Duncan Hardy has been awarded the 2016 Essay Prize for his essay ‘Tage (Courts, Councils and Diets): Political and Judicial Nodal Points in the Holy Roman Empire, c. 1300–1550’.

The runner up was Roísín Watson for her essay ‘In search of the “bedrock of one’s heart”: The mourning grotto of Magdalena Sibylla von Württemberg and the construction of contemplative space at a seventeenth-century court’.