Humanities librarian receives Strauss Prize for book on the legacy of the Protestant Reformation

Michael Printy ’94, librarian for Western European Humanities, has been awarded the 2025 Gerald S. Strauss Prize in German Reformation History for his book “Enlightenment’s Reformation: Religion and Philosophy in Germany, 1750-1830” (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

The Strauss Prize is awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society, an organization for the study of the Early Modern Era, the period from about 1450 to 1750. 

Calling the book “erudite and deftly written with an admirable clarity of prose,” the society cited Printy for highlighting how “we continue to live with, and struggle over, the consequences of the Enlightenment’s Reformation to this day.”

The prize citation also notes: “This book offers a powerful argument about the historicity of our understanding of German Reformation history. Tracing the transformation of the concept of the ‘Protestant Reformation’ into a German Protestant triumphalist narrative of progress and modernism, Printy delineates the active recasting of religion and theology, and Martin Luther himself, as rational and modern through the print vernacular culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”

Printy, who earned his doctorate in history at the University of California, Berkeley, joined Yale Library in 2014. He supports collections and research related to French, German, and Italian language and literature, and European and British history. He is a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College and works with the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI). This spring he will teach a YPEI course on the history of information, “Information Revolutions: From the Origins of Writing to the Digital Age.” He previously taught the course as a first year seminar in 2022 and 2024.

—Patricia M. Carey

Photo by Monica Ong Reed