History of the prize
Rose Mary Crawshay (1828-1907), educationist and feminist. Crawshay was an early supporter of women’s suffrage, one of the first women to be elected to local school boards following the 1870 Education Act, and an advocate for free local libraries opening every day of the week.
In 1888 Crawshay endowed an unusual literary prize for women scholars, writing about one or more of the Romantic poets: Byron, Keats and Shelley. The prize was first awarded in 1916.
In the early 20th century, this prize migrated to the British Academy. The prize is now awarded for a work written by a woman, in English, on any subject related to literature.
Eligibility
a) The prize is awarded each year for an historical or critical book by a woman, on any subject connected with literature.
b) Eligible nominations must be for books, written by women, in English, published within the last three years (2022-2025).
How to nominate
Nominations for this award are open from 1 December to 31 January and may only be made by Fellows of the British Academy. Entries should be submitted electronically via this nomination form.
The deadline for submissions is 31 January each year. Nominations will be reviewed, and the winner selected, by the relevant panel.
If you have any queries submitting a nomination, please email [email protected].
2024 winner
Dr Katrin Ettenhuber has been awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book 'The Logical Renaissance: Literature, Cognition and Argument, 1479-1630' (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Katrin Ettenhuber is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Originally from Germany, she completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where she was subsequently the AH Lloyd Research Fellow. Her early work focused on the writings of John Donne and paid particular attention to his religious contexts, as well as his approach to reading and interpretation. This resulted in two major publications: a monograph, 'Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation' (Oxford University Press, 2011), and a scholarly edition of Donne’s Lincoln’s Inn sermons, vol 5 of 'The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne' (Oxford University Press, 2015). She has also published widely on early modern rhetoric and is the co-editor, with Sylvia Adamson and Gavin Alexander, of a collection of essays entitled 'Renaissance Figures of Speech' (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is currently working on two projects: an edition of Milton’s Samson Agonistes and a book-length study of Shakespeare’s arts of argument.
"I am honoured and delighted to have won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for 'The Logical Renaissance'. The book argues that logic was absolutely central to the literature and culture of the early modern period, but that we have largely misunderstood what logic was and, more importantly, what it was for. Logic formed the most important part of the early modern undergraduate curriculum – but where students today might expect to encounter logic as part of a specialist degree in philosophy, mathematics, or computer science, the early moderns saw it as a foundational subject that prepared students for work in every other discipline or field of study. Logic was, quite simply, the art of thinking and arguing well and, as such, underpinned and shaped the poetry, drama, and prose of the period. This was a hugely enjoyable book to write, but also a challenging one. 'The Logical Renaissance' addresses some of the central orthodoxies of early modern literary scholarship, but I am not, by temperament or inclination, an iconoclast. It also deals with a large and often obscure archive of writings on the arts of discourse from England, Italy, Spain, France, the Low Countries, and Germany. The fact that I was able to confront these challenges at all is due in no small part to the support and inspiration of the late Professor Peter Mack FBA, whose ground-breaking research on rhetoric and logic will inform all subsequent work in the field. Peter is much missed, and I dedicate this prize to his memory, with enormous gratitude and admiration."
- Dr Katrin Ettenhuber, August 2024
Previous winners
(The current convention is that one prize is awarded each year, but the list below shows that in the past, there have often been two winners in a year.)
2023 Associate Professor Noémie Ndiaye for Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022); and Professor Clare Pettitt for Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2020).
2022 Dr Erica McAlpine for The Poet's Mistake (Princeton University Press, 2020)
2021 Dr Helen Moore for Amadis in English (Oxford University Press, 2020); and Professor Gillian Russell for The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
2020 Professor Marion Turner for her book Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton University Press, 2019)
2019 Dr Marina MacKay for Ian Watt: the Novel and Wartime Critic (Oxford University Press, 2019)
2018 Professor Emma J. Clery for Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
2017 Dr Kate Bennett for John Aubrey, Brief Lives with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers (Volume I & II) (Oxford University Press, 2015)
2016 Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge for The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2011)
2015 Professor Catherine Bates for Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2013); Professor Ankhi Mukherjee for What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford University Press, 2014)
2014 Dr Hannah Sullivan for The Work of Revision (Harvard University Press, 2013)
2012 Professor Julie Sanders for The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama 1620-1650
2011 Professor Fiona Stafford for Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford University Press)
2010 Dr Daisy Hay for Young Romantics (Bloomsbury)
2009 Frances Wilson for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber); Professor Molly M Mahoood for The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge University Press)
2008 Dr Helen W Small for The Long Life (Oxford University Press)
2007 Dr Susan Oliver for Scott, Byron and the Politics of Cultural Encounter (Palgrave)
2006 Dr Rosalind Ballaster for Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (Oxford University Press)
2005 Judith Farr with Louise Carter for The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press); Dr Claire Preston for Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early Modern Science (Cambridge University Press)
2004 Dr Maud Ellmann for Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh University Press); Dr Anne Stott for Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford University Press)
2003 Mrs Claire Tomalin for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Penguin); Dr Jane Stabler for Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge University Press)
2002 Professor Wendy Doniger for The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (University of Chicago Press); Professor Kate Flint for The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press)
2001 Dr Annette Peach for Portraits of Byron (reprinted from the Walpole Society Volume LXII); Dr Lucy Newlyn for Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford University Press)
2000 Marina Warner for No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Chatto and Windus; Vintage); Joanne Wilkes for Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition (Ashgate)