In cooperation with the Medieval Academy of America, the American Branch is pleased to announce the 2024 winners of our Schallek Awards.  

Every year, we offer five $2,000 awards to help defray research expenses for graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500).  This year’s winners and their wonderful research topics are:

• Jordan K. Skinner – Princeton

  Jordan is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University where he is completing a dissertation project titled “Medieval Curfew: Poetic Space and the Governance of Time.” This dissertation examines the cultural meaning and disciplinary power of medieval curfew regulations in order to track the long history of law enforcement. The Schallek Award will enable him to spend the summer at the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies.

• Hannah Keller – Ohio State University

  Hannah’s research examines four marriages that took place during England’s fifteenth-century conflict, the Wars of the Roses. She analyzes the political motivations behind these unions, particularly how they were used to regain the York family’s political capital by enacting violence on other noblemen and women through damaging their reputations. She will use the funds from the Schallek Award to conduct research at the British Library. She intends to examine Additional MS 11814, a Middle English translation of the poem De Consulatu Stilichonis that was dedicated to Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York.

• Isabelle Ostertag – University of Virginia 

  Isabelle’s dissertation, “Porta Caeli: Lay Piety and Marian Devotion in the Parochial Lady Chapels of East Anglia,” upends the current linear model of the dissemination of devotional practices from monastic authority downwards through an examination of lay Marian spaces in parish churches. The existence of these chapels demonstrates lay agency in the creation of local devotional space. This project provides new evidence for how one of the primary devotional cults of the middle ages was disseminated and localized for lay practice. The Schallek Award will support the completion of the archival and field-based research necessary to finish her dissertation this summer.

• Tess Lavalley – Exeter University

  Tess’s project seeks to examine the transmission of charms that contain saints in Late Medieval England and to determine possible reasons why some of these patterns emerged. It looks at charm transmission both through a series of case studies of specific saints and across a broader sample of charms that include any saints. She plans to use the funds from the Schallek Award to finance research trips to Oxford, Cambridge, and London to collect charms directly from manuscripts, in order to expand and enrich the body of primary sources she has to work with.

• Regina Noto – Brown University  

  Regina Noto, a PhD Candidate at Brown University, studies reredoses. These medieval stone constructions covered in painted sculptures stand behind the high altar in English churches. Her dissertation will explore the uses and requirements of a reredos, describe this particularly English form of ornamentation, and explore how reredoses served architectural, decorative, and liturgical functions. The funds from the Schallek Award will be used for research travel and fieldwork in the UK and Spain.

Congratulations to all of these young scholars, and to the recipient of the annual Schallek Fellowship, Morgan McMinn of West Virginia University!