The Margaret Wade Labarge Prize is a prize for the best book published by a Canadian medievalist. It is named for the Society's first President, Dr. Margaret Wade Labarge. Dr. Dorin won for his monograph, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
The prize committee's citation for No Return read as follows:
This book examines the medieval history of ecclesiastical and secular policy and practice toward the lending of money at interest in Western Europe, as well as the expulsions of moneylending parties, and reframes this history’s relationship to the history of medieval Jews and antisemitism by integrating the treatment of Christian usurers. The committee considered No Return a most impressive first monograph, deeply learned, and drawing on extensive research in numerous fields and languages. Especially impressive is Dorin’s emphasis on “inventing” and propagating judicial expulsion as a cultural, religious, and legal means of confronting undesirable elements in society, which played out differently in different regions of Europe. No Return addresses both the meanings of discourse and also its observable effects. The exemplary clarity and cogency of Dorin’s prose also distinguishes the book, in the Committee’s assessment.
The prize for the best book published by a Canadian medievalist is named for the Society’s first President Dr Margaret Wade Labarge. It was instantly dubbed “The Polly,” reflecting the nickname by which this warm and beloved medievalist was known from coast to coast.
Throughout her career Dr Labarge was an academic anomaly. She was an inspiring figure and a respected independent scholar. Although she taught at Carleton and Ottawa from time to time, she did not hold a full-time academic appointment. Nevertheless, she was a sought-after speaker and her scholarship was acclaimed across Canada and throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. She wrote nine books on a sweeping array of topics ranging from A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (1965); The Life of Louis IX of France (1968); Medieval Travellers (1982); and perhaps most significantly, Women in Medieval Life (1986), a pioneering monograph dedicated to the study of women in the Middle Ages. Her contributions to medieval studies in Canada was recognized by election to the Royal Society of Canada and appointment to the Order of Canada.
With this award for an outstanding book, the Society seeks to recognize and encourage the quality and diversity of scholarship exhibited by our first President, Margaret Wade Labarge. Calls for submissions for the 2025 Labarge prize will be posted in Fall 2024.
For further information on the winning books, see the entries below this list.
2022 - Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (UPenn P, 2021)
2021 - John Osborne, Rome in the Eighth Century: A History in Art (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
2020 - David K. Coley, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019).
2019 - James Grier, Ademarus Cabannensis Monachus et Musicus. Corpus Christianorum, Autographa Medii Aevi, 7. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).