The Renaissance Studies article prize 2022 goes to Erin Griffey for ‘”The Rose and Lily Queen”: Henrietta Maria’s fair face and the power of beauty at the Stuart court’, Vol. 35 No. 5, pages 811-836, November 2021. (DOI: 10.1111/rest.12724).
The judges noted this was a beautifully-written and original piece in which a truly interdisciplinary range of sources and approaches was deployed to consider female portraiture. Working from the portraits themselves, and considering these through medical texts, recipe books and accounts from court, the author offers a compelling argument for the rhetorical significance of the queen’s “rose and lily” skin. Complexion was deployed as a gateway through which to consider theories of whiteness and its representation in official portraits as embodying concepts of nobility, and through this pointing towards broader issues of race and skin colour in contemporary debates.
The panel would further like to note that selecting a winner was difficult; articles in the 2021 issues of Renaissance Studies were of a very high quality, representing a very broad disciplinary range with both chronological and geographical variety of material, all of which bodes well for our field.