Congratulations to our Honorary Fellow Professor Lorna Hutson, whose book England’s Insular Imagining has won the Research Book of the Year at the Saltire Society National Book Awards 2024.
England’s Insular Imagining explores Tudor efforts first to justify an attempted Scottish conquest, then to remake Scotland’s nationhood in service of an Anglo-imperial view of history. The judges pronounced it, “a landmark text across multiple disciplines.”
Prof Lorna Hutson
Professor Lorna Hutson said: “I am deeply honoured to have been awarded the Research Book of the Year Prize from the Saltire Society, which does such important work in supporting Scottish literary culture. My book asks us to look again at what we thought we knew about Anglo-Scots relations in the sixteenth century, but it has benefitted hugely from innovative work on Scottish materials by many others. This is a time of transformative research in Anglo-Scots history, of which I’m glad to be a part, and it means a great deal to me personally to have my work prized in Scotland.”
Professor Hutson is Merton Professor of English, a Fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the interrelations between early modern English literary form and other forms of cultural practice, including economics, law, and national conception. England’s Insular Imagining follows The Invention of Suspicion (2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015) as her third full-length critical study. She also edited The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700, and Ben Jonson’s Discoveries.
Facsimile of the Hertford sketch of 1544, scanned from a 19thC book. (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)