Winner of John Nicholas Brown Prize

The 2011 John Nicholas Brown Prize is awarded to Leor Halevi for Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (Columbia University Press, 2007) and to Carol Symes for A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell University Press, 2007).

A powerful and original synthesis of textual, archaeological, and material cultural sources, Muhammad's Grave describes how the new religion of Islam developed rites for death and burial first in Arabia and then in Syria and Mesopotamia. As the religion expanded rapidly from Arabia, it encountered the different customs of converts from Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism and the need to define its own rituals. Since the Prophet's grave itself did not survive a subsequent rebuilding and aggrandizement, the book's title refers more to the operations of memory in the early Islamic community and to the ways in which the remembrance of the death of Muhammad and his early followers was maintained and transformed by different groups of Muslims in subsequent centuries. The first clue to the multiplicity of practices that prevailed is provided by tombstones, which are not consistently inscribed with Qur<&hamza;>anic references until over a century after the Prophet's death. Jurists made contradictory pronouncements about who should bathe the corpse of the deceased, and especially what role women could have in the process. A particular concern throughout the book is the status of women in the first centuries of Islam as it solidified into a patrilineal society. The funeral laments of women form an important chapter that illustrates the social differences between Arabia and Mesopotamia, a theme that continues in further discussions of burial shrouds, funeral processions, and the social politics of burial and tomb memorials. The book's last chapter investigates the consequences of all these actions on the soul of the deceased between death and resurrection. Here the book makes useful comparisons with Christian and Jewish traditions of afterlife as it historicizes Islamic conceptions of purgatorial torture in the grave. Thoughtful, well researched, and methodologically exacting, Muhammad's Grave explains how early Muslims Islamicized the body of the dead through prayer, cleansing, and shrouding and how they Islamicized societies by means of funeral rituals that prescribed prayer leaders, funeral processions, and places and manners of burial. The result is an important contribution to the social history of the Middle Ages.

Providing notable insight into the intersections of culture, literature, and politics, Carol Symes's comprehensive study of a number of the earliest vernacular plays in Europe persuasively makes the case for reading medieval theater within a spectrum of activities that shared a common stage, the entire city of Arras. These activities include the crying of news, the publication of laws, the preaching of sermons, storytelling, liturgical celebrations, and the conception, organization, and presentation of civic spectacles. The plays studied within this broad context originated in Arras, a prosperous town on the border between France and Flanders, which has preserved unusually rich, highly pertinent documentation. That documentation is here examined, in all its complexity, with patience, sensitivity, and a critical spirit. The book begins with an argument about how the location of an early play should be, so to speak, "excavated." This argument is based not only in extensive reading in theater history and historiography but also in careful and wide-ranging study of literary and cultural theory. A Common Stage first explicates an early history play by delicately teasing out from the play's text its manifold connections with what are usually deemed nontheatrical aspects of town life. It goes on to explore the agency behind the creation and performance of plays in a commercial city such as Arras. Its study of performing jongleurs fascinates the reader, but it also makes clear that performers were but one among many important categories of people who shaped theatrical performances. In imaginative yet well-documented fashion, the book poses and addresses the question of "media access" in a medieval environment. An analysis of The Play of the Bower and several other secular plays shows fruitful, and hitherto unrecognized, connections with contemporary ecclesiastical practices. A Common Stage, written with care and verve, is a great read for anyone interested in medieval culture, particularly that of towns. Moreover, specialists in urban, theater, and literary history will find much that is theoretically and methodologically innovative here. Indeed, this erudite book shows very effectively how an aspect of the cultural history of one town has powerful implications for the study of early spectacle and attendant community formation in many parts of Europe.

Respectfully submitted,
SARA LIPTON
ROBERT NELSON
SUSAN NOAKES, Chair