The 2022 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in Medieval Studies was awarded to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton for her book The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In a masterful, paradigm-shifting study, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton delivers new insights about the importance to late medieval English poetry of the "invisible" medieval clerics in minor orders without benefices or established positions, the adjuncts of their time. This "clerical proletariat" lived and worked between the ecclesiastical and lay worlds. Underemployed and overeducated, their reaction to precarious working conditions and adversity exerted a transformational influence on medieval English literature and helped re-establish English as the dominant language of literary expression. In a field where so much has already been written, Kerby-Fulton refreshingly reorients the approach to lesser-known poets through this stellar example of historical literary criticism.

Congratulations to Dr. Kerby-Fulton! The committee thanks all the authors who submitted books for consideration. They provided the committee with ample and interesting reading, and their work is testimony to the excellent contributions of Canadians to research fields of the Middle Ages.

Le prix Margaret Wade Labarge 2022 du meilleur livre en études médiévales a été attribué à Kathryn Kerby-Fulton pour son livre The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (Philadelphie : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). Dans une étude magistrale, qui change de paradigme, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton offre de nouvelles perspectives sur l'importance pour la poésie anglaise de la fin du Moyen Âge des clercs médiévaux "invisibles" des ordres mineurs sans bénéfices ni positions établies. Ce "prolétariat clérical" vivait et travaillait entre le monde ecclésiastique et le monde laïc. Sous-employés et suréduqués, leur réaction aux conditions de travail précaires et à l'adversité a exercé une influence transformatrice sur la littérature anglaise médiévale et a contribué à rétablir l'anglais comme langue d'expression littéraire dominante. Dans un domaine où tant de choses ont déjà été écrites, Kerby-Fulton réoriente de façon rafraîchissante l'approche des poètes moins connus grâce à cet excellent exemple de critique littéraire historique.

Félicitations à M. Kerby-Fulton ! Le comité remercie tous les auteurs qui ont soumis des livres pour examen. Ils ont fourni au comité une lecture abondante et intéressante, et leur travail témoigne de l'excellente contribution des Canadiens aux domaines de recherche du Moyen Âge.

(le français suit)

Congratulations to Dr. John Osborne, Professor Emeritus at Carleton University who was awarded the 2021 Labarge Prize for his monograph, Rome in the Eighth Century: A History in Art (Cambridge University Press, 2020)!

Citation:

In an incisive and synthetic study, John Osborne invites readers to reconsider the history of Rome in the eighth century, arguing that what has long been considered a fallow period was in fact a dynamic, vibrant one, and arguably one of the most consequential in all of Roman history.  To do so, he has developed an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology that, inter alia, confirms further the autonomy of material culture as historical evidence.  Using art, artifact, and archaeology as historical documents, Osborne constructs a portrait of a city that was in the process of renegotiating its identity in a cultural borderland between the Greek East and the Latin West, a city becoming “Roman” again, but a different kind of “Roman” than before.  For example, Osborne offers a particularly insightful assessment of the ruling elite, characterizing them not as a Greek elite replaced by Romans, but as the existing elite reinventing themselves as distinctly Roman.  He also uses art and architecture to chronicle the process of Rome becoming a “city of the Church,” situated consciously as the centre of Christendom.  Like the tesserae of the mosaics he describes, Osborne’s individual analyses are beautiful on their own, but taken together, they offer a broad and nuanced view of Rome and its place in the global medieval worldview.  Throughout, this study also encourages readers to ask broad, complex questions about what “Rome” and “Roman” really meant in the Middle Ages.  Finally, we would like to recognize that this book, in its conception and execution, reflects the interdisciplinary ethos that has come to define Canadian medieval studies.

Félicitations à Dr John Osborne, Professeur émérite de l’université Carleton qui a remporté le prix Margaret Wade Labarge 2021 pour son livre Rome in the Eighth Century: A History in Art (Cambridge University Press, 2020)!

L’éloge du comité du prix: Avec son étude approfondie et sagace, John Osborne invite ses lecteurs à reconsidérer l’histoire de Rome au huitième siècle. Il affirme que ce siècle n’était pas une période en jachère, mais plutôt une période dynamique, vivace, et primordiale dans l’histoire de la cité. Afin d’appuyer cette nouvelle interprétation du huitième siècle, il développe une méthodologie innovante et interdisciplinaire qui, de plus, souligne l’autonomie de la culture matérielle comme preuve historique. Osborne tient compte de l’art, les artéfacts, et l’archéologie comme les documents historiques, et dresse ainsi un tableau d’une ville en train de renégocier son identité à la frontière entre l’Est grec et l’Ouest latin, une ville en train de redevenir « romain », mais « romain » d’une autre manière qu’auparavant. Par exemple, Osborne nous présente une interprétation innovatrice de l’élite dirigeante. Ce groupe, il dit, n’était pas une élite grecque remplacée par une élite romaine, mais plutôt une élite qui se caractérise nouvellement et nettement comme romain à cette époque. À travers l’art et l’architecture de Rome, Osborne explique aussi comment Rome est devenu une « ville de l’Église » qui se situe sciemment comme le centre de la chrétienté. Comme les tesserae des mosaïques qu’il décrit, les analyses présentées par Osborne sont individuellement belles, mais ensemble elles offrent une vision large et complexe de Rome et de sa place dans le monde médiéval. Rome in the Eighth Century invite aux lecteurs de réfléchir sur les significations compliquées de « Rome » et « Romain » qui circulaient durant le Moyen Âge. Finalement, la conception et la réalisation de ce livre reflètent la philosophie interdisciplinaire qui marque les études médiévales au Canada.

Congratulations to David K. Coley who was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for his book Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England, published by The Ohio State University Press in 2019. For more details, see below.

Death and the Pearl Maiden examines a central question in medieval English literature: why did the immense shock of the Black Death – a pandemic scholars now think killed more than half the population of England – make so little explicit impact on vernacular English works of the second half of the fourteenth century? Through his analysis of the four poems in Cotton Nero A.x –Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Coley argues that the plague’s trauma was both woven through these works and yet ineffable, largely suppressed but omnipresent. As he puts it, “the human response to traumatic events exists as a negotiation between acknowledgement and suppression, between the need to speak events that are too terrible to ignore and the desire to deny events that are too painful to speak” (p. 6). Coley’s book is especially and indeed wrenchingly resonant in 2020, though its excellence rests on its interdisciplinary erudition and virtuosic readings of late medieval texts rather than its sheer timeliness.

Coley’s careful reimagining and re-reading of poems that have generated a great deal of scholarly discussion is new and illuminating.  His acknowledgment of the often vexed and delicate relationship between historical scholarship and literature is carefully established in order to set up his reading of poems not typically associated with the plague. In lucid prose he offers a useful and indeed essential re-reading of the poems of the Pearl manuscript, thus managing to narrow his scope of “Middle English in the fourteenth century” for his purpose but also, tantalizingly, opening up a world of possibilities to re-read much of contemporary Middle English poetry – and indeed cultural productions of any time or place – for new “whispers” of trauma.  Coley is especially good at close reading these poems even as he carefully locates them in a social, political and medical historical moment.  He asks us (and shows us how) to seek a poetry that responds to the Black Death by revealing a hidden and “muffled” response to the trauma of plague in medieval England.

2018 - Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary. Oxford UP, 2017.

Congratulations to Shannon McSheffrey who was awarded the 2018 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for her book Seeking Sanctuary (Oxford UP, 2017). For details on the book, see below.

From the publisher:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Since finishing her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1992, Shannon McSheffrey has taught at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is now Professor of History. She has won several awards for her research and teaching. Over the last twenty-five years she has published books and articles on a number of aspects of late medieval and Tudor England, exploring issues as varied as gender roles, law, civic culture, marriage, literacy, heresy, and popular religion. Seeking Sanctuary grew out of a curiosity about how English people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries used law, legal records, and legal archives.

2017 - Levi Roach, Æthelred the Unready. Yale UP, 2016.

Congratulations to Levi Roach! He won the Margaret Wade Labarge prize for his book Aethelred the Unready (Yale UP, 2016). For details on the winning book, see below.

From the publisher:

An imaginative reassessment of Æthelred "the Unready," one of medieval England’s most maligned kings and a major Anglo-Saxon figure

The Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred "the Unready" (978–1016) has long been considered to be inscrutable, irrational, and poorly advised. Infamous for his domestic and international failures, Æthelred was unable to fend off successive Viking raids, leading to the notorious St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, during which Danes in England were slaughtered on his orders. Though Æthelred’s posthumous standing is dominated by his unsuccessful military leadership, his seemingly blind trust in disloyal associates, and his harsh treatment of political opponents, Roach suggests that Æthelred has been wrongly maligned. Drawing on extensive research, Roach argues that Æthelred was driven by pious concerns about sin, society, and the anticipated apocalypse. His strategies, in this light, were to honor God and find redemption. Chronologically charting Æthelred’s life, Roach presents a more accessible character than previously available, illuminating his place in England and Europe at the turn of the first millennium.

Levi Roach is lecturer at the University of Exeter, and formerly a junior research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. He lives in Exeter, UK.

2016 ~ Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif. Cornell UP, 2014.

Fiona Somerset’s book's importance in developing the MS basis for its field, and that field's contribution to late-medieval religious and social history, is undoubted. The sheer wealth of sources which provide evidence of diverse lollard teachings on living a virtuous life, stories, saints, praying, and "feeling," revise previous assumptions about lollards and provide a more nuanced perspective than ever before. It is a significant piece of scholarship, looking at a wide range of manuscript sources and challenging the assumptions of the whole field of Lollard scholarship. . . . Whether or not Somerset is correct in her readings of sources she classifies as Lollard, her work will be one that future scholars have to ‘answer’ if they are going to look at any of these writings.  More...

2015 ~ Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe. Cambridge UP, 2014.

From the publisher:

How did medieval Europeans use and change their environments, think about the natural world, and try to handle the natural forces affecting their lives? This groundbreaking environmental history examines medieval relationships with the natural world from the perspective of social ecology, viewing human society as a hybrid of the cultural and the natural. Richard Hoffmann's interdisciplinary approach sheds important light on such central topics in medieval history as the decline of Rome, religious doctrine, urbanization and technology, as well as key environmental themes, among them energy use, sustainability, disease and climate change. Revealing the role of natural forces in events previously seen as purely human, the book explores issues including the treatment of animals, the 'tragedy of the commons', agricultural clearances and agrarian economies. By introducing medieval history in the context of social ecology, it brings the natural world into historiography as an agent and object of history itself.

2014  ~ Frank Klaassen, The Transformation of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.

Klaassen’s elegantly written monograph is an incisive analysis of an understudied body of evidence. His argument that two types of “illicit learned magic” characterized the period between 1300 and 1600 brings coherence and clarity to an intellectual tradition that has too often been overlooked. By locating magical texts within broad theological, philosophical, and scholarly traditions and by emphasizing the continuities between medieval ritual magic and Renaissance texts, Klaassen challenges his readers to see medieval and Renaissance intellectual culture in new ways. His work thus not only makes a valuable contribution to the history of magic in the premodern era, but it also participates in conversations about the periodization of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His study stood out in a year in which there were several strong contenders for the Labarge prize. Click here for more.

2013 ~ James Grier, Ademari Cabannensis Opera Liturgica et Poetica: Musica cum Textibus. Brepols, 2012.  

The committee unanimously agreed that Grier’s monumental two-volume critical edition of the works of the eleventh century monk Adémar of Chabannes was a scholarly achievement of the highest order. Many of the musical texts transcribed here have not previously appeared in modern editions. Committee members praised the meticulous scholarship evident in the introduction and the transcriptions, and they noted the similarly high quality of the philological work. They also drew attention to the elegance and clarity of the written presentation. The committee believes that this work not only makes a significant contributionas  to medieval musicology, but that those contributions will be of lasting scholarly value. 

2012 ~ Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 

Koopmans surveys more than seventy-five collections and offers a new model for understanding how miracle stories were generated, circulated, and replicated. She argues that orally exchanged narratives carried far more propagandistic power than those preserved in manuscripts; stresses the literary and memorial roles of miracle collecting; and traces changes in form and content as the focus of the collectors shifted from the stories told by religious colleagues to those told by lay visitors to their churches. 

Wonderful to Relate highlights the importance of the two massive collections written by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury in the wake of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Koopmans provides the first in-depth examination of the creation and influence of the Becket compilations, often deemed the greatest of all medieval miracle collections. In a final section, she ponders the decline of miracle collecting in the thirteenth century, which occurred with the advent of formalized canonization procedures and theological means of engaging with the miraculous. More...