SCSC Literature Prize

About This Award

The SCSC Literature Prize is given for the best literature paper published in the Sixteenth Century Journal.  (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 prizes may be made by anyone and shall be sent to the Executive Director of the SCSC or the chair of the prize committee. The authors should sent three copies of their paper to the Executive Director of the SCSC by April. Announcement of the winning paper will be made by the chair of the committee at the annual business meeting of the conference and the winner will receive a $500.00 prize. Announcement of the winner will appear in the Sixteenth Century Journal. 

Previous Winners 

  • 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. 
  • 2014: 
  • 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 SCSC) 
    • Article: Jane Donawerth, “Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified,” SCJ  37/4 (2006): 985-1005 
  • 2006: 
  • 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”