In Memoriam

The Sixteenth Century Society remembers with gratitude the sustained dedication and exceptional contributions to early modern scholarship and to the Society by the following scholars who have recently passed.

James Stayer

James Mentzer Stayer, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, passed away on April 23, 2025, after an extended battle with cancer.

Jim was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on March 15, 1935. He attended Juniata College in Huntingdon, PA for his undergraduate education, and subsequently earned an MA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University under the supervision of Eugene F. Rice, Jr. He taught at Ithaca College, Bridgewater College, and Bucknell University before moving to Canada in 1968 and joining the faculty at Queen’s, where he spent the rest of his professional life.

For scholars of the sixteenth century, Jim’s name will always conjure up images of Anabaptism. His 1972 monograph Anabaptists and the Sword has been acclaimed as a major component of a revisionist approach to the study of Anabaptism that challenged the confessional approach to the subject championed by Harold Bender in “The Anabaptist Vision”. No less momentous in many ways was “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis: The Historical Discussion of Anabaptist Origins,” which Jim published with his former graduate student Werner Packull and close friend Klaus Deppermann three years later in The Mennonite Quarterly Review. These works, and the approach to the study of Anabaptist history they embodied, have had incredible staying power, and scholarship on early Anabaptism still wrestles with their legacy. Nor were Jim and his collaborators in this enterprise champions of a new orthodoxy, and they contributed to revisions of the revisionism along with their critics.

Central to Jim’s research was a desire to establish Anabaptism in its rightful place in the history of the Reformation and the popular Reformation in particular. This became obvious in 1991 with the publication of The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods. Nor did Jim shy away from topics at the center of more traditional approaches to the study of the Reformation, as became evident in 2000 with the publication of Martin Luther, German Saviour: German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933. Not surprisingly, his friendships and collaboration with other scholars in the field continued throughout his career, resulting in a number of important works, including Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert/Radicalism and Dissent in the Sixteenth Century (2002, co-edited with Hans-Jürgen Goertz) and A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521-1700 (2006, co-edited with John Roth).

Jim’s legacy continues not only in the work of his former graduate students, but also in the numerous studies conducted by those influenced by his works and his personality.

Olga Pugliese

Professor emerita Olga Zorzi Pugliese passed away peacefully on 23 March 2025 with her family at her side. In her long and distinguished career as a professor at the University of Toronto, Olga not only influenced generations of students and colleagues who admired her to no end, but also worked tirelessly for the advancement and promotion of scholarship in general and Italian culture in particular.

Born and raised in a Friulian-speaking family in Toronto, at the age of seventeen Olga enrolled at the University of Toronto where she began to study standard Italian and continued her studies of French and Spanish. At that time, she was one of the very few young women of Italian heritage at the University of Toronto; in fact, she recalled that “a French professor commented that it was strange to see an Italian female in university.”

During her 45-year career at the University of Toronto Olga taught in the Department of Italian Studies and in the Renaissance Studies Programme (Victoria College) and served in many administrative positions, including as Emilio Goggio Chair of the Department of Italian Studies (1997-2002) and as Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at Victoria College (2005-09). An active member of the profession, she was one of the founding members of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, which in 2008 awarded her its Lifetime Achievement Award, and of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, where she served as president (2005-08). A strong believer in the community of learning, she was an active member of many scholarly organizations, including the Renaissance Society of America, the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the Modern Languages Association, the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium, the American Association for Italian Studies, the Sixteenth Century Studies and Conference, the Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana, and more. She was also active outside the academy, especially in the Dante Alighieri Society of Toronto, the Famèe Furlane of Toronto, the Fogolârs Federation of Canada, the Centro Canadese Scuola e Cultura Italiana, and the Italian Canadian Archive Project.

Olga’s scholarly work focused on Italian Renaissance literature and culture and included major contributions on Baldassarre Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli, as well as many other writers. In her latter years she carried out ground-breaking research on the contribution of Italians in Canada, focusing in particular on Italian mosaicists in Canada and on the Italian-Canadian artist Albert Chiarandini. Olga also wrote her family history, tracing the ancestry of the families of her four grandparents in the Italian region of Friuli.

Some years ago, a journalist wrote about Olga’s “three souls” –– Canadian, Italian, and Friulian, and indeed that was the case. She lived and worked at the intersection of these three cultures, fostering and advancing them in all she did. Together with her late husband Guido Pugliese (1940–2016), she endowed in perpetuity a number of scholarships for study in Italy at various institutions: Victoria College (in the University of Toronto), the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Western University.  She also endowed a course in Italian Canadian Studies now offered annually in the Canadian Studies Program at University College, University of Toronto.

Olga Zorzi Pugliese embodied what is the very best in teaching, research, and collegiality. For more than half a century she contributed generously and selflessly to the study and advancement of Italian culture, be that historical in Italy or contemporary in Canada. While doing so, she struck life-long friendships with colleagues and students, enriching their lives and inspiring their work. She will be sorely missed, but her legacy will endure and inspire future generations.

Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler, CM, OMRI

Thomas A. Brady

via the Department of History at UC Berkeley:

Dear friends,

It is with deep sadness that I share the news that our distinguished colleague Thomas A. Brady, Peder Sather Professor Emeritus of History, passed away at home on Friday evening, March 7, 2025, at the age of 87.

A magisterial scholar of the social, political, and religious history of early modern Europe, Tom laid new foundations for his field through path-breaking books and dazzling articles across the decades. His special focus was the German Reformation, a domain in which his erudite scholarship repeatedly broke new ground. He was no less known for his wit and collegiality, his generous and open spirit, and his readiness to nurture the next generation in close partnership with his wife Kathy.

Tom was born in Columbia, Boone County, Missouri on November 23, 1937. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1959 and, following upon naval service as well as graduate studies at Columbia University, earned the Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of Chicago. Tom was appointed to the faculty of the University of Oregon in 1967 and rose through the ranks to become full professor of History and Religious Studies and President’s Distinguished Professor of the Humanities. Moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, he served with distinction on the faculty of the Department of History and as affiliated faculty in Celtic Studies. He was awarded the Peder Sather Professorship of History in 2001 and retired in 2006.

Tom’s razor-sharp assessment of historical sources and his intrepid exploration of the archives, often together with Kathy, provided critical new impulses to his field methodologically and historiographically, placing him at the forefront of the profession. Beginning with his Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg, 1520-1555 (1978), his memorable books include Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450-1550 (1985); Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the German Reformation (1995); The Politics of the German Reformation (1996); and his summa, German Histories in the Age of Reformation, 1400-1650 (2009). He contributed in many other ways to the foundations of early modern European history, including as co-editor of the two-volume Handbook of European History 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation (1994-95). He was the recipient of IREX, Fulbright, Guggenheim, and National Humanities Center fellowships and was named an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow twice and a Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. Along with an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern, visiting professorships at the University of Arizona and the National University of Ireland (Galway), and many other awards and honors, Tom was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Tom was broadly known as an engaged teacher and a mentor to doctoral students, including at other universities and the Graduate Theological Union as well as UC Berkeley. The Brady home was open to generations of graduate students from around the world, who became part of Tom and Kathy’s extended family and were nourished in all senses of the word. Both the American Historical Association (through its Nancy Roelker Mentorship Award, 2004) and the Sixteenth Century Society (through its inaugural Anne Lake Prescott Prize, 2023) recognized Tom’s contributions in supporting early-career scholars. In addition to instructing a wide range of classes and seminars in early modern European history, he was a dedicated teacher of modern Irish history and the history of modern Christianity.

Our thoughts go out to Kathy and their family in this time of sorrow.

In sadness,
Cathryn Carson

Carter Lindberg

From David Whitford, Past-President:

It is with great sadness that I announce that Carter Lindberg, Professor Emeritus of Church History at Boston University, passed away on Monday, 8 April 2024. Carter served as President of the Sixteenth Century Society in 1979. He is best known for his 1996 textbook, The European Reformations, which changed how many both understood and taught the era. He cared deeply about the social impact of the Reformations, publishing two books on the topic. He also wrote about and thought a great deal about love. He wrote his dissertation at University of Iowa, where he worked with George Forell and Robert Kingdon, on Anders Nygren’s conception of love in his interpretation of Luther. His last monograph, published in 2008 was a Love: A Brief History. He loved and laughed deeply. He was married to Alice for 63 years. They met in high school and began dating their first year of college. She died six weeks ago and Carter began to fade almost immediately. They have three children, Anne, Erika, and Matthew, and five grandchildren, and Carter’s doctoral students also became unofficial members of the extended Lindberg family. People who knew him will well-remember his infectious laugh and his ever-present pipe.

On behalf of his family and his former students, if you wish to honor Carter in some way, we encourage you to donate to the Sixteenth Century Society’s Robert M. Kingdon Prize, which awards travel grants to graduate students so that they can attend the annual meeting of the society. Carter shared Bob’s passion for encouraging graduate students to participate in the life of the society and worked to make it affordable.

If you would like to make a donation to the Society in memory of any of these scholars, please use this link and include the scholar's name in the mention box.