Professor Micheline White (Department of English, College of Humanities) was awarded the Sixteenth Century Society’s Raymond B. Waddington Prize for the best English-language journal article on the literature of the Early Modern period (1450-1750) published in 2023.
Synopsis of Katherine Parr’s Giftbooks, Henry VIII’s Marginalia, and the Display of Royal Power and Piety, Renaissance Quarterly, 76 (2023): 39–83:
Micheline White’s essay employs very impressive detective work in order to identify Henry VIII’s previously unknown marginalia in a deluxe copy of Katherine Parr’s Psalms or Prayers of 1544. The piece identifies Parr’s practice of employing gift books to advance Henry’s political causes and shows that his marginalia validated their transactional relationship, which allowed her to influence both political and literary trends at court and beyond. The essay breaks new ground in using historical methods to shed new light on Parr’s role as both queen and author and models the considerable rigor and intellectual heft which characterize the best scholarship in our discipline.