Royal Historical Society announces winners of the Society’s 2025 Early Career Article and First Book Prizes

21 July 2025

Early Career Article Prize

 

Michaela Kalcher, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine: Revolution, Terror and Trauma in a Parisian Diary‘, published in History Workshop Journal (2024)

In their citation for Michaela Kalcher’s article, ‘The Self in the Shadow of the Guillotine’, this year’s judges praised:

A beautifully written, psychologically rich analysis of trauma, identity, and diary writing. Combining microhistory with theoretical depth, this compelling article will likely become a key part of the historiography of the French Revolution on account of its provocations and highly intelligent construction.

Michaela Kalcher is a historian of the French Revolution and the Long Eighteenth Century currently finishing her DPhil at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. David Hopkin and Prof. Lyndal Roper, provides the first study of diaries from revolutionary France and re-examines the French Revolution through the lens of subjective experience.

Based on over sixty previously unknown diaries written by ordinary men and women across the country, her research asks how a broad cross-section of the population actually experienced living through this tumultuous period, how they understood the revolutionary changes as personally meaningful, and how they felt that the Revolution changed not just the country, but also themselves. More broadly, her work aims to help us better understand how humans privately make sense of living through transformative times of political upheaval and violent departures from old certainties. Her current research interests also include the history of emotions, trauma, dreams, and material culture. Michaela is grateful for the generous financial support from the Clarendon Fund, Exeter College, the Society for the Study of French History, the Oxford History Faculty and other donors who have funded her doctoral studies and enabled the extensive archival research necessary to complete her doctoral project. 

First Book Prize

 

Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485-1547, by Laura Flannigan (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

In their citation for Laura Flannigan’s monograph, Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, the judges congratulated:

An impressive, conceptually adept and ambitiously argued book. This is a study grounded in extraordinarily deep archival research on a previously neglected judicial court that was established in the late fifteenth century. The rich quantitative data yields intriguing vignettes that give wonderful colour to institutional history. Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth is clearly written and structured, as well as being cleverly and convincingly argued.

Dr Laura Flannigan is a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, having completed her degrees at the universities of York and Cambridge. She specialises in late medieval and early modern England, and is particularly interested in how wider society interacted with a growing legal system. Her doctoral project examined the records of one Crown court, the Court of Requests, to understand how early Tudor kings used justice as a means of governing their subjects - and how those subjects could benefit from royal rule. This was published as Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, as well as in articles for Law and History Review, Historical Research (a piece awarded the Sir John Neale Prize in Early Modern History in 2020), and Northern History. Laura's latest research seeks to understand how, and how much, ordinary people knew about law in early modernity. In August this year she will join The Ohio State University as the Warner Woodring Chair in British History.

The dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace. This book presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late medieval and early modern England. Delving into the rich but little-studied archive of the royal Court of Requests, it reconstructs collaborations between sovereigns and subjects on the formulation of an important governmental ideal: justice. Examining the institutional and social dimensions of this point of contact, this study places ordinary people, their knowledge and demands at the heart of a judicial revolution unfolding within the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet it also demonstrates that directing extraordinary royal justice into ordinary procedures created as many problems as it solved.