Duncan Hardy, associate professor of history, received the 2019 Gladstone Award for his first book, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346-1521. The Royal Historical Society annually presents the Gladstone History Book Prize for a first solely-written book on a historical subject not primarily related to British History published in the UK.
“I am delighted and very grateful that my book has been recognized with this award,” says Hardy. “The Gladstone Prize reflects the Royal Historical Society’s long commitment to European and global history. My work aims to provide new concepts and models to think about a part of the world–the Holy Roman Empire, which was in medieval and early modern Central Europe–that looks very unfamiliar to us in our twenty-first century system of nation-states, and I am thrilled that the prize’s judges found this persuasive and important. In our increasingly interconnected but also unstable world, it is more important than ever to try to understand the many possible forms of socio-political organization that humans can develop. We can accomplish that by studying the past, especially more distant and strange-seeming regions and periods.”
The volume offers the first book-length study of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century and it proposes a new model for examining medieval and early modern politics. To learn more about the award and the judges’ response to Hardy’s work, visit the Royal Historical Society’s complete list of winners.