A saga that ended with the rebel preacher Thomas Müntzer beneath an executioner’s axe in Mühlhausen on May 27, 1525, began not with his radical Protestant preaching or his apocalyptic visions, but rather a year before with snails.
Helix pomatia, better known as the Burgundy snail, is common throughout Europe and found in the town of Stühlingen just below the Black Forest. Among other uses, it is prized for its large, brownish-cream-colored spiral shell that can be useful as a thread spool.
During the notoriously difficult harvest of 1524, when inclement weather had caused disastrous crop failures throughout the Holy Roman Empire, the countess of Lupfen ordered over a thousand of her serfs to cease working their fields so as to collect snail shells to be used as spools in her estate.
In feudal Europe, the serfs were only a step up in the great chain of being from actual possessions, so what the countess willed, the peasants had to abide. But Müntzer had imagined a different creed, that ancient command of “Omnia sunt communia” — the notion that “All property shall be held in common.”
Already at risk of starvation, the peasants couldn’t quit their farm labor to gather trifles, so they didn’t. It was the first volley in Müntzer’s revolution. The example of the humble snail shows us that the origins of the rebellion lay in the basest of material realities, for all of the debates about the role of the Protestant Reformation in general and Müntzer’s antinomian gospel in particular.
This small refusal was the beginning of what became…
Auteur: Ed Simon
