OU historian wins 2026 Gerald L. Strauss Prize

Róisín Watson, Lecturer in History, has been awarded the Gerald L. Strauss prize by The Sixteenth Century Society for her first monograph The Beauty of Belief. Decorating the Württemberg Church during the Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2025). The Society awards the prize to the best book published in English during the preceding year in the field of German Reformation history.

The Beauty of Belief charts the evolution of ecclesiastical visual culture in the Duchy of Württemberg in southwest Germany following the Reformation there in 1534, challenging the long-held view that Lutherans in the territory were iconophobic and uninterested in the appearance of their church. It moves beyond the brief iconoclasm of the 1530s to explore the diverse motivations that underpinned Lutheran desires to decorate their churches. Róisín examines these developments through the three interlocking lenses of the Württemberg Dukes, the territory’s clergy, and the individual Lutheran parishioner to present a dynamic ecclesiastical visual culture that went beyond passive acceptance. The dukes used images to assert dynastic and confessional longevity as well as to signal imperial allegiances. The clergy worked to shape the visual literacy of their congregations and used their church interiors as didactic and affective tools to inculcate orthodoxy. Finally, parishioners donated objects to and commissioned images for their churches to memorialise themselves and their families, to assert their position within the confessional community, and to engage with their God directly.

Róisín argues that telling the story of alterations to church interiors in the Reformation can reveal more than attitudes towards the place of the visual in devotional culture. It provides a window onto the nature and pace of religious change itself and illuminates the ways that communities navigated religious rupture and how a confessional culture was constituted. The Beauty of Belief shows the relevance and importance of the space of southwest Germany to the discussion of Lutheran devotional culture, a field which hitherto has predominantly focused on the Lutheran heartlands of Saxony.

More on Watson's research on OpenLearn: Opening up history: art in the Reformation.