ICMA Annual Book Prize
We are delighted to announce the recipient of the 2023 ICMA Annual Book Prize:
Brigitte Buettner
The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
Click here for the Penn State University Press site
Brigitte Buettner’s The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture is a landmark study, deeply learned and intellectually adventurous. Physically, it is also an exquisitely beautiful book that brings to light a variety of objects that do not usually get the kind of careful, highly critical analysis they find here. In Buettner’s deft hands, crowns, illuminated lapidaries, stones carved with figures, and geographic manuscripts (among other things) demonstrate the depth of the medieval fascination with the mineral, tying it to the once-living bodies that wore, handled, and viewed these objects. Buettner skillfully weaves together contemporary theory with medieval epistemologies and plays out a coherent argument about the significance of precious stones that situates them within a larger, very timely, reexamination of relationships between the intellectual and material cultures of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern, and between the Latin Christian sphere of western Europe and the wider worlds of Byzantium, Islamic north Africa and western Asia, Persia, India, and China. While reveling in the visual and material delights of the Gothic mineral arts, the book does not ignore the more sinister aspect of this history, namely its seminal role in the growth of extractive colonialism, especially after 1492. This broad and nuanced view of the later European Middle Ages in a global context will make The Mineral and the Visual a profoundly influential book for future medievalist scholarship. Furthermore, it is written in elegant, lively prose that moves the complex argument along in a lucid fashion. In the words of Alexander Neckam, chosen by Buettner herself to conclude this innovative monograph, it is “a delight, a study, and a treasure.”
We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Alexa Sand (chair), Benjamin Anderson, Heather Badamo, Till-Holger Borchert, and Eric Ramirez-Weaver