Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, will present the Wallace T. MacCaffrey Memorial Lecture in History.

Martin Luther is famed as the man who split the Catholic church and started the German Reformation, one of those rare individuals who really do ‘make history’. An extraordinarily courageous man, he could also be extremely belligerent. His was a Reformation which worked by upholding the power of secular rulers, and so he is often accused of being subservient to them. But he also wrote a series of tracts that took on key rulers of the day. These pamphlets are full of vivid and scurrilous abuse, and they revel in the rhetoric of manhood and the feud. Most theologians attack other theologians: why did Luther attack rulers in this way? What does this tell us about manhood in the sixteenth century, and how the Reformation might have changed models of masculinity?

Lyndal Roper is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of the Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften. She is former Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, a former Humboldt Fellow and an Honorary Visiting Fellow of the History Department University of Melbourne. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Melbourne.

Professor Roper has recently published the biography, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (Bodley Head, 2016). Her current project is a history of the German Peasants’ War (1524-5), the greatest uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. Her interests include modern German history, the history of witchcraft, gender history, history of the body, sexuality, and other topics within the cultural and religious history of the early modern period.

Followed by a reception in the Performing Arts Building Atrium at 8:30 p.m.

Sponsored by the department of history and the Division of History and Social Sciences. Free and open to the public.