Natalie Zemon Davis Prizes

Natalie Zemon Davis (1928 – 2023) was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emerita at Princeton University. Before Princeton, Professor Davis taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, and the University of California at Berkeley. Her early work, including Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), and Fiction in the Archives (1987), focused primarily on France. She ranged wider geographically in Women on the Margins (1995), Trickster Travels (2006), and countless articles, and continues to do so in her forthcoming work. Whatever her topic, Professor Davis developed innovative interdisciplinary methodologies, introducing early modern historians to anthropological methods, ethnography, cultural theory, and other approaches. She made use of a huge variety of sources, particularly to explore the lives of ordinary people. Those people included women, as from her earliest essays to her last works, Prof. Davis examined the exterior and interior lives of women. She was also one of the first to argue that men should be studied as men, thus advocating analysis of gender before that word was first applied to historical studies. Professor Davis received honorary degrees from nearly 20 institutions and was awarded both the Holberg Prize and the National Humanities Medal, for which President Barack Obama praised "her insights into the study of history and her exacting eloquence in bringing the past into focus.” 

The Natalie Zemon Davis Prizes will recognize two books each year, recognizing the best books published in English in the preceding year in the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Early Modern Era (1450 - 1750). The first prize will be awarded for an author’s first sole-authored book (the author may have edited a book). The second prize will be awarded for any book beyond an author’s first book.  

The prizes honor Prof. Davis’s stature in the field, and her long involvement with the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, which stretched over half a century. At the very first Sixteenth Century Society conference in 1969, Professor Davis was invited to give the plenary address on the “Social Aspects of the Reformation,” and was elected a member of SCSC's first council. She has given several more plenary talks since—including one at the SCSC’s first venture outside the US in Guelph, Ontario—and been a member of many panels, workshops, and sessions.  

The Natalie Zemon Davis Prizes will be awarded at the Sixteenth Century Society’s annual conference beginning in 2024.

Criteria for selection shall 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   If you wish to help support the Natalie Zemon Davis Prize, please donate here.

Nominations for the prize may be made by anyone, including authors. Nominations should be sent to the Executive Director (director@sixteenthcentury.org), who will then send contact information for the committee members. A copy of the nominated work, either in hard copy or electronic form, should then be sent no later than 1 April.

Nominations must designate whether the book is the author’s first sole-authored book.

To read more about Professor Davis, please click here.