The winner of the 2023 book prize is Alice Isabella Sullivan, The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (Brill, 2023)
Sullivan’s is the first English monograph to provide a comprehensive overview of Moldavia’s artistic and architectural landscape during the 15th and 16th centuries, locating the region as a significant facet in the global map of art history. Moldavia is revealed as a complex artistic region at the intersection of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic cultural spheres, with regional and trans-European links that straddle medieval, Byzantine, post- Byzantine, and early modern historical and cultural boundaries. Building on her knowledge of all the source languages in the region – Latin, Greek, Romanian, and Church Slavonic – Sullivan analyzes the visual material in tandem with the textual evidence, presenting the first English translations of several primary sources. As a result, Sullivan’s analysis effectively shows how the lingering influence of Byzantium in Moldavia interfaced with various traditions, giving rise to a distinctively local material and visual legacy. Her book will be useful to scholars focusing on the region but also to the scholars of other regions seeking to bridge the divide between Byzantine, post-Byzantine, Western, and Ottoman traditions in medieval and early modern Europe.
Honorable mention: Agnes Kriza, Depicting Orthodoxy in the Russian Middle Ages. The Novgorod Icon of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (Oxford University Press, 2022)
In this meticulously researched book, Kriza explores the meaning, function, and historical context of the creation of the Novgorod Sophia iconography, separating the investigation of the Sophia icon from the so-called sophiological paradigm. By adopting a new methodological approach that abandons the Florovskian paradigm of “returning to the Fathers” and replaces it with the concept of “returning to the medieval sources”, Kriza challenges the established Trinitarian explanation of the icon. Instead, she reads the icon’s iconography and its contemporaneous commentary as two inseparable units, rigorously linking textual and visual sources. Drawing on philology, art history, theology, and history, Kriza convincingly proposes that the Novgorod Sophia image represents the Orthodox Church and that the icon, together with its commentary, was a response to the Union of Florence, acting as a tool of self-legitimization of the Moscow Metropolitanate and the emerging Moscow state. Kriza’s multidisciplinary, innovative book sheds new light on the visual, theological, ecclesiastical, and political culture of medieval Muscovy and will useful to other scholars studying the connections between iconographies and the relevant texts.
Winners of the 2023 Translation of primary sources Prize
In Zinoviy Otenskiy and the Trinitarian Controversy, Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko and Mikhail V. Shpakovskiy present the first English publication of two key Slavic works penned by the great Russian theologian Zinoviy Otenskiy (d. 1571/2). The texts represent a major source for accessing the complexities of the Trinitarian dispute in sixteenth-century Russia, revealing Zinoviy’s profound theological thought.
The authors present a thorough and welcome summary of the history of the Trinitarian issue and Zinoviy’s participation in it that is useful to scholars of the East Slavic region as well as scholars focusing on religion and theology in the medieval and post-medieval periods at large.
