A Richly Deserved Honour:
Peter Bietenholz, Professor Emeritus in History (shown here with his wife Doris) was named the 2005 winner of The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies Lifetime Achievement Award at the Society's annual conference banquet, in conjunction with the Congress of Humanities and Fine Arts, at the University of Western Ontario, on May 30. Peter was in Europe and unable to attend, but he will receive an engraved plaque at the next conference banquet in May 2006. For Peter this is the latest landmark in a distinguished career in which he has published seven single-authored monographs, including History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Geneva 1966), Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva 1971), Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden 1994), and Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678): Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only (Florence 1997). He has also edited the works of Renaissance Latin writers, including poems and correspondence of Mino Celsi (Naples and Chicago, 1982) and four volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus, the flagship project of the University of Toronto Press. A companion to that project, the Biographical Dictionary of the Contemporaries of Erasmus, was co-edited in three volumes with our own Tom Deutscher (Toronto 1985-87) and was reprinted in a one-volume paperback in 2004. Peter remains active in research (it is impossible to imagine him otherwise) since his retirement, preparing, among other publications, a monograph on radical readings of Erasmus' work from his death to the end of the seventeenth century. As everyone on or about the seventh floor has known for many years, Peter is both a resource and an inspiration to his colleagues in History and the CMRS. (Click on the photo to enlarge)