Joan A. Holladay, professor emeritus in the Department of Art and Art History, received the 2022 Karen Gould Book Prize in Art History from the Medieval Academy of America for her monograph, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). The prize is awarded annually for a book or monograph in medieval art history judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality.
"This is the first book to deal exclusively with medieval genealogical imagery. While paying attention to historical precedents in Roman and Carolingian times, and covering a wide range of examples in multiple media, Joan Holladay does full justice to a distinctive and important visual genre which, from the twelfth century, developed rapidly across medieval Europe," writes the adjudication committee in the prize citation.
Through diagrams, monumental painted cycles, tomb sculpture and stained glass, the author’s sweeping and authoritative analysis is driven by admirable attention to the structural and formal qualities of the imagery, which throughout the book emerge as a visual genre in their own right. Equally focused on the genre’s ideological dimensions, Holladay persuasively demonstrates, for example, how genealogical imagery was produced to solidify lineal claims -- both real and imagined -- and assist memory in contexts of discontinuity and stress in transition lines. By touching on a great variety of stimulating topics, this fluently written and generously illustrated book offers a unique and seminal contribution to the field, one destined to inspire a broad interdisciplinary audience of medievalists.
Karen Gould (1946 – 2012), herself a University of Texas at Austin alumna who earned her B.S. and M.A. degrees in Art History before completing her doctoral degree in History in 1975, was an art historian specializing in manuscript illumination. She authored The Psalter and Hours of Yolande of Soissons (Speculum Anniversary Monographs) (Medieval Academy of America, 1978). The prize in her name consists of a certificate and a monetary award of $1,000. It was established in 2016 by an endowed gift from Lewis Gould, professor of History at UT Austin from 1967 to 1998. Recent Karen Gould Book Prize winners include Margaret Graves for Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), Benjamin Anderson for Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), and Ivan Drpić for Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
The Prize will be presented at the Academy’s 2022 Annual Meeting, hosted by the University of Virginia. The presentation of the Prize and the reading of the citation will take place preceding the Presidential Address on Saturday, March 12, 2022. The Medieval Academy of America, founded in 1925, is the largest organization in the United States promoting excellence in the field of medieval studies.