Thanks to the generous support from Boydell & Brewer Publishers together with all of our individual Friends of Ceræ, the annual Friends of Ceræ + Boydell & Brewer Best Essay Prize is valued at $400 (AUD). The prize consists of:
- A voucher for $250 (AUD) worth of books chosen from the following Boydell & Brewer imprints:
- Boydell Press;
- D.S. Brewer;
- Durham University IMEMS Press;
- Tamesis Books;
- University of Rochester Press;
- York Medieval Press;
- and a $150 (AUD) cash payment.
To be eligible for the prize, the winning article must by authored by a person who meets the ECR criteria below, and the article must not have been published elsewhere in part or in full prior to publication in Ceræ nor may it have been written through the use of AI. Further information about our AI policy may be found on our Submissions page. Ceræ considers the definition of an ECR to be:
- a graduate student who is either currently enrolled in a higher-research degree, or have a dissertation currently under review; or
- someone who has previously been awarded either a masters-level or bachelor-level degree and is currently not enrolled in a doctoral-level program; or
- someone who has been awarded their doctorate not more than 5 years prior to submitting their article for consideration and has not attained the academic title of associate professor or its equivalent.
Co-authored articles are also eligible for the prize so long as all authors meet the criteria listed above, and the prize value would in that instance remain at $400 AUD and be equally divided between the authors.
If you have any queries about your eligibility for the Friends of Ceræ + Boydell & Brewer Best Essay Prize, please contact us with any further questions not covered on this page.
Ceræ is able to offer this prize thanks to the generosity of our past and present sponsors. For a full list of the organisations which support us, please visit our Sponsorship page. If you wish to personally donate towards our essay prize fund outside of the Friends of Ceræ arrangement, please visit the Donations page to share your coins with Ceræ’s authors.
Previous Ceræ Best Essay Prize Winners
Volume 12 (2025): Dreams, Visions, and Utopias
- Elisabeth Genter Montevecchio – Melusine and Eve: Christian Alchemical Visuality and the Serpent-Woman
Volume 11 (2024): Metamorphosis, Transformation, and Transmutation
- Roxanne Bodsworth – Meet Me in My World: a creative prosimetric reconstruction of Aislinge Óenguso
Volume 10 (2023): Memory
- Jacob Herrmann – Myths and Memories of the Arthurian Empire in The Awntyrs off Arthur
Volume 9 (2022): Ritual: Practice, Performance, Perception
- Solveig Marie Wang – Finnvitka: The Cultural Interface, Identity Negotiation, and Saami Ritual in Medieval Fennoscandia
Volume 8 (2021): Exile, Isolation, and quarantine
No prize awarded.
Volume 7 (2020): Minority and Marginalised Experiences:
- Emma Louise Barlow – Emotional Minds and Bodies in the Suicide Narratives of Dante’s Inferno
Volume 6 (2019): Landscapes:
- Sofia Fagiolo – The Pious Knight in Medieval Hagiography, c. 930–1058
Volume 5 (2018): Representations and Recollections of Empire:
- Miranda Lee Elston – ‘Holy Things:’ Dürer’s Feast of the Rosary in the Rudolfine Court
Volume 4 (2017): Influence and Appropriation:
- Jocelyn Hargrave – Aphra Behn: Cultural Translator and Editorial Intermediary
Volume 3 (2016): Words, Signs, and Feelings:
- Lisa Tagliaferri – ‘A Gentlewoman of the Courte’: Introducing and Translating the Court Lady
- Matthew Firth – Allegories of Sight: Blinding and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England
Volume 2 (2015): Transitions, Fractures, and Fragments:
- Richard Firth-Godbehere – For ‘Physitians of the Soule’: The roles of ‘flight’ and ‘hatred of abomination’ in Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall
Volume 1 (2014): Emotions in History:
- Andrea Brady – The Physics of Melting in Early Modern Love Poetry
- David Thorley – The Melancholy of Henry More
The Ceræ committee reserves the right not to award a prize in any given year. The prize winner(s) is decided solely by the Ceræ committee.
Featured Image: The knighting of Pyrrhus, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie, BNF Fr. 782, fol. 161r), c. 1340-1350.
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