The 2026 Holberg Lecture: 'Who Owns Fertility? The Reformation’s Sexual Politics'

Lecture by the 2026 Holberg Laureate, Lyndal Roper. This is the Laureate's academic statement during the Holberg Week.  How is fertility a force in history? What happens when people try to regulate who can have children, or who owns them? And when and why do religious movements seek to control sexuality? These questions seem more urgent now than ever. They were what first drew me to the Reformation. Many towns and territories pursued the vision of an ordered godly society, where men would be fathers and women their obedient wives. By the mid sixteenth century, all over Europe, marriage was being redefined and restricted, migration controlled, legal prostitution abolished, and infanticide harshly prosecuted. The ‘holy household’ was of course a fiction, and the second part of the lecture explores what that ideal left out, and how complex and non-binary sexual identities could be. Finally I turn to the sexual politics of a revolutionary movement, the Peasants’ War of 1525. The peasants fought serfdom, a system that included property rights in women’s fertility, and they were bound together by a vision of brotherhood in Christ. Thinking about fertility historically, I argue, expands how we see historical causation. About Lyndal Roper 2026 Holberg Laureate Lyndal Roper is the Regius Chair of History Emeritus at the University of Oxford. Roper is internationally recognized as one of the leading scholars of early modern European history. Ropers pioneering studies have reshaped understandings of witch persecutions, the German Peasants’ War (1524–1525), and the life and thought of Martin Luther, illuminating how gender, the body, psyche and power operated in social and religious conflicts of the sixteenth century. Roper’s work is widely renowned for its methodological innovativeness and capacity to cut across disciplinary boundaries.