Continuing our recap of the award winners announced at last week's meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn to the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, "awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English." This year's award went to John Christopoulos (University of British Columbia), for Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021). Here is the citation from the selection committee:
John Christopoulos’s Abortion in Early Modern Italy is a masterful interweaving of medical, religious, and legal perspectives on abortion in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing in part on records of trials in criminal and ecclesiastical courts, Christopoulos reveals the full complexity of how women and men from all parts of society thought about and experienced abortion. He demonstrates how large the gulf could be between prescription and practice. In its careful interrogation of a wide range of sources, and in its thoughtful discussion of an issue that the book shows to have been no less controversial in the early modern period than it is today, Abortion in Early Modern Italy is a model of historical scholarship.
An Honorable Mention went to Jocelyn Hendrickson (University of Alberta) for Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Congratulations to Professor Christopoulos and Professor Hendrickson, and thank you to the selection committee for their service!
-- Karen Tani
