Richard T. Yoder, a doctoral candidate in the history department at Pennsylvania State University has been awarded the 2021 Peter Guilday Prize for his article “From the Dove to the Eagle: Jansenist Visual Culture Between Piety and Polemic.” The article was published in the Catholic Historical Review 107, no. 4 (Fall 2021).
The Guilday Prize honors a manuscript from an author who has not previously been published. The winning manuscript is published in the Catholic Historical Review. The award carries a $250 purse.
The prize committee writes:
“In his article on Jansenist visual culture, Richard T. Yoder makes creative use of visual material in order to demonstrate a political turn in the Jansenist movement during the eighteenth century. Elegantly written and analytically strong, the article provides a fascinating new contribution to existing studies of Jansenism and offers readers a new way to understand the way the movement changed during its late middle period. By deftly examining artistic changes in the annual frontispieces of the Jansenists’ journal Nouvelles ecclésiastiques – images that were seen not only by the journal’s readers, but also by a much wider population of illiterate and less-educated people – Yoder demonstrates how Jansenists disseminated new forms of patriotic politics during a time of “intense upheaval in church and state.”
Yoder’s fine scholarship offers a welcome contribution not only to the study of Jansenism, but also to the history of eighteenth-century French print culture and politics.”