Each year, Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) awards its Essay Prize to a scholarly article that exemplifies the Society’s mission of advancing the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects through capacious, interdisciplinary scholarship.
This year, the prize goes to Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago, for her article “Written in the Stars?: Alphabets and Angels in Early Modern Europe,” published in the Journal of the History of Ideas (86:3, 2025).
The SoFCB Essay Prize Committee was especially inspired by the materiality of sky-writing described in Macfarlane’s article and was impressed by the capacious application of the implicit central question “Which languages receive authority?” The committee members noted that by focusing on a moment (or moments) that had the potential to shake the authority of scripture between roughly 1550 and 1650, Macfarlane’s scholarship outlines and sustains the stakes of this work through multiple paths. At once an analysis of “angelic alphabets,” a disruption of learned angelology’s erudition as a field, and a commentary on knowledge production in early modern Europe, her article works seamlessly across several registers to produce an accessibly rigorous piece of writing.
The SoFCB Essay Prize Committee recognizes innovative scholarship that brings together multiple fields of study, strives to be accessible to the bibliographical community at large, and centers the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects as integral to the essay’s argument and the evidence upon which it relies. The committee received many stellar submissions from scholars working across disciplines in the humanities—an encouraging response that attests to the vibrancy of critical bibliography in the twenty-first century. As such, the committee members’ decision was difficult. They would like to highlight an additional submission, which merits honorable mention: Paul Tamburro’s “Reading All About It: Rethinking Orality in Classic Maya Scribal Imagery” published in Ancient Mesoamerica (35, 2025).
The Essay Prize Committee found Tamburro’s discussion of the relationship between textuality, monumentality, and orality to be very compelling. Committee members were particularly inspired by the article’s positioning of the relationship between writing, reading, and storytelling in order to ask questions about the way that scholars excavate the past and past practices from an inscribed record.
The SoFCB Essay Prize has been underwritten by Kimball Higgs, a supporter of Rare Book School and a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Library Service.
2025–26 SoFCB Essay Prize Committee:
Amy Gore (Chair), North Dakota State University
András Kiséry, City College of New York
Eilin Pérez, The Cooper Union
David Weimer, Newberry Library