October 31st 2025 in News

Lyndal Roper wins 2025 Cundill History Prize for Summer of Fire and Blood

Lyndal Roper has won the 2025 US$75,000 Cundill History Prize for Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. (John Murray Press / Basic Books).

The announcement was made at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, where the prize is administered by McGill University.

The 2025 Cundill jurors awarded the prize to Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, for her “sensational” account of the sixteenth-century uprising that shook Europe to its core. The first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, and told through the voices of the peasants themselves, Summer of Fire and Blood uncovers the far-reaching ramifications of this doomed rebellion. Though the victors portrayed the uprising as naive and chaotic, Roper instead reveals a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical principles of the Protestant Reformation. Her deeply researched account shows that the uprising was one that expressed early ideas of justice, communal decision-making, and resistance to arbitrary power.

The announcement was made this evening at a gala dinner in Montreal by Chair of the Jury Ada Ferrer, in the company of the 2025 finalists and jury members. Fellow finalists, Marlene L. Daut and Sophia Rosenfeld, will each be awarded US$10,000.

2025 Chair of the Jury, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University and 2022 Cundill History Prize finalist, Ada Ferrer, said: “Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood is a gripping history of the German peasant rebellions of 1524-1525, the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. 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. Through this lens, she delivers a history of the Reformation from the ground up—as it was lived and understood by the ordinary people, who often interpreted its message as far more radical than envisioned by its architects. Her analysis is stunning and multifaceted, seamlessly weaving together cultural, intellectual, social, economic and religious history into a rich and engaging narrative."

Lisa Shapiro, Dean of the Faculty of the Arts at McGill, said: “2025 has been another exceptional year for the Cundill History Prize, with a record number of submissions and a highly competitive longlist and shortlist. Jurors with a true range of expertise deliberated carefully to arrive at our three superb finalists. Each of these books showcases the craft of historical scholarship and the compelling communication of a story of consequence to us in the present, and they represent the very best in history writing across the world today. It has been a pleasure to celebrate all three writers at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal this week, and we hope their work will inspire the next generation of historians, including our students here at McGill. Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood stands as a remarkable embodiment of the prize’s criteria: it is not only an outstanding achievement in historical scholarship, but it also engages the reader and dramatically reclaims one of the most significant but neglected revolts in European history. We at McGill offer her our heartfelt congratulations.”

Lyndal Roper is Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, and the first woman to hold the Regius Chair in History, and the first Australian. One of the most respected historians at work in Britain today, her previous books include Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet and Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. She is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. She lives in Oxford, South Wales and Berlin.

Lyndal Roper joins an exceptional alumni list of world-class historians: Kathleen DuVal (2024) Tania Branigan (2023), Tiya Miles (2022), Marjoleine Kars (2021), Camilla Townsend (2020), Julia Lovell (2019), Maya Jasanoff (2018), Daniel Beer (2017), Thomas W. Laqueur (2016), Susan Pedersen (2015), Gary Bass (2014), Anne Applebaum (2013), Stephen Platt (2012), Sergio Luzzatto (2011), Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010), Lisa Jardine (2009), Stuart B. Schwartz (2008).

The Cundill History Prize is the largest purse for a book of non-fiction in English. The prize is awarded to a work of outstanding history writing and is open to books from anywhere in the world, regardless of the author’s nationality, as well as works translated into English.