Nancy Lyman Roelker

About This Award

The Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize, named for Professor Roelker of Boston University, author and translator of many works of excellent scholarship, doctoral advisor and friend to many scholars in early modern studies, is awarded annually by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for the best article published in English on sixteenth-century French history during the preceding calendar year. 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 SCSC or the chair of the prize committee. Three copies of the article are to be solicited from the author, or an electronic copy must be submitted to the Executive Director by 1 April. Announcement of the $500.00 award will be made by the chair of the committee at the annual business meeting of the conference. Announcement of the prize will also be made in the Sixteenth Century Journal. 

Previous Winners 

  • 2021: Elisabeth Narkin, “Architectural Network as Dynastic Strategy in Fontainebleau’s Galerie des Cerfs”Renaissance Quarterly
  • 2020: Stuart Carroll, “Political Justice and the Outbreak of the Wars of Religion” French History 33: 2 (2019): 177-98. 
  • 2019: Hervé-Thomas Campangne, “Framing the Early Modern French Best Seller: American Settings for François de Belleforest’s Tragic Histories,” Renaissance Quarterly 71 (2018): 77–113. 
  • 2018: David van der Linden, University of Groningen. “Memorializing the Wars of Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century French Picture Galleries: Protestants and Catholics Painting the Contested Past,” Renaissance Quarterly 70 (2017): 132–78. 
  • 2017: Nancy Fitch, “‘Entrepreneurial Nobles’ or ‘Aristocratic Serfs.’ Reconsidering Feudalism in Old Regime Central France,” French Historical Studies 39/1 (2016): 105-43 
  • 2016: Morgan Ng, “Collage, Architectural Inscription, and the Aesthetics of Iconoclasm in Jacques Perret’s Des fortifications et artifices (1601),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45/3 (2015) 
  • 2015: Eric Nelson, “Remembering the Martyrdom of Saint Francis of Paola: History, Memory and Minim Identity in Seventeenth Century France,” History and Memory, 26/2 (2014): 76-105 
  • 2014: Stuart Carroll, “‘Nager entre deux eaux.’ The Princess and the Ambiguities of French Protestantism,” SCJ (2013) 
  • 2013: Ewa Kociszewska, “War and Seduction in Cybele’s Garden: Contextualizing the Ballet des Polonas,” Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012) 
  • 2012: Suzannah Lipscomb, “Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Gossip, Insults and Violence in Sixteenth-Century France,” French History 25 (2011): 408-26. 
  • 2011: Philippa Woodcock, “The Fortified Parish Church: Pacification, Protection or Provocation During the French Wars of Religion?” French History 24 (2010) 524-49. 
  • 2010: Michael Wintroub, “The Heavens Incribed: the Instrumental Poetry of the Virgin in Early Modern France,” British Journal for the History of Science 42 /2 (2010) 
  • 2009: Anna Klosowska, “Erotica and women in early modern France: Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Queer Poems,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 /2 (2008) 
  • 2008: Penny Roberts “The Languages of Peace during the French Religious Wars,” Cultural and Social History 4/3 (2007): 297-315. 
  • 2007: Allan A. Tulchin, “The Michelade in Nimes, 1567,” French Historical Studies 29 (2006) 
  • 2006: Philip Benedict, Larry Bryant, and Kristen Neuschel, “Graphic History: What Readers Knew and Were Taught in the Quarante Tableaux of Perrissin and Tororel,” French Historical Studies 28 (2005): 175-230. 
  • 2005: Jamie Foa, “Making Peace: The Commissions for Enforcing the Pacification Edicts in the Reign of Charles IX (1560-1574),” French History 18 (2004): 256-74. 
  • 2003: Stuart Carroll, “The Peace in the Feud in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France,” Past and Present 178 (2003): 74-115. 
  • 2002: Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Art Patronage and Women (including Habsburg) in the Orbit of King Francis I,” Renaissance Studies 16 (2002): 474-524.