“You plan to read two books and type out a review of each in twenty-five minutes?”

“Read?” Tony stopped typing long enough to give me a look of honest indignation. “Nobody reads these things. Don’t be silly.”

He started typing again.

I picked up the nearest book and glanced at it.

“I see what you mean,” I admitted.

All the books were inches thick; I don’t know why scholars judge accomplishment by weight instead of content. This one was the heaviest of the lot, and its title, in German, was also ponderous.

“The Peasants’ Revolt: A Discussion of the Events of 1525 in Franconia, and the Effects of the Reformation,” I translated. “Is it any good?”

“How would I know? I haven’t seen that one yet.”

Tony went on typing. Casually I began leafing through the book. Scholarly prose is generally poor, and scholarly German prose is worse. But the author had gotten hold of some new material—contemporary letters and diaries. Also, the subject interested me.

In recent years, students have done a lot of complaining about “relevance.” No one can quarrel with the basic idea: that education should have something to do with real life and its problems. The trouble comes when you try to define the word. What is relevant? Not history, according to the more radical critics. Who cares what happened in ancient Babylon or medieval England? It’s now that counts.

They couldn’t be more wrong. Everything has happened before—not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called “the lessons of history,” but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.

Social upheaval and revolution are old issues, as old as society itself. The Peasants’ Revolt, in the southern and western provinces of Germany, is not one of the better-known revolutions, but it has some interesting parallels with our own times. The peasants are always revolting, says the old joke. It’s a sick old joke. The peasants had plenty to revolt about. There had been many rebellions, by groups driven to desperation by conditions that make modern slums look like Shangri-La, but in the sixteenth century social discontent and misery found a focus. The focus was a real rebel—a renegade monk who called the Pope bad names and loudly proclaimed the abuses of the Establishment. He even married an ex-nun, whom his bad example had seduced from her vows. His name was Martin Luther.

Although his teachings gave the malcontents a mystique, Luther was against violence. “No insurrection is ever right, whatever the cause.” And, in the crude style which was typical of the man at times, “A rebel is not worth answering with arguments, for he does not accept them. The answer for such mouths is a fist that brings blood to the nose.”