Lyndal Roper

Lyndal Roper
Roper as honorary speaker at the Historikertag 2014 in Göttingen
Born	(1956-05-28) 28 May 1956 (age 61) Melbourne, Australia
Occupation	Historian

Lyndal Roper, FRHistS, FBA (born 28 May 1956) is an Australian historian and academic. She was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2011. She is a fellow of Oriel College, an honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and the author of a variety of groundbreaking works on witchcraft.

Roper was educated at the University of Melbourne, the University of Tübingen, and King's College London.

She was previously a fellow and tutor at Balliol College, Oxford. She is editor of the historical journal Past & Present.

In 2004 Roper published Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, a study of the Burning Times of persecution of people as witches in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries in an attempt to understand why it took place at that particular time, why it was not geographically universal, and what kinds of fears, fantasies, and confessions were involved. As she points out, any historical explanation should, in part, explain "why the witch hunts were so heavily concentrated in the German speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, why so many of the victims were women" (around 80%) with – in Germany - "a shocking preponderance of old women", which given the life expectancy of the time, meant over 40.

In this study, Roper suggests various ways of making sense of the historical record, saying that she was surprised because she began the study expecting to look at confessions of sex with the Devil, flying to the Sabbath, or Satanic rituals, and while these facets were there, they did not predominate.