Giunto alla sua quattordicesima edizione il Premio, pensato e voluto dallo storico Piero Melograni e promosso dalla Fondazione Giuseppe Levi Pelloni, da cinque anni a questa parte contempla, oltre le canoniche sezioni dedicate alla saggistica, alle biografie, al romanzo storico e alla diaristica, anche quella dedicata al lavoro di ricerca agito da storici e ricercatori che hanno rivolto l’attenzione dei loro studi e della loro attività pubblicistica alla Storia italiana ed Europea. Amelie Patriarca, Lutz Klinkhammer, John Foot, Hans-Ulrich Thamer e Peter Englund sono stati i vincitori delle passate edizioni.
Quest’anno il riconoscimento è andato alla storica israeliana TAMAR HERZIG. Per la sua ricerca di studiosa della Storia dell’Italia fra Quattrocento e Cinquecento, per il suo impegno nell’insegnamento e per la sua preziosa produzione pubblicistica.
Tamar Herzig is the Konrad Adenauer Professor of Comparative European History at Tel Aviv University. She currently serves as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Humanities, as Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America. She is PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project, “Female Slavery in Mediterranean Catholic Europe, 1500-1800” (2024-2029). In 2014-2021, she served as Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E. Curiel Institute for European Studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social, religious, and gender history, with a particular emphasis on the oppression of marginalized groups in Italy and the broader Mediterranean.
Her article “Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence: A Multiple Perpetrator Rape in Seventeenth-Century Livorno” (American Historical Review 127:1) won the 2022 Best Article Award of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and was awarded the Mediterranean Seminar’s Article of the Month Award for July 2022. In 2021, she was awarded the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies’ Michael Bruno Memorial Award for groundbreaking research, for her contribution to the study of premodern history and especially of the Italian Renaissance. In 2020 she won the American Historical Association‘s Rosenberg Prize and later on was awarded Honorable Mention of the Renaissance Society of America‘s Gordan Book Prize in Renaissance Studies (2021) for her book A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2019; Italian translation published by Viella; Hebrew translation published by Magnes Press). For her work on religious conversion in early modern Italy, she also won the Kadar Award for Outstanding Research in 2019.
She is also the author of Savonarola’s Women: Visions and Reform in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2008; Italian edition published by Carocci in 2014); of a book in Hebrew on the Italian Renaissance (2011; 2014); and of ‘Christ Transformed into a Virgin Woman’: Lucia Brocadelli, Heinrich Institoris, and the Defense of the Faith (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2013). She is the co-editor of Ebraismo e cristianesimo in Italia tra ’400 e ’600: Confronti e convergenze [Special issue of Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà 25 (2012)]; of Knowledge and Religion in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Honor of Michael Heyd (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and of Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her articles have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly; Sixteenth Century Journal; Journal of Early Modern History; Church History; Religions; Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte; Genesis; Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft; I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance; Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pietà; Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo; Memorie Domenicane.