ICMA Annual Book Prize
We are delighted to announce the recipient of the 2022 ICMA Annual Book Prize:
Shirin Fozi
Romanesque Tomb Effigies: Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021.
Click here for the Penn State University Press site.
The straightforward title of Shirin Fozi’s Romanesque Tomb Effigies both offers homage to the classic iconographic studies to which it is heir and belies the important ways in which this volume disrupts traditional approaches to the analysis of sculptural tombs dating to the late eleventh through twelfth centuries in northern Europe. In this compelling, rigorously researched and elegantly written book, the author investigates the phenomenon of figural tomb sculpture in its earliest medieval period of emergence, setting aside the anachronistic narrative that has long framed these works simply as precursors to the great flowering of figural tombs in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. Instead, close analysis of the archeological, textual, epigraphic, and social context of a series of works mostly from northern Germany and France allows Fozi to account for them in their own settings. At the center of the book lies the argument that these early effigy tombs consistently mark communal interventions into troubled histories of loss and failure, serving to recuperate, reframe, and reorient the pasts of living communities through the represented bodies of the dead. This is a mature work of scholarship that speaks of longstanding and intimate acquaintance with the works under consideration, some of which, such as the Plantagenet funerary monuments at Fontevrault with which the book concludes, are well known, but others of which have received less attention than they deserve, especially in English-language scholarship. Engaged with current discourses about the cultural construction of space, memory, body, and material, the study ultimately centers the objects themselves as the protagonists in the narrative, resulting in a book that will serve as a model and departure point for future scholarship, and one that is eminently readable for audiences ranging from interested amateurs, to undergraduates, to professional medievalists in a variety of fields.
We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Alexa Sand (chair), Heather Badamo, Péter Bokody, Dorothy Glass, and Eric Ramirez-Weaver