The ICMA is delighted to announce the recipient of the 2024 ICMA Annual Book Prize:
Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms
Beate Fricke and Finbarr Barry Flood
Princeton University Press, 2023.
Beate Fricke and Finbarr Barry Flood have made a major contribution to art history and the interdisciplinary practice of medieval studies with their eminently readable study, Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms. Building on work that Fricke, a scholar of western European medieval art, and Flood, a specialist in the Islamic medieval and early modern periods, have done together over more than a decade, the arguments are derived directly from medieval objects rather than from abstract academic concepts. These “archives of flotsam” nevertheless directly engage the literature of anthropology, especially the work of James Clifford and Alfred Gell on materiality and aesthetics. Amidst many attempts to do global art history, this book stands out for its erudition and the identification of convincing points of convergence and comparison. By engaging with a wide variety of scholarship in archeology, literary studies, and economic history, the authors ground their visual analyses in a solid matrix of corroborating evidence. The underlying, anthropological concept of “entanglement” presents a way forward for global medieval art history, one that productively balances global networks with distinctively local phenomena. This text is already reconfiguring conversations in the discipline about how collaborative approaches to premodern material might transform our archives and their interpretation.
ISBN: 9780691215150
304 pages
Princeton University Press, 2023.
Click HERE for the Princeton University Press site
FINALIST
Bastions of the Cross: Medieval Rock-Cut Cruciform Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia
Mikael Muehlbauer
Dumbarton Oaks Studies, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2023.
The wide-ranging picture of a global Middle Ages presented by Fricke and Flood resonates with many of the exceptionally strong books nominated this year, and none more so than Mikael Muehlbauer’s Bastions of the Cross: Medieval Rock-Cut Cruciform Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia. This year, we want to name Mikael Muehlbauer’s Bastions of the Cross: Medieval Rock-Cut Cruciform Churches of Tigray, Ethiopia as a Finalist. The book is richly deserving of this status for its rigorous, detailed, and accessible investigation of a group of monuments that have been little studied to date, for reasons of politics, geography, and the Eurocentric biases of medieval studies. Muehlbauer pays close attention to visual and material evidence, including architectural ornament, textiles, and wood-carving. He thereby shows us a medieval world centered not solely on the Mediterranean, but also on the Indian Ocean, and the intersections of culture, religion, and trade across its waters.
ISBN 9780884024972
256 pages
Dumbarton Oaks Studies, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2023.
Click HERE for the Harvard University Press site
We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Alexa Sand (chair), Benjamin Anderson, Till-Holger Borchert, and Luke Fidler