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1. PROFESSOR LYNDAL ROPER,

   REGIUS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, OXFORD.

   Professor Lyndal Roper is the first woman, the first Australian and the first
   graduate of the University of Melbourne, to hold the Regius Chair in History at
   the University of Oxford. This is the oldest and most distinguished chair of
   history in Britain and has been occupied by some of the most famous and
   important historians working in Britain since its establishment by George I in
   1724. It is an extraordinary achievement and an achievement that shows how
   far Professor Roper has gone and how much she has achieved since
   graduating with first class honours in History from the University of Melbourne
   in 1977. Inspired by her teachers here, and especially by those teachers who
   taught her about some of the wilder moments of the German Reformation of
   the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Professor Roper has engaged since
   the early 1980s in one of the most concentrated and intellectually inspiring
   investigations into the intersections of psychology, gender and history that any
   contemporary historian has done. She has made witches both real and
   understandable while also showing that we cannot understand them without a
   deep knowledge of the particular cultural, social and psychological milieu of
   the German Reformation. That milieu, or mentalité, to use a word historians
   prefer to use when discussing the ambience of an age, helps make explicable
   what to contemporary minds seem inexplicable: why people believed in
   witches and why some people accused of witchcraft also considered
   themselves witches.

   Professor Roper became Regius Chair at Oxford because of the power of her
   scholarship. She is the author of three powerful and paradigm-shifting
   monographs, each on different aspects of witchcraft and witch hunting in the
   German Reformation. In her first book, she asked how the reformation
   changed conceptions of gender and described in great detail the workings of
   `holy households’ in Augsburg. She is returning to some of those themes
   once more in her current project, a large biography of Martin Luther. In her
   second book, the highly acclaimed masterpiece, Oedipus and the Devil, she
   drew on serious research into psychology to understand better the psychology
   of witchcraft in Germany, along with forays into the literary culture of sixteenth
   century Germany. Taking psychoanalysis seriously, she offers a nuanced
   approach to understanding the psychological obsessions of the early modern
   period, drawing expertly on theories by Klein and Freud. In her third
   monograph, Witch Craze, she developed this theme more systematically, so
   as to explain the role of unconscious fantasy in history. This study
   encompassed areas of human experience that often elude the historical
   record, realms such as fantasy, envy and terror. It brought the physical and
   psychological together. It won the Roland H Bainton Prize. Her next book
   deals with the witch as figure in western imagination.
   Professor Roper has many intellectual distinctions, such as being a fellow of
   the British Academy and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.
   She is a past editor of Past and Present, Britain’s pre-eminent historical
   journal. Not least of her honours is that she is an Honorary Professor within
   History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. Her appointment
   as Regius Chair is recognition of the extraordinary intellectual contributions
   and continuing brilliance of this extremely gifted historian.

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