Society Prizes
Book Prizes
Article Prizes
Graduate/Early Career Prizes
Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize
Nancy Lyman Roelker, 1915 - 1993, was Professor of History at Boston University. Roelker was the author and translator of many works of excellent scholarship, including One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (1996) and Queen of Navarre: Jeanne d’Albret, 1528 - 1572 (1968). Professor Roelker was a doctoral advisor, mentor, and friend to many scholars in early modern studies.
The Prize is awarded annually by the Sixteenth Century Society for the best article published in English on the history of France and its empire in the Early Modern Era (1450 - 1750).
Criteria for selection include:
quality and originality of research
methodological skill and/or innovation
development of fresh and stimulating interpretations or insights
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 Roelker Prize, please donate here.
Previous Winners:
2024: Steven Vanderputten, “Jean Mabillon and the Debate on the Regular Origins of Secular Canonesses in Seventeenth-Century France,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 74, no. 3 (July 2023): 491-515.
2023: Odile Panetta, “Heresy and Authority in the Thought of Théodore de Bèze,” Renaissance and Reformation, 45: 1 (2022): 33-72.
2022: Elisabeth Narkin, “Architectural Network as Dynastic Strategy in Fontainebleau’s Galerie des Cerfs,” Renaissance Quarterly 74: 2 (2021): 454-97.
2021: Tom Hamilton, “Adjudicating the Troubles: Violence, Memory and Criminal Justice at the End of the Wars of Religion,” French History 34: 4 (2020): 417-34.
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.
