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Prison Writings wins award

Posted on 20 January 2011

Prison Writings in Early Modern England, a special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly edited by Professors Bill Sherman (English) and Bill Sheils (History), received the 2009 Voyager Award at this year's MLA convention in Philadelphia.

The collection began its life as a conference at our Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies (CREMS) in 2007 and was published as the June 2009 issue of the HLQ. It offers the first collaborative, interdisciplinary assessment of this crucial phenomenon, which not only transformed the country's social and political structures but also left its mark on a surprising number of literary lives and texts. The essays include a historical introduction by Thomas Freeman; an afterword by Rivkah Zim on the literary authority of carceral experience; analyses of texts by Thomas More, Walter Raleigh, John Bunyan and others; and treatments of prison writings by Royalists and Quaker women, the use of spies and informers in Elizabethan prisons, and the epidemic of imprisonment for debt during the Early Modern credit crunch.

The Voyager Award is given by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) to the journal with the best coverage of the period 1500-1800. Prison Writings in Early Modern England was the HLQ's submission for 2009.

From the judges' citation: 'Prison Writings in Early Modern England significantly reflects on a neglected literary genre devoted to neglected, often stigmatized experience, organizing and focusing for the reader a dazzling array of literary and documentary texts of the period, and situating them in the cultural politics and poetics in which they participated much more and much more eloquently than we knew. The articles in this issue cover the whole period from More to Bunyan, capture the experience of both men and women, spies and dissenters and inventors, and most important allow those writing about incarceration to speak for themselves across the centuries in ways that humanize the prisoner and query the social structures to which they were subject. Beautifully conceived and executed, Prison Writings in Early Modern England is a profoundly informative and humane work.'