In Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, Samuel Cohn ambitiously and persuasively takes on almost every venerable historiographical assumption about mass revolt in medieval Europe. The book asks similar questions about the nature and identity of collective working-class action raised in his earlier works, notably The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence and Creating the Florentine State (New York, 1980), but it substantially expands the temporal and geographical scope of analysis. In earlier works, Cohn used medieval and Renaissance Florence as a case study to test and investigate larger questions, but now he tackles the broadly conceived issue of social protest throughout western Europe, and he has cast his net as widely as possible for a single historian without a research team.

The second subtitle of the book—Italy, France, and Flanders—belies its range. Cohn's central data concerns those three countries, but we are never far from comparative reflection on England, Spain, and Bohemia as well. Cohn samples archival data from criminal and judicial records in his primary regions, but the real backbone of the book is a careful, detailed, and against-the-grain reading of the abundant chronicle tradition, and one of its most impressive accomplishments is the revelation of how fruitfully such sources can be used to answer questions not directly addressed in their primary narratives.

The book is structured thematically, rather than chronologically or geographically. Each of the book's ten chapters grows out of the same pan-European sources but examines them from a different perspective and with a different set of questions. A few broad arguments apply generally to all the chapters. First and foremost, in each chapter Cohn consistently demonstrates that popular uprisings and revolts in preindustrial Europe were frequent and frequently successful. Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and George Rudé, among others, had all influentially argued that collective social and political protest before industrialization was rare and almost invariably brutally repressed. Their arguments were based on the three biggest social revolts of the Middle Ages: the French Jacquerie of 1358, the Florentine Ciompi revolt of 1378, and the English Uprising of 1381. These revolts ultimately all failed, either like the Jacquerie through brutal suppression after initial success or like the Ciompi through gradual political dismantling of its achievements. Not Hobsbawm nor Thompson nor Rudé were medievalists with detailed knowledge of more minor and local uprisings, however, and hence they extrapolated from what Cohn calls the “big three” (2). Cohn's survey of smaller rebellions, uprisings, and revolts in Flanders, France, and Italy shows that collective protest was a chronic condition of late medieval history and one that equally often ended on terms favorable to the working and laboring classes.

The core arguments unfold in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 addresses the frequency and character of peasant revolts. Contrary to James Scott, who argued that in preindustrial societies open and formal political protest tended to be the preserve of the aristocracies and prosperous members of the middle class, Cohn argues that peasant revolts were frequent, widespread, and possessed of a politically charged sense of purpose and resolve. Cohn found that the English peasant revolt of 1381 was somewhat anomalous: most of the Continental peasant revolts, unlike their famous English counterpart, were not motivated by economic issues and did not take the form of revolt against landlords. Though there was often an economic dimension, the crucial catalyst and principal issues were usually political—for one frequent example, peasants would often side with local lords to fight against jurisdictional and political encroachment by neighboring city-states.

In chapter 3, Cohn arrives at similar conclusions regarding urban revolts, which account for over 90 percent of medieval popular revolts. Here, too, Cohn challenges the widespread notion that economic issues—most notably, grain scarcity and subsistence crises—were the spark that ignited urban protest. Such issues certainly mattered, but Cohn's survey persuasively suggests that they mattered considerably less than more fundamentally political issues. Where revolt did occur in the name of equitable grain distribution, it was often used symbolically by relatively privileged corporate groups like students and clerics to embarrass and weaken their city-state government. Most frequently, urban revolts, riots, and insurrections pursued political goals, such as protection against the violent rule of aristocracies and the corruption of merchant oligarchies. The urban laboring classes usually pressed for political inclusion, such as the recognition of minor guilds in Florence or the granting of full citizenship rights to weavers and fullers in Flanders.

The remaining chapters consider the varieties of revolt, the identity of the leaders, the role of women, the relative value of symbols and words as catalysts of revolt, and connections between separate but roughly contemporaneous revolts. The most common type of revolt was the urban revolt in which a laboring corporate body attacked its ruling oligarchy, but Cohn also surveys revolts against royal power, the papacy, and the Holy Roman Empire, colonial revolts, tax revolts, revolts of children and adolescents, religious protests, and peace movements. On the subject of the leaders of rebellions, Cohn disputes the claim that peasants' and workers' revolts typically relied on the organizational ability, martial skill, and rhetorical eloquence of more privileged class outsiders from the bourgeoisie, clergy, and nobility. The big three give this impression, but in the far more frequent smaller revolts that Cohn surveys, peasants, artisans, and workers—urban and rural—were the leaders of their own protests, making speeches, organizing elections, drafting lists of aims, and the like. On the subject of women and ideology, Cohn disputes the argument that women predominated in the crowds of medieval revolts, most of which were reactionary, a view that Cohn shows grew out of the misconception that most popular revolts centered on grain scarcity and other “matters of the hearth” (130). Medieval social revolts were considerably more complex, and hence their social and gender composition was more complex as well.

At the broadest level, Cohn is advancing an argument similar to that advanced in his Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999), namely, that popular, working-class protest should be seen as a central protagonist in the narrative of European state building. Most theorists of European state building have characterized the European peasantry as either a static or a retrograde force in the gradual emergence of centralized, bureaucratic nation-states, but Cohn provocatively and persuasively suggests that the sixteenth-century turn toward centralization and absolutism had at least as much to do with the dynamism and political pugnacity of the bottom rung of western Europe's social ladder as it did with dynastic wars and the rapid and costly transformation of military technology.

In addition, Cohn has demanded that historians rethink the fundamental characteristics of European peasantry and laboring classes. The sharp divide between material and ideological forces in history that many of the Marxist-inspired social historians of the 1960s and 1970s held still predominates on this subject. In their view, the European peasantry tended to be prepolitical, a proletariat-in-waiting that concerned itself with economic survival but had little political consciousness beyond questions of manorial dues, rents, and land rights. Cohn's working classes, however, seem to be moved by questions of politics and justice first and economics second. They protested frequently, they protested successfully, and they protested for political rights and for political recognition.

Lust for Liberty will certainly be the point of departure for all future studies of protest and social revolt in premodern Europe. Some historians will no doubt disagree with various points in Cohn's reading of the chronicle tradition, but I suspect few will dispute Cohn's larger challenge to consider and incorporate working-class protest into the larger European political narrative of state building and the political ideologies—communal, republican, and royal—that accompanied that narrative.