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Brian Cummings wins Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award

Posted on 5 December 2014

Professor Brian Cummings has been selected to receive the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for the best recent book in English Renaissance Studies.

The Award was established in 2005 by Rice University (Houston) in memory of Professor Dietz and is managed by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, a quarterly journal publishing scholarly articles on English literature.  Out of an exceptional field of some 191 qualifying publications, the judges for 2014 have selected Professor Cummings for his publication Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. The book is published by Oxford University Press.

As the judges report, Mortal Thoughts "is a bold and brilliant work of scholarship, interpretation, and theoretical reflection" which "offers a significant and enduring contribution to contemporary debates about the quality and pace of secularization in the early modern period and the urgency and inventiveness of religious thought in the age of Dürer, Shakespeare, and Donne." One judge praised the text as a "beautiful book, written with a fluency and grace that comes of wide and deep learning, but also from what may be even more rare: a capacious sensitivity to the works of art that are this period’s legacy."  Another judge notes, "Cummings aims high: he wants to ‘transcend the narrow division of religious and secular to suggest a more open-ended approach to the history of identity’ (p. 18). In this goal, he has been brilliantly, and I believe enduringly, successful."

Upon learning of the decision, Professor Cummings responded that he was "delighted and honoured to receive this award dedicated to the memory of an inspiring and energetic researcher and teacher in Renaissance literature."

Professor Cummings joined the English Department at York as Anniversary Professor in 2012; prior to this, he taught at Cambridge and Sussex, where he was co-founder of the Centre for Early Modern Studies.

The Award will be presented at a ceremony and reception hosted by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 to be held in Vancouver during the annual Modern Language Association Convention.