From time to time, the Society for Italian Historical Studies presents a citation to a senior scholar in recognition of distinguished achievement over the course of a career. No more than one such citation may be presented in a single year, and in some years no award is given.
Latest Recipient: Sharon Strocchia
Professor Strocchia has been one of the most important and dedicated researchers of the lives of Italian Renaissance women for many decades. Her first book, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (1992) used the Florentine archive to explain the public prominence given to women in mourning rituals in this Renaissance city. Strocchia charted the persistence and meaning of this phenomenon and, equally important, its decline. In a period when a great deal of innovative work was being done about civic ritual and political life, she found an important way to demonstrate the gender politics and define the role of women in Medicean Florence.
Strocchia’s subsequent work has made creative and innovative issue of other archives to reconstruct the lives of women. Her prizewinning Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (2009) is an important contribution to the work of pioneering scholars such as Gabriella Zarri, using the rich Florentine convent archives to reconstruct the social and religious lives of fifteenth and sixteenth-century women. This book led her to research and write her spectacular Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (2019), awarded prizes from SIHS, the History of Science Society, and the Renaissance Society of America. In this impressive, deeply researched book, Strocchia reconstructs the world of nuns who served as healers in a variety of different capacities – making and selling medicine, writing and using medical recipe books, and acting as healers in and outside of the convents. She published this book in tandem with her prizewinning collaborative special issue of Renaissance Studies: Gender, Health, and Healing, 1250-1550 (2020), coedited with Sara Ritchie, awarded the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Prize for best collaborative research project. Prof. Strocchia is a generous and active intellectual citizen in many contexts, including SIHS. She has been a superb mentor of her undergraduate and graduate students, who have learned from her superb archival and intellectual instincts about the histories we should write.
Past Recipients
- 2022 – David Kertzer
- 2021 – Guido Ruggiero
- 2020 – Mary Gibson
- 2017 – Victoria De Grazia
- 2016 – Katharine Park
- 2015 – John A. Davis
- 2014 – Edward Muir
- 2013 – Nancy Siriasi
- 2004 – Denis Mack Smith
- 2003 – Richard A. Goldthwaite
- 2002 – John W. O’Malley, S. J.
- 2001 – Alan Reinerman
- 2000 – Raymond Grew
- 1998 – Paul Grendler
- 1994 – William Bowsky
- 1992 – Robert Brentano
- 1989 – Gene Brucker
- 1988 – Charles Trinkaus
- 1986 – H. Stuart Hughes
- 1985 – Charles Delzell
- 1984 – R. John Rath
- 1982 – Emiliana P. Noether
- 1981 – Norman Kogan
- 1980 – Max Salvadori
- 1979 – David Herlihy
- 1978 – Eric Cochrane
- 1976 – Myron P. Gilmore
- 1974 – Felix Gilbert
- 1970 – Hans Baron
- 1969 – Robert Lopez
- 1968 – Shepard B. Clough
- 1967 – A. William Salomone
- 1966 – Frederic Lane
- 1964 – Paul Oskar Kristeller
- 1963 – Lauro Martines