Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper, an excellent new history of one of the largest popular uprisings before the French Revolution, won this year’s Cundill History Prize and its $75,000 prize. The award, which is administered by Montreal’s McGill University, is given to “a work of outstanding history writing” and boasts the largest purse for a non-fiction book in English.

Lyndal Roper is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, and has written books about Martin Luther and the sixteenth and seventeenth century “witch craze” in Baroque Germany. Summer of Fire and Blood is “told through the voices of the peasants” who fought and died in the doomed rebellions of 1524-1525. Roper brings to life this often misunderstood “mass movement inspired by the radical principles of the Protestant Reformation” and “shows that the uprising was one that expressed early ideas of justice, communal decision-making, and resistance to arbitrary power.”

Ada Ferrer, this year’s jury chair and a professor of history at Princeton, praised Roper’s analysis as “stunning and multifaceted, seamlessly weaving together cultural, intellectual, social, economic and religious history into a rich and engaging narrative.”

Roper’s book was selected from an impressive shortlist and two other finalists, Marlene L. Daut’s The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe and Sophia Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, will each be awarded $10,000.