SIHS Medieval/Early Modern Article Prize Winner: Catherine Ferrari

The year’s SIHS committee awards the prize for an outstanding article on medieval or early modern Italian history to Catherine Ferrari, for her article, “The Widow, the Gambler, and the Unruly Witnesses: Witness Testimony and Political Agency in a Lawsuit in Early Modern Piedmont,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 53.4 (2022): 889-913. In this carefully reasoned and clearly written article, Ferrari uses the evidence of witness testimonies to re-center the study of law and lawsuits away from litigants and toward their witnesses: this refocusing has the salutary effect of emphasizing those witnesses’ own agency, reminding us that even legal records are constructed narratives, which litigants occasionally find themselves unable to control. Ferrari’s analysis of a single inheritance dispute in seventeenth-century Piedmont nuances our understanding of the transmission of property in patriarchal inheritance settings, while skillfully framing the legal squabbles and social connections of a single family within the broader context of the Savoy Civil War. Ferrari’s study will interest legal, economic, and political historians beyond the history of Savoy and seventeenth-century Italy.