'Dr Liar' meets 'The Devil Himself': Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer

These brilliant insults each threw at the other express the theological differences of the two men: Thomas Müntzer fought on the peasants’ side at the Battle of Frankenhausen; Luther blamed Müntzer for the entire Peasants’ War. The two men’s enmity was legendary.

And yet they were remarkably similar.

Their enmity also had an afterlife: The Communist East German regime made Thomas Müntzer its hero, naming streets after him, even putting his image on the 5-Mark note. So how was he celebrated in 2025, the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ War?

Guest Speaker

Lyndal Roper is Emeritus Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford. She was the first woman to hold the Regius Chair in History, and the first Australian. Roper’s most recent publication is Summer of Fire and Blood, a history of the German Peasants’ War (1524-6) the greatest uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution (Winner, Cundill Prize 2025). She has written a biography of the reformer Martin Luther and has published on witchcraft and on gender and the German Reformation. She has lived and worked in Germany (where she held a Humboldt Fellowship and was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg). She was a graduate of the University of Melbourne and holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Melbourne and the University of Basel. She is the Holberg Laureate 2026.