The winner of the JHI’s 2023 Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize for the best first book in intellectual history is Melinda Latour, for The Voice of Virtue: Moral Song and the Practice of French Stoicism, 1574–1652, published by Oxford University Press.
The judging committee provides the following statement:
At first glance, The Voice of Virtue might seem an erudite specialized study. It describes a minor genre (which Latour calls “moral song”) that emerged in France in the second half of the sixteenth century. This genre consisted of collections of poems lauding moral virtue that composers set to music and printers labored to produce and market as moral prints. The Voice of Virtue is certainly both erudite and specialized, but Latour connects the genre of moral song to two matters of greater generality: the doctrinal violence of the French Wars of Religion that, she plausibly suggests, gave rise to the genre; and interest in educated circles in recovering and re-enlivening ancient Stoicism. Evoking a suggestion made decades ago by the historian William Bouwsma, Latour insists that Stoicism was one of the most important influences on “the tradition of European thought,” and that it remains one of the least recognized. Linking together musical practices and philosophical/therapeutic reflection in France in that period, Latour discerns a “philosophical polyphony” not quite so audible from other listening posts. She hastens to advise her readers that she offers a “likely story,” “carefully grounded in historical evidence yet far from definitive or complete.” This learned and inventive product of a historian’s and musicologist’s workshop will fascinate those readers who spend time with it.
Melinda Latour is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Tufts University.
Honorable Mention for the 2023 Forkosch Book Prize: Natasha Wheatley for The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 2023). Wheatley is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University.
