Cultural historian of the early modern period, Dr Holly Fletcher, has been named the recipient of this year’s St Andrews Article Prize by the ESEH for her article Making Beds in Early Modern England: Sleep Matter and Environmental Change.

The research was completed as part of the Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, which Holly has been a Research Associate on for the past four years alongside Professor Sasha Handley, Dr Abigail Greenall and Lucy Elliott. The project analyses sleep habits as historically situated environmental practices, uncovering an environmentally informed culture of ‘sleep care’.

The ESEH St Andrews Prize is awarded to the best article in the field of environmental history in Europe, with the aim of identifying and encouraging innovate research. Holly’s article was selected from 40 submissions which, the committee stated, demonstrated the depth and breadth of the field.

The prize was awarded at the 13th biennial ESEH Conference in Uppsala, Sweden from 18-22 August, where the project team also presented their panel Sleep, Environments and Healthcare in Early Modern Britain, Ireland and Early America.

The prize committee described Holly’s article as a “beautifully written, utterly original and deeply entertaining” piece of work, praising the “complex stories about poverty, animal physiology, gender, science, folk customs, domesticity, traditional ecological knowledge and historical concepts of the body”.

Holly reflected on her win, saying: “It was a real honour to receive the prize, and particularly gratifying since the article itself was a lot of fun to research and write. It was wonderful to hear that the judges appreciated the bigger, multilayered story that I aimed to tell.

“I think it’s also encouraging that this study – which interweaves environmental history with histories of health and the body, material culture, poverty and gender – has been rewarded, pointing to the broader and more integrated field that environmental history can be. It’s a wonderful way to mark the end of my time on the Sleeping Well project and to recognise the contribution that this project has made to early modern histories of health and environment.”

Professor Sasha Handley, Principal Investigator of the Sleeping Well project, said: "As Project PI, I was thrilled to hear about Dr Fletcher’s fantastic achievement. Our research project is the first to establish historic practices of sleep care as environmentally-situated healthcare practices. The ESEH prize committee’s recognition of the originality and significance of Dr Fletcher’s work shows that our work is making a vital contribution to the environmental and medical humanities.”