Professor Kathy Stuart was awarded the 2024 Natalie Zemon Davis Book Prize for Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation. Prof. Stuart’s research on Suicide by Proxy was the basis for the 2024 feature film The Devil’s Bath, directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. The Devil’s Bath, awarded a “Silver Bear” at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, has won multiple international awards.

Read the Book Prize laudatio below.

"What to do about women (and sometimes, men) who gruesomely murdered children because of their own 'weariness with life?'  This was a dilemma faced by elites in German-speaking lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and engaged by Kathy Stuart in this strikingly original monograph. A pervasive, if now largely forgotten behavioral pattern featured women who wished to end their lives but feared the doctrine held by Catholics and Protestants alike, that their souls would then face certain damnation. Instead, they would murder a child: their own, someone else’s, even one chosen at random, and immediately turn themselves in to the authorities. This form of 'suicide by proxy,' as Stuart terms it, resulted in their execution to be sure, but gave them a chance to repent beforehand. To elucidate this troubling history, she mines an impressive array of primary sources from archives throughout Germany and Austria, as well as broadsheets and other forms of art.  She draws penetrating insights from law, gender studies, religion, and medicine. To her sophisticated use of empirical research and interdisciplinary perspectives Stuart adds a sense of compassion, for these desperate women and the parents of the children murdered during this time of religious and social upheaval."