Lyndal Roper wins 2026 Holberg Prize for rewriting how we understand witches, Luther, and peasant revolt

For five centuries, the standard telling of the European witch craze went roughly like this: superstitious communities, whipped up by religious authorities, targeted marginal women in episodes of mass hysteria. The story of Martin Luther followed another well-worn track: a brilliant theologian nailed his theses to a door and changed the world through the force of his ideas.

Lyndal Roper has spent her career dismantling both narratives - not by rejecting them outright, but by showing what they leave out. What they leave out, she argues, is the body: the physical experience of aging, fertility, motherhood, masculinity, and desire that shaped both the accused and the accusers, the reformer and the reformed.

On March 17, the Holberg Committee in Bergen, Norway, named Roper the 2026 laureate of the Holberg Prize, one of the largest annual international awards for research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. The prize carries an award of NOK 6,000,000 (approximately USD 630,000). Roper will receive it at a ceremony at the University of Bergen on June 4.

Witchcraft as a story about mothers and aging

Roper's 2004 book Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany analyzed hundreds of trial records from southern Germany and arrived at conclusions that disturbed comfortable assumptions. The witch persecutions, she demonstrated, were not primarily about religion or social control in the abstract. They were about motherhood, fertility, and the female body in transition. Accusations clustered around older women - post-menopausal, often in caregiving roles - and the confessions extracted from them drew on deep anxieties about breastfeeding, infant death, and bodily decay. The book won the Roland H. Bainton Prize in 2005.

Earlier, in Oedipus and the Devil (1994), she had laid the methodological groundwork: history must account for the psyche and the body, not just ideas and institutions. The book examined masculinity, violence, drinking, and sexual behavior in early modern Europe, showing how these shaped Protestant identity and operated as political instruments.

Luther as a man, not just a mind

Roper brought the same approach to Martin Luther. Across three books - Der feiste Doktor (2012), Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (2016), and Living I Was Your Plague (2021) - she presented Luther not as a disembodied intellect but as a man whose coarse language, physical self-presentation, emotional volatility, and bodily experience all shaped his theology and public authority. Luther's use of scatological humor, his relationship with food and drink, his projection of masculine authority - these were not footnotes to his ideas but integral to how those ideas gained power and spread.

The largest uprising before the French Revolution

Her most recent major work, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War (2025), tackles the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution - an event that had not received a major English-language treatment in over a generation. The book won the Cundill History Prize in 2025. It reconstructs the social tensions, religious ferment, and political violence of 1524-1525 through the lived experiences of individuals caught up in the conflict, continuing Roper's commitment to history that foregrounds ordinary people rather than great-man narratives.

A career of firsts

Roper was the first woman and the first Australian appointed to the Regius Chair of History at Oxford, a position she held from 2011. She earned her PhD from King's College London in 1985, co-founded the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender in 1999, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2016, she received the Gerda Henkel Prize for lifetime achievement in history.

In a statement, Roper described her motivation simply: she wanted a history that would include the voices of ordinary people - all kinds, classes, and colors - and women in particular. She wanted gender at the center, and she wanted to bring bodily experience and unconscious motivation into historical analysis.

What the prize recognizes

The Holberg Prize, established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003, is awarded annually by the University of Bergen. Previous laureates include Jurgen Habermas, Cass Sunstein, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Achille Mbembe. The prize committee, chaired by Professor Ann Phoenix, cited Roper as "one of the foremost scholars of early modern Europe and an outstandingly original historian" whose research challenges previously established assumptions about the period.

This is not a science story in the conventional sense - there are no mice, no molecules, no clinical trials. But Roper's work illustrates something that hard-science journalism sometimes overlooks: that methodology matters as much in the humanities as in the lab. Her contribution has been to demonstrate, across four decades and multiple subjects, that historical evidence means more when you account for the body, the psyche, and the power dynamics that shaped who got to speak and who got burned at the stake.