Gerald Strauss Prize

About This Award

The Gerald Strauss Book Prize is named in honor of Gerald Strauss, the influential scholar of the German Reformation and long-time Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University. Author of eight books, including such well-known titles as Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (1966), Luther’s House of Learning (1978), and Law, Resistance, and the State (1986), Strauss was a meticulous researcher. His works were pioneering and sometimes controversial, but they continue to engage scholars and students of the German Reformation. 

This prize, which is awarded at the annual meeting of the SCSC, recognizes the best book published in English during the preceding year in the field of German Reformation history. 

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 

Nominations for the prize may be made by anyone. Either the publisher or the author shall send three bound copies of the book to the Executive Director of the SCSC no later than April 1st who in turn will send books to each member of the Strauss prize committee. The books to be considered for the prize will be those books published within the preceding calendar year. The recipient receives a prize of $1000 and a certificate. 

Previous Winners 

  • 2021: Martin Christ, Biographies of a Reformation: Religions Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520-1635 (Oxford University Press)
  • 2020: Amy Nelson Burnett, Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2019)
  • 2019: Natalia Nowakowska’s King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation Before Confessionalization (Oxford University Press)
  • 2018: Eric Saak, Indiana University of Pennsylvania.  Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press) 
  • 2017: David Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press) 
  • 2016 – Katherine Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015)
  • 2015 – Geert Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
  • 2014 – Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters. Noblewomen as healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
  • 2013 – Marjorie E. Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife (Ashgate Press, 2012)
  • 2012 – Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011)
  • 2011 – Katheleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  • 2010 – Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1600. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  • 2008 – Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529-1629. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology Series. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
  • 2007 – David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
  • Honorable Mention: Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525-1547 (Brill)