2023 Butler Prize awarded to Sheridon Ward for her First Year Paper “Lettered Women, Midwives, and Cursyde Calets: Navigating Ways of Knowing in Reproductive Healthcare Practice.” The paper interprets a complex fourteenth-century medical-advice treatise known as The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing — a text with a multilayered history that raises a series of challenging questions about the creation and compilation of knowledge, both medical and experiential.

The paper provides both a much richer understanding of the text than historians have offered before, and a narrative that brings women back into the center of their own healthcare decisions and practices. For all of these reasons, the Committee and Department are thrilled to be congratulate Sheridon Ward on winning this year’s Butler Prize.