Editor's Note: Louis Round Wilson Prize for 2008

The Editorial Board of Studies in Philology voted at its annual meeting in May 2008 to establish an annual prize of $1000 for the best article published in the journal during the previous year. The prize was named in honor of Louis Round Wilson whose monograph Chaucer's Relative Constructions, based upon his 1905 U NC doctoral dissertation, appeared as the first issue of Studies in Philology in 1906.

At the board meeting in May 2009 an editorial committee appointed by the Editor announced that the first of these annual awards would go to Mary Ann Lund of Mansfield College, Oxford for her article "Reading and the Cure of Despair in The Anatomy of Melancholy," which appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of SP. In that article Lund argues that the Anatomy of Melancholy presents in its final subsection an alternative to existing types of religious discourse on despair; and in presenting this alternative, Burton turned away from English Calvinism and from religious tracts that are "too tragicall, too much dejecting men" and turned instead to a type of sixteenth-century Lutheranism derived from the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen with the hope of offering his readers comfort and "God's universal invitation to believe."

We are pleased to have had the opportunity to publish Mary Ann Lund's fine article, and we offer her our congratulations on being chosen for this award.