Lyndal Roper wins 2025 Cundill History Prize for Summer of Fire and Blood
Lyndal Roper has won the 2025 US$75,000 Cundill History Prize for Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. (John Murray Press / Basic Books).
The announcement was made at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, where the prize is administered by McGill University.
The Cundill History Prize recognizes and rewards the best history writing in English. Administered by McGill University in Montreal and awarded by a distinguished jury, the Cundill History Prize honours the abiding passion for history of its founder, F. Peter Cundill, by encouraging informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world.
WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2025
The definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe.
The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as thousands of people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they would prove no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months.
In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants’ War in a generation, leading historian Lyndal Roper uncovers the far-reaching ramifications of this doomed rebellion. Though the victors portrayed the uprising as naive and chaotic, Roper’s deeply researched account reveals instead a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical principles of the Protestant Reformation. Told through the voices of and beliefs of the people themselves, this is the thrilling, tragic story of the peasants’ fight to change the world.
