Shea, Ellis and Marraro award recipients announced

The Association is happy to announce the recipients of the Shea, Ellis and Marraro awards for 2012.

Anne Jacobson Schutte, Professor of History, Emerita, University of Virginia, “By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe” (Cornell University Press) has been selected as the 2012 Marraro Book Prize recipient by the ACHA. In announcing the award, the Marraro committee noted that “In a lively text marked by vivid examples, Anne Jacobson Schutte masterfully revises our picture of how religious houses fit into early modern family dynamics.  Men as well as women were forced into vows, often through a violence shaped by strategy and circumstance that left deep scars.  Schutte carefully lays out the institutional apparatus of the houses and the legal processes for release from vows, and offers a rich store of data for further examination.”

Benjamin D. Reed, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, John Tracy Ellis dissertation award for “Devotion to Saint Philip Neri in Colonial Mexico City.” The committee agreed that Mr. Reed’s research on the Oratorians was of exceptional significance.  The Oratorians, as he explained, contributed to “modernizing the role of priests” during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries at a time when modern Catholicism was experiencing major changes due to the Council of Trent, the Reformation movements, and the increasing European involvement in the Americas.  His innovative work will provide “the first in-depth history of [one of the] Congregations of the Oratory in the Spanish Empire.”  Mr. Reed’s proposal demonstrated several strengths.  His project is thoughtful and well-conceived.  He has already completed a significant amount of research and he communicates his findings clearly and precisely.  The project requires considerable methodological sophistication, which is reflected in work already completed.  As historians begin to study the effects of Vatican II, Mr. Reed’s study of an earlier reform movement will be of considerable interest.”

John Connelly, professor of History, University of California-Berkeley, John Gilmary Shea book award for Enemies to Brothers: The revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Harvard University Press). Professor Connelly has made a unique contribution with his original and thoroughly researched study of how and why the Holocaust changed the attitude of the Catholic Church to the Jewish people and resulted in Nostra Aetate, the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that revolutionized the relationship between Catholics and Jews.He demonstrates that this change was due not only to popular revulsion at the horror of the Holocaust, but was also rooted in the groundwork laid by Catholic scholars in 1930s who were pioneers in combating anti-Judaism within the Catholic Church. Professor Connelly’s book is noteworthy not only for the range and thoroughness of his research and the clarity of his presentation, but also for his dispassionate and non-polemical approach to a highly controversial topic.

The Association will be honoring all its academic/scholarly prize winners for 2012 at our annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, Saturday, January 5, 2013, at Antoine’s restaurant in the French Quarter.