Professor Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford since 2011, will give a Lady Margaret Lecture 'Brotherhood: Masculinity and the German Peasants' War 1524-1526', in the Yusuf Hamied Theatre on Tuesday 24 October 2023, 5:30pm-7:00pm.
Lyndal Roper is the first woman, and the first Australian, to hold the post of Regius Professor of History at Oxford. A distinguished historian of early modern Europe, she has written extensively on gender, witchcraft and Martin Luther. She is now working on the German Peasants' War - the largest popular revolt in western Europe before the French Revolution.
Professor Roper writes:
"I’ve always been a historian of women and gender, so when I started work on the Peasants’ War I expected to find lots about women. Instead, I’ve found many appeals to ‘brotherhood’, stories of men marching, eating and sleeping together as they fought against the lords, and theologies that were about ‘standing firm’ on Christ’s side. The sixteenth century image of the peasant hero, in his boots, hat, and with his dagger at his side, was definitively male. What happens if we take the ‘maleness’ of the German Peasants’ War seriously? How does a gender analysis help us understand the German Peasants’ War?"
