Award:
David Bevington Award
Award Year:
2024
Winner: Swift, Christopher (he/him). Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville: Performing Empire. ARC Humanities Press, 2023.
The Bevington committee is delighted to award this year’s Bevington Prize to Christopher Swift for Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville: Performing Empire, published by ARC Humanities Press in 2023. Swift’s impressive monograph brings Iberian theater out of the blind-spot of the field of early drama studies and teaches us something new about medieval theatrical traditions that have gone overlooked and understudied while also making important and exciting contributions to current theories of performance and performativity. The committee found Swift’s book innovative, engaging, and beautifully expressed.
Honorable Mention: Johnson, Laurie (he/him). Leicester's Men and their Plays: An Early Elizabethan Playing Company and its Legacy. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
The honorable mention for this year’s Bevington award goes to Laurie Johnson for Leicester's Men and their Plays: An Early Elizabethan Playing Company and its Legacy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Johnson’s work on companies beyond London and the court, his research on the movements of companies, and his findings on the residences of touring actors in London transform our perception of pre-Shakespearian drama production. This book is a excellently researched example of archival sleuthing into an early and important theatre company that slowly layers facts and details to achieve truly masterful results.
Committee: Mark Chambers, Mario Longtin, and E. Maggie Solberg (chair). Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2024, at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.