With effect from 1 October 1985, the prize was awarded annually, although some years there were no candidates. Regulations were altered in 1989 to permit one or two prizes at discretion in one year. It is also possible to co-write an essay, and to win the prize jointly.

You will find below a list of some of the previous winners. Those whose email addresses are offered are happy to be contacted if you have some questions about the prize. Copies of the essays can be consulted in the Manuscripts Room at Cambridge University Library. They should be ordered with the classmark “Gordon Duff” followed by their running number.

2022:
Peter Kornicki
'Why typography was abandoned in 17th-century Japan’

Paul Lennon
'Caveat emptor: the curious case of Scotland’s Astorga Collection’

2021:
Harry Spillane, hjms4@cam.ac.uk
Two bibles, one printer: the Bishops’ and Geneva Bibles in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England

2020:
Micha Lazarus, mdsl3@cam.ac.uk
Roger Ascham’s working library

2019:
James Burke, jrab4@cam.ac.uk
The custodial history of the ‘Sadler Partbooks’ (GB-Ob MSS Mus. e. 1–5)

 2018:
Jonathan Nathan, jsn32@cam.ac.uk
Seventeenth-century benefactors’ books at Oxford and Cambridge colleges

2017:
Ryan Pepin, rrp22@cam.ac.uk
The volgarizzamento of the Imola commentary to the Commedia: the identification of a hand in MS Oxford, Bodleian Canon. Ital. 107, present in MS Paris, BNF Italien 78, with notes towards a Venetian milieu

2016:
Michael J. Sullivan, mjp90@cam.ac.uk 
'The chips of the workshop': punctuation and revision in Tennyson’s early notebooks

2015:
Madeline McMahon, mcm74@cam.ac.uk 
Dating manuscripts in sixteenth-century England: the efforts of Matthew Parker and his circle

Max Twivy, mt573@cam.ac.uk 
William Gladstone's book collection

2014:
Jamie Trace, jrt52@cam.ac.uk 
An Analysis of Richard Etherington and Giovanni Botero’s Della Ragion di stato in MS Sloane 1065.

Rebecca Watts, rew35@cam.ac.uk 
‘Crazier and more of it than we think': Contextualising the production of Louis MacNeice’s unfinished autobiography

2012: 
William Kynan-Wilson, wk225@cam.ac.uk
Ottoman costumes albums in Cambridge

2011: 
Charlotte Anne Panofre
Printing Protestant texts under Mary Tudor: the role of Antwerp. 

2007: 
Richard Serjeantson, rws1001@cam.ac.uk, conjointly with Thomas Wooldford 
Scribal publication of a printed book: the printing, suppression, and manuscript completion of Francis Bacon’s Certaine considerations touching…the Church of England (1604).

2005: 
Hope Johnston, Hope_Johnston@baylor.edu 
Henry Pepwell, minor printer. 

2004:
Catherine Eagleton, Catherine.Eagleton@bl.uk
John Whetamstede, Abbot of St Albans, on discovery of the liberal arts and their tools. Or, why were astronomical instruments in late-medieval libraries?

Yu-Chiao Wang
The image of St George and the Dragon: Promoting Books and Book producers in the pre-reformation England

2003:
16 John Craig, johnc@sfu.ca
Forming a Protestant consciousness? Erasmus’ paraphrases in English Parishes, 1547-1666

1999:
Cathy Shrank, c.shrank@sheffield.ac.uk
“These Fewe scribbled words”: representing scribal intimacy in early modern print 

Beth Lynch
Mr Smirke and “Mr Filth”; a Bibliographic case study in Non conformist Print Culture

1998:
Nicolas Bell
The scribe as an editor in the musical codex of Las Huelgas, Burgos

1997: 
Anne C. Henry (Toner) 
“to fill up chasms”, Reading ellipsis in the eighteenth-century novel

1996:
Susanna Avery-Quash
‘Cheapness of production and the valuable imitative faculty…the marvels of the present age’: Sir Henry Cole’s Interest in and Influence on Book binding design and production in the mid-nineteenth century.

Laura Sole
The Anglo-Saxon Office for St Cuthbert.

1995:
Mary Morrissey
A Layman’s reading of Religious controversies in the 1630s: A study of CUL MS Dd XIV. 25 9item 9, now item 3) 

1992: 
J.J. Greenland
The iconography of the Hunterian Psalter, Glasgow University Library, MS. Hunter 229 

1991:
A.R. Atkins 
A bibliographical analysis of the Manuscript of D.H. Lawrence’s “The White peacock”

1990:
K.A. Lowe
Latin versions of Old English Wills

1988:
Kathryn Lowe
The scribe of MS.CUL. Ff.2.33: How good a copist?

1976:
Timothy Crist
Government control of the press after the expiration of the Printing Act in 1679. 

1967:
John Robert Harvey
The etchings by H.K. Browne (“phiz”) for Dickens’ s novels.

1958: 
S.A. Skilliter
New light on Barton’s services for the levant company, a study of Additional Manuscript 461 preserved in Cambridge University Library, submitted as an essay for the Gordon Duff Prize, 1958. 

1955: 
R. Vaughan
The handwriting of Matthew Paris (reprinted in Transcription of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society Vol. 1 part 5 pp. 376-394, P850.b.55.1).

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