Summer of Fire and Blood is the very model of a Cundill winner. That is, it is a big, widely-acclaimed narrative history on a topic both substantial and relatively neglected (at least in English), readable but deeply researched, from a distinguished professor at a leading university (Roper, an Australian, is Regius Professor at Oxford, and the first woman ever to hold that chair -- Hugh Trevor-Roper may be rolling in his grave), and published by a major press -- though in this case not actually an academic press by Basic Books).
Roper makes much of the simultaneous explosion of the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt in Germany, both of which were at fever pitch in the early 1520s. It's not quite that the reformation inspired the peasants or that the peasants inspired the reformation, but how they overlapped and influenced each other. Luther's demand that Christians be allowed to think for themselves, keep their pastors accountable, and read and pray in their own language definitely resonated with the peasants, in ways Luther, a mine owner's son and friend to many German princes, came to loathe and denounce). The peasants had issues and crises of their own that made them receptive to religious reform as well as social revolution.
Spoiler alert (and I haven't got to the end yet myself): it doesn't end well for the peasants, as pretty much always in peasant revolts.
