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: 

  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, 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.

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Past Winners: 

  • 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)