The American Historical Association awarded its Marraro Prize, for the best book in English on Italian history in any epoch, to Nicholas Terpstra's Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy. Part of the series "I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History", it was published by Harvard UP in 2013.
“This humane and engaging study of collective action revises how historians understand early modern European poor relief, and provides a supple model for investigating pragmatic and aestheticized responses to the poor in other times and places,” commented Alison K. Frazier (Univ. of Texas, Austin), chair of the prize review committee. Other members include Borden W. Painter (Trinity Coll., Conn.), and Valerie Ramseyer (Wellesley Coll.).
Last April, Cultures of Charity won the Phyllis Goodhard Gordan Book Prize, awarded by the Renassance Society of America for best book of the year in Renaissance studies.
Professor Terpstra, chair of history at the University of Toronto, is a former Fellow and Visiting Professor at I Tatti. He joins a number of former I Tatti appointees who have received this highly prestigious award, listed below.
- 2014 Nicholas Terpstra's Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics, and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy
- 2002 Paul Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance
- 2001 Ronald Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Italian Humanism from Lovato to Bruni
- 1996 T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy
- 1993 Edward Muir, Jr., Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance
- 1992 Samuel Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution
- 1989 Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600
- 1985 Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome
- 1983 John Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400
- 1982 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance
- 1981 Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History
- 1979 John O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521
- 1977 Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence