Clarissa Ann Chenovick receives Honorable Mention for the Chauncey Wood Dissertation Award of the George Herbert Society for 2017-2019
For the first time since the inception of the Chauncey Wood Dissertation Award of the George Herbert Society, the panel of judges has decided to make an Honorable Mention Award for a dissertation that they felt was particularly worth acknowledging. The Honorable Mention Award for 2017-2019 goes to Clarissa Ann Chenovick, for “Repentant Readers: Reforming Body and Soul in Late Medieval and Early Modern England,” completed in April 2017 at Fordham University under the supervision of Heather Dubrow (director of the dissertation committee), Corey McEleney, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Mary Erler. This thesis offers a revised understanding of penitential texts and reading practices of the Pre- and Post-Reformation period, emphasizing hitherto unrecognized continuities between the two periods, alongside numerous differences. Via extensive analyses of Henry Duke of Lancaster’s Livre de Seyntz Medicines (1354), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, an assortment of translators of the Penitential Psalms, including Thomas Wyatt and Mary and Philip Sidney, and George Herbert, she examines the interplay of theological and medical treatments of repentance, and the pivotal role of penitential devotional literature, including psalms and poems, in the shaping of the modern sense of selfhood emerging during this period.
Professor Chenovick will be honored with a $250 prize, complimentary conference registration and fees, and a plaque to be presented at the Sixth Triennial Conference of the George Herbert Society at Cambridge in June 2021. She also will receive a $250 travel bursary.
The George Herbert Society wishes to thank our distinguished panel of judges for their work in evaluating the dissertations under consideration for 2017-2019: Professor Sidney Gottlieb, Sacred Heart University/Editor, George Herbert Journal (Chair); the late Professor Cristina Malcolmson, Emerita of Bates College; and Professor Jonathan F.S. Post, Emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles.
