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Title page of the Memmingen Articles of War, March 1525. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

During the German Peasants’ War of 1524–26, the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution, hundreds of convents and monasteries were plundered, seized, and even destroyed. The Peasants’ War was driven by the intense anticlericalism of the early Reformation, and in particular by a hatred of monastic institutions. Convents and monasteries became key strategic and symbolic targets for peasant bands who drank their cellars dry, stole their livestock and in one case even performed a mock mass.

Despite centuries of research – beginning with contemporary chroniclers who attempted to catalogue the devastation around them – no one has yet produced a comprehensive list of religious institutions affected by the Peasants’ War, let alone mapped them. Now, advances in digital humanities methods have made such a map possible – and the results are highly significant.

This project, undertaken by Louisa Bergold, Charlotte Gauthier, Lyndal Roper and Edmund Wareham Wanitzek, is the first-ever attempt to quantify and map the full destruction of monastic houses during the revolt.

The project was launched at the Society for Renaissance Studies conference in Bristol in July 2025. Additional research outputs will be added to this site as they become available.