News

Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has received the 2026 Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography Best Essay Award for her article "Written in the Stars?: Alphabets and Angels in Early Modern Europe," published in the Journal of the History of Ideas (86:3, 2025).

The SoFCB awards its annual prize to a scholarly article that exemplifies the Society's mission of advancing the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects through capacious, interdisciplinary scholarship. In selecting Macfarlane's essay, the prize committee highlighted its treatment of the materiality of sky-writing and its central inquiry into which languages—and which traditions—receive authority.

The article traces a century of early modern engagement with so-called angelic alphabets, examining how mysterious characters from medieval kabbalistic manuscripts came to be understood by learned Christians as celestial writing authored by angels. By the mid-seventeenth century, Macfarlane shows, these interpretations had accumulated enough authority to unsettle established Christian teachings on angelic beings. The essay situates these developments within broader transformations in knowledge production in early modern Europe.

The award is underwritten by Kimball Higgs, a supporter of Rare Book School and a graduate of Columbia University's School of Library Service.

Learn more here: https://rarebookschool.org/sofcb/