by Disha Karnad Jani
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford about her new book Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books, 2025), also available in German as Für die Freiheit: Der Bauernkrieg 1525 (trans. Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, S. Fischer Verlage, 2024). In this new history of this massive event, Roper closely examines the political, religious, and intellectual worlds of the thousands of peasants who rose up and took over vast lands in what is now Germany, in one of the most decisive moments in the history of the Reformation, and (as we discuss) for the intellectual history of everything from revolution to ecology to brotherhood. By reading the peasants’ movements, physical landscape, complaints, dreams, desires, and visions for the future, Roper offers us an account of how, for a few months in the middle of the sixteenth century, the poorest people in Germany almost overturned the social order of their world.
Lyndal Roper is the Regius Professor of History at Oriel College, Oxford. She 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.
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927–1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
Featured image: Cover of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books, 2025), design by Emmily O’Connor.
