Nicholas Terpstra's "Cultures of Charity" wins Marraro Prize

November 6, 2014
Nicholas Terpstra's "Cultures of Charity" wins Marraro Prize

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