Emeritus Regius Professor of History wins Cundill History Prize

Professor Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War has won the Cundill History Prize for her “sensational” account of the German Peasants’ War of 1525. The prize, which is administered by McGill University, claims the largest cash award for a non-fiction book written in English.

Roper was the Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford until September, when she retired. She was appointed to the 300-year old History chair in 2011 and has published books about Martin Luther and witchcraft, receiving numerous recognitions such as the Gerda Henkel Prize in 2016.

As the Regius Professor in History Roper has also been a member of Oriel College, as has been the case for holders of the chair since the English constitutional historian William Stubbs was appointed in 1866. She is the first Regius Professor in History who is a woman at either Oxford or Cambridge University.

The announcement that Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood won the Cundill History Prize was made at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal in the company of the other finalists and members of the jury.

The book is the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation. Ada Ferrer, the chair of the jury and the Dayton-Stocker Professor of History at Princeton University, said that Roper’s work is a “gripping history of … the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution’.

She added: “At the centre of her history are the peasants themselves. Roper traces the emergence, unfolding and eventual undoing of the rebellion and offers a vivid and compelling portrait of the peasants’ world.”

The other 2025 finalists were Marlene Daut, a professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University, and Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.