Notes and Comments

At its Presidential Luncheon during the annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association on January 5, 2019 in Chicago, the following awards with their citations were announced:

John Gilmary Shea Book Prize: Michelle Armstrong-Partida of the University of Texas at El Paso, for Defiant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalunya (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

This meticulously researched monograph reconstructs the lives of Catalunyan clerics on the eve of the Black Death, offering an intimate view of the passions and conflicts animating their parishes. It draws upon over 2,500 surviving episcopal visitation records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Through her analysis of these and many other sources, Michelle Armstrong-Partida establishes not only that clerical domestic unions (marriages in fact if not in law) were ubiquitous in late medieval Catalunya, but also that clerics in both major and minor orders routinely exhibited the behaviors of their lay male counterparts—most disturbingly, the violent defense of their status and honor within their villages.

The author also reconstructs dozens of clerical families, showing how sons succeeded their fathers in the clerical profession over several generations. Armstrong-Partida effectively demonstrates that the Gregorian reforms had little effect in this corner of western Europe, and that clerics were formed by and participated in the dominant masculine culture in which they lived. In sum, this highly significant study of clerical life in medieval Catalunya opens new vistas on the ecclesiastical development of Europe and raises questions for further investigation, by centering Iberia alongside England and France within the history of clerical celibacy. On account of its outstanding research and original contributions, Defiant Priests deserves recognition with the 2018 John Gilmary Shea Prize.

Harry C. Koenig Book Award for: Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva, Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France

Mother of the Church is a thoroughly researched and well told history of an unusual and neglected figure in modern church history, the Russian aristocrat and Roman Catholic convert Sofia Svechina. The research required familiarity with extensive sources in Russian, French, and other languages. Svechina, who was multilingual, read profusely and left behind notebooks on her reading as well as her personal reflections on spiritual subjects. Bahkmetyeva uses these materials to explore Svechina’s engaging character and her religious thought. The book shows how Svechina was engaged in and took informed positions on important public questions, in conversation with leading intellectuals, first in her native Russia and then in Paris. She became close to Catholic leaders of widely different views, especially through her Paris salon.

This book blends the story of Svechina’s appealing personality and her impact on friends and contacts, amid the background first of war, dislocation, and post-French Revolutionary reaction, and then of debates about the future of Europe and the Catholic Church. Bakhmetyeva’s description of salons, their sources and influence, and their demise represents an important contribution to nineteenth-century history generally and to women’s history. Bakhmetyeva’s biography of Sofia Svechina well deserves the Koenig Prize.

Howard R. Marraro Book Prize: Paul F. Grendler, The Jesuits and Italian Universities, 1548–1773

Paul Grendler applies his unparalleled understanding of Renaissance education to elucidate the frequently contentious, less-often harmonious relationship between Italian universities and the Jesuit order. With exemplary clarity and economy, he balances a command of the European stage and mastery of archival resources to identify how ideological differences, amplified by local concerns, prevented men who seemed “predestined to become university professors” from penetrating Italy’s universities, notwithstanding the Jesuits’ growing international dominance over Catholic education. For this, the ACHA is happy to award him the Marraro Prize.

The ACHA 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award presented to J. Philip Gleason, University of Notre Dame

Philip Gleason, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame, received a master’s degree in history from the University Notre Dame in 1955, joined the University’s history department faculty in 1959, and received his doctoral degree the following year. He chaired Notre Dame’s history department from 1971–74, and...