Carl S. Meyer Prize

About This Award

The Carl S. Meyer Prize, named for the co-founding editor of The Sixteenth Century Journal and one of the founders of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, professor of historical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, as well as executive director of the Center (Foundation) for Reformation Research, is awarded annually for the best paper delivered at the yearly meeting by a scholar who is still in graduate school or has earned the Ph.D. in the last five years. The winning paper is chosen by a committee of three conference members appointed by the president who shall designate the chair as well. The committee shall be named by 1 January of each year. 

Criteria for selection include: 

  1. quality and originality of research 
  2. methodological skill and/or innovation 
  3. development of fresh and stimulating interpretations or insights 
  4. literary quality 

Papers placed in competition for the Meyer Prize cannot have been delivered at other conferences. 

To be considered for the prize, presenters must give three copies of the paper as read at the conference to the Executive Director of the SCSC, who shall forward the copies of the paper to the prize committee members by April 1. The committee shall make its decision by August 15. The chair shall then submit the top-ranked paper to an expert in the field of the paper’s topic. If the reader determines the work is not of prize-winning caliber, the second-ranking paper shall be submitted by the chair to an expert reader, and so on, until the winner is selected. 

When the committee has arrived at the final decision, the winner will be reported to the Executive Director of the SCSC who in turn shall notify the winner. The winner must be present at the annual meeting to receive the award, which will be announced by the chair of the prize committee along with the presentation of the $500.00 prize. The Sixteenth Century Journal shall have first right to accept the paper for publication, once it has been revised from an oral presentation to an article appropriate for a scholarly journal. It is not necessary that the Meyer Prize be awarded each year. An announcement of the winner will appear in The Sixteenth Century Journal. 

Previous Winners 

  • 2020: Christine Zappella, “The Meta/Physics of Light, Confraternal Worship, and Andrea del Sarto’s Monochrome Life of St. John the Baptist” presented at SCSC St. Louis, 2019
  • 2019: Kristen C. Howard, “Child Welfare and the General Hospital in Reformation Geneva” presented at SCSC Albuquerque, 2018.
  • 2018: Anatole Upart, “A Ukrainian Apocalypse in Rome: Master Prokopii’s Woodblock Prints at the Archives of the Propaganda Fide” presented at SCSC Milwaukee, 2017.
  • 2017: Jennifer Binczewski, “Bestowed Upon God: The Movements of Catholic Children in Post-Reformation England and Beyond,” presented at SCSC Bruges, 2016. 
  • 2016: William Keene Thompson, “Conflict and Compromise in an English Parish: Long Melford under Edward VI,” presented at SCSC Vancouver, 2015. 
  • 2015: Christina Squitieri, “O Loyal Father?: Aumerle, treason, and Feudal Law in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” presented at SCSC New Orleans 2014. 
  • 2014: Amy Newhouse, “Bodies as Boundaries: Corporal Jobs and Contagious Disease in 16th Century Nuremberg,” presented at SCSC San Juan, Puerto Rico 2013. 
  • 2013: Patricia McKee, “Scorning the Image of Virtue,” presented at SCSC Cincinnati, 2012. 
  • 2012: Michael Tworek, “Patavium virum me fecit: Study Abroad and Renaissance Humanism from Poland to Italy and back in the Sixteenth Century,” presented at SCSC Fort Worth, Texas, 2011. 
  • 2011: Adam Asher Duker, “The Hermeneutics of Emotional Restraint: Calvin’s Pastoral Theology of Imprecation in Comparative Context,” presented at SCSC Montreal, Quebec, 2010. 
  • 2010: Prize not awarded 
  • 2009: Jacob Baum, “Incense and Idolatry: The Reformation of Olfaction in Late Medieval German Christian Ritual,” presented at SCSC St. Louis, 2008. 
  • 2008: Anastasia C. Nurre, “Among the Philippists: The Identification of a Magdeburg Patrician in a Lutheran Confessional Epitaphs,” presented at SCSC Minneapolis, 2007. 
  • 2007: Adam G. Beaver, “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469-1598,” presented at SCSC Salt Lake City, 2006. 
  • 2006: Jonathan Reid, “Caught between Confessional Fronts,” presented at SCSC Atlanta, 2005 
  • 2005: John Frymire, “Rites of appeasement: Suffering and the Defense of Catholic Ritual in Early Modern Germany,” presented at SCSC Toronto, 2004 
  • 2004: Robert Christman, “Literacy and Self-Determination: Confessions of Belief Composed by the Common Man in Central Germany c. 1575,” presented at SCSC Pittsburgh, 2003 
  • 2003: Suzanne Jablonski, “Neutralizing Violence: Images of the Hunt at the Court of Phillip IV,” presented at SCSC San Antonio, 2002 
  • 2005: ppeasement: Suffering and the Defense