ICMA Annual Book Prize
We are delighted to announce the recipient of the 2025 ICMA Annual Book Prize:
Andrew Griebeler
Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean
The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Click HERE for The University of Chicago Press site
This year’s Book Prize is awarded to Andrew Griebeler for Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (University of Chicago Press). This innovative study redefines the role of botanical illustration in the premodern Mediterranean, presenting it as a central mode of knowledge-making rather than a mere supplement to text.
Griebeler’s work spans a broad yet coherent cultural sphere shaped by trade, diplomacy, and intellectual exchange, offering an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates art history with linguistic, medicinal, and scientific traditions. His thesis—that image-making conveyed knowledge in its own right—has far-reaching implications for understanding Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange, manuscript traditions, and the history of scientific imagery.
The book dismantles long-standing misconceptions about medieval botanical illustration, revealing its dynamism and accuracy through close analysis of objects within the context of copying and adaptation. By tracing the interplay of Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Syriac traditions, Griebeler illuminates a complex visual culture that transcends religious boundaries and enriches Mediterranean studies. And by demonstrating that the scientific picturing of plants comprised a host of critical practices, each responsive to the needs and desires of their makers, he advances a sensitive model for exploring questions of iconography and replication in the medieval context.
Beautifully produced with abundant illustrations of rarely reproduced materials, Botanical Icons combines erudition with accessibility, making it essential reading for specialists and a wider scholarly audience. Its originality and scope promise to inspire future research on visual knowledge and cross-cultural exchange in the medieval world.
ISBN: 9780226826790
344 pages | 96 color plates
The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
We thank the ICMA Book Prize Jury:
Alexa Sand (chair), Benjamin Anderson, Till-Holger Borchert, Luke Fidler, and Lynn Jones