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Barzun Prize Recipients

2009 award presented in November 2010

Daniel Hobbins, Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, in recognition of his book Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book takes a look at one of the most powerful theologians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Jean Gerson.  Gerson, who lived from 1363 to 1429, was an impressive player in Western Europe during a time of war, plague, and schism.  In the book, Dr. Hobbins argues for a new understanding of Gerson as a scholar taking advantage of this period of rapid expansion in written culture.  Gerson contrasts with earlier theologians due to his more humanist approach to reading and authorship; indeed, his attempts to reach a broader public with publications in both Latin and French garnered him an international audience.

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The American Philosophical Society awarded the Jacques Barzun Prize for the best book in cultural history published in 2009 to Professor Daniel Hobbins in recognition of his book Authorship and Publicity Before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Daniel Hobbins earned his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University on Notre Dame. He researches and teaches the history of medieval Europe from 500-1500 at the Ohio State University, where he is an associate professor.  His specific interests include the cultural and intellectual history of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with special emphasis on universities, written culture, the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc, and, as evidenced by this latest work, Jean Gerson.

Dr. Hobbins' book takes a look at one of the most powerful theologians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Jean Gerson.  Gerson, who lived from 1363 to 1429, was an impressive player in Western Europe during a time of war, plague, and schism.  His life and work, as seen through a theological lens, have not harmonized with the modern understanding of this era, leaving a puzzle for historians.  Dr. Hobbins attempts to fill this gap in knowledge by arguing for a new understanding of Gerson as a scholar taking advantage of this period of rapid expansion in written culture.  More broadly, Dr. Hobbins casts Gerson as a mirror of the complex cultural and intellectual shifts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Gerson contrasts with earlier theologians due to his more humanist approach to reading and authorship; indeed, his attempts to reach a broader public with publications in both Latin and French garnered him an international audience.  However, the book avoids painting a triumphalist picture of this transitional period, not dissimilar to our own.  Instead, Dr. Hobbins portrays Gerson as the embodiment of a period of creative and dynamic growth which necessitated and eventually produced new technologies of the written word.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.  Established by a former student, the prize honors historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1984. The selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2008 award presented in November 2009

Dianne Sachko Macleod, Professor Emerita of 19th-Century, Modern & Gender Studies at the University of California, Davis, in recognition of her book Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 published by University of California Press.  The book is a scholarly and beautifully illustrated study of 19th-century wealthy American women collectors and their role in shaping the cultural taste of their age and afterwards in painting and the fine arts, with full emphasis on their post-Bellum political involvements, the "gendering" of the modern museum, and the strategies of hiding and later exhibiting their acquisitions.

The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dianne Sachko Macleod for her book, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 (University of California Press, 2008). The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Dianne Sachko Macleod earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkely in 1981. That same year she joined the faculty of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where she has recently become Professor Emerita.  Her other works include Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (1996) and (co-edited with Julie F. Codell) Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (1998).

Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects - American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 is a scholarly and beautifully illustrated study of 19th-century wealthy American women collectors and their role in shaping the cultural taste of their age and afterwards in painting and the fine arts, with full emphasis on their post-Bellum political involvements, the "gendering" of the modern museum, and the strategies of hiding and later exhibiting their acquisitions. The book is particularly original in its sympathetic and detailed expression of the range of collectors under consideration beyond the familiar and famous horizons.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history.  The prize honors historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1984.

The selection committee consisted of Donald R. Kelley (chair), James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.
 

2007 award presented in November 2008

Thomas E. Burman, Lindsay Young Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, in recognition of his book Reading the Qur'an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 published by University of Pennsylvania Press. A learned and revisionist study of the knowledge of the Qur’an in the West in the later Middle Ages, Professor Burman’s book presents a hands-on picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam. Through examinations of the Latin translations in early printed books, Burman finds that scholars of the period were immersed in a wide range of grammatical, lexical and interpretive problems presented by the text. He considers these subjects in the historical and comparative context of Christian-Muslim relations and cultures and modern Qur’anic scholarship. In so doing, he has broadened the way that medieval and Renaissance history of Muslim-Christian relations is understood.

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The American Philosophical Society awarded the 2008 Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History to Dr. Thomas E. Burman for his book, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560. The award was presented by Mary Patterson McPherson, Executive Officer of the Society.

Thomas E. Burman is Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1991. He received his Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto in 1991. In 1995 he received a research grant from the Society.

Exceedingly original in its deployment of source material, its analyses and its conclusions, Thomas Burman’s Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560 is a major contribution that is changing the way medieval and Renaissance history of Muslim-Christian relations is written. A learned and revisionist study of the knowledge of the Qur’an in the West in the later Middle Ages, it has its origins in the Latin translations found primarily in early printed books. Whereas past historians have leaned heavily on polemical treatises against Islam written by Christian scholars, Burman’s largely unmined sources tell a different story: that the reading of the Qur’an in Western Europe was highly complex, with scholars of the period immersed in a wide range of grammatical, lexical and interpretive problems presented by the text. Burman considers these subjects in the historical and comparative context of Christian-Muslim relations and cultures and modern Qur’anic scholarship. The result is a hands-on picture of how Europeans read the sacred text of Islam.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history. The prize honors historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1984.

The selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus, Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English, Princeton University.

2006 award presented in April 2007

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, in recognition of his book Five Germanys I Have Known, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “We all seek traces of a tangible past,” Fritz Stern writes in Five Germanys I Have Known, “and we try to fill them with life.” This sentence describes the aspirations both of personal memory and of professional history, and in this incomparable book Stern brings them magisterially together. Because he is such a gifted and disciplined historian, his very memories acquire the quality of evidence, carefully weighed and sifted, never over-interpreted. And because the central thread of memories in the book is his own – from the destruction of the world of European Jewry to the reunification of Germany – history here takes on a discreetly compelling personal accent. When Stern tells us that “the German roads to perdition...were neither accidental nor inevitable,” and that he finally feels, returning as an honored son to his German birthplace now become a part of Poland, that he has been given back a part of his past, we know we are reading not only an elegant memoir and not only a distinguished work of history, but a unique evocation of a haunted and haunting culture, an intimate analysis of that enduring Germany that has so altered our world.

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The American Philosophical Society’s Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded to Fritz Stern in recognition of his book Five Germanys I Have Known, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2006. “We all seek traces of a tangible past,” Fritz Stern writes in Five Germanys I Have Known, “and we try to fill them with life.” This sentence describes the aspirations both of personal memory and of professional history, and in this incomparable book Stern brings them magisterially together. Because he is such a gifted and disciplined historian, his very memories acquire the quality of evidence, carefully weighed and sifted, never over-interpreted. And because the central thread of memories in the book is his own – from the destruction of the world of European Jewry to the reunification of Germany – history here takes on a discreetly compelling personal accent. When Stern tells us that “the German roads to perdition...were neither accidental nor inevitable,” and that he finally feels, returning as an honored son to his German birthplace now become a part of Poland, that he has been given back a part of his past, we know we are reading not only an elegant memoir and not only a distinguished work of history, but a unique evocation of a haunted and haunting culture, an intimate analysis of that enduring Germany that has so altered our world.

One of America's best known historians, Fritz Stern is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1953. The author of books such as The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (1961), The Responsibility of Power (1967) and Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder and the Building of the German Empire (1977), Dr. Stern also served on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs for many years. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1988.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author or authors whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history. The prize is for books in English by U.S. citizens or permanent residents in this country, published in the United States. Books must be single-authored volumes, not collections of articles or edited texts.

The prize honors historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, University Professor Emeritus of Columbia University and a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1984. It was established by a gift from Roger Williams, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wyoming, a former student of Professor Barzun.

The selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University; Glen W. Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study; and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University.

2005 award presented in April 2007

Jacob Soll, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, in recognition of his book Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, University of Michigan Press. Jacob Soll follows the typographical fortunes and receptions of the French translation of Machiavelli's Prince and its various and changing meanings into the Enlightenment. In the course of his researches, especially on erudite textual criticism, he makes valuable contributions both to the history of reading as a social and political practice and as a modern medium of subversive as well as absolutist political thought.

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The American Philosophical Society's Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded to Jacob Soll for his book, Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism, published by University of Michigan Press in 2005. It is a superb example of contemporary book history, printing history and influence. In this book Jacob Soll follows the typographical fortunes and receptions of the French translation of Machiavelli's Prince and its various and changing meanings into the Enlightenment. In the course of his researches, especially on erudite textual criticism, he makes valuable contributions both to the history of reading as a social and political practice and as a modern medium of subversive as well as absolutist political thought.

Jacob Soll received his Diplôme d'Études Approfondies from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1993. He began his doctoral research in Paris, but eventually moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge University, where he finished his Ph.D. in 1998. In 1997, while completing his doctorate, he began lecturing in the history department at Princeton University. He moved to Rutgers University in 1999, where he is currently an associate professor of history.

The Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History is awarded annually to the author or authors whose book exhibits distinguished work in American or European cultural history. The prize is for books in English by U.S. citizens or permanent residents in this country, published in the United States. Books must be single-authored volumes, not collections of articles or edited texts.

The prize honors historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, University Professor Emeritus of Columbia University and a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1984. It was established by a gift from Roger Williams, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wyoming, a former student of Professor Barzun.

The selection committee consisted of chairman Donald R. Kelley, James Westfall Thompson Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University, Glen W. Bowersock, Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University.

2004 award presented in 2005

Bart Schultz, Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, in recognition of his book Henry Sidgwick - The Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge University Press.
This book is a comprehensive study of the great Victorian moral philosopher, author of Methods of Ethics, and influential writer on many subjects (including religion, politics, education, psychology, and parapsychology), placed in his social circle and in the culture of pre-Bloomsbury England.
2003 award presented in 2004

Stéphane Gerson, assistant professor of French at the Institute of French Studies, New York University, in recognition of his book The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Cornell University Press.
Working below the level of national "unity," Stéphane Gerson explores regional and village space and time in terms of local culture, employing historiography, archeology, cults, archives, monuments, museums, monographs, learned societies, popular celebrations, pageants, commemorations, committees, and other vehicles of social memory to open another and decentralized dimension of French identity and to recall multiple local pasts into modern national consciousness.
2002 award presented in 2003

Robert E. Norton, professor and chair of German and Russian Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, in recognition of his book Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle, Cornell University Press.
This book is a comprehensive and original study of the most influential, perhaps greatest, and in recent times most unappreciated poet of twentieth-century Germany. George was an ambivalent prophet and symbol of the true, "secret," and "sacred" Germany underlying modern bourgeois corruption. He "loved art as power," and he aspired indeed to turn poetry into reality in his imagined domain. He was a major presence as an author but even more as an arachnoid "master" and Führer of many poets, philosophers, artists, and historians of the Weimar Republic and, though his hubris kept him from participating in fascist politics before his death in 1933, as a cultural harbinger of the Third Reich.
2001 award, presented in 2002

Jonathan Rose, Professor of History, Drew University, and founder and past president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), for The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press
This work, which goes beyond old-fashioned intellectual history, offers a rich and innovative study of the "history of audiences," based on an impressive array of neglected sources (memoirs, oral history, social surveys, school records, and newspapers). Showing the reading choices and practices of workers from the pre-industrial age to the twentieth century, Rose concludes that, between the rise and the decline of the "autodidact tradition," working-class knowledge of politics, science, history, philosophy, literature, and sexuality was much higher and more sophisticated than previously assumed and that this unsuspected level of cultural literacy forces revision of the traditional view of English social and cultural history.
2000 award, shared; presented in 2001

Peter N. Miller, Professor of Cultural History, Bard Graduate Center, for
Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century, Yale University Press
The author explores the correspondence of the renowned French scholar, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, illuminating the learning and cultural values of the seventeenth-century world of letters.

 

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Ronald D. Witt, Professor of History, Professor of History, Duke University, for In the Footsteps of the Ancients: the Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Brill Press
The author revisits the problem of the origins of Italian humanism, greatly expanding the range of interpretations and giving attention to the later significance of Renaissance humanism.