Abigail Agresta Received 2023 Turku Book Prize

Abigail Agresta won the 2023 Turku Book Prize for her monograph The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia (Cornell UP, 2022). It was presented to her at this year’s Twelfth Conference of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH), which took place in Bern from 22 to 26 August 2023. Established in 2011 at the sixth conference of the ESEH in Turku, Finland, the prize, which is sponsored by the Rachel Carson Center and endowed with a prize money of 3,000 euros, has now been awarded a total of seven times. For this year’s ceremony, 27 books were considered, out of which 19 were eligible for the award.

Announcing the winner, the Turku Prize Committee, chaired by Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University) with fellow members Katie Ritson (Rachel Carson Center), Marcus Hall (University of Zurich), 2021 Turku Book Prize recipient Nicolai Hannig (Darmstadt Technical University), and Violette Pouillard (Ghent University), stated:

Meticulously researched yet highly readable, Agresta’s work combines a convincing narrative with an outstanding level of scholarly rigor in her approach to archival sources. Her own translations of original materials, which are seamlessly interwoven with analytical and narrative passages, strongly indicate both her sensitivity to historical context and her masterful ability of making late medieval sources accessible to a contemporary readership.

The regional focus is counterbalanced by highly useful references and comparisons to developments in other parts of the Iberian peninsula, thus highlighting not only the specificity of Valencia as a religiously heterogeneous urban space but also the great analytical potential of cultural environmental history for the analysis of natural disaster responses in late medieval societies.

Abigail Agresta is an assistant professor of history focusing on medieval Europe at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences in Washington, D.C. The Keys to Bread and Wine explores the governance of the Valencian environment by the city council from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. It examines how the city council responded to natural disasters and hazards and demonstrates how material and religious reactions were deeply intertwined.

The following titles were shortlisted for the award:

• Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von. A Monastery for the Ibex: Conservation, State, and Conflict on the Gran Paradiso, 1919–1949. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
• Lehmann, Philipp. Desert Edens: Colonial Climate Engineering in the Age of Anxiety. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
• Orsini, Davide. The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022.

Special mention was given to Alexandra Cotofana for her wonderful contribution to the development of a region with Xenophobic Mountains: Landscape Sentience Reconsidered in the Romanian Carpathians (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).