International book award for a colleague

Tom Hamilton’s book A Widow’s Vengeance after the Wars of Religion: Gender and Justice in Renaissance France has been awarded the 2025 Natalie Zemon Davis Book Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society.

The Natalie Zemon Davis Prize recognizes the best book published in English in the preceding year in the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the Early Modern Era (1450–1750).

Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023) was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emerita at Princeton University. She was the author of many works of early modern history, including The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), which is the core book for Tom Hamilton’s strand of the module Making History entitled ‘Microhistories of Early Modern Life’. Among other works, her classic articles in Past & Present, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’ and ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Lyon’ are key texts for his special subject on France in the Wars of Religion.

The prize honour Natalie Zemon Davis’s stature in the field, and her long involvement with the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, which stretched over half a century. Whatever her topic, Natalie Zemon Davis developed innovative interdisciplinary methodologies, introducing early modern historians to anthropological methods, ethnography, cultural theory, and other approaches. She made use of a huge variety of sources, particularly to explore the lives of ordinary people. Those people particularly included women, from her earliest essays to her last works.