The Renaissance Studies Article Prize 2025 has been awarded to Tim Shephard and Melany Rice for ‘Giovanni Pontano hears the Street Soundscape of Naples’ Vol. 38, No 4, pages 519-540, September 2024 DOI 10.1111/rest.12913.
The judges were hugely impressed by the quality and range of the articles in the 2024 issues of Renaissance Studies and particularly would like to commend:
Ruben Celani for his insightful reading of paratexts of a popular book of secrets (the Secreti diversi et miracolosi attributed to Gabriele Falloppio) in his article ‘”Come parto imperfetto” : Paratexts and Organization in a Sixteenth-Century Book of Secrets’, Vol. 38 No. 1 pages 89-109, February 2024 DOI 10.1111/rest.12898. By examining the publication strategies of successive editions, this excellent article offers a compelling contribution to the study of early modern recipe literature, demonstrating how editorial choices shaped both the function and reception of these collections.
Rachel White and Brett Greatley-Hirsch for their winningly persuasive article ‘Ass-troll-ogical Nashe: Revisiting Two Dangerous Comets and A Wonderful Prognostication’, Vol 38, No. 3, pages 335-362, June 2024 DOI 10.1111/rest.12893, that used a combination of high-level scholarly detective work and machine assisted textual analysis to convincingly attribute two pseudonymous mock prognostications to the satirist Thomas Nashe. It offers important new insights into Nashe’s oeuvre and enriches our understanding of early modern satire and print culture, whilst providing a model of scholarship of this kind.
However, the judges finally agreed that the prize should be given to Tim Shephard and Melany Rice’s methodologically innovative ‘Giovanni Pontano hears the Street Soundscape of Naples’ Vol. 38, No 4, pages 519-540, September 2024 DOI 10.1111/rest.12913 which uses close contextualised reading of Pontano’s writings to reconstruct the sonic world of Renaissance Naples. This is a richly textured account of urban soundscapes—interweaving street cries, domestic noise, and philosophical reflection to consider how sound was experienced, interpreted, and ethically framed in the late 15th-century city. We felt that it is a strikingly original contribution to the field, and is exemplary in both scope and execution.