Collection edited by Southampton researcher wins 'Best Book in Medieval Art' prize
‘Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts’, edited by Mike Bintley (Associate Professor in Medieval English Literature in Southampton’s English Department) and Pippa Salonius has won the “Best Book in Medieval Art' AFCEMS [Association of Friends of the Center for Early Medieval Studies, Brno] Book Prize 2024. This annual prize is awarded by the Association of the Friends of the Centre of Early Medieval Studies, Masaryk University, Brno in the Czech Republic.
The book explores the role of trees in the middle ages. Forests, with their interlacing networks of trees and secret patterns of communication, are powerful entities for thinking-with. A majestic terrestrial community of arboreal others, their presence echoes, entangles, and resonates deeply with the human world.
The chapters interrogate the pre-Anthropocene environment, reflecting on trees as metaphors for kinship and knowledge as they appear in literary, historical, art-historical, and philosophical sources. They examine images of trees and trees in-themselves across a range of environmental, material, and intellectual contexts, and consider how humans used arboreal and rhizomatic forms to negotiate bodies of knowledge and processes of transition. Looking beyond medieval Europe, they include discussion of parallel developments in the Islamic world and that of the Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.
The prize award noted that ‘this profoundly researched, well written, and clearly composed book has been deemed outstanding for its stimulating contribution to a nuanced and profound understanding of the nexus between nature and human creativity as expressed through various media in the visual arts and literature as well as theology and cosmology. Although mainly focusing on the European continent, it also comprises analyses of Māori and Islamic cultures for comparison and thereby embraces a 'global' approach to its common arboreal focus’.