John Martin's "A Beautiful Ending" Wins Pelikan Award
On October 8, Yale University Press announced that a group of Yale University faculty members has named A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World, by John Jeffries Martin (Yale University Press, 2022), as the fifth winner of the Pelikan Award. Martin is professor and former chair of the Department of History at Duke University.
Jennifer Banks, Yale University Press’s Senior Executive Editor in Religion and the Humanities, said: “The committee was impressed by the book’s profoundly original argument, deep research, diverse frames of reference, and beautifully crafted narrative. They believe the book reveals something genuinely new and urgent to its readers: how the idea of an imminent end has shaped the modern period.”
The Pelikan Award is a biannual prize awarded by Yale University Press to a distinguished book on religion published by the Press in the previous two years. Honoring the late Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University Sterling Professor Emeritus of History and Yale University Press author, the award includes a cash prize of $5,000. The winning book is selected by an independent committee of Yale faculty and was first awarded in 2016.
The previous winners are Caroline Bruzelius’s Preaching, Building, and Burying: Friars in the Medieval City; Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650; Eliyahu Stern’s Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s; and Abram C. Van Engen’s City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism.
Martin’s “engaging prose . . . reminds us that, while millenarian visions of the future could inspire violence, rebellion, and fear of ‘outsiders,’ . . . the longing for the end also generated optimism, egalitarianism, and an ecumenical spirit.”—Brett Edward Whalen, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
A “marvelous, provocative, and genuinely original work of historical imagination.”—Ethan H. Shagan, Journal of Modern History
“Martin’s book ends as beautifully as it begins, its apocalypse in the eternal now.”—Jonathan Locke Hart, Renaissance and Reformation
