A Yale University academic has won the first annual Cundill International Prize in History, which, with a value of $75,000 (U.S.), is being billed as "the largest non-fiction historical literature prize in the world."
Stuart B. Schwartz, the George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale, received his award at a ceremony yesterday hosted by Montreal's McGill University, which administers the prize on behalf of McGill alumnus and financier Peter Cundill.
Schwartz was honoured for All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World, published in May this year by Yale University Press. The book, an investigation of the evolution of religious tolerance in the Hispanic world from the heyday of the Inquisition in the 16th century through the early 19th, was one of 170 books submitted to Cundill's inaugural six-person jury, which was asked to select a winning book with "profound literary, social and academic impact in the area of history."
A short list of three titles, all by U.S. authors, was announced last month. The two runners-up - Harold J. Cook for Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age and Peter Fritzsche for Life and Death in the Third Reich - each received $10,000 (U.S.).