Notes and Comments

Association news

At its Presidential Luncheon during the annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association on January 5, 2018 in Washington, D.C., the following awards with their citations were announced:

2017 John Gilmary Shea Prize Citation awarded to William B. Taylor of the University of California–Berkeley, for Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Awarded to William B. Taylor for his book Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). This magisterial study takes as its subject the transformation, through Catholic devotions, of the landscape of the New World in the colonial period. Taylor's principal concern is to demonstrate how different strains of early modern piety became rooted in specific places in Mexico, and why certain practices flourished over the first three-hundred years of that nation's history. In addition to considering shrines large and small, he explains the place of miracles, of pilgrimages, of the promotion of shrines in print, and of the role of devotional images in the elaboration of a new spiritual geography. Rooted in decades of archival research and in a deep knowledge of religion in colonial Mexico, Theater of a Thousand Wonders challenges facile interpretations of devotional behaviors and of the fluctuations in popularity of different shrines. Rather than seeing simply the substitution of one form of religious behavior for another in the wake of the Spanish conquest, and a mirror for metropolitan devotions, Taylor demonstrates how Mexican shrines and devotional practices diverged from their Spanish sources in ways that were unique to New Spain. These differences in behavior, amply adduced by records as diverse as hagiographic texts, Inquisition records, confraternity archives, as well as artistic and architectural evidence, reveal the tensions between popular spirituality and official desires, as well as the competition between religious orders to harness the wellsprings of devotions across the colony. In sum, Taylor's study is a profound meditation on the presence of the holy in New Spain, and how Mexicans responded to it over the span of the colonial period. Owing to its skillful deployment of a massive quantity of data on lived religion in New Spain, as well as to its elegant analysis of the pious practices of colonial Mexicans, this work amply merits recognition with the 2017 John Gilmary Shea Prize.

2017 Msgr. Harry C. Koenig Journal Prize in Catholic Biography awarded to Prof. Paul T. Murray of Siena College, for "'The Most Righteous White Man in Selma': Father Maurice Ouellet and the Struggle for Voting Rights," The Alabama Review 68.1 (January 2015): 31–73.

The inaugural Harry C. Koenig Journal Article Prize, for an outstanding biographical study of a catholic individual published in 2015 or 2016, has been awarded to Prof. Paul T. Murray of Siena College, for "'The Most Righteous white Man in selma': Father Maurice Ouellet and the Struggle for Voting Rights," The Alabama Review 68.1 (January 2015): 31–73. Prof. Murray draws on published records, private papers, and personal interviews to present the story of Father Ouellet's sustained engagement, at considerable personal risk, in the struggle for African-American civil rights in the early 1960s. Though cast in a biographical mode, this article is not limited to recounting an individual life. The author very effectively sets Father Ouellet's story in its social and political context, links it with broader historical developments, and brings in the actions and contributions of his brethren in the Society of St. Edmund and the Sisters of St. Joseph, expanding our knowledge of the Catholic contribution to critical questions of racial justice in the civil rights movement. Moreover, while the focus is definitely on Father Ouellet's engagement with the civil rights movement in Selma, that central episode is situated within the broader arc of his life. The result is a moving story of moral courage, told with great sensitivity to the historical circumstances in which that story unfolds.

2017 Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History awarded to John Howe, Before the Gregorian Reform...