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Konrad Eisenbichler is the first Canadian to win Italy's International Flaiano Prize for scholarship — and only the second Canadian to win any Flaiano Prize, following in the footsteps of Alice Munro, who won for narrative prose in 2008.

Eisenbichler was at lunch with his parents when he received a phone call from Adriana Frisenna, the director of Toronto’s Italian Cultural Institute. She had received a letter from the Flaiano organization notifying her that Eisenbichler had won the prestigious International Flaiano prize for Italian Studies.

“I had to quickly change my plans for the summer!” said Eisenbichler, recalling that moment. “They won’t give me the award if I don’t show up!”

Eisenbichler – of the Department of Italian Studies and Victoria College’s Renaissance Studies program – won the prize for his book The Sword and the Pen: Women, Poetry and Politics in Sixteenth-Century Siena.

The award is for scholarship, under an umbrella of awards for literature (which also includes narrative prose, poetry and lifetime achievement).

Created in 1976, Flaiano Prizes also go to cinema, theatre, radio and television personalities both in and outside of Italy.

“For me, winning this prize is like winning an Oscar,” said Eisenbichler. “I’m very pleased.”

The Sword and the Pen takes a look at activist women who, during the last 20 years of the independent republic of Siena in the 16th century, were writing politically-engaged poetry, something that was quite unusual for the time. One woman Eisenbichler studied, Virginia Martini Salvi, was arrested and risked capital punishment for her poems, but Emperor Charles V intervened and actually ordered for her to be released.

A second woman, Laudomia Forteguerri, wrote love poetry for another woman, the first case of lesbian poetry in the Italian tradition. A third woman, Onorata Tancredi Pecci, wrote religious poetry with subtle Protestant undertones.

“These women were part of reformist ideas that were very lively in Siena and certain parts of Italy,” he said. “Their poetry reflects their engagement with politics and religion at that crucial time for Siena and for Italy.”

Eisenbichler, who in 2010 was named a Knight Commander in the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy by President Giorgio Napolitano, accepted his prize in Pescara, Italy, at a televised ceremony July 14.

Jessica Lewis is a writer with the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto.