The Mediterranean Seminar Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection, 2025
The 2025 Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection was open to books published from 2022 to 2024 inclusive. The committee was most interested in collections of essay that break new ground conceptually or methodologically, are comparative and/or interdisciplinary, that emphasize the intercultural/interregional/inter-religious contact, that are “of” rather than merely “in” the Mediterranean, and that are both internally coherent and comprehensive. For source translations and editions, the committee looked for works of an original nature that exemplify or reflect the essential characteristics of the Mediterranean as a region, and which are prefaced by a comprehensive introduction. Books ranging from any period were considered, with the Mediterranean broadly construed as the region centered on the sea, but including connected hinterlands in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the western Indian Ocean, the Near East and Central Asia.
The next round of the Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection will be held in 2028, for books published from 2025 to 2027. The next prize competition, for the Best First Book (published from 2023—2025) will be announced in July.
The committee for the 2025 Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection was:
• Brian A. Catlos: Religious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Claire Gilbert: History, Saint Louis University
• Sharon Kinoshita: Literature, University of California Santa Cruz
The committee received numerous entries of extremely high quality, which made our work very difficult. Nevertheless, the committee was unanimous in awarding this year’s prizes.
Thank you to everyone who submitted entries; your scholarship is appreciated, and we wish you continuing successes.
Winner (Essay Collection)
Fabris, Angela, Albert Göschl, and Steffen Schneider, eds., Sea of Literatures Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2022).
This interdisciplinary volume engages an urgent theoretical and epistemological question: what is Mediterranean Literature? To answer the question, this volume combines twenty contributions reflecting diverse vantage points on the sites, texts, peoples, and ideas from which Mediterranean Literature can be written. The volume is organized around 4 engaging themes: 1) Memories and Identities, 2) Social and Linguistic Spaces, 3) Fictional Spaces, and 4) Conceptual Spaces. As the section titles suggest, each study develops space as a lens through which to understand Mediterranean literature and/or literatures of the Mediterranean. In addition to the conceptual and theoretical positionings elaborated in individual articles, collectively the volume provides a valuable bibliography of Mediterranean literature, from classical geographers to modern novelists. The diverse contributions show a remarkable cohesion, exploring Mediterranean literatures from the medieval to the modern and from Morocco to Malta. Indeed, the volume embodies Horden and Purcell’s characterization of the Mediterranean Sea itself as a site bound by fragmentation as much as by connectivity. Through the diversity of cases and approaches it presents and the engagements of its authors with the frame of Mediterranean literature, it is a collection that represents the best of scholarship “of” the Mediterranean.
Winner (Best Translation)
Reynolds, Dwight., Medieval Arab Music and Musicians Three Translated Texts. (Boston: Brill, 2021).
In Medieval Arab Music and Musicians Dwight Reynolds does a service to scholars and students alike with his translation of three key texts relating to the music and song of the medieval Islamic world. The first is a biographical sketch of Ibrāhīm al-Mawṣilī (d. 804), as recorded in a tenth-century encyclopedia of music and musicians. A Persian singer who became a fixture of the Golden Age Abbasid court, he served three caliphs, including the storied Harun al-Rashid, and trained a series of notable students. Among these was ‘Ali ibn Nafi’ or Ziryab (“Blackbird” – a nod to his possible African heritage?), who fled Baghdad for the West, settling in Umayyad al-Andalus. Here, he brought his distinctive oud technique, established a school for singers, and revolutionized provincial Andalusi culture, imbuing it with the sophistication of the East. Ibn Hayyan (d. 1075), whose biography is the second piece, lauded Ziryab as “the greatest singer of the land of al-Andalus.” The third translation is a section of the Dar al-Tiraz written by the eleventh-century Egyptian scholar and poet, Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk. An exhaustive work on the Andalusi genre of muwashshahat, it illuminates the relationship between music and verse. Reynolds, himself an accomplished musician and an excellent Arabist, translates these texts in lively prose and verse, thus making a collection of primary sources that illuminate the musical traditions of the medieval Islamic world– a crucial element of this culture that is too frequently overlooked by scholars – both accessible and enjoyable.
Winner (Best Edition & Translation)
La Porta, Sergio, and Alison M. Vacca, An Armenian Futūh Narrative: Łewond’s Eighth-Century History of the Caliphate (Chicago: : Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture , 2024).
Sergio La Porta and Allison Vacca’s edition and translation of this eighth-century Armenian chronicle is a model of scholarly rigor and style. A contemporary witness to the consolidation of the Umayyad and early Abbasid Caliphate, Łewond’s history recounts the dynamics of the Armenian elite, the Islamic expansion, the revolution which transformed the caliphate, and its relations with Byzantium and the peoples and polities of West Asia and beyond, placing these events in the context of a broader Abrahamic West. Beginning with the era of the Rashidun, it recounts the rise and fall of the Umayyad dynasty, through to the “Golden Age” of Abbasid Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid. By casting this Armenian work as a Futūh (“Conquest”) narrative of the Arabo-Islamic tradition, the editors provide a frame for readers to understand the biases and perspectives that shape this account. It invites comparisons to similar chronicles (notable the Mozarab chronicles of the Islamic West) produced by non-Muslim witnesses to the Islamic expansion. With a substantial introduction and commentary, and generous and precise footnotes, Vacca and La Porta make an important source available to scholars and students of Armenian history, Islamic history and the history of the larger Byzantine world. Most importantly, they provide us with a lateral perspective of the events – one which complements and illuminates the parallel histories produced in Byzantium and the caliphates.
Honorable Mention (Essay Collection)
Bouras-Vallianatos, Petros, and Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, eds., Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean : Transmission and Circulation of Pharmacological Knowledge (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Medieval recipes for drugs, notes co-editor Petros Bouras-Vallianatos in his introduction to this volume, evoke a variety of contexts: the geographical and transcultural; the textual and therapeutic; the non-medical. This volume collects thirteen essays that expand our perspectives on medieval pharmacology. The Mediterranean frame, bringing together researchers from diverse disciplines, aims to disrupt the civilizational silos that have dominated traditional scholarship. Rather, highlighting the transmission and circulation of knowledge focuses attention on multilingualism (Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, but also Syriac and Persian) and translation (in centers such as Baghdad, Constantinople, and Toledo), as where the incorporation of foreign words suggests the introduction of new materia medica. Several essays call attention to what had previously been understudied: unedited manuscripts, the way complex textual histories reveal changes over time (Chapter 2), the role of marginalia and oral transmission (Chapter 4), areas of medical practice such as dental care (Chapter 2), subgenres such as self-healing manuals (Chapter 9) or lists of animal properties (Chapter 3). Part II, “The Borders of Pharmacology,” examines pharmacological-adjacent material in works devoted to magic and sorcery (Chapter 7); cookery (Chapter 10); alchemy (Chapter 11); and minerology (Chapter 12). The volume concludes with an essay on the circulation, not of knowledge but of drugs and materia medica themselves, highlighting the role of gift exchange, large and small, alongside the typical Mediterranean activities of commerce and raiding.
Honorable Mention (Best Translation)
Zacuto, Moses ben Mordecai, Hell Arrayed (Tofteh ‘Arukh): A Seventeenth-Century Hebrew Poem on the Punishment of the Wicked in the Afterlife, translated, annotated, and introduced by Michela Andreatta (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2023).
In this volume, Michela Andreatta provides a complete English translation of Tofteh ‘arukh (Hell Arayed), a 925-line moral drama in verse by the polymath rabbi, Kabbalist, and legal scholar Moses Zacuto. Born in Amsterdam into a Portuguese converso family, Zacuto (1609?-1697) likely studied halakhah (Jewish law) in Poland before eventually settling in Venice in 1645 and finally Mantua in 1673. Cultivating a life-long interest in Kabbalah (especially versions emanating from Ottoman Palestine), he was a prolific composer of religious verse and occasional poetry (including riddle poems) in addition to moral drama. Tofteh ‘arukh, long considered “a towering work of pre-modern Hebrew literature and as one of the greatest examples of baroque poetry in Hebrew,” was first published posthumously in Venice in 1715. Andreatta’s translation, prefaced by an Introduction and three chapters of finely-detailed contextualization, retains the strophic structure of the original; she opts for a literal, rather than a poetic, rendition of Zacuto’s highly ornate language, dense with scriptural and rabbinic allusions, that showcases a daring combination of Italian baroque poetics, Counter-Reformation rhetorical devices, and formal elements from Spanish Golden Age literature. Andretta’s expansive prefatory chapters—“Microhistory of a Hellish Book,” “On Death, Afterlife, and Kabbalah,” and “ Hell on Stage”—together with her copious annotations to the translation itself make this a volume of interest not only to specialists in Kabbalah and early modern Hebrew literature, but to all scholars interested in the cross-linguistic and cross-confessional dynamics of the seventeenth-century world.
Honorable Mention (Best Edition & Translation)
Colominas Aparicio, Monica, The Book of Disputation : A Mudejar Religious-Philosophical Treatise Against Christians and Jews : A Study and an Accompanying Text Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2024).
This diplomatic text edition offers specialists the opportunity to study a unique work of mudéjar polemic, the Kitāb al-mujādala ma‘a al-Yahūd wa-n-Naṣārā, aided by a detailed scholarly apparatus and appendices which demonstrate the work’s intertextuality with biblical and philosophical traditions across the Mediterranean. Though the edition itself will be of most interest to specialists, it is prefaced by an extensive introductory study which contextualizes the work as a “mudéjar microcosm,” à la Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio. The study and diplomatic edition together recover and explain difficult technical aspects of those philosophical and religious discourses which informed mudéjar polemic. Those discourses provide evidence of the the entangled philosophical and religious frameworks which informed mudéjar polemic, and show how mudéjar communities were influenced not only by their precarious social position in Iberia, but by longstanding intellectual connections across the Mediterranean. The work provides copious bibliography and editorial notes, an apparatus that will be useful for specialists and provide points of entry for newcomers to the field.