Telling Stories: History, Narrative and the German Peasants' War 1524-1526

How do you write a history of a profound, traumatic event? How do you make sense of an event that is absolutely overwhelming in its scale, scope (involving five modern European countries) and the sheer numbers of those who died, perhaps somewhere between 70 and 100 thousand men? And how do you write that history when one side is literate, and the other’s leaders are all executed, or are illiterate? This lecture explores how people at the time wrote that history. The answers they found raise for us the question of how we should write history today, and what the role of narrative is, in the age of AI.

Lyndal Roper is Emeritus Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, the first woman to hold the post. She is a historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century Germany and has published on witchcraft, the Reformation, and gender. In 2016 she published a biography of Martin Luther. Her most recent book, Summer of Fire and Blood, won the 2025 Cundill Prize. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Melbourne and Basel, and in 2016 she won the Gerda Henkel Prize.

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Host or Publisher German Historical Institute