German Society at the Close of the Middle Ages — Context and Discussion

Folklore as Social Symptom

The chapter on folklore does not treat folk tales as quaint survivals but as evidence of a society in crisis. Bax recounts Luther's stories of changelings, devilish compacts, and witchcraft with a clinical eye. In one anecdote, a peasant drowns his own child after a voice from a brook confirms it is a changeling; Luther reportedly advised drowning such creatures, calling them 'lumps of flesh animated by the devil.' These narratives reveal a theological hardening: the old pagan spirits are recast as agents of Satan, a shift Bax links to the coming witchcraft panics. The folklore section thus functions as a diagnostic tool, showing how popular belief was reshaped by Reformation anxieties about evil and salvation.

The New Jurisprudence and Social Control

Bax devotes a chapter to the transformation of law in the period. He argues that the reception of Roman law undermined customary rights, especially for peasants, and concentrated power in territorial princes. The new jurisprudence is presented as a weapon of social discipline, replacing local arbitration with codified procedures that favored the propertied. Bax notes that legal pedantry—insistence on witnesses and evidence—was itself suspect to reformers like Luther, who believed the devil could harden suspects against torture. The chapter connects legal change directly to the grievances that exploded in 1525, grounding the Reformation's social conflicts in concrete shifts of authority.

Town and Country at the End of the Middle Ages

The relationship between urban and rural life is a recurring thread. Bax contrasts the growing autonomy of German towns with the tightening seigneurial control over the countryside. The town offered guild organization and civic rights, but also new forms of inequality; the countryside saw the erosion of common lands and the intensification of labor dues. Bax does not idealize either sphere. He notes that the Revolt of the Knighthood (1522–23) and the Peasants' War were separate but overlapping rebellions, each rooted in distinct economic pressures. The urban–rural divide, he suggests, was both a source of tension and a structural feature that shaped the failure of unified revolt.

Readers approaching this work should expect a materialist analysis that privileges economic and legal structures over personalities or doctrine. Bax's use of folklore and legal history as primary evidence gives the book an unusual texture. The volume is best read as a companion to more conventional Reformation histories, filling in the social substratum that doctrinal accounts often ignore. Those interested in the Peasants' War or the early Reformation's popular dimensions will find a detailed, if partisan, framework for understanding the period's convulsions.

Reading about the quiet unrest in late medieval German villages—the grinding economic tensions beneath the folk customs—I found myself remembering another afternoon, another book. The same shadow seemed to fall across both: the fear that shaped ordinary lives. That older, broader examination of how belief systems policed daily existence came back to me, patiently. A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume I — Story, Setting & Ideas felt like a distant, slower echo of the same human ache. I simply sat with that thought for a while.