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Margaret Wade Labarge

Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

Photograph from the Heritage Photograph Collection, Archives and Research Collections, Carleton University Library.

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.

Eligibility :

The Canadian Society of Medievalists / Société Canadienne des Médiévistes welcomes entries for the 2021 Margaret Wade Labarge Book Prize. The 2021 prize honours a book published in 2020 in the field of medieval studies (including monographs, editions, translations, and other categories as determined by the Prize Committee), authored or co-authored, translated or co-translated, edited or co-edited, etc. (the test being at least 50% participation) by a Canadian or someone resident in Canada. Edited collections of essays are not eligible.

A three-person committee judges the entries. The winner will be announced at the Society’s Annual General Meeting planned for June 2021, during the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. The prize includes a cash award and a three-year membership in the Society, which includes subscription to our journal, Florilegium.

The deadline for submitting three copies of an eligible book is February 15, 2021. Because of the changing circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, please contact the Chair of the Margaret Wade Labarge Book Prize Committee (Dr. James Maiello) about the best way to send books:

Dr. James V. Maiello

Desautels Faculty of Music

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg

James.Maiello@umanitoba.ca

Past Winners of the Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

For further information on the winning books, see the entries below this list.

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).

2018 - Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550 (Oxford UP, 2017).

2017 - Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready (Yale UP, 2016).

2016 - Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wycliff (Cornell UP, 2014).

2015 - Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge UP, 2014).

2014 - Frank Klaassen, The Transformation of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (Pennsylvania State UP, 2013).

2013 - James Grier, Ademari Cabennensis Opera liturgica et poetica: musica cum textibus (Brepols, 2012).

2012 - Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England (U of Pennsylvania P, 2011).

2011 - Frank Mantello and Joseph Goering, Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (University of Toronto Press, 2010).

2010 - Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy (Penn. State Press, 2009).

2009 - Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (U of Pennsylvania P, 2008).

2008 - Fiona J. Griffiths, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007).

2007 - No prize awarded.

2006 - Cynthia J. Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earltoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140-1365 (Four Courts Press, 2005).

2005 - Paul Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

2004 - No prize awarded.

2003 - No prize awarded.

2002 - Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2001).

2001 - Alexander C. Murray, From Roman to Merovingian Gaul: A Reader (Broadview, 2000).

2000 - No prize awarded.

1999 - Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford UP, 1998).

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2009 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize Recipient

15 Jul 2017 2:47 PM | Andrew Klein

2009 ~ Siân Echard Printing the Middle Ages. U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.

Purchase Here

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings.

Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

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2008 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize Recipient

15 Jul 2017 2:46 PM | Andrew Klein

2008 ~ Fiona J. Griffiths The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.

Purchase Here

In The Garden of Delights, Griffiths offers the first major study of the Hortus deliciarum, a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law written both by and explicitly for women at the end of the twelfth century. In so doing she provides a brilliantly persuasive new reading of female monastic culture. Through careful analysis of the contents, structure, and organization of the Hortus, Griffiths argues for women's profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the period on a level previously thought unimaginable, overturning the assumption that women were largely excluded from the "renaissance" and "reform" of this period. As a work of scholarship that drew from a wide range of sources, both monastic and scholastic, the Hortusprovides a witness to the richness of women's reading practices within the cloister, demonstrating that it was possible, even late into the twelfth century, for communities of religious women to pursue an educational program that rivaled that available to men. At the same time, the manuscript's reformist agenda reveals how women engaged the pressing spiritual questions of the day, even going so far as to criticize priests and other churchmen who fell short of their reformist ideals. Through her wide-ranging examination of the texts and images of the Hortus, their sources, composition, and function, Griffiths offers an integrated understanding of the whole manuscript, one which highlights women's Latin learning and orthodox spirituality. The Garden of Delights contributes to some of the most urgent questions concerning medieval religious women, the interplay of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement, to discussions concerning women scribes and writers, women readers, female authorship and authority, and the visual culture of female communities. It will be of interest to art historians, scholars of women's and gender studies, historians of medieval religion, education, and theology, and literary scholars studying questions of female authorship and models of women's reading.

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Recipient of the 2006 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

15 Jul 2017 11:42 AM | Andrew Klein

2006 ~ Cynthia Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earltoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140-1365. Four Courts Press, 2005.

Purchase Here

In the century or so after 1125 significant numbers of Anglo-Norman and European noblemen settled in Scotland at the invitation of the crown, chiefly in the lowlands. North of the Forth, however, lay large provincial lordships ruled on behalf of the king by hereditary lords known as ‘mormaers’. Even after the arrival of the newcomers, the native rulers of this area, Gaelic speakers for the most part, remained a small, powerful, and largely independent group. Using the lordships of Strathearn and Lennox as focal points, this book explores the complex nature of the encounter between the cultures of the Gaels and the Europeans, and shows how important were native customs and practices in the making of the later medieval kingdom.

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Recipient of the 2005 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

15 Jul 2017 11:40 AM | Andrew Klein

2005 ~ Paul Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.

Purchase Here

Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age presents the reader with seven engaging studies of cultural life and thought in the Carolingian world: Why did Charlemagne have a mustache and why did hair matter? Why did the king own peacocks and other exotic animals? Why was he writing in bed and could he write at all? How did medieval kings become stars? How were secrets kept and conveyed in the early Middle Ages? Does the world age with the aged? And why did early medieval peoples believe in storm- and hailmakers? The answers, Dutton finds, are often surprising.

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<< First < Prev 1 2 Next > Last >>

Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

Past Winners of the Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

2009 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize Recipient

15 Jul 2017 2:47 PM | Andrew Klein

**2009 ~ Siân Echard Printing the Middle Ages. U of Pennsylvania P, 2008.**

2008 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize Recipient

15 Jul 2017 2:46 PM | Andrew Klein

**2008 ~ Fiona J. Griffiths The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. U of Pennsylvania P, 2007.**

Recipient of the 2006 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

15 Jul 2017 11:42 AM | Andrew Klein

**2006 ~ Cynthia Neville, Native Lordship in Medieval Scotland: The Earltoms of Strathearn and Lennox, c. 1140-1365. Four Courts Press, 2005.**

Recipient of the 2005 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize

15 Jul 2017 11:40 AM | Andrew Klein

**2005 ~ Paul Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.**