Last week, Australian historian Lyndal Roper FAHA was awarded the Holberg Prize for 2026, one of the largest international prizes awarded annually to an outstanding researcher in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology. This highly prestigious prize is worth 6 million Norwegian kroner or almost AUD $900,000.
The Prize described Roper as “pioneering” the study of German history, women’s history and “how gender, the body, psyche and power operated in social and religious conflicts of the sixteenth century.”
So, who is this scholar who has won what is considered to be equivalent to a Nobel Prize? And what does her research tell us about the past, and ourselves?
Australian beginnings
Born in Melbourne, Lyndal Roper received her initial training in history (as well as philosophy) while completing a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) at the University of Melbourne, where she specialised in the German Reformation.
In 1978, Roper left Australia to do postgraduate research at the University of Tübingen in Germany on a German Academic Exchange Scholarship. Roper was immediately taken with Germany — German history would become the focus of much of her scholarship — and she would remain in Europe for the rest of her career.
Despite her time overseas, in an ABC interview in 2017, Roper described herself as “a Melbourne girl”, and she has continued to maintain close links with Australia and the Australian academic community.
She completed her doctoral thesis at King’s College, University of London in 1985. Her dissertation on women and morals in Reformation Augsburg was supervised by an Australian, Bob Scribner, originally from the University of Sydney and fast becoming a leading new light in German Reformation research.
Scribner’s historical approach which focused on social and cultural history and involved close attention to popular practice, the critical role of gender, and attention to visual as well as textual forms of communication and propaganda was clearly attractive to a young Lyndal Roper.
It formed the basis of her first book, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (1989), which highlighted that while the Reformation may have brought progressive reform for men, women were subjected to a moral crusade that restricted their social and economic positions.
A clear theme across Roper’s work is her sensitivity to human experience. Her work proposes taking seriously how our bodies, emotions, childhood experiences and relationships form the person, and so influence wider behaviours and social action.
Lyndal Roper held numerous positions across the United Kingdom, and has been critical to ensuring the visibility and viability of gender in historical work. She established, with Amanda Vickery, the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she was made Professor in 1999.
In 2002 she moved to Balliol College, Oxford, and in 2011 was appointed the first female Regius Professor at Oriel College Oxford.
Witches, witch hunts & the Reformation
In the 1990s, Roper’s research turned more to exploring the role of the body, fantasy and dreams, and the emotional and psychic worlds of early modern Europe. Some of these interests may have been seeded in her earlier family experiences. Her mother, Ailsa Roper, was a teacher and lecturer at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education and had a strong interest in psycho-drama.
Such issues came to life over a decade and more through the publication of Dreams and History (2003) and three acclaimed books exploring the phenomenon of the witchhunt in early modern Germany: Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994); Witchcraze: terror and fantasy in baroque Germany (2004); Witchcraft and the Western Imagination (2012). In these books she analysed hundreds of trial records from southern Germany, demonstrating how fear, fertility, motherhood and aging underpinned accusations of witchcraft, and continue to shape our understandings of the “witch”. In the last she also explored visual representations to consider the symbolic power of this female figure and how it shaped the hearts and minds of its viewers.
But topics that were traditionally more central to the Reformation story were never far away. In works such as and Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy (2021), Roper considered Luther’s carefully crafting of his own image, the contrast between his fat or stout presence and the more ascetic thin body of his fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon, how he projected the idea of authority, and his use of florid and even vulgar language as a tool of a certain kind of self and public performance.
Roper also explores Luther’s own experience of his feeling body, and its relation to his views about sexuality, perspectives on women’s role in society, and the implications of his complex personality for the Reformation that followed and its consequences for European society.
Roper’s biography of Luther, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (2016), was preceded by a widely discussed article in the American Historical Review, “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and His Biographers” and a short booklet in German, Der feiste Doktor (2012). This widely celebrated 2016 book was commended for the virtuosity of its archival research, its elegant style and nuanced insights into a complex subject.
Shining a light on forgotten history
This work was followed by the highly acclaimed Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (2025), which won the prestigious Cundill History Prize.
In describing the key purpose of her work, Roper told the Holberg Committee: “Over the course of my career, I’ve been trying to do history from below, that is, I wanted a history that would include the voices of ordinary people, of all kinds, colours and classes, and of women in particular. I wanted new historical narratives that were not about great men and giant events.”
Summer of Fire and Blood represented a spectacular study of the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution, though it is far less known than the latter. Roper’s scholarship brought the enormity of the German Peasant’s War, which led to the deaths of possibly 100,000 peasants and farmers, into focus. The uprising has been a fraught topic in Reformation scholarship because of the continuing divisions between East and West Germany both before and after unification in 1989-91.
Uniquely, the book is told through the voices of the peasants themselves, detailing their experiences and emotions as a small movement grew to a fever pitch, demanding a new and more egalitarian order.
In the foreword of the book, Roper states, “the peasants’ story matters. It can help us see new answers to questions that confront us today. It also discloses a radical Reformation, whose theological, social and political vision could have taken history in a very different direction. This is the Reformation we have lost sight of, and this is why we need to understand what drove the peasants. For what mattered to them also matters to us.”
The notion of brotherhood among peasants was a critical element of the research, as was a 600+ km bike ride through Germany undertaken by Roper that mirrored the pace and movement of the peasants and their uprising, and allowed Roper to view the battle scars — from crumbling tower foundations to evidence of dug-out trenches.
Roper’s scholarship was also influential in Australia, not least informing scholarship under the banner of what would become known as ‘the History of Emotions’. She was on the Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011-2022) and worked closely with the Centre as its scholars became international leaders in the study of emotions as historically and culturally specific phenomena. These relationships have continued and remain productive.
Lyndal is an imaginative and exciting scholar, whose work amplifies the voices, experiences and emotions of the everyday person — young and old, woman or man — throughout major changes in European history.
