The Mediterranean Seminar Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection, 2022

The 2022 Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection was open to books published from 2016 to 2021 inclusive. The committee was most interested in collections of essay that broke new ground conceptually or methodologically, were comparative and/or interdisciplinary, that emphasized the intercultural/interregional/inter-religious contact, and that were “of” rather than merely “in” the Mediterranean, and that were both internally coherent and comprehensive. For source translations and editions, the committee looked for works of an original nature that exemplified or reflect the essential characteristics of the Mediterranean as a region, and which were prefaced by a comprehensive introduction. Books ranging from any period were considered, with the Mediterranean broadly construed as the region centered on the sea, but including connected hinterlands in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the western Indian Ocean, the Near East and Central Asia.

The next round of the Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection will be held in 2026, for books published from 2022 to 2025. The next prize competition, for the Best First Book (published from 2019—2022) will be announced in July.

The committee for the 2022 Prize for the Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection was:
• Fred Astren: Jewish Studies, San Francisco State University
• Brian A. Catlos: Relgious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Sharon Kinoshita: Literature, University of California Santa Cruz

The Mediterranean Seminar is happy to announce the results of the 2022 Best Source Edition, Book Translation, or Essay Collection contest. We received many entries of extremely high calibre, and in the end decided to award one prize in each category: collection of essays and source edition/translation. In the first category the committee voted unanimously to recognize the volume Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean, edited by Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, and Luke Yarbrough. For the category of source edition and translation the committee chose Giancarlo Casale’s edition of Osman of Timisoara’s memoir, published as Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe, with Aaron Michael Butts’ and Simcha Gross’s, The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr garnering honorable mention. We are particularly grateful to the editors of these and all of our other excellent entries. Scholars — particularly early career-stage academics — are under increasing pressure to publish sole-authored journal articles and monographs; the time and effort needed to concieve of, coordinate, and produce high quality collections of essays, and to translate and edit primary sources represents a tremendous sacrifice and yields important benefits to the scholarly community and to both teachers and students. Thus, we thank all of those who submitted works for consideration for these prizes.

Winner (Essay Collection)

Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, Luke Yarbrough, eds. Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021).
Putting together a volume of collected essays is necessarily challenging because compiled book chapters by definition comprise a range of subjects, methodologies, and writing styles. An accomplished example of such a volume is Minorities in Contact in the Medieval Mediterranean, edited by Clara Almagro Vidal, Jessica Tearney-Pearce, and Luke Yarbrough, Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 33 (Brepols, 2020). Veteran contributors, whose collective scholarly expertise ranges judiciously across the medieval Mediterranean, offer chapters with emphases on Syria and Egypt in the East and the Iberian West, and with a chronological frame from the eighth through the fifteenth century. However, the chapters are arranged neither chronologically nor topically, but in a descending level of abstraction that brings forward the collaborative character of the volume. The first chapters start with broad methodological issues, while middle chapters point to the intersection of “intellectual-historical topics” with political and institutional subjects. The final chapters treat “highly specific historical interactions” that illustrate and critique the volume’s themes. The collection is framed by an Introduction that problematizes the term “minority,” while each one of the quality contributions is firmly anchored in inter-cultural/regional/religious contexts. The chapters, each in their own way, work toward adopting new approaches to larger questions regarding minorities in the medieval Mediterranean. This is a volume that binds history “in” the Mediterranean with history “of” the Mediterranean.

Winner (Source Edition/Translation)

Osman of Timisoara, Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. and trans. Giancarlo Casale (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).
A native of Timisoara (then an administrative center of the Ottoman Balkans, today in Romania), Osman was taken prisoner by Habsburg troops in 1688 and escaped captivity in 1699. Prisoner of the Infidels presents a first-person account of his capture, his brutalization at the hands of his first master, his eventual transfer into the service of a high Habsburg court official in Vienna, and a lengthy account of his colorful escape. Prefaced by an account of his boyhood and concluding with a brief coda of his subsequent years in Ottoman service, this memoir constitutes ‘the first [book-length] autobiography ever written’ in Ottoman Turkish. Translator Giancarlo Casale provides an extensive introduction that ably contextualizes Osman’s life against the vicissitudes of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ottoman history, including the suggestion that Osman’s composition of his memoir in the 1720s partakes of the vogue for “Occidentalism” in the so-called “Age of Tulips.” Of special interest is Casale’s discussion in his Translator’s Note of the various “ethnic,” religious, and linguistic affiliations that arise in Osman’s text. This compact and affordable paperback is nicely supplemented with maps, an Appendix of Main Characters, and separate indices of people and places.

Honorable Mention (Source Edition/Translation)

Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross, The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’ : From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2016).
With their edition and en face translation of the Syriac-language The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: from Jewish Child to Christian Martyr, Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross bring to English readers a fascinating example of the Judenknaben genre – a Christian polemical tale in which a Jewish boy converts to Christianity and then is martyred (or nearly so) by his own father. Composed in in southern Mesopotamia between the mid-seventh and mid-ninth centuries, the editors read the tale in the socio-cultural context of Late Antique Babylonia, eschewing established interpretations of the text as reflecting contemporary Jewish-Christian interactions. Two recensions of the tale are translated into readable modern English, and are prefaced by a comprehensive introduction which situates the story geographically, historically, and within the context of Christianity and Judaism of southern Iraq at the dawn of the Middle Ages, a crucial period in the development of Mediterranean society and culture. The prize committee voted unanimously at award The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’ honorable mention for this year’s best edition of a primary source.