17th October 2023

The German History Society is pleased to announce that Prof. Stefan Hanß has been awarded the 2023 German History Article Prize by the journal editorial board for his article ‘Gendering the Material Renaissance: Women, Industriousness and the Female Body at the Court of Württemberg’. Awarded regardless of career stage, the prize is awarded annually and is intended to showcase outstanding work from scholars of German history.

Stefan Hanß is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester and works on material culture, cultural encounters, and global history. He is also the Deputy Director and Scientific Lead of the John Rylands Research Institute.

Focusing on almost 9,000 receipts issued by the ducal chancery of Friedrich I and Johann Friedrich of Württemberg between 1593 and 1628, the article charts the industriousness and material creativity of female makers and consumers in Protestant Württemberg. It provides a detailed discussion of craftswomen’s lives, materials, networks, artefacts and earnings and relates them to the duchesses’ strategies of consumption. The article examines women’s embodied creative material engagement in an increasingly diversified consumerist world, more specifically the material practices, communities and regimes of female industriousness at the court of Württemberg. By conceptualising female industriousness in bodily, material and gendered terms and in regard to the overlapping worlds of production and consumption, this article charts women’s entrepreneurial role in shaping material lives at this Lutheran court around 1600.

Congratulations to Stefan for this prestigious award!