Society Prizes
Book Prizes
Article Prizes
Graduate/Early Career Prizes
Gerald L. Strauss Prize
Gerald L. Strauss, 1922 - 2006, was the Distinguished Professor of History at Indiana University, where he taught from 1959 to his retirement in 1989. Author of eight books, including such well-known titles as Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century (1966), Luther’s House of Learning (1978), and Law, Resistance, and the State (1986), Strauss was a meticulous researcher. His works were pioneering and sometimes controversial, but they continue to engage scholars and students of the German Reformation.
This prize, which is awarded at the annual meeting of the Society, recognizes the best book published in English during the preceding year in the field of German Reformation history.
Criteria for selection shall 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, including authors. Nominations should be sent to the Executive Director (director@sixteenthcentury.org), who will then send contact information for the committee members. A copy of the nominated work, either in hard copy or electronic form, should then be sent no later than 1 April.
If you wish to help support the Strauss Prize, please donate here.
Past Winners:
2024: Noria K. Litaker, Bedazzled Saints: Catacomb Relics in Early Modern Bavaria (University of Virginia Press) 2023
2023: Carla Roth, The Talk of the Town: Information and Community in Sixteenth-Century Switzerland (Oxford) 2022
2022: Martin Christ, Biographies of a Reformation: Religions Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520-1635 (Oxford University Press) 2021
2021: Robert Christman, The Dynamics of the Early Reformation in Their Reformed Augustinian Context (Amsterdam University Press) 2020
2020: Amy Nelson Burnett, Debating the Sacraments: Print and Authority in the Early Reformation (Oxford University Press) 2019
2019: Natalia Nowakowska’s King Sigismund of Poland and Martin Luther: The Reformation Before Confessionalization (Oxford University Press) 2018
2018: Eric Saak, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press) 2017
2017: David Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press) 2016
2016: Katherine Hill, Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief in Reformation Germany: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press) 2015
2015: Geert Janssen, The Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile in Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
2014: Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters. Noblewomen as healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
2013: Marjorie E. Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife (Ashgate Press, 2012)
2012: Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011)
2011: Katheleen M. Crowther, Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
2010: Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1600. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
2008: Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529-1629. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)
2007: David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Honorable Mention: Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525-1547 (Brill)
