me was writing on screen. I didn't. I didn't draft on screen, but I always drafted with handwriting at that time. But for me, it was a big breakthrough not to be able to see what I had just written because I was it would I would never be happy with it, and I would get bogged down. I would get depressed. I'd be very unhappy with what I saw. And for me, the key thing was having a text that I could begin with, and then I could edit it. And if I couldn't see it, then I could write more of it, and so I had more to edit. So that's what changed things. For me.
Kate Carpenter 5:38
That's fun to hear, because often you hear about people saying, Oh, I can only, can only think if I write by hand. So it's fun to hear someone for whom the screen made a positive difference.
Lyndal Roper 5:48
It's interesting. I continued to write by hand for quite a while, and when things were very difficult, I would sometimes write in bed because I felt safe. So if I was writing something particularly adventurous I did that something that I was anxious about. The other place that helped me write was trains, because long train journeys in Germany, they're often, you know, you can spend easily eight hours in the train. And for me, that was a very helpful place to write, because I wasn't anywhere. I was between two places, and I found it easier to write there.
Kate Carpenter 6:30
Well, I'd love to know the details of how you work. So when and where do you like to do your writing? I know sometimes on trains. Are there other regular places that you write?
Lyndal Roper 6:40
I find it very helpful to go walking or running before I'm writing, so I often do that. I like to write at home, but I don't have to be at home. So I'm very happy to write in Berlin, where I am now. I think the key thing for me is very often being able to exercise and just to allow myself to free associate for a bit, and then I get ideas. I also feel happier, usually when I've done exercise. And I think actually, I've had such a terror of having another writing block that it has been very important to me to always make sure that I don't that I don't get into a situation where I'm feeling depressed and blocked.
Kate Carpenter 7:32
Do you have a daily writing routine?
Lyndal Roper 7:37
no, I write when I can, but I do have one thing that I do, which is actually something that an artist friend of mine told me to do. She said that every day she takes 10 minutes to sketch, so she goes to somewhere fun, and then that usually means going to a cafe, having a really good cup of coffee, and sketching for 10 minutes. And it doesn't matter when in the day it is so long as it happens at one point during the day. And she said, after a year, she had a whole book of sketches so that she had material that she could always go back to and draw on and I started doing this, my version of it. I found I needed slightly longer than 10 minutes. I probably needed about 20 minutes. So what I try to do is to do that at some point in the day. It's often good to do it first thing in the day, just because once the day begins, an email starts to flood in, and teaching preparation has to be done, it usually just doesn't happen. So I try to give myself a period of time where I can work, and then I work not on writing, but on a serial source of some kind. So it has to be a source where I don't have to spend a lot of time finding where I am or where I'm up to, but where I read just a little bit, and then I can free associate in relation to that, or just notice things in that bit of source material. And that was how I got through all of Luthers letters, just by doing that every day. And there are 17 volumes of Luthers letters, and I found that really helpful. And it also cheered me up as a teacher, because I was starting to get grumpy. You know how it is you think I'm spending all this time working on other people's work, and I haven't got any ideas of my own, and I just feel overwhelmed by the amount of teaching preparation I have to do, whereas if I was doing a bit of source work. Then I could think, Oh, I'm learning from this too, and what the students are saying that really helps me. And I could think about it like this. And then if you think about this issue in relation to what Luther says about his relationship to Malacca or something, then it felt like I was intellectually alive. And so I try to do that. I don't always succeed, but the plan is to do some source work and to be somewhere where I feel happy, where it's pleasurable, what I'm doing, and where it's time that that is just for me.
Kate Carpenter 10:39
How do you like to organize yourself, particularly your research, but also your drafting?
Lyndal Roper 10:44
Well, I've just finished a book on the German peasants war, and that's probably the most difficult thing I've ever had to do. It's not my strength working on material of that kind. I'm very bad at place. I'm bad at reading maths. I'm bad at having a wide view. I tend to concentrate on particular things in front of me. So I'm much better at detail. But for this, I had to think broadly. I had to think about dates and time, and I had to somehow makes sense of this profusion of information, because the German peasants war stretches right from a south so right from France, right through the whole of South Germany, going down to the border with Switzerland, and then right up To Thuringia and Saxony and right over to Austria. So it was a huge area and masses of sources and enormous amount of detail and dates and things happening at the same time in different places. So I had a huge technical problem about how to deal with that, and probably looking back, what I should have done is use a computer program to set that all out. But in the end, what I did was take an enormous piece of paper and divide that vertically by date, and then horizontally by area, so that I could see where place and time intersected. And of course, that isn't a perfect way to do things, because you're not always aware of contiguity, and because it does put a grid on it, but that was the way that I used to try and make sense of everything that was happening. And then I added dates and places into that big grid. And I had that beside me while I was working, so I was constantly looking at that and referring to it, and I blue tacked it up on the wall, and then shortly after I'd finished, the thing fell off the wall, back up. Tells me something.
Kate Carpenter 13:14
The universe letting me know that you're done. What does your revision process look like?
Lyndal Roper 13:21
Goodness, it's just going back through it again and again and again. The experience of writing this particular book, the actual writing of it, was comparatively easy. I felt a I was very lucky. I had two years in which to do it, and those two years were funded, so that was away from most of the work that I do. And I was very, very lucky to have that time. But so having written it sort of in one huge, sort of splurge, the rest of the writing experience was extremely difficult, probably the most difficult I have ever had, and so I relied on help of many, many other people. I probably had about 1011, 12 people read it, and that was really important and helpful, because my problem was that my publisher didn't like the book, my editor, so this was a shock. I hadn't been expecting that, and so I had to reshape the book. And I'm very bad at thinking in terms of shape. I find it hard to edit and very hard to create a different shape. And also I had a shape which I broadly liked and which was very important to me, and I didn't want to lose that. So my editor couldn't say what it was that was wrong with the book. He said it didn't tell. Story. It didn't have enough people in it, it wasn't vivid, and that I had to change it. So I tried to do that, and I rewrote it, I think about three or four times, and every time you said, No, you haven't rewritten that enough, until finally, I had to break the contract, and that has never happened to me before, and I found that very difficult to do, and I probably left that too late. So in the meantime, I knew that I had to have this manuscript done, and for the first in my lifetime, in my life had actually met the deadline for when a manuscript needed to be completed. I think with Luther I was something like 10 years late, but with this, I was on time, and I knew that I had to be on time because the 500th anniversary of the peasants war is being celebrated this year, and I knew that the book had to be finished in time for it to be translated, so it really had to be ready for the Germans. So the experience was very different, because on the one hand, I had this very negative response and a very slow response from my UK editor. But on the other hand, I had a very warm response from my German editor, and because I had the response from the UK editor, I didn't believe my German editor. I thought she was making it up, and so I didn't take what she said seriously. And it took me some time after I had broken the contract, to realize that actually she had been behind it from the word go, and I had been to see her before I began to write. We had a wonderful conversation on the roof of the Fisher publishing house in Frankfurt, and that was a really important conversation. And at my worst moments, knowing that she wanted the book was really important to me. And then when it came to it, it turned out that she hadn't just been saying it's fine. She had actually read what I had sent her, the same manuscript that I'd sent the UK publisher. She'd read it in detail, and she thought about it, and she didn't want me to change it as much as he changed it. But in the end, I think that the UK publisher was right about many of the things that he said. But I think that the fundamental thing that he may have wanted me to do, although he never said so, would have been a mistake. I think he wanted me to write a chronological account of the peasants war, and I knew that I couldn't do that. That's not how I work as a historian. That wouldn't have been my voice and the shape of the book would have been wrong. And the reason that I think you can't write a straightforward chronological history, or I can't, is that if one does that, you're constantly repeating the same story again and again and again, and you can't give a sense of the rhythm of the whole thing, and that's what I wanted to convey. So, yeah, that's what happened.
Kate Carpenter 18:35
Wow, that's quite a process.
Lyndal Roper 18:37
A big process
Kate Carpenter 18:39
Is Basic, as the US publisher was that a whole other contract?
Lyndal Roper 18:44
We had had a contract with basic from the word go. And the way it had originally worked was, I was working with the UK publisher, but we had that contract with basic. And basic were also fabulous, because they were sent the book, they also did not respond in the way the UK had. And they said, Well, this seems to be pretty much what she said in the proposal, which it was, and they were hugely supportive. They by this point. However, it was really quite a crisis, because I knew that the German text had to be translated. It had to be in so I'd had to give an unedited text to the Germans to translate. And that was just an absolute nightmare. I never wanted that to happen. And for a time, it seemed as though we would have two different texts, which I was really very anxious about, but I had the most extraordinary translators who I'd worked with before. Are a husband and wife team. They are really what is the word? They are perfectionist to the point that is just unbelievable. And they work very, very carefully with the text and basic were fantastic. I worked with a wonderful editor there who just did a line edit and sorted out things that needed to be put more simply. He didn't cut very much, but it's the way that that final crafting speeds things up, makes it smoother and makes it go. And that's what he did, just fantastically, and we were able to get that final text in the end, so that the translators were able to work from about chapter five on with the finalized text and then go back and just polish the earlier chapters. But it was a very strange writing experience, where a lot of the work was done in German with the Chinese natives. Wow.
Kate Carpenter 21:09
What a journey this book has taken you on. To take a closer look at the book that resulted from that journey, I asked Lyndall to read an excerpt so that we could talk about it. Here's Dr little Roper reading from the introduction to summer of fire and blood, the German peasants war.
Lyndal Roper 21:27
The key thing about the peasants war was that it was a mass movement. For too long, histories of the war have emphasized its leaders, men like Thomas munse in touring here, adopted by British Engels and then by the East German regime as a revolutionary hero to rival a reactionary Colossus, Luther. There are indeed a series of outsized characters who populated the war Goetz, vanishingen, the knight with the iron fist, who became a peasant leader after his mother in law failed to hand him his liege lord summons to fight against them, or so he later claimed in his mendacious autobiography, written in his 90s, or Florian Gaia, a noble who also led peasant armies and was finally knifed by an assassin, or the black hofmen In a peasant woman who claimed she urged on the peasant troops and rubbed the fat of the slaughtered nobles onto her shoes, or the barnyard torque, says Gael from wagborg, who led the Lord's army of the Swabian Lee and mercilessly torched rebel villages. But this was a movement, not a drama of great men, the peasant side of the story has been forgotten because they did not write it down, either because they were illiterate or because they was slain or executed in the war, the winners, the Lords and mainstream theologians, Who were the peasants enemies, instead, wrote the history. The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naive and contradictory, though historians have tried to distill the movement's ideology from the programmatic, programmatic writings of some of its leaders. This was not a revolt driven by the literate few, it was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world, to reconstruct what they did, what they said and what they wanted to achieve. The book ranges widely to follow the turbulent flows of vast numbers of people. The vision that drove them was about humans relationship to creation. They were angry that Lords claimed ownership of natural resources, the water, the common land, the woods and forests, when these were God's creation given to all. They were enraged that the Lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood. Thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free, as they put it, they were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them as individuals like the fuggers, the richest merchants in the world amassed wealth on scales never seen before. They wanted men to live as brothers in mutual obligation, and not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal nourished by bonding amongst the peasant fighters. Though this does not mean that women did did not support it too. They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment. Which God had created.
Kate Carpenter 25:03
This whole introduction. And part of the reason that I chose this excerpt is because it is just a master class in writing introductions. I think you give readers the stakes. You tell us what others have thought about this history and what you're going to present to us instead, you give us a taste of what's to come in the rest of the book, and then you even connect it to sort of present day issues and concerns, and you do all of this with such a lovely and clear voice. I love that first line of just the key thing about the German peasants war, I think introductions are very hard, especially for a more popular audience. What's your approach to writing an introduction like this?
Lyndal Roper 25:42
Well, what happened there was that I had a very long introduction in which I set out the methodology, and I can't remember what I talked about, I think was about subjectivity. And I said, Oh, you know, we have to look at the subjectivity of groups. This is problematic for this, this and this reason. And then it was actually my agent who said, look, I think this introduction isn't right, and I think this is one of the problems that we've got here. I think you need to rewrite it. What's it about? And I heard, I think, a five or 10 minute conversation with her, when I suddenly realized what the book was about. And I realized that this introduction was all wrong. I sounded like a teacher. I sounded like I was ticking people off. It wasn't the tone I wanted, and instead, I just needed to say what I thought about the Reformation. So I had to give a paper. I think it was in Cambridge. I can't remember where it was, and I remember thinking, I really care about the peasants war, but I don't know how to explain to people in the UK who mostly don't know anything about the German peasants war. It's not like in the US, where people have heard of the peasants war. It's not like Australia, where people certainly have heard of it, but in the UK, I haven't met anyone who has heard of it, except for really highly trained German historians. Even other historians haven't heard of it. And I thought, well, how do I convey that this does really matter? Because I felt like I was, I don't know things were going so badly with the book, and then it was something I cared so much about, and I thought, I have to, I have to say, Why? Why it matters. So I was so kind of wound up that I just thought I'm going to go for it. I'm just going to say what I think, and so I did, and I was thinking about the Reformation as a donut, as an event with a hole in the middle, and that hole being the peasant's wall. So I gave a paper in which I set that out. Goodness knows what they thought. They probably thought I was mad. But then I put that in the introduction and wrote it around that. And then when I went back, I thought, actually, the donut isn't right. I'm going to take that out. But that had given me the shape to think about what I wanted to say. And then I was able to do a much shorter introduction, which went to the nub of why I wanted to do it. And interestingly, my German editor didn't like that. She liked the early but in the end, we compromised, and I think there might be one paragraph more in the German edition. There is a UK one or us one.
Kate Carpenter 28:39
I this, this bit I also chose because it talks about sources, which, of course, is an interesting challenge for you in this book. How do you follow the turbulent flows of vast numbers of people, as you put it, when they aren't necessarily in traditional archives? For all the reasons you talk about here,
Lyndal Roper 28:56
How you do it is, you have to make maps. And so what I found I was doing all the time was working with Google Maps and putting in place after place after place, and just making maps for myself to see where they were going. And how you can do this is in many cases, after the war, there were criminal interrogations of people, and people had to say what they did and where they went. So I started trying to reconstruct as many of these journeys as I could, just mapping them, saving the maps, and just seeing where they went and what shape their journey took. And then there's a wonderful chronicle by somebody called hug. He really is called a as we would say. And this chronicle is written by someone in the town of filling in, and he describes the peasant armies and where. They were coming. And so using that, I was able to work out where they were on which particular day. And of course, that's a slightly different question, because the roots that an individual talk are not necessarily the roots of the whole army, and that's because people are constantly dropping out of the army and then coming back in, it's a kind of constantly turning over flow of people. So it's a different question, as to where the Army goes as a group, as to where do individuals go during the peasants war? And both questions are really important. So I did that, and then I had a student who was working on GIS mapping, and who was interested in mapping where the Sabbath takes place, the richest Sabbath, of course, the richest Sabbath never happened, but what it does tell you is how people, at the time perceived space. So this was very exciting work that he was doing, and he was using GIS, all my graduate students, all of us, started to think about mapping and to do courses in mapping. And then I was also able to work with a wonderful student who created a database of all the converts and monasteries that were destroyed. And then working with that, I was also able to get a sense of which places were attacked, when and where, and what did that look like, and what on earth must it have felt like? And so using all those little details, it is actually possible to work out the turbulent flows of people.
Kate Carpenter 31:47
What about, then, the sort of intellectual and social component of of the peasants experience of the war?
Lyndal Roper 31:54
Well, here I was very concerned not to do the approach to history that that that had car Come on, put this that had dominated much of the historiography of the peasants war, and that was to do with the fact that nothing had been written really for the last 3040, years. And what we had was a very particular historical moment. So in the West, the historiography of the peasants war was really dominated by, I would say, a post 1968 post student uprising, West German very, in many ways, very attractive and very interesting sort of slightly left wing approach to the peasants war, which was about how you showed that Germany did have a democratic tradition and a tradition of engaging in revolt. The Germans were not just obedient Prussians, and that, I think, was very much the worldview out of which a lot of that historiography came. And it is they did some wonderful things, but part of what characterized those debates on the left post 68 was about ideology and the idea that there were ideas, and it was ideas that drove revolts, and ideas were dreamed up by a great man. And so the reason why the peasants revolt failed was because it didn't have a developed ideology. So that was on the west and in the east, I think it was a similarly complicated historiography, dominated by the relationship between historians and the East German regime on the one hand, and with the Lutheran church as an opposition or force, but still part of The social structure of East Germany. So you also had different attitudes to the peasants war going on. There an idealization of Thomas Munson, some interest in social conditions, an interest in particular in mining and some good local history, but also a simplification of the movement, because they still saw it as an early bourgeois revolution, which is all very well, but where are the peasants in that? So that's also a historical a historiographical tradition, which I couldn't draw on beyond a certain point. So it seemed to me that one had to think about this differently, and I wanted to get away from the way of thinking about it as caused by the ideas of Thomas Minstrel, or caused by the theology of Thomas mince, or caused by ideas, as it were, by those who could read and write so in. Instead of talking about ideology, I wanted to talk about dream about something much less worked out, about convictions that people had, about ways of viewing the world, about religious experience, because I felt that really hadn't been taken seriously, partly because the 60 eighters saw religion as a cloak for something else, so you can't take religion seriously. It was really about law, or it was really about social conditions, and religion just legitimated all of this, and that was the role it played. I wanted to get away from that. I thought that was way too mechanistic. Nor did I want to look just at the theology of Thomas Munson. And probably the biggest shock in researching the book was that I had expected to love the writing of Thomas Munson, but when I read it, I just couldn't take it. I found it very bombastic writing. I was reminded very much of the work of Victor Kate on Nazi language and the way in which in the Third Reich, all kinds of words began to be used in particular ways, and, and, and they were, they were used in such a way that you got caught in a framework of words. And it seemed to me that this was something that months is writing hadn't been subjected to that kind of of defamiliarization, where you get to see how a writer is creating authority through words that broke no argument. And I thought you couldn't really have done that kind of thing if you had seriously engaged with the legacy of Nazi language, and of course, in the east, that that didn't seem to be something you needed to do, because the Eastern regime understood itself as the inheritor of the socialist and the communist opposition to Hitler. So I guess that was the big shock, which meant that I had to find another way of talking about muck a o
Kate Carpenter 37:33
To switch back a little to what you were saying about the importance of place and mapping in thinking about this project, I also loved reading that you cycled much of the space that you write about, and that that was really important to how you thought about writing. Can you tell me a little bit more about how biking and walking influenced the way you wrote this book?
Lyndal Roper 37:55
I could see that I needed to know the landscape. And I guess the major experience for me was the first time I went to the battlefield at frankenhausen, which is where Thomas mins was one of the leaders of the troops, and where they face the Lord's onslaught, and where we'll never Know, but six or 7000 peasants were probably slain. So it was only one of about, I don't know, 1012 battles, but it is a very important one, and it's in what is now turinia. So I thought, well, I'm going to have to look at this. So I set up from milhausen, which is where mitzvah went from he went to that Battlefield, and so I cycled the path that goes there, because I needed to get a sense of how difficult the terrain was. Was it easy to get there? Did you have to go uphill, or was it quite simple, and how long did it take? And I wanted to get an ex a sense of what it would have felt like to do that. So I cycled that got lost in the process, but did eventually get to where I was going. And the thing that is that you have to understand about the battlefield is that it's quite high, so you have the most amazing view. You can see pretty much 360 degrees around and you can see all the land that you're fighting for. And we know that shortly before the battle, a rainbow appeared around the sun, and that must have been the most phenomenal experience, because that is a very, very particular landscape, and to see a rainbow there, you would have felt that this was a divine sign. This is a message God. And I felt I could understand much more about. Battle having actually been there, and then for the rest of it, that was a lot of cycling. It just so happened that a cycling company that we'd used before offered a cycling route that unbeknown to them happened to be the root of much of the that the peasants war took from Alsace. So went through all the areas in the Alsace, or some of them, then right down through to the Black Forest, and then down to Freiburg, and then over to Constance, where the peasants revolt began. So it was wonderful to be able to cycle that and get a sense of how these areas are interconnected, to get a sense of the what the soil is like, of course, that but has changed, and the agriculture that goes on there has changed, but it hasn't completely changed. So you can still get a sense of that, and also to see how the landscape is marked by church towers, convent and monastery towers, and to be able to see where those convents and monasteries were destroyed or where the castles were burnt down. And that was also very important for getting a sense of what the war must have, must have felt like to contemporaries as an experience. And of course, the peasants war really is about marching. That's what everybody does. That's what it consists in moving from one place to another.
Kate Carpenter 41:41
I want to talk a little bit more broadly than than just this book, because I know that you are interested in teaching graduate students about writing, about thinking as historians. Why is thinking closely about writing an important part of your work?
Lyndal Roper 41:55
Well, what I want to do is to bring physical exercise, together with thinking and feeling. So what I've done is devise a series of sort of games. And so the idea is, what was concerning me particularly was that I'm very concerned about the relationship between evidence and argument, and I was noticing in my teaching that this was a real problem for many People, the relationship between an argument which students were very good at summarizing and giving to me, but they were less good at knowing what the historian had actually researched, what they'd done and what their findings were. And I'm very concerned about this because I think that with chatgpt, the relationship of the findings to the sources and the evidence is hidden. It's not clear. And I think that as teachers, we have a real duty to, if you like, burnish the tools that enable us to interrogate that relationship. Otherwise, all we have is what someone's view is what argument they're making. We don't have evidence and we're not willing to change what we think in the light of that evidence. So that was my initial concern. And I wanted to see whether, if you did exercise as a group, whether that would change how people thought. I think it does change how people think. I think it recruits, if you like, other parts of the brain. So what the point of the games is, is, is to start out with a series of conventional questions like so what I try to do is to take an intellectual process to bits. So I get one group to summarize the argument of an article and another group to summarize the evidence with no reference to the argument. So the argument group makes no reference to the evidence. And then what is very interesting is that I haven't yet had a group that was able to summarize the evidence without referring to the argument, which I found very, very interesting. And then we bring the two together, and we see how they match. So that's the game that I start out with. And then I try and go a little bit. Other than that, and I try and get people to talk about what color they would associate with an article. I thought, What a stupid thing to ask people. I really didn't ask them. But then, to my astonishment, with one article that everybody read, most people associated the same color with it, and I realized it is actually a very interesting question to ask, because it brings other aspects of people's response to a piece of writing into the conversation. So I have little games like that. Then we work on source material, where it's not about, how are you going to analyze this piece of source material, but it's how many different ways could you think of that you could analyze this bit of source material? So then we have with that. So it's trying to devise a series of games that, or activities, if you like, that involve thinking analytically, but then move towards thinking originally, so that, because I think that originality is something that you can teach people, and you can do that through just developing intellectual techniques like comparison and contrast, like thinking about the relationship between evidence and argument, like thinking about what happens if you apply the argument of one writer to the material of another, that's another very fun game. So there are a whole series of intellectual techniques that can be used to move towards thinking originally. And again, I think this is really important because of the development of AI and the need to keep human originality and creativity part of what we do.
Kate Carpenter 46:54
You have fortunate students, it sounds like
Lyndal Roper 46:56
Oh I think I'm the one who's fortunate because they're willing to put up with this and to do the exercises, which must be very annoying, but it's great fun, and we all learn a lot from
Kate Carpenter 47:09
Well, in the last bit of time I have, I'd like to ask you a bit about your own inspirations. Are there writers or specific books that you turn to for inspiration for writing?
Lyndal Roper 47:19
I would say that the historian who influenced me most would be Natalie Zemon Davis, because she is a brilliant writer, and because she showed that history didn't have to be about big narratives. It could be about people. It could be something that involved the use of historical imagination. And by that, I don't mean making things up, but it's a capacity to think through the implications of small bits of evidence and to think them through in a very disciplined and coherent way, using all that you know about a society. And I think her work has been really inspirational to me, and I'm sure to many others of my generation. So she has been a huge influence with this particular book. There were other things I read and saw that were a big impression, made a big impression on me. I spent a lot of time going to art galleries wherever I am, because I find the visual really helpful just just to think about past cultures. So the thing that really gave me a shape for the whole book was the panorama by Werner Tübke. Was an East German artist who did a sort of magical historical realism, and I came to know his work through the man who supervised my work as a student and who really inspired me to go on, Charles Zika. And I remember seeing the first work of Tubke I ever saw in the National Gallery in Berlin, when Charles happened to be visiting and I saw it with him. I saw it through his eyes. And then what Tubke did was to do this massive panorama. It's the biggest painting, or was the biggest painting in the world, 14 meters a high, 123 meters long. And that is done. It's a representation of the whole of the peasants war. And it's done through the seasons, and that was what made me think, this is how I have to present the peasants walk, because there is something that's really important here. So my seasons are slightly different from his, but that certainly inspired me and gave me a sense that. Of the shifting mood and the seasonality of the war that was very, very important to me. The other thing that I read again recommended by a friend of mine, who has written a magnificent book about millhares and Thomas Munzer, and who was the director of the museums in nor arse. This is Thomas Muller, and he recommended a book by Leo Perutz Nacht AR Steinen and Bucha. So it's Leo Perutz, and I don't know what it would be called in English. It's something like at night under the stone bridge. And this is a book that he began, I think, in the 1930s didn't finish until the 1950s it is a collection of short stories at one level, set in 16th century Prague, but another level, all those stories fit together, and it is really a lament for A whole Lost World of the Prague ghetto and of Prague, and it is an incredibly moving collection of story. And I found it very, very inspiring to read, because what he's able to do is to weave in centuries of Jewish storytelling and of Prague and of different viewpoints of different people of all different social ranks into one whole which somehow manages to be true To the very different perspectives that everybody has, and I found that just fabulous as a as a way of trying to write about a complex society.
Kate Carpenter 51:53
What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
Lyndal Roper 51:55
Cut! My closest friend reads all of what I write. My husband also reads it, and over the years, I still find it very difficult, but I try not to use jargon. I try always to use active prose wherever possible, and I try to simplify and wherever possible, cut, cut the amount of words, cut the paragraphs that are just and have that awful school, school mommy tone, which I don't like and which I often fall into. So yes, it's it's been about learning how to distill that fewer words is better than more.
Kate Carpenter 52:46
I am glad for your words. I feel deeply unfair asking this, as I often do when someone has just published a new book. But are you looking ahead to anything? Are you giving yourself a break for a bit?
Lyndal Roper 52:58
I don't know the shape of what I'm going to write next, but I think it is about memory and the peasants war, and it's about particular places. So I had this extraordinary experience of going up a tower in haip one, and this tower has a spiral staircase on the outside. Tourists can't go up this you have to make special appointments, and going up this tower is a really quite deep experience, because I don't know whether you've been up a church tower or whether you've been up a spiral staircase that is on the outside of a tower. But believe you me, it is terrifying. So you go up this tower, and then you reach the point where you have to cross to the tower itself. The spiral staircase is on the outside, but there's probably about, I don't know, six inches where it joins, and you have to step across and there's nothing on the other side, so you're still not up. The tower is still quite a way to go, and there would be so much to say about this particular tower. And the reason why I'm obsessed with it is that it was begun before the peasants war, but it was finished in 1529 at the same time as it was just four years after the war, and the town was involved in a huge court case to argue that it had never been involved in the peasants war, when, of course, it had been, if it's one brotherhood with the peasants. So this tower is full of the most disgusting anti clerical sculptures. It's really quite extraordinary as a tower. And I think that there's something there about contested memory, about the fact that you can't see. Eat all these anti clerical sculptures from the ground. But of course, God can see them, and I just really want to understand that power. And in the end, all of it will remain questions I can't settle it one way or the other. Fascinatingly, the monument was re erected after the Second World War and rebuilt because the harboroners knew how important it was. They could have put it in the museum, but they didn't, and I think that's because they knew that the experience of going up the tower is crucial. It's not something where you understand it if you just look at the sculptures. So that's one of the things that I want to write about. But there are a whole series of things that I came across as I was cycling and going to these various sites in the peasant war, and I always wanted to look for any any traces that the peasants war had left in terms of memory, mostly, there aren't many traces. But it seemed to me that an event that was so traumatic must have left some hidden traces, and so that's what I was looking for. And what I found is a complex culture of remembrance that goes right up to now. I found a lot of interesting things from 1960s 1970s West Germany, even 1980s then different things after Germany is reunited, all kinds of different ways of remembering the peasants war and slotting it into people's own understanding of what Germany is and where the peasants war fits into that, and that's what I want to write about. But I don't quite know what shape that's going to take, and maybe I don't know. I've been a historian for so long, and I've written in a conventional way, but I wonder whether this time, I might be able to write in a way that's freer and is more about place and is more about experience and things that you can't necessarily put into words in the form of argument, but which you just have to show.
Kate Carpenter 57:28
I cannot wait to see what you do with it. Dr Lyndal Roper, thank you so much for joining me on drafting the past. It's been such a pleasure to hear about your writing process.
Lyndal Roper 57:37
Thank you very much. It's been really helpful to me to be able to talk about it. So thank you for such a wonderful podcast.
Kate Carpenter 57:46
Thanks for joining us for this episode of drafting the past. Don't forget to visit drafting the past.com for links to Lyndal's books and everything we talked about in this episode. There. You can also sign up for the newsletter, learn how to support the podcast and check out past episodes until next time. Remember that Friends don't let friends write boring history.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
