| Ruth Dean | |
|---|---|
| Born | 10 March 1902  |
| Died | 2003 (aged 100–101) |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Literary historian |
| Awards |
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Ruth Josephine Dean (1902-2003) was an American scholar of Anglo-Norman literature. Throughout her career, she worked hard to establish the legitimacy of Anglo-Norman literature as a subject of study, and her definitive work, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (1999) has won widespread praise for its substantial contribution to the study of literature. [1] [2]
Ruth Dean was born in New York City on March 10, 1902. She attended Wellesley College, graduating with a B.A. in 1922. She subsequently attended Saint Hugh's College, Oxford, earning a B.A. in 1924, an M.A. in 1928, and a D.Phil in 1938. [3] During her time at Oxford, Dean had the opportunity to work alongside eminent medievalists: she was research assistant to the notable palaeographer E. A. Lowe, and moreover studied for her doctorate under Mildred Pope. [4] It was also during this time that she met Dominica Legge, with whom she enjoyed a lifelong friendship until her death in 1986. [5] After returning to America, Dean joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College, where she served as a French language and literature professor until her retirement in 1967. She chaired her department from 1951 to 1954 and was named the Mary Lyon Professor in 1967. After her retirement, Dean taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she chaired the Medieval Studies program. In 1973, she was elected president of the Medieval Academy of America. [6] Ruth Dean died in 2003. [6] [7]
Dean was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic years 1943–1944 and 1950–1951. [8] She was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1948–1949. [9]
For much of her career, Dean was a passionate advocate for the study of Anglo Norman both as a body of literature and as a language. This can be seen particularly in her essay 'A Fair Field Needing Folk: Anglo-Norman', written in 1954, where she paints a picture of scholarly neglect of Anglo Norman as a field of study:
'Anglo-Normanists often feel that their subject has been treated in the world of research as stepchild, Cinderella, poor relation, even barbarian. In France, the descendants of its paternity consider it, at its best, an ornament or even a chapter of French literature, and compliment it on contributing joy, light, and color to the gloomy Anglo-Saxon scene; the more it takes on local characteristics the less attention the French pay to it' [10] Dean finished her manifesto with these words:
'A definitive study of Anglo-Norman language, literature, and ideas in western culture is still some way off. Here is a field for many workers and a training-ground for rising scholars who should go on, from their philological, paleographical, and literary grounding, to make critical evaluations and eventually to compose the larger interpretations for non-specialists which are now recognized as part of the role of scholars. [11] Indeed, she made such a vast undertaking more feasible for many Anglo Norman scholars through her life's work, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, compiled with the collaboration of Maureen Boulton and published by the Anglo-Norman Text Society. [12] Dean's Guide has been referred to as an 'indispensable catalogue of manuscripts of Anglo-Norman literary texts and manuscripts'. [1] This work was based on an earlier survey of manuscripts undertaken by Johan Vising, a copy of which was given to Dean by a fellow medievalist during her years of study at Oxford. [13] Dean herself writes that with this volume in hand, she began to explore manuscripts, library catalogues, and bibliographies with a view to updating Vising's work. [13] Dean's survey, which came to be known as the 'new Vising', attracted the attention of scholars on five continents, many of whom contributed to its growth and development. [14] This collaborative effort, coordinated by Dean, in actuality greatly surpassed the efforts of Vising. Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts catalogues close to 1,000 texts, over 500 more than are recorded in Vising, and the number of manuscripts in which they are found exceeds 1,100, whilst Vising only lists 419. [14] The colossal advance to scholarship represented by the volume was awarded by the Prix Chavée by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 2001. [15]
Dean's Guide has been described as 'a substantial addition to knowledge [...] simply irreplaceable'. [14] Elsewhere, the extraordinary effort behind Dean's scholarly contribution has also been highlighted:
‘In another environment, this book might have issued from the collaborative work of a large industrious committee: it is in fact a testament to the life-long passion of a nonagenarian, a work that should take its rightful place as a monument of national culture [...] This is truly a monumentumaere perennius for Ruth J. Dean, who devoted more than seventy years to it before her death at the age of ninety-nine. It is also a monument to her surviving collaborator, Maureen B. Boulton, and a great gift to the rest of us.’ [16] It has, since publication, become the standard reference work in Anglo Norman studies. [1]
Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Eugène Vinaver was a Russian-born British literary scholar who is best known today for his edition of the works of Sir Thomas Malory.
Hope Emily Allen (1883–1960), was an American scholar of medieval history who is best known for her research on the 14th-century English mystic Richard Rolle and for her discovery of a manuscript of the Book of Margery Kempe.
Durant Waite Robertson Jr. was a scholar of medieval English literature and especially Geoffrey Chaucer. He taught at Princeton University from 1946 until his retirement in 1980 as the Murray Professor of English, and was "widely regarded as this [the twentieth] century's most influential Chaucer scholar".
Edith Rickert (1871–1938) was a medieval scholar at the University of Chicago. Her work includes the Chaucer Life-Records and the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940).
Mildred Katherine Pope was an English scholar of Anglo-Norman England. She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford University, where she taught at Somerville College.
The Anglo-Norman Text Society is a text publication society founded in 1937 by Professor Mildred K. Pope. The founding aim of the society was to promote the study of Anglo-Norman language and Anglo-Norman literature by facilitating the publication of reliable scholarly editions of a broad range of texts of literary, linguistic, historical and legal value and interest. Based in the United Kingdom, the Society draws individual and institutional members from across the world.
Mary Dockray-Miller is an American scholar of early medieval England, best known for her work on gender in the pre-Conquest period. She has published on female saints, on Beowulf, and on religious women. She teaches at Lesley University, where she is professor of English.
Elaine Treharne was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, in 1964. She is the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, Courtesy Professor of German Studies, and a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She is Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Leicester, where she worked for fifteen years as a lecturer, then professor, head of department, and dean, before emigrating to the USA. She is a Welsh medievalist, focusing on Manuscript Studies, Early English literature, and the History of Text Technologies, particularly of the handmade book. She led Stanford University's online courses on manuscript study entitled Digging Deeper. She is a qualified archivist, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the English Association, for whom she was also the first woman Chair and President from 2000-2005. Treharne was made a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in April 2020.
The Holkham Bible is an illustrated collection of biblical and apocryphal stories in Norman French. The picture book was produced in England during the decades before 1350 for use by an unidentified Dominican friar. Its illustrations depict the stories in contemporary English settings, making it a visual source on medieval English society.
Professor Mary Dominica Legge, FBA, known as Dominica Legge, was a British scholar of the Anglo-Norman language.
Helaine H. Newstead (1906–1981) was an American scholar of medieval literature. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 for her work. She was the first American and the first woman to serve as president of the International Arthurian Society.
Allen J. Frantzen is an American medievalist with a specialization in Old English literature. Since retiring from Loyola University Chicago, he has been an emeritus professor.
Margaret Rickert was an American Art Historian and World War II codebreaker. In 1954, she became the first American and first woman to author a volume in the original series of the Pelican History of Art with her title, Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages. She was the sister of art historian Edith Rickert.
Constance Bartlett Hieatt was an American scholar with a broad interest in medieval languages and literatures, including Old Norse literature, Anglo-Saxon prosody and literature, and Middle English language, literature, and culture. She was an editor and translator of Karlamagnús saga, of Beowulf, and a scholar of Geoffrey Chaucer. She was particularly known as one of the world's foremost experts in English medieval cooking and cookbooks, and authored and co-authored a number of important books considered essential publications in the field.
Grace Mayer Frank was an American medievalist and lecturer. Frank, along with her spouse, the classicist Tenney Frank, was primarily associated with Bryn Mawr College, first as a graduate student, and later as a Lecturer and Associate Professor of Romance Philosophy and Old French. Beginning in 1919, Frank lived in Baltimore, Maryland, where she would reside for the majority of her life, serving also as a Visiting Professor of Romance Philology at Johns Hopkins University in that city.
Mary Rambaran-Olm is a literary historian specialising in the literature and history of early medieval England from the fifth to eleventh centuries.
The Old French Tristan Poems: A Bibliographic Guide is a 1980 bibliography by David J. Shirt, a scholar of French literature who specialised in Arthurian and Tristan studies. It presents an overview of the literature on the medieval Tristan and Iseult poems, including the 12th-century poems by Béroul and Thomas of Britain. The book was published by Grant & Cutler as volume 28 of the Research Bibliographies and Checklists series. Critics generally praised its layout and use of cross-references, though some pointed out studies that the bibliography omitted. Reviewers also applauded Shirt's inclusion of a verse-by-verse index of Béroul's text.
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