Harold J. Grimm Prize

Harold J. Grimm, 1901 - 1983, was professor of history at Indiana University and The Ohio State University. As prodigious author and scholar, Grimm was one of the founders of the Society for Reformation Research, an editor of the Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, as well as doctoral advisor and friend of many scholars.

The Grimm Prize is awarded annually by the Sixteenth Century Society for the best article published in English during the previous calendar year in an academic journal which reflects and sustains Grimm’s lifelong interest in the development of religion during the Reformation Era.

Nominations for the prize may be made by anyone and shall be sent to the Executive Director of the Society (director@sixteenthcentury.org) by 1 April.  

If you wish to help support the Grimm Prize, please donate here.

Past Winners:

  • 2024: Francesco Quatrini, “Tolerance, Society, and Sovereignty: The Retreat from Pluralism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023): 124-65.

  • 2023: Sky Michael Johnston, “Accounting for a Fruitful Little Ice Age: Overlapping Scales of Climate and Culture in Württemberg, 1560-1590,” Environmental History 27:4 (2022): 722-746.

  • 2022: Genelle Gertz and Pasquale Toscano, “The Lost Network of Elizabeth Barton,” Reformation 26:2 (2021): 105-128.

  • 2021: Jennifer Binczewski, “Power in Vulnerability: Widows and Priest Holes in the Early Modern English Catholic Community,”British Catholic History 35:1 (2020): 1-24.

  • 2020: Charles R. Keenan, “English News in Papal Rome: Cross-Confessional Information Exchange in Reformation Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History 23:4 (2019): 350-66. 

  • 2019: David Como, “The Family of Love and the Making of English Radical Religion: The Confession and ‘Conversions’ of Giles Creech,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 48.3 (2018): 533-598. 

  • 2018: David van der Linden,  “Memorializing the Wars of Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century French Picture Galleries: Protestants and Catholics Painting the Contested Past,” Renaissance Quarterly 70:1 (2017): 132-178.  

  • 2017: Peter Marshall and John Morgan, “Clerical Conformity and the Elizabethan Settlement Revisited,” The Historical Journal 59:1 (2016): 1-22. 

  • 2016: Rady Roldán-Figueroa, “Martín de Roa, S.J. (1559-1637) and the Consolidation of Catholic Literary Culture in Spain,” European History Quarterly 45/1 (2015): 5-33. 

  • 2015: Louise M. Burkhart, ‘Little Doctrine’ and Indigenous Catechesis in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 94:2 (2014): 167-206. 

  • 2014: Matthias Range, “‘Wandelabendmahl’: Lutheran ‘Walking Communion’ and Its Expression in Material Culture,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64:4 (2013): 731-768. 

  • 2013: Peter Marshall, “The Naming of Protestant England,” Past and Present 214 (2012): 87-128. 

  • 2012: Amy Nelson Burnett, “The Social History of Communion and the Reformation of the Eucharist,” Past and Present, 211/1: 77-119 (2011). 

  • 2011: Alexandra Walsham, “Invisible Helpers:Angelic Intervention in Post-Reformation England,” Past and Present 208/1: 77-130 (2010). 

  • 2010: David Weil Baker, “The Historical Faith of William Tyndale: Non- Salvific Reading of Scripture at the Outset of the English Reformation,” Renaissance Quarterly (2010). 

  • 2009: Jesse Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration of the Eucharist in Sixteenth-Century Wesel,” Sixteenth Century Journal 39/3 (2008). 

  • 2008: Ray Mentzer “Fasting, Piety and Anxiety among French Reformed Protestants,” Church History 76 (2007): 330-62. 

  • 2007: Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo. Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform,” Renaissance Quarterly (Spring 2006) 

  • 2006: Andrew Keitt, “The Miraculous Body of Evidence: Visionary Experience, Medical Discourse and the Inquisition in Seventeenth Century Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 77-96. 

  • 2005: Shared by the following: 

    • N. Shepardson, “Gender and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des vrays tesmoins,” Sixteenth Century Journal 5, 1 (2004): 155-174. 

    • M. L. Hickerson, “‘Gospelling sisters goinge up and downe’: John Foxe and disorderly women,” Sixteenth Century Journal 35, 4 (2004): 1035-1051. 

  • 2004: Bonnie J. Noble, “A work in which the angels are wont to rejoice: Lucas Cranach’s Schneeberg Altarpiece,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 1011-37. 

  • 2003: Craig Harline, “Miracles and This World: The Battle for the Jesus Oak,” Archive for Reformation History (2002): 217-38.