Recipients of the Jacques Barzun Prize

Recipients of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History

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.

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.

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 to both

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.

and to

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.

1999 award, presented in 2000 to

J.G.A. Pocock, Professor of History Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University, for Barbarism and Religion, 2 vols., Cambridge University Press
In the first volume, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, the author distinguishes between the British, Swiss and French Enlightenments, and traces their influence on Gibbon's interpretation of the Christian millennium. In the second volume, Narratives of Civil Government, he compares Gibbon to other historians of his age, and follows Gibbon's narrative of the Roman empire, shaped by the forces of barbarism and religion.

1998 award, shared; presented in 1999 to both

Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Professor of History, Occidental College, for Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, Princeton University Press
The author traces the idea and image of the human mind as a garden, from the Greek Stoics and hellenistic Judaism, through early and later Christianity, to the Lutheran Reformation.

and to

Philip D. Morgan, Professor of History, College of William and Mary, and Editor of The William and Mary Quarterly, for
Slave Counterpoint, University of North Carolina Press The author combines cultural, social, and economic history to recreate the external and inner life of African American slaves in eighteenth-century America.

1997 award, shared; presented in 1998 to both

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Professor, University of Toronto, for Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent, University of California Press
The subject is a group of devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun around 1500 for other members of her community. The author shows what this type of art, often held in low esteem, can tell us about late medieval religious thought and spirituality.

and to

Arnold Lewis, Professor of Art History Emeritus, College of Wooster, for An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop and the World's Columbian Exposition, University of Illinois Press
The subject is the international importance of Chicago in the transformation of Western culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The author studies the collision between old world assumptions and new world realities.

1996 award, presented in 1997 to

Dianne Sachko Macleod, Professor of Art History, University of California, Davis, for Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity, Cambridge University Press
The author explores the collecting of art in Victorian England by newly wealthy members of the expanding middle classes. She analyzes the social and psychological motives of the collectors, the types of art they favored, and the impact they had on the British art world and British society.

1995 award, presented in 1996 to

Caroline Walker Bynum, Morris and Alma Schapiro Professor of History, Columbia University, for The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Columbia University Press
The author traces the controversial history of the body from the patristic period to the thirteenth century, casting light on an aspect of culture neglected by social and intellectual historians.

1994 award, shared; presented in 1995 to both

C. Stephen Jaeger, Professor of Germanics and Comparative Literature, University of Washington, for The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, University of Pennsylvania Press
The author studies the cathedral schools of France and Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries, both as centers of learning and as conveyors of a new standard of behavior for the aristocracy, before the rise of the universities in the twelfth century.

and to

James H. Johnson, Assistant Professor of History, Boston University, forListening in Paris, University of California Press
The author examines the Parisian opera audiences of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, analyzing their reactions to the performances, both in the context of history of music and in that of the history of cultural change.

1993 award, shared; presented in 1995 to both

Roger Chickering, Professor of History, Georgetown University, for Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life, Humanities Press International
This is the first comprehensive intellectual biography of the most controversial historian of imperial Germany. Lamprecht's emphasis on scientific cultural history was long disparaged.

and to

John O'Malley, Distinguished Professor of Church History, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, for The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press/MIT Press
The author places the Jesuits in the cultural context of the sixteenth century. This new light shows the era in its own perspective and dispels long-held views about the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Jesuits.