ICOG member David van der Linden receives two prestigious article awards

On 2 November 2018, Dr David van der Linden, post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Groningen, received two prestigious awards from the Sixteenth Century Society, both for his article “Memorializing the Wars of Religion in Early Seventeenth-Century French Picture Galleries: Protestants and Catholics Painting the Contested Past,” published in Renaissance Quarterly in 2017 (volume 70, issue 1). The article is now available in open access.

David was awarded the Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize for the best article published in English on sixteenth-century French history, as well as the Harold J. Grimm Prize for the best article that reflects and sustains Grimm’s lifelong search for a broad understanding of the Reformation as a fundamentally religious phenomenon which permeated the whole civilization of Europe in the Reformation era.

The article examines a series of purpose-built picture galleries to understand how Protestant and Catholic elites in early seventeenth-century France remembered the Wars of Religion. It demonstrates that postwar France remained a divided nation: Protestant and Catholic portrait galleries offered a sectarian memory of the conflict, glorifying party heroes. Historical picture galleries, on the other hand, promoted a shared memory of the wars, focusing on King Henry IV’s successful campaign against the Catholic League to unite the kingdom. The article argues that postwar elites made a sincere effort to manage religious tensions by allowing partisan memories to circulate in private while promoting a consensual memory in public.

David will be using the prize money to complete his archival research in France. He is currently preparing a book manuscript titled Divided by Memory: Remembering the Wars of Religion in Early Modern France, which examines how conflicting Protestant and Catholic memories about the French Wars of Religion undermined religious coexistence and re-ignited civil conflict.

For further information, please visit https://vanderlinden.weebly.com, or follow @dcvanderlinden on Twitter. More information on both prizes is available at www.sixteenthcentury.org/prizes/roelker/ and www.sixteenthcentury.org/prizes/grimm/.