A trio of recent books in the field of medieval studies have been awarded prizes. Jonathan Lyon, Sarah Ifft Decker and Jody Enders have each been honoured for their works.
Jonathan R. Lyon, professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, has won the 2024 Otto Gründler Prize for Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand-Year History.
Announced at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, the award is named for the late, longtime director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. Given annually since 1997, the Otto Gründler Book Prize recognizes a monograph on a medieval subject that the selection committee determines has made an outstanding contribution to the field.
Published by Cambridge Press in 2022, Lyon’s book focuses on medieval advocates, who served as agents who provided protection and justice on behalf of others. This focus, according to the prize committee, allows Lyon “to show why protection and justice in many locales remained outside of any centralizing authority for so long.”
Using a variety of sources across time and territory, the book provides “insightful and often poignant reminders of the complexity and messiness of human power relations.”
Another prize awarded at this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies was the La corónica International Book Award. Sponsored by the journal La corónica, the 2024 prize went to Sarah Ifft Decker for her book, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities.
The book explores the social and economic history of women’s work in three Catalan cities—Barcelona, Girona, and Vic—between 1250 and 1350. Decker, an assistant professor of history at Rhodes College, comments “Amid recent conversations about gender roles in the United States, it feels particularly important to me to remind people that women have always worked outside the home, and that their work mattered to their families and communities.
“I began this book a decade ago, as my dissertation; it was especially meaningful to receive the award at ICMS Kalamazoo immediately before the plenary lecture by my fantastic doctoral advisor, Paul Freedman. At the same time, it was bittersweet to receive this award so soon after the passing of one of my most important informal mentors, Marie Kelleher. This book would not be what it was without them both.”
Earlier this year, Jody Enders, a theatre historian and professor of French at UC Santa Barbara, won the Lois Roth Award for translation of a literary work for Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English. It is the third volume by Enders where she has been translating plays in Middle French, allowing new audiences to learn about this funny and raunchy part of medieval theatre.
The prize is given out by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Their selection committee praised not only Enders’s translation skills but also her artistic contributions to the scripts as she adapted them with stage notes and suggested musical accompaniment, according to the award statement. “The volume masterfully unites technical translation prowess, scholarly rigor and guffaw-inducing creative humor that capture the timbre of these uncomfortably entertaining plays. These comedies skewer everyone and everything, especially priests, monks, lawyers, healers and bickering husbands and wives. If the Middle Ages and Renaissance could be said to have had sitcoms, these were it.”
Enders commented, “I have plans for maybe eight volumes total. The farces were marketplace theater, and while virtually unknown to us, they were extremely popular in their day. More than 200 extant plays survive in France, which is more than in any other European vernacular.”
A trio of recent books in the field of medieval studies have been awarded prizes. Jonathan Lyon, Sarah Ifft Decker and Jody Enders have each been honoured for their works.
Jonathan R. Lyon, professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, has won the 2024 Otto Gründler Prize for Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand-Year History.
Announced at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, the award is named for the late, longtime director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. Given annually since 1997, the Otto Gründler Book Prize recognizes a monograph on a medieval subject that the selection committee determines has made an outstanding contribution to the field.
Published by Cambridge Press in 2022, Lyon’s book focuses on medieval advocates, who served as agents who provided protection and justice on behalf of others. This focus, according to the prize committee, allows Lyon “to show why protection and justice in many locales remained outside of any centralizing authority for so long.”
Using a variety of sources across time and territory, the book provides “insightful and often poignant reminders of the complexity and messiness of human power relations.”
Another prize awarded at this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies was the La corónica International Book Award. Sponsored by the journal La corónica, the 2024 prize went to Sarah Ifft Decker for her book, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities.
“I began this book a decade ago, as my dissertation; it was especially meaningful to receive the award at ICMS Kalamazoo immediately before the plenary lecture by my fantastic doctoral advisor, Paul Freedman. At the same time, it was bittersweet to receive this award so soon after the passing of one of my most important informal mentors, Marie Kelleher. This book would not be what it was without them both.”
Earlier this year, Jody Enders, a theatre historian and professor of French at UC Santa Barbara, won the Lois Roth Award for translation of a literary work for Immaculate Deception and Further Ribaldries: Yet Another Dozen Medieval French Farces in Modern English. It is the third volume by Enders where she has been translating plays in Middle French, allowing new audiences to learn about this funny and raunchy part of medieval theatre.
Enders commented, “I have plans for maybe eight volumes total. The farces were marketplace theater, and while virtually unknown to us, they were extremely popular in their day. More than 200 extant plays survive in France, which is more than in any other European vernacular.”
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