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Malte Griesse, Harvard/Konstanz:The "peasant war" of 1626 was one of the peaks of broad popular resistance against counter-reformation in Upper Austria (the Ländlein ob der Enns). Already in 1619 the Protestant Estates had allied with the "rebellious" Bohemians against Emperor Ferdinand II's re-catholicization efforts. Therefore, in 1620, in compensation for military assistance in the Catholic League, the country was mortgaged to the Bavarians. In the first years the Bavarian steward Adam von Herberstorff was rather popular among the population, much more than he was among the nobility. He regularized court procedure and fought corruption and nepotism, from which the landed nobility had profited in the first place, to the detriment of the commoners. Even though he was a staunch convert to Catholicism, his religious policy was rather circumspect, since he knew about the sensibilities in this region. The shift to a much more repressive policy of re-catholicization (starting in 1624) was initiated by Ferdinand II and his reformation patents. Protestant predicants were expulsed and replaced by foreign Catholic priests. Due to the dearth of priests, many of them had to be recruited from Tyrol and did not even speak German. In several villages parishioners chased them away, sometimes quite violently. In the beginning Herberstorff remained indulgent, but in Frankenburg, where several parishes had united and coordinated their actions, he decided to state an example: the so-called Frankenburg game of dice (1625). He summoned the population promising mercy. But then the village chiefs had to throw the dice and the losers were hanged, 17 altogether. This practice was drawn from martial law and demonstrated the fact that Upper Austria was under occupation. The act provoked an immediate change in popular moods. Herberstorff became the target of popular hate. For almost an entire year insurgents prepared for war, organizing recruitment and military trainings. In May 1626 the war broke out and lasted until the end of the year, with large-scale battles and heaviest losses on both sides.From the very beginning, the rebellion gave rise to an enormously rich iconography: both in print and, shortly after the end of the war, also in popular painting. In my paper I will present some general features of this visual production, compare it to accompanying textual accounts and try to draw some preliminary conclusions. I will argue 1) that the very notion of a "peasant war" was to a large extent created by the trans-regionally connected Protestant Upper Austrian nobility, who immediately promoted publications of prints in the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire and 2) that under a policy of damnatio memoriae within Upper Austria the struggles on retrospective assessments of the peasant war with respect to the crucial questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy were at least partly fought out in the realm of visuality.[audio mp3="http://revolt.hypotheses.org/files/2014/04/malte_peasant-war_schnitt.mp3"][/audio]After his studies of history and philosophy in Cologne, Volgograd, Moscow and Paris, Malte Griesse received a Ph.D. from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris in 2008. He taught in Paris (Université de Paris VIII St. Denis), was assistant professor in Bielefeld, and since 2013 he leads a research group at University of Konstanz. In his book, Communiquer, juger et agir sous Staline: La personne prise entre ses liens avec les proches et son rapport au système politico-idéologique (Peter Lang 2011), he deals with the evolution of personal ties under Stalin. Another book on the Soviet century from the perspective of a politically engaged communist family is in preparation. In his current project he is working on early modern revolts as communicative events, which is also the focus of his research group at University of Konstanz (Germany). This year 2013/14 he holds a fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, where his research group is currently working, too. He recently edited From Mutual Observation to Propaganda War: Premodern Revolts in Their Transnational Representations (2014), which has just come out.