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Congratulations!
St Andrews Article Prize 2025 Winner
Holly Fletcher, Making beds in early modern England: sleep, matter and environmental change, Historical Research, 2024, 97, pp. 307–328. https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htae001
This is an extraordinarily multi-layered and creative article that describes sleep in the early modern period as a multispecies assemblage. Dr. Fletcher uses records from London’s Worshipful Company of Upholders to identify the myriad natural fibers with which mattresses were stuffed and the medical, moral, and legal discourses surrounding each one. With stories of bedding filled with rabbit fur, straw, goat hair, goose feathers, wool, thistledown, and more Fletcher’s prose draws us into complex stories about poverty, animal physiology, gender, science, folk customs, domesticity, intimate knowledge of local environments, and historical concepts of the body. The article is beautifully written, utterly original, and deeply entertaining. We are very pleased to present Dr. Fletcher with this year’s St. Andrews Article Prize.
St Andrews Article Prize 2025 Honorable Mention:
Andrew W. M. Smith, “Ovine invasion: sheep as protest objects and animal agents in the Larzac campaign,” published in French History in 2023 and winner of the French History Article Prize. Dr. Smith’s article demonstrates how sheep served as both tools of protest and autonomous actors whose behaviors amplified the impact of farmers’ protests against the expansion of an army base in the 1970s. It is a deeply theorized exploration of more-than human entanglements.
Giacomo Bonan, “Hydraulic Engineers and Antiquarians: Political Use of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Venice,” published in Technology and Culture in 2023. Dr. Bonan’s work examines the evolving relationship between hydraulic engineering and historical scholarship in 19th-century Venice. By showing how history transitioned from being a source of empirical data to a tool for rhetorical and political purposes in debates over water management, he highlights how historical knowledge was integral to scientific and engineering practices before the disciplines became more specialized and divided.
Committee:
Sarah R. Hamilton, chair (University of Bergen, Norway)
Hrvoje Petrić (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Iva Peša (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
Ellen F. Arnold (University of Stavanger, Norway)