About the Prize
Best Article Prize, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies
Each year, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies and Routledge/Taylor & Francis award a $500 prize for the most outstanding article published in the journal during the preceding year. Prize winners are selected by a rotating committee made up of members of the journal’s Advisory Board.
All articles published in JMIS are automatically considered for the Best Article Prize in the following year, and the winner is then made freely available.
Submissions must be prepared in Chicago ‘humanities’ style and should be approximately 10,000-12,000 words; articles of other lengths may be accepted at the discretion of the editors. Submissions are accepted in English or Spanish.
For special issue proposals, please contact the Editor-in-Chief, Therese Martin ([email protected]). To submit papers, please visit our site for on-line submission.
2020 Best Article Prize Winner: Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, “A Tale of Two Tolranas: Jewish Women’s Agency and Conversion in Late Medieval Girona.”
The article by Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, “A Tale of Two Tolranas,” focuses on a theme of particular interest in current historiography. Their research approaches two cases of Jewish women whose actions, between 1391 and 1421, illustrate how women could exercise agency as a means of determining their own lives. Divorce and conversion cases in Girona allow the authors to trace carefully the constellations of options by Jewish women in a time of increased pressure on the Jewish community, situated within a wide background of canon and Jewish law. Apart from the exciting insights and interesting cases that are presented in the paper, the internal structure is well developed and the available data is well presented and clearly explained, as are the objectives. Raising important issues and leading us to understand the role of (Jewish) women in controlling their own lives, this study shows the room for manoeuvre they had within and outside of their community. It is likely to inspire the development of further research on the many roles played women in medieval Iberian society.
2020 Prize Committee: Ross Brann, Cornell University, US; Catarina Tente, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal; Susanne Wittekind, Universität zu Köln, Germany.
