Raymond B. Waddington Prize

In recognition of the joining together of the Sixteenth Century Journal and the Sixteenth Century Society and to recognize his decades-long contributions to both SCSC and SCJ, the Sixteenth Century Society is pleased to announce that the SCSC Literature Prize has been renamed the Raymond B. Waddington Prize. A colleague of Robert Kingdon's at the University of Wisconsin during the 1960s and 1970s, Professor Waddington was instrumental in helping to establish literature as a field of inquiry at the Society's annual conferences. He served as president of the Society in 1985. From 1994 to 2012, Waddington was a senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal. 

Raymond B. Waddington, Jr. (b. 1935) is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis. A native Californian, he graduated from Stanford in 1957 and received his PhD from Rice University in 1963. Before UC, Davis, Waddington taught at the University of Houston, the University of Kansas, and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he was promoted to full professor in 1974. He taught at UC, Davis from 1982 to 2012. His fields of interest include Renaissance literature and art, Shakespeare, as well as cultural and intellectual history. He is most known for his work on John Milton and Pietro Aretino. His books include Looking into Providences: Designs and Trials in Paradise Lost (2012, Toronto), Titian's Aretino: A Contextual Study (Florence, 2018), Pietro Aretino: Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy (Ashgate, 2013), and as editor The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton (California, 1974). During his career, Professor Waddington held many fellowships, including the Guggenheim (1973), NEH (1977), and the Newberry Library Fellowship (1978). 

The Waddington Prize is given for the best English-language article on the literature of the Early Modern period (1450 - 1750) published in an academic journal in the prior calendar year. (Until 2007, papers presented at the annual Conference were eligible for this prize.)  The prize-winning article is selected by a committee of three conference members appointed by the president who shall designate one of the members as chair. 

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 

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 Literature Prize, please donate here.

Previous Winners 

  • 2024: Micheline White, “Katherine Parr’s Giftbooks, Henry VIII’s Marginalia, and the Display of Royal Power and Piety,” Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2023): 39-83

  • 2023: Lisa Demets, “Manuscripts, Stationers, and Printers: Reading Medieval Chronicles in Early Sixteenth-Century Bruges” (2022)

  • 2022: Clio Doyle, “‘Slimy Kempes Ill Smelling Mud’: The Terroir of Poetry and the Desire in Barclay’s Ecologues”

  • 2021: Adam Horsley, “Secret Cabinets, Scribal Publication and the Satryique: François Maynard and Libertine Poetry in Public and Private Spaces” (2020)

  • 2020: Ariane Helou, “Sybiline Voices: Prophecy and Power at the Medici Theater” Sixteenth Century Journal 50 (2019)

  • 2019: Elizabeth Crachiolo, “Queen Bees, Queen Bess” Sixteenth Century Journal 49/2 (2018)

  • 2018: Jennifer Higginbotham, “Finding Margaret (Pole) in Shakespeare’s Richard III,” Sixteenth Century Journal 48/3 (2017): 615-635. 

  • 2017: Nicole La Bouff, “An Unlikely Christian Humanist: How Bess of Hardwick Answered ‘the Woman Question’,” SCJ 45/4 (2016): 847-882. 

  • 2016: Eleanor Hubbard, “I Will Be Master of What Is Mine Own: Fortune Hunters and Shrews in Early Modern London” SCJ  (2015): 331-358. 

  • 2015: Louisa Mackenzie, “The Fish and the Whale: Animal Symbiosis and Early Modern posthumanism,” SCJ 45/3 (2014): 579-597. 

  • 2013: Beatrice Groves, “‘Those Sanctified Places where our Sauiours feete had trode’: Jerusalem in Early Modern English Travel Narratives,” SCJ 43:3 (2012): 681-700. 

  • 2012: 

  • 2011: Matthew Woodcock, “Shooting for England: Configuring the Book and the Bow in Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus,” SCJ 41/4 (2010): 1017-1038. 

  • 2010: Brendan Kane, “Domesticating the Counter Reformation: bridging the bardic and Catholic traditions in Geoffrey Keating’s The Three Shafts of Death,” SCJ 40/4 (2010): 1029-1044. 

  • 2009: Jaime Goodrich, “Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: A Case for Rethinking Women’s Participation in the Early Modern Public Sphere,” SCJ 39/4 (2008): 1021-1040. 

  • 2008: Sharon T. Strocchia, “Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Movement in Sixteenth-Century Florence,” SCJ 38/2 (2007): 393-418. 

  • 2007: Two prizes were awarded: 

    • Paper: Jeff Persels, “Macer’s 1555 Account of the Japanese: A Curious Case of Ethnographic Cleansing” (presented at the 2006 Society conference) 

    • Article: Jane Donawerth, “Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified,” SCJ  37/4 (2006): 985-1005  

  • 2005: David Whitford, for his paper “Mistaking the Tree for the Forest: Why Kenotic Theory in Milton is Anachronistic” 

  • 2004: JoAnn DellaNeva, for her paper “Du Bellay and quelques modernes Italiens: Variations in a Minor Key” 

  • 2003: Susan M. Felch, for her paper “Prayerbooks in their pockets: Poetic Writing, Prayerful Reading”