2008 Pech Prize Announcement

[David L. Cooper]

*2008 Pech Prize Announcement*
* *
Every other year the Czechoslovak Studies Association awards a prize, 
named in honor of Stanley Z. Pech, for the best article or essay dealing 
with the history of Czechoslovakia and its successor and predecessor 
states/provinces. This year the Pech Prize committee received thirteen 
entries that had been published in 2006--2007 to consider for the 2008 
Pech Prize. While the majority of the entries were written by 
historians, other disciplines were represented as well, including 
popular culture studies, musicology and musical performance, and 
economic and business history. We look forward to even greater variety 
in the future as our organization, with its new name (Czechoslovak 
Studies Association, formerly the Czechoslovak History Conference), 
attracts new members from a broader spectrum of disciplines.
 
The prize committee this year, which included Chad Bryant, Carol Leff, 
and chair David Cooper, was looking in particular for essays that were 
ambitiously conceived, that challenged scholars to rethink a fundamental 
problem or issue in Czechoslovak history while providing an argument 
that spoke to larger scholarly audiences with clear and engaging prose. 
A number of articles distinguished themselves in these areas, with 
excellent new research and innovative analysis that contested 
established historical consensus and interpretation. But in the end, the 
committee agreed that one article in particular excelled on all fronts:
 
Sheilagh Ogilvie's article "'So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave': 
Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia." It was published in the 
first issue of the 48^th volume of /Comparative Studies in Society & 
History/.
 
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

-- 
David L. Cooper
Assistant Professor
Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Ph: 217-244-4666


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