Award:
Alexandra Johnston Award
Award Year:
2025
Winner: Skinner, Jordan. “‘The lawe of this lande’: Curfew Law in the York Corpus Christi Plays.” ICMS Leeds, 3 July 2024.
The committee is delighted to announce that the 2025 Alexandra Johnston Award goes to Jordan Skinner's “‘The lawe of this lande’: Curfew Law in the York Corpus Christi Plays.” This paper provides an insightful and compelling analysis of the role of curfew law in the York biblical plays. His paper impressively wields all the tools of medieval drama scholarship—close reading and explication of the dramatic text, extensive archival work, surveying previous scholarship, and considerations of original performance—to demonstrate not only how the legal structures of curfew inform the York plays but also how the plays themselves serve to reinforce those legal structures.
Honorable Mention: Ortega, Liora. “Mercury’s Endgame: Cognitive Chess in Lope’s Servir a un señor discreto and Alarcón’s La cueva de Salamanca.” MLA New Orleans, 11 January 2025.
This is an ambitious and wide-ranging essay that covers an impressive range of material from drama and visual art to novels, ballads, historical texts on chess, and even scientific treatises on the brain. Nevertheless it manages to avoid being overloaded with context and its opening comparative summary is a good example of the essay’s ability to synthesize multiple materials and present them efficiently. There were a few moments where it seemed like separating the discussions of chess and each of the two plays into separate sections meant missing some opportunities for thinking across them, but given the volume of material and the oral presentation mode, it did help with clarity.
Committee: Harry Cushman (chair), Cameron Hunt McNabb, and Nicole Sheriko. Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2025, at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.