{"id":2368,"date":"2025-09-09T11:15:17","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T10:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/sleeping-well\/?p=2368"},"modified":"2025-09-09T11:15:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T10:15:17","slug":"dr-holly-fletcher-wins-eseh-article-prize-for-environmental-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.manchester.ac.uk\/sleeping-well\/2025\/09\/09\/dr-holly-fletcher-wins-eseh-article-prize-for-environmental-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Holly Fletcher wins ESEH article prize for environmental history"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Dr Holly Fletcher<\/a>\u00a0has been awarded the 2025 St Andrews Article Prize by the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) for her article \u2018Making Beds in Early Modern England: Sleep Matter and Environmental Change\u2019<\/a>, published in\u00a0Historical Research<\/em>\u00a0in 2024. The research for this article was completed as part of our project \u2018Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World<\/a>\u2019 on which Holly has been a Research Associate for the past four years.<\/p>\n

The ESEH St Andrews Prize is awarded to the best article in the field of environmental history in Europe and aims to identify and encourage innovative research. Holly\u2019s article was selected from forty submissions which, the committee stated, demonstrated the depth and breadth of the field. The prize was awarded at the 13th biennial ESEH conference which took place in Uppsala, Sweden, 18-22 August.<\/p>\n

The prize committee described Holly\u2019s article as a \u2018beautifully written, utterly original and deeply entertaining\u2019 piece which presents sleep as a multispecies assemblage. They highlighted Holly\u2019s creative use of the records of London\u2019s Worshipful Company of Upholders to identify the myriad natural fibres with which mattresses were stuffed, as well as the medical, moral and legal discourses which surrounded such practices. They further praised the \u2018complex stories about poverty, animal physiology, gender, science, folk customs, domesticity, traditional ecological knowledge and historical concepts of the body\u2019 which the article weaves together.<\/p>\n

Holly shares some reflections on winning the article prize below:<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 discovering the records of the Society of Upholders, where fines were issued to upholsterers who were selling beds with \u2018illegal\u2019 stuffing materials, was such a gift. These records enabled me to trace the diverse range of sleeping materials being used in early modern England, including beds filled with goat hair, rabbit fur and the fluffy seeds of thistles and bulrushes! From this starting point, I sought to show how ideas and practices concerning healthy sleep involved multispecies interactions, and place-specific material and ecological knowledge. It was wonderful to hear that the judges appreciated the bigger, multilayered story that I aimed to tell. I think it\u2019s also encouraging that this study \u2013 which interweaves environmental history with histories of health and the body, material culture, poverty and gender \u2013 has been rewarded, pointing to the broader and more integrated field that environmental history can be. Finally, it\u2019s a wonderful way to mark the end of my time on the \u2018Sleeping Well\u2019 project and to recognise the contribution that this project has made to early modern histories of health and environment.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Sleeping Well research team (Prof. Sasha Handley, Dr Holly Fletcher, Dr Abigail Greenall & Lucy Elliott) travelled to Uppsala for the ESEH conference where they presented their panel \u2018Sleep, Environments and Healthcare in Early Modern Britain, Ireland and Early America\u2019.<\/p>\n

Following the completion of the \u2018Sleeping Well\u2019 project, in October 2025 Holly will take up a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award at University College London for her project \u2018The Fats of Life in the Early Modern World, 1500-1750: Matter in Multispecies Medicine<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

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