Laureate of the GIS Sociabilités Master's Thesis Prize 2025

Laureate of the 2025 GIS MA Prize - 6th edition

Frank QIAO 

McGill University, Canada

for his MA thesis entitled:

'The “Mad Crew” tamed?: The sociability of former Ranters in Interregnum and Restoration England, 1651-c.1700'

Abstract:

Few early modern religious groups inspired as much universal derision as the Ranters. Indeed, all competing confessions active in Interregnum and Restoration England unanimously lambasted them for their libertinism, drunken ecstasies, denial of sin’s existence, and ostensible 'madness', effectively casting them as the antitheses of seventeenth-century conventions of sociability. Yet could such societal pariahs ever become sociable? Seeking to rectify existing scholarship’s inattention to this question, this thesis investigates how former Ranters negotiated with their scandalous pasts and grappled with prevailing conventions of sociability after their movement’s suppression by 1651. It contends that erstwhile associates of the Ranter milieu reaccepted, further rejected, or reinvented mainstream sociability by propounding their own visions of sociability through diverse, creative ways, such as subtly critiquing mainstream societal institutions in their recantations, recasting their Ranting past as a necessary step in their journey to prophethood, and straddling the edge of sociableness by adopting contradictory personas.

 

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Members of the 2025 GIS MA Prize Jury: 

President: Brian Cowan (McGill University, Canada)

Coordinators: 

- Valérie Capdeville (Université Rennes 2)

- Alain Kerhervé (UBO Brest)

- Kimberley Page-Jones (UBO Brest)

Reviewers (2 per application): 

- Claire Boulard (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)

- Michèle Cohen (UCL, London)

- Natacha Coquery (Université Lyon 2)

- Mélanie Cournil (Sorbonne Université)

- Carolyn Eastman (Virginia Commonwealth University)

- Mascha Hansen (Universität Greifswald)

- Mark Knights (Warwick university) 

- Pierre Labrune (Université de Lille)

- Solenn Mabo (Université Rennes 2)

- Sarah Maza (Northwestern University)

- Amy Milne-Smith (Wilfrid Laurier University)

- Jennifer Ruimi (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier)