Prize awarded to Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga

By Marius Warholm Haugen

We have the great pleasure to announce that Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga, one of the researchers on our project, has been awarded the 2024 Gaetano Cozzi Prize for studies on the history of games, funded by the Benetton Foundation.

The prize is awarded for her academic essay «‘Out of love for the poor and in hope of profit’: early modern lottery players and their reasons to play the Haarlem lottery of 1607», which will be published in the the next issue of the journal Ludica. Annals of Game History and Civilization.

The Benetton Foundation has long promoted studies and research on play, celebration, sport, and playfulness in general from the ancient world until the outbreak of World War II. Every year, it announces two annual prizes of 3,000 euros for unpublished essays by young scholars of any nationality.

Marly Terwisscha van Scheltinga is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp, completing a thesis on «how people of all classes, and women in particular, used lottery tickets to make their voices heard between 1450 and 1650»¹. As van Scheltinga points out in a recent interview with Stroom, the University of Antwerp magazine:

Lottery prose tell us things that other sources cannot. It sheds light on population groups that generally remain underrepresented in history, such as women and the less privileged. For many people from that time, this prose is even the only source we have, because official documents were written almost exclusively by men of high standing. And as these lottery tickets are a record of people’s own voices, they’re very personal indeed! […] Unlike, say, tax ledgers, lottery prose reveals how people felt, what they longed for, and what was on their minds². 

On behalf of the project, we would like to congratulate Marly on her achievement and also thank her for participating in our joint attempt to shed new light on the cultural history of European lotteries.

1. Lisa Hilte, «Historic lottery tickets give a voice to women and the underprivileged». Stroom, University of Antwerp, 26.06.2024. https://stroom.uantwerpen.be/en/the-source/historic-lottery-tickets-give-a-voice-to-women-and-the-underprivileged- ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎