STANLEY Z. PECH PRIZEAt the 1985 annual meeting in Washington, D. C., the CSA adopted a motion by Stanley Winters to create an award to be given every two years for an outstanding article published by a member of the Czechoslovak History Conference, now the Czechoslovak Studies Association. It was later determined to name the award in honor of Stanley Z. Pech.
2008 PECH PRIZE COMPETITION (Articles published in 2006-2007) Winner:Sheilagh Ogilvie, “‘So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave’: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia,” Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 48, no. 1 (January 2006): 38-78. In the article, Ogilvie investigates the applicability of the theory of “social disciplining”—which links authorities’ attempts to regulate people’s private lives to the emergence of the early modern capitalist state in Europe—to east-central and eastern Europe, where “refeudalization” or the “second serfdom” put most of the control over private subjects into the hands of noble landlords rather than the rationalizing state and where the development of capitalist market conditions was deliberately impeded by these same landlords. Ogilvie moves beyond the confrontation of western theory with eastern realities, however, because, as she eloquently argues, the “very general comparative questions with wide-ranging implications for our understanding of early modern European society” generated by this confrontation “cannot be satisfactorily addressed using evidence generated at a similar level of generality” (39).For her micro-study of social disciplining, Ogilvie analyzes a unique data source, a set of manorial ordinances and manorial court records, both covering most of the seventeenth century for the large Bohemian estate of Friedland/Frýdlant. This data allows Ogilvie to compare details of regulation to details of actual enforcement, and thus to confront the theory of social disciplining, often based on only the regulatory evidence, with actual disciplinary practice. She thus addresses the unresolved conflict in discussions of social disciplining over whether the regulatory initiatives had any real effect, while drawing important distinctions between western and eastern Europe. Ogilvie finds that regulations in Friedland/Frýdlant were selectively enforced, and that whatever the modernizing and rationalizing intentions of those who wrote the regulations, they were enforced only when that best served the interests of two institutions with feudal roots, the manor and the peasant commune. This brief summary can hardly do justice to the subtlety of her arguments and her thoughtful, creative analysis of an impressive cache of research materials. Her conclusions promise to generate vibrant debate and her approach has the potential to transform the discussion of social disciplining, compelling it to become more grounded in enforcement data and thus better contextualized. She shows how scholars in our field can remain sensitive to the peculiarities of our region while engaging with larger, European issues and debates. We are very pleased, therefore, to award this article the 2008 Pech Prize. David Cooper Carol Leff Chad Bryant THE NEXT PECH PRIZE COMPETITION The next Pech Prize competition will be held in 2010, accepting articles published in 2008 and 2009. The rules for the award are:
Peter Bugge, "The Making of a Slovak City The Czechoslovak Renaming of Pressburg/Pozsony/Presporok, 1918–19," Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 205-227.
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