On this episode of the authors of history podcast my guest is Wolfson Prize nominated author and historian Lyndal Roper.
Lyndal is a historian of early modern Europe. She grew up in Australia and did her first degree at the University of Melbourne. Since girlhood in Australia she has been fascinated by German history, and she has written on women and the Reformation, witchcraft, and sexuality in the sixteenth century.
In 2011 she became Regius Professor of History at Oxford, the first woman to hold the 300 year old post.
In 2016 she published a biography of the reformer Martin Luther.
Lyndal's book "Summer of Fire and Blood, the German peasants war" was published in 2025 and won the Cundill Prize. It has been shortlisted for the prestigious Wolfson History Prize in 2029. To write this book, she cycled or walked almost all the areas it took place, cycling over 600 km from Strasbourg to Konstanz.
Lyndal is the Holberg Laureate of 2026. won the Holberg Prize In 2016 won the Gerda Henkel Prize for lifetime achievement in history. Currently she holds a Humboldt Research Award (associated with the Free University Berlin) for research in Germany. She is honorary fellow of the History Department, University of Melbourne, fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2009), fellow of the British Academy (2011), and fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin (2016).
She also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Melbourne (2013) and the University of Basel (2021). In 2021 a portrait of Lyndal painted by Nneka Uzoigwe was hung in the dining hall of Oriel College, Oxford.
She now runs experimental workshops, ‘Moving History’, teaching critical and creative thinking in combination with physical exercise.
Lyndal recommends that we all should read Susan Peterson's book "Burn This Letter - Love and Trouble in a Marriadge of Four"
Lyndal recommends the independant book shop Book-Ish in Crickhowell in Wales (https://www.book-ish.co.uk/)
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