Home » Jacques Barzun Prize

Barzun Prize Recipients

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.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.