How is fertility a force in history? What happens when people try to regulate who can have children, or who owns them? And when and why do religious movements seek to control sexuality?
Lyndal Roper is awarded the 2026 Holberg Prize for her pioneering work on early modern European history. This lecture is the Laureate’s academic statement during the Holberg Week.
Abstract
These questions seem more urgent now than ever. They were what first drew me to the Reformation. Many towns and territories pursued the vision of an ordered godly society, where men would be fathers and women their obedient wives. By the mid sixteenth century, all over Europe, marriage was being redefined and restricted, migration controlled, legal prostitution abolished, and infanticide harshly prosecuted.
The ‘holy household’ was of course a fiction, and the second part of the lecture explores what that ideal left out, and how complex and non-binary sexual identities could be.
Finally I turn to the sexual politics of a revolutionary movement, the Peasants’ War of 1525. The peasants fought serfdom, a system that included property rights in women’s fertility, and they were bound together by a vision of brotherhood in Christ. Thinking about fertility historically, I argue, expands how we see historical causation.
About Lyndal Roper
Photo: John Cairns
Lyndal Roper is a historian of German history 1500 to1800, especially women and gender. She has written a biography of the reformer Martin Luther, and last year published Summer of Fire and Blood, a history of the German Peasants’ War: to write it, she walked or cycled just about all the areas affected by the War. She has taught at King’s College London, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Oxford. In 2011 she became Regius Professor of History at Oxford, the first woman to hold the 300 year old post. She co-edited the journal Past & Present for over a decade and has been a member of History Workshop Journal Collective for forty years. Now she runs experimental workshops, ‘Moving History’, teaching critical and creative thinking in combination with (light!) physical exercise.
