Book Awards
Each year, the winners of the Otto Gründler Book Prize and the La corónica Book Award are announced during the ICMS plenary lectures. The following are this year's winners, announced at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 8–10, 2025.
Otto Gründler Book Prize
Rory Naismith, Making Money in the Early Middle Ages
Princeton University Press, 2023
Making Money examines the uses and meanings of coined money from the end of the western Roman Empire until the twelfth century. The study is deeply informed by numismatics and economic history; however, it also demonstrates that the social and cultural meanings of money were equally rich, embedded as they were in gift-giving, exchange, authority structures, and the construction of social value. Naismith excels at framing his study for a general scholarly audience. As one judge remarked: “I am also impressed how well-planned and well-written this monograph is: 515 pages of numismatics might be tough to read (!), but not here… It feels to me like a very long, carefully planned, slowly refined project brought to a very full and satisfying conclusion.”
La corónica Book Award
Graham Barrett, Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia
Oxford University Press, 2023
This study explores literacy in early medieval Christian Iberia through a comprehensive examination of over 4000 Latin charters created dating from 711 to 1031. The author brings together this vast corpus of legal texts from archives across the Peninsula, the overwhelming majority of which concern property and ownership, and shows how scribes and the members of the society that they served developed shared textual communities “and created a written world in which parchment was power, each text opening onto others.” By providing a new framework for understanding the role of written texts, it significantly influences the interdisciplinary field of medieval Iberia and proposes a new model of early medieval reading based not on books, but fragments of texts cited in charters.
