SSCLE Awards Best Paper Prize 2026
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
The SSCLE has announced the winner of the best paper given by a postgraduate or early career researcher at the Society's 2026 conference in Porto.
Glauber Wisniewski’s paper explored the role of Jews in the newly established Templar land-holding mechanisms in and around the city of Lleda following its conquest. It showed how this collaboration with the Templars allowed the Jewish community to integrate into the local economic and social system, while allowing the Templars to consolidate their hold on the region.
This very impressive work offered a close reading of the extensive document corpus against the grain, breaking away from established binary readings that oscillate between conflict and co-existence. Instead, this paper situated the source material in a broader context of social and economic mechanisms formed in the Iberian Peninsula between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and by doing so made a compelling case that reinforces and nuances existing models concerning the scope and limits of Convivencia.
Glauber Wisniewski is a student at the PhD program in Medieval History at Saint Louis University, writing his dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Damian J. Smith.
Runner-up:
Nour Saber's paper examined the Almohad chronicle of al-Mann bi-l-imāma by the Andalusi official ʿAbd al-Malik Ibn Ṣāḥib aṣ-Ṣalāḥ, analyzing its rhetoric and showing how it constructs a sacralised East-West geography in which bilād al-Rūm refers not narrowly to Byzantium, but to Latin Christian Iberian territory within a wider Roman-Christian horizon.
This paper impressed us not least for its engagement with a hitherto little-studied source in the context of Iberian Crusading and Jihad, but also for positioning this source within a wide framework which includes geopolitical changes, the text's reception, and its role in formulating a new perception of the Muslim rule across different regions in the Mediterranean.
Nour Saber is a PhD candidate at the cluster for Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval studies at the University of Vienna, writing her dissertation under the supervision of Philippe Buc and Pascal Buresi.
