The ESSA is pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 Publication Prize, which was for the category of scholarly articles:
First prize:
Maria Grazia Bartolini, “Visible Rituals: Theology and Church Authority in the Iconography of the Seven Sacraments in Peter Mohyla’s Trebnyk (1646).” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (January 2020)
The prize committee writes: “This article makes a series of interventions into East Slavic cultural history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a careful, thoroughly researched and impeccably argued close analysis of visual culture. The article opens up avenues for considering how ideas changed not only about sacramentology (its primary focus), but also about the body and embodiment. Bartolini also contemplates which sources were capable of conveying theological standpoints during the early modern period and how, bringing new sources and cultural forms into the purview of theology.”
Honorary mention:
Tomasz Grusiecki, “Michał Boym, the Sum Xu, and the Reappearing Image.” Journal of Early Modern History 23 (2019) 2.
The prize committee writes: “Grusiecki’s focus on an image created by a Polish-Ruthenian Jesuit who moves between cultures and empires is a useful contribution to art-historical scholarship, while also engaging thoughtfully with ideas of national identity and affiliation in the early modern world. The article is challenging and thought-provoking in the way it casts doubt over hegemonic ideas of cultural production, especially ideas of periphery and center, and original and copy, and it breaks down simplistic national and cultural boundaries in favor of close analysis. Grusiecki utilizes an unusual primary source from our field to make a broader methodological (as well as ideological) intervention subtly but effectively.”
