Distinguished Professor of Literature Carla Freccero dies at 69

In Memoriam: Professor Emeritus Ian Lancashire | Department of English

Hilaire Kallendorf left lasting impact on Aggie faculty | Texas A&M News | myaggienation.com

Additional tribute forthcoming.

Born and raised in a Friulian-speaking family in Toronto, at the age of seventeen Olga enrolled at the University of Toronto where she began to study standard Italian and continued her studies of French and Spanish. At that time, she was one of the very few young women of Italian heritage at the University of Toronto; in fact, she recalled that “a French professor commented that it was strange to see an Italian female in university.”

During her 45-year career at the University of Toronto Olga taught in the Department of Italian Studies and in the Renaissance Studies Programme (Victoria College) and served in many administrative positions, including as Emilio Goggio Chair of the Department of Italian Studies (1997-2002) and as Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at Victoria College (2005-09). An active member of the profession, she was one of the founding members of the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies, which in 2008 awarded her its Lifetime Achievement Award, and of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, where she served as president (2005-08). A strong believer in the community of learning, she was an active member of many scholarly organizations, including the Renaissance Society of America, the American Association of Teachers of Italian, the Modern Languages Association, the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium, the American Association for Italian Studies, the Sixteenth Century Studies and Conference, the Associazione Internazionale per gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana, and more. She was also active outside the academy, especially in the Dante Alighieri Society of Toronto, the Famèe Furlane of Toronto, the Fogolârs Federation of Canada, the Centro Canadese Scuola e Cultura Italiana, and the Italian Canadian Archive Project.

Olga’s scholarly work focused on Italian Renaissance literature and culture and included major contributions on Baldassarre Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli, as well as many other writers. In her latter years she carried out ground-breaking research on the contribution of Italians in Canada, focusing in particular on Italian mosaicists in Canada and on the Italian-Canadian artist Albert Chiarandini. Olga also wrote her family history, tracing the ancestry of the families of her four grandparents in the Italian region of Friuli.

Some years ago, a journalist wrote about Olga’s “three souls” –– Canadian, Italian, and Friulian, and indeed that was the case. She lived and worked at the intersection of these three cultures, fostering and advancing them in all she did. Together with her late husband Guido Pugliese (1940–2016), she endowed in perpetuity a number of scholarships for study in Italy at various institutions: Victoria College (in the University of Toronto), the University of Toronto Mississauga, and Western University. She also endowed a course in Italian Canadian Studies now offered annually in the Canadian Studies Program at University College, University of Toronto.

Olga Zorzi Pugliese embodied what is the very best in teaching, research, and collegiality. For more than half a century she contributed generously and selflessly to the study and advancement of Italian culture, be that historical in Italy or contemporary in Canada. While doing so, she struck life-long friendships with colleagues and students, enriching their lives and inspiring their work. She will be sorely missed, but her legacy will endure and inspire future generations.

Olga’s body is lying in repose at Holy Cross Catholic Funeral Home (211 Langstaff Road East, Thornhill, Ontario, L3T 3Z6). For information on visiting hours, funeral, and entombment, please visit https://www.catholic-cemeteries.ca/obituary/olga-louise-pugliese/

Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler, CM, OMRI

Remembering William Kennedy, professor emeritus in comparative literature | Cornell.edu

Gerhard Dünnhaupt, Gerry to his friends, was a Büchermensch, a book lover. He loved books as beautiful physical objects, he loved to read books, he loved to collect books, and he loved to produce and write books. Books also were the focus of his stellar academic career and of his engaging and successful academic teaching.

Gerry was born into a family of printers and newspaper publishers in Bernburg an der Saale (Anhalt). He received his Abitur in 1945 at the Fürstliches Ludwigs-Gymnasium in nearby Köthen. At the end of the War, he was conscripted as Luftwaffenhelfer—minors who were forced to serve as auxiliary staff of the German air defense. While entering the family business, he completed a typesetter apprenticeship at the Bauhaus in Dessau and earned his Meisterbrief (master certificate) as printer in Leipzig in 1949. He relocated to western Germany the same year when the partition of Germany became permanent; he worked in the publications department of the University of Gießen where he managed the print shop. In 1952, Gerry emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, a city that would remain his Wahlheimat (adopted h0me) for the rest of his life. He received a job offer as printer right away. He continued to work in printing and advertising for over a decade. In these early years, Gerry started to buy and collect early modern books, and his collection became highly regarded by scholars and other collectors.

In 1964, he decided to pursue academic studies in Italian and German literature at the University of Toronto, where he received his B.A. He earned his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1972 with a dissertation on the German translations and adaptations of the epics by Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto. The same year, he was offered a position as assistant professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, to teach German and Comparative Literature. In 1976, he accepted an appointment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was promptly promoted to full professor. He held guest professorships at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Cornell University, and University of Göttingen. He retired from the University of Michigan in 1992. For a few years, he maintained an appointment as adjunct professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In a conversation shortly before his death, Gerry joked that he had been a professor emeritus for much longer than he had been on active duty.

In spite of his relatively short academic career, his scholarly output was extraordinary. He authored countless articles and book reviews about early modern European literature. He often wrote about his native Principality of Anhalt, especially about the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruit-Bearing Society) that was initially based in Köthen. In 1973, he published Diederich von dem Werder: Versuch einer Neuwertung seiner Hauptwerke, to this day the definitive monograph on this author. Subsequently, he published two reprint editions of texts by Diederich von dem Werder, both with substantial introductions. Gerry founded Rarissima Litterarum, a book series providing high-quality reprints of important but rare early modern German texts, and he edited eight volumes himself, mostly after his official retirement in 1992. This was a valuable project at a time when early modern texts were not yet available online in a digitized format. Furthermore, he published two Reclam editions of plays by Andreas Gryphius, Horribilicribrifax Teutsch and Absurda Comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz.

Gerry’s crowning achievement was the three-volume Bibliographisches Handbuch der Barockliteratur (1980–82). He identified the one hundred most important German authors of the seventeenth century and provided full descriptions of all their known works and editions, complete with listings of library holdings. He revised these personal bibliographies and expanded the project to include an additional one hundred writers in the six-volume second edition, entitled Personalbibliographien zu den Drucken des Barock (1990–93). On 4,500 pages, he gave detailed descriptions of around 10,000 books. Gerry spent many years visiting a large number of research libraries in Europe and North America to examine their holdings. By doing so, he established a vast global network of librarians and fellow scholars who were eager to assist him with his Herculean task. To this day, Gerry’s work is viewed as the key to assessing German literary production in the seventeenth century.

In recognition of Gerry’s accomplishments, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) awarded him the prestigious triennial Breslauer Prize for Bibliography in 1985. In 1990, he was elected as Fellow and Life Member of the Royal Society of Canada. He also was an honorary life member of the Modern Language Association of America. When the Renaissance Society of America met in Toronto in March 2019, many of his friends, colleagues, and students organized a series of panels in Gerry’s honor, with Gerry in attendance. Much to Gerry’s delight, the proceedings were edited by Mara R. Wade and published in 2023 as Collections and Books, Images and Texts: Early Modern German Cultures of the Book, a title that reflected on his life’s work.

One of his most influential publications was “Der barocke Eisberg: Überlegungen zur Erfassung des Schrifttums des 17. Jahrhunderts” (1980), where he argued that aside from a small number of canonical texts most books that were printed in the seventeenth century still were largely unknown. He also was one of the first to argue for investigating the libraries of German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire and adjacent states, territories no longer in then present-day Germany, thereby extending the purview of early modern literature. Helping to make this iceberg melt perhaps was Gerry’s most significant accomplishment. The detailed research included in his bibliographic handbook gave us a sense of the wealth of the extant literature and helped us gain access to it. More importantly, his six-volume Personalbibliographien became the backbone for the project simply called dünnhaupt digital. The aim of the project, which is housed in the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), was to digitize about 2,000 works from their holdings that were described by Gerry and to make them accessible to a large number of scholars and students. Thus Gerry’s book became the catalyst for a digital humanities project, which will ensure that Gerry will live on as “the Dünnhaupt.”

One of the highlights of his career was the three-day Martin Luther Quincentennial Conference that he organized at the University of Michigan in September 1983. Gerry’s extensive network allowed him to bring leading Reformation scholars to Ann Arbor where they gave memorable presentations and engaged in lively debates. He edited the proceedings and published the volume The Martin Luther Quincentennial in 1985.

Gerry had a large circle of friends, both inside and outside of academia, and he took time to cultivate these relationships. At Michigan, Gerry usually showed up at the department around nine or nine-thirty in the morning. He chatted with the office staff, drank coffee (although real coffee was only served at his home), went to teach his classes, took time to meet with students and to mentor them, and talked to his colleagues. Gerry always had a positive outlook—he never seemed to be in a hurry or in a bad mood. When asked how he got his work done, his simple answer was that he worked on his scholarly projects from four to eight in the morning, every day. This level of self-discipline allowed him to create an enormous body of work while being generous with his time to others.

Even after Gerry’s retirement, his intellectual curiosity never slowed down. He researched whatever caught his eye, particularly if it related to the early modern world, and gave public lectures highlighting his insights. He kept up with internet technology and performed a lot of research online. Furthermore, he authored and edited a large number of Wikipedia articles. Back in Toronto, he took a renewed interest in music and music performance. When he sold his substantial collection of Baroque books in 1996, he used the proceeds to establish a fellowship for graduate students in musicology at the University of Toronto, thus remaining an engaged patron of early modern studies in his Wahlheimat. Until the final weeks of his life, he loved to meet with friends to have stimulating conversations, as the accompanying portrait taken at the end of October 2024 indicates.

Gerry was an accomplished scholar, but also was a mentor, teacher, and friend to many of us. He knew how to live well, had a full and amazing life, and will be sorely missed.

Peter Hess, University of Texas at Austin
Mara R. Wade, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

CRS mourns the passing of Mary Beth Rose, a distinguished scholar of the Renaissance and former director of CRS, who died peacefully in Chicago on December 17, 2024.

A Chicago native, Mary Beth grew up in California and graduated from UC Berkeley in 1971. She worked as a journalist before continuing her studies in English literature at the University of Chicago (MA 1974) and at Duke University (PhD 1979). She was author and editor of numerous books and articles and she took on key leadership roles at both the Newberry Library and the University of Illinois Chicago, becoming one of Chicago’s foremost leaders in public humanities.

Rose came to the Newberry initially in 1981-82 as a Monticello College Foundation Fellow, an award designed specifically for early-career women to provide time for research and a community within which to build career contacts. Rose stayed on at the Newberry as Associate Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies. She replaced founding director John A. Tedeschi as head of the Center in 1984. Under her leadership, the Center received prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation and its consortium grew substantially to include universities throughout the US.

In 1997, Rose accepted the position of Director of the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also taught as a Professor in the Department of English. She held the position of Director until 2010, and retired from UIC in 2018. Under her direction, the Institute came to national attention as it welcomed legions of celebrated scholars and mounted innovative conferences on topics ranging from the American Presidency to the politics of the modern family.

Mary Beth Rose wrote and lectured widely on literature of the English Renaissance. She was author of three groundbreaking scholarly monographs: The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Cornell University Press, 1988; paper 1991); Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2002); and most recently Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She was also co-editor of Elizabeth I: Collected Works (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a landmark publication of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I. From 1995 to 1998 she served as editor of Renaissance Drama, one of the premier journals in Renaissance Studies. In 1997 and 1998, she served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. In all her scholarly work, Rose explored the intersections of literary production with cultural norms and social standards; she focused in particular on how literary works enact or contest traditional gender roles. She continued to write after retirement and before her death was completing a book on tragedy and heroic masculinity in Shakespeare.

Rose received many awards and fellowships recognizing her distinguished research, including support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her co-edited volume of Elizabeth I’s works won a prize from the Association of American Publishers.

In addition to her teaching at UIC, Rose held Lecturer and Visiting Professor positions at Northwestern University (1987-97) and the University of Chicago (2005). She will be fondly remembered by generations of students and colleagues at these and other institutions, who benefited from her insight and vision as a teacher, scholar, mentor, and institutional leader.

There will be no funeral. A memorial service will be held in February and announced at a later date.

Born in Marion, Indiana in 1933, Richard Goldthwaite earned his bachelor's degree in history from Oberlin College in 1955. He won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Florence (1955-56), served in the US. Army from 1957 to 1959, and earned his PhD in history in 1965 at Columbia University, where his advisors included Garrett Mattingly, the eminent scholar of Italian Renaissance diplomacy. After teaching briefly at Kent State from 1965 to 1968, he spent the rest of his career at Johns Hopkins University, where he was named emeritus in 1998.

Richard's pioneering studies of Renaissance Florence set the terms of discussion for generations of historians, art historians and, indeed, all students of the field. His work stands at the forefront of discussions about the origins of capitalism, the significance of double entry bookkeeping, the importance of material and consumer culture and the point of intersection of economy, society, art and architecture. Richard's seminal contributions included the study of the relations between private wealth and family structure, the complexities of commerce and the Florentine building industry, wages, prices and, ultimately, in his later work, the connection between economy and music.

At the core of Richard Goldthwaite's research lay his unparalleled ability to interpret complex Florentine account books and to bring them to bear on critical and broad issues relating to Renaissance Florence. Richard's dedication to rigorous archival research served as a model and inspiration to the scholarly community. His writing is characterized by elegant prose and impressive clarity of expression. His intellectual achievements were matched by his generosity toward friends, colleagues and fellow scholars. A trip to the Florentine State archive often meant lunch or dinner with Richard and a serious discussion of subject matter/archival sources that revealed the true meaning of scholarly community.

Golthwaite's first book, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence (1968), derived from his thesis, explored the financial dealings, investments and family dynamics of four merchant families of the ruling class: the Strozzi, Guicciardini, Gondi and Capponi. Through close examination of their private account books, Richard explored shifts in their economic fortunes, but also changes in family structure, patronage networks and ultimately a loss of cohesiveness of the families that helped lead to a Burckhardtian individualism. In studying private account books, Richard made careful note of the resources spent on palaces and architectural projects, which led to his next book, The Building of Renaissance Florence. An Economic and Social History, published in 1980 and translated into Italian in 1984. This magisterial and groundbreaking work, based on hitherto little studied sources on artisan workshops, construction workers and other laborers, examined how the great palaces -- and by extension Florence more generally -- was "built" in the years from 1300 to 1500. Despite the complexity of the material, the book was a model of clarity and erudition, and thus not surprisingly received the American Historical Association's Howard R. Marraro Prize in 1981.

Richard Goldthwaite followed the success of The Building of Renaissance Florence with a flurry of important and wide ranging studies. His book Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600, published in 1995 and translated into Italian in 1996, focused on elucidating the "demand side" of the Florentine economic world and the relations between economy and art, particularly material culture. The book came out a year after his technical analysis of Florentine money and of the changing relative values of monies of account, in collaboration with Giulio Mandich, entitled Studi sulla moneta fiorentina (secoli XIII-XVI). It stands as an indispensable handbook for anyone studying payments at any level, be it industry, commerce, or an altarpiece. In addition, Richard edited, along with Enzo Settesoldi and Marco Spallanzani, an early Alberti account book. The result was a two-volume edition Due libri mastri degli Alberti. Una grande compagnia di Calimala, 1348-1358, for which Richard provided a lengthy essay. Alongside these works, Richard, together with Marco Spallanzani, began compiling a comprehensive "census" of all extant Florentine account books found in public and private archives and libraries, covering the long Renaissance to 1600. The extraordinary inventory is now available on-line at this link.

In 2009 Golthwaite published his monumental and brilliant The Economy of Renaissance Florence, which was translated into Italian in 2013. The book, a summation of a lifetime of research, traced the economic emergence of Florence from its unlikely beginnings, removed from traditional trade routes and with no direct access to the sea, into a colossus, home of a great wool cloth industry, of merchant banks and of double entry bookkeeping, that were emblematic of Renaissance Florence. It won the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America in 2010 and remains the most exhaustive study to date of the Florentine economy.

Richard's work with account books ultimately brought him to music, in effect combining two of his greatest pleasures -- economic history and music. He wrote Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence, published in 2013, together with the musicologist Tim Carter. The linkage of economy and music was typically original and carefully argued, breaking entirely new intellectual ground. He returned to this theme in his last article, “Music: a growth industry in Renaissance Italy,” published in 2022 by the Rivista di storia economica/Italian Review of Economic History. It is a highly readable outline of what for decades he had yearned to write, namely an economic history of music in Italy and Europe, from the demand created by churches, courts and urban markets, to the supply of instruments, printed scores, and musicians. The product, which could change readily with changing demand, involved good taste and pleasure.

A discussion of Richard's many articles must by necessity be reduced to manageable proportions. He wrote on many topics directly related to his books and others less so. The latter include essays on schools and teachers of arithmetic during the Renaissance and his essay "The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica,” which received the Renaissance Society of America's Nelson Prize for the best article of 1989. Richard's most recent articles focused on double entry bookkeeping, which he saw as expression of a mentalité and “culture of precise quantification,” that distinguished Florence from other cities.

Richard Goldthwaite's list of awards and honors includes a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, and various visiting professorships. It also includes the distinction of being awarded the title of Knight of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy, an honor he received in 1984 and of which he was very proud. According to his niece Rebecca, Richard and she joked about the irony that their ancestor, Thomas from Yorkshire, who came to America in the early 1600’s, was a barrel maker, so that any family biography would necessarily be entitled "From Cooper to Commander."

Richard's sense of humor and irony complemented his finely tuned aesthetic sense in the visual arts and music and spanned both his public and private lives. He loved his piano and harpsichord, both of which he practiced daily, though he deprecated his ability to play, noting how his teachers consistently criticized him, an opinion not shared by those who heard him play. And notwithstanding his enchantment with the baroque abbey church of Birnau which he still fondly recalled decades after seeing it during his army years, his ironic sense of humor led him once to decorate his office with a Miss Piggy calendar.

Yet what Richard's students, colleagues and friends remember most about him was his soaring intellectual standards, dedication to exhaustive archival research, critical eye and remarkable generosity to fellow scholars, both young and old. Among Richard's scholarly legacies was serving as mentor to numerous graduate students in both America and Italy, many of whom became prominent scholars in their own right.

After retiring early, Richard lived full time in Florence. He was a fixture in the Florentine State archive, sitting in his usual place: two rows from the entryway, at the last chair on the right, wearing a jacket and bow tie. Invitations to lunches and dinners became invitations to scholarly debate and exchange of ideas, which for many are cherished memories not only of Richard, the person, but of what the profession should be about. His death represents the passing of one of the most important historians of his generation.

Richard Goldthwaite died peacefully in his sleep. He is survived by his long-time friend Marco Spallanzani, his niece Rebecca and nephew Michael.

Respectfully submitted,
William Caferro

An esteemed scholar of medieval and Renaissance art, she has left us with an extensive body of work that questions the motivations of patrons, artists, and art historians, explores intersensorality and emotion, and challenges the limits imposed through categories of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and animality.

Corine Schleif studied art history at prestigious universities in the United States and Germany: Washington University in St. Louis, Philipps University in Marburg, Free University in Berlin, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She received her Ph.D. from Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg in 1986. Corine Schleif felt equally at home and was respected in the academic environments on both sides of the Atlantic. As a university professor it was important to her to devote time and effort to mentor students and, whenever possible, to help open doors on a difficult career path. As an activist she was vocal about protecting endangered cultural heritage, such as the library of the now-dissolved Birgittine monastery of Altomünster, which she helped to safeguard.

Since her extensive work addressed many topics in medieval and Renaissance art, it must remain an unsuccessful attempt to cover all her four single authored or co-authored books, three edited volumes, 70 articles and reviews, close to 140 presentations, and various other projects. However, one may attempt to highlight those that were of particular importance to her.

Throughout her career Corine Schleif worked extensively on medieval memorial practices and gift exchange which created the basis for complex perpetual and cyclic rituals of remembrance. Her dissertation Donatio et memoria, Stifter, Stiftungen und Motivationen an Beispielen aus der Lorenzkirche in Nürnberg, published by prestigious Deutscher Kunstverlag in 1990, focuses on the partly elaborate donation strategies by clerics and patricians at the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, ranging from the 15th century to the beginning of the Reformation in 1524. Her groundbreaking work provided the methodological framework and became a case model for subsequent scholarship on devotional practices at other churches, especially in the German-speaking lands and the Low Countries.

As a feminist who was not only aware of gender inequalities but also social hierarchies, Corine Schleif was devoted to shedding light on the work of the many wives of medieval and Renaissance artists who were mostly written out of the historic narratives, generated within the initially male-dominated field of art history in a successful attempt to forge the image of the male genius artist (e.g. “The Many Wives of Adam Kraft: Renaissance Artists’ Wives in Legal Documents, Art-Historical Scholarship, and Historical Fiction”). She also explored how artists’ wives were unjustly denigrated as nagging and interested solely in material gain, such as Agnes Frey, the wife of Albrecht Dürer, who as patrician daughter indeed was the apt and successful manager of the family workshop (e.g. “Albrecht Dürer between Agnes Frey and Willibald Pirckheimer“). Schleif’s work, based on her meticulous research in the archives and libraries especially of Nuremberg, enabled her to identify, isolate and in many instances correct the multilayered stories replete with prejudice and personal opinions that often had not been scrutinized.

In 1998, Corine Schleif and Volker Schier happened across a collection of letters by a Birgittine nun at a monastery in South Germany that was largely untapped. Together they authored the book Katerina’s Windows: Donation and Devotion, Art and Music, as Heard and Seen through the Writings of a Birgittine Nun in 2009 and subsequently Pepper for Prayer, in collaboration with Anne Simon in 2019, which describes how a successful businesswoman with a patrician family background in 16th century Nuremberg entered the monastery of Maihingen following the death of her husband. In her new role as nun, Lemmel made use not only of her extensive funds, but also her family and business networks, to rebuild, improve and furnish parts of the monastery, foremost the cloister which played a central role in the Birgittine liturgy for women. The letters provide previously unknown insights into detailed planning and fund-raising strategies in order to formulate the exchange value of prayers and remembrance for potential donors. Lemmel’s carefully formulated strategies substantiate and corroborate many of Corine Schleif’s previous theories and assumptions in regard to spiritual economies.

Another large project Corine Schleif was devoted to for many years was the contextualization of the so-called Geese Book, a large format two volume illuminated gradual produced in the years 1507 and 1510 for the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, today kept at the Morgan Library in New York. In retrospect the extensive manuscript resembles a final backup of the liturgical practice of the church on the eve of the Reformation. "Opening the Geese Book" (http://geesebook.asu.edu), launched in 2012, makes use the digital technology of our time to explain aspects of the genesis and production as well as the liturgical use of a manuscript that encodes central elements for multi-faceted rituals in a multisensorial environment.

Among her many articles, the most well-known is beyond doubt “Men on the Right – Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places,” published in 2005, which analyzes (localized) gender polarities within and beyond medieval society. The project that was probably dearest to Corine Schleif was a monograph on the Nuremberg artist Adam Kraft, today best known as the maker of the famous tabernacle at St. Lorenz. Her extensive study of the life and work of Kraft, based on archival sources, paired with research of his afterlife, including appropriations in popular narratives, various scholarly environments, as well as in political contexts, accompanied Corine Schleif throughout much of her career. It was only weeks before her death that she completed the last chapter. Thus, Bending Stone: Adam Kraft and the Sculpting of Art’s History will be her lasting memorial. For a medievalist and scholar, nothing seems more appropriate than readers performing remembrance once they will be able to hold this book in their hands. In a truly medieval sense this not only permits access to her thoughts, otherwise lost, but also establishes a physical connection back to the author. In this respect, one might even imply that Corine Schleif made use of strategies not dissimilar to those employed by many of the donors she had written about. I have no doubt that her strategy will prove successful.

Volker Schier

(To remember and commemorate Corine Schleif, you may want to access many of her articles mentioned above, as well as the entire volume Donatio et memoria on her Academia page: https://asu.academia.edu/CorineSchleif. The page also contains full bibliographic references to her work.)

David was an indefatigable and dedicated archival researcher. As a graduate student in the late 1970s, he began exploring the rich documentary collections of the Florentine and Vatican archives with a singular tenacity and efficiency that always characterized his seasons of research. Unlike Florence’s State Archives, which had regular hours, the city’s archiepiscopal archive was less reliable: one never knew beforehand if it would be open on a given day. As it was halfway between David’s lodgings and the State Archives (then in the Uffizi), he adopted the practical working strategy of packing what he needed for both destinations, going first to the archiepiscopal archive and, if he found it closed, continuing on to the State Archives without having to return home. In those days in Italy there were security risks that, on at least one occasion, made his association with the archives useful in a quite unexpected way. Checking into overnight accommodations on a research trip, he failed to have with him his residence permit (permesso di soggiorno) – a serious offense at the time that resulted in the arrival minutes later of police intent on interrogating him. But he did have his admission card to the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, which so impressed the police that they “forgave” him and did not require him to return to Florence to procure the required documentation. Cornell’s Mommsen Traveling Fellowship allowed David to spend two years in Florence, and after graduate school he returned often during periods of leave and summers. He held an I Tatti fellowship in 1984-85, a Mellon Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 1987-88, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including one for study at the Newberry Library in 1994-95.

Surprisingly, given all the attention to Renaissance Italy’s history and culture, its religious and ecclesiastical history had been either neglected or misunderstood (except, episodically, in art and architectural history). David was among the historians who, in the last decades of the twentieth century, discarded the persistent myth of the secularizing Renaissance and affirmed the centrality of religion in its culture and politics. (See his two masterful surveys of the historiography: “Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly, 2000, pp. 835-879, and “Religion and the Church,” in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, Oxford, 2004, pp. 59-81.) David’s contribution to this comprehensive reassessment was grounded in a systematic exploration of the vast archival collections pertaining to Florence’s ecclesiastical communities. The salient merit of his scholarship lies in the skill with which he wove Florentine religion and church history into the fabric of the city’s politics and culture and tied both in turn to the vicissitudes of the papacy as it was experiencing, and recovering from, the crisis of the schism. He closely examined the local church’s connections and conflicts with various Florentine governments and the role of both government and ecclesiastical institutions in the devotional, penitential, and charitable activities of the laity. He uncovered and analyzed an enormous quantity and variety of sources that demonstrate the complexity and diversity of Florence’s regional church: its diocesan structures; cathedral chapter; collegiate churches; baptismal churches; secular and religious clergy; mendicant orders and their Observant wings; older monastic orders and their abbeys, monasteries, and nunneries; and hospitals and lay confraternities, many of them supervised by clerical institutions. Surveying the typology, origins, demography, and wealth of hundreds of ecclesiastical entities within the dominion, David revealed the inadequacy of conventional generalities concerning Florence’s “church.” From episcopal visitations he illuminated the disparate circumstances of ecclesiastical institutions and, from the republic’s fiscal records, their endowments and landed holdings, which in some areas encompassed 25% of the countryside.

Among David’s most arresting contributions to the study of the Florentine church is his investigation, elaborated in a series of essays, into the remarkable experiment in self-government by the secular clergy of the Florentine diocese just when the Council of Constance was declaring its superiority over the pope in 1417. Florence’s clergy wrote and promulgated the Constitutiones synodales cleri florentini, in which, like the Council at Constance, they declared themselves a corporation (universitas) whose membership was represented by a “great council” that approved legislation and delegated executive authority to a committee of eleven representatives of the various clerical constituencies. Unlike earlier clerical organizations that remained subordinate to Florence’s bishop, the Constitutiones elaborated procedures of collective self-governance in which the bishop had little or no role. In addition to the inspiration provided by Constance, David revealed the similarities, in theory and practice, between the clerical corporation and Florence’s republican constitution. He manifested the functioning of the corporation (from his discovery of the minutes of one of its meetings); its complex electoral system, which, surprisingly, favored lower and rural clergy; its success in sidelining the bishop; and, most importantly, as it was the primary stimulus for the corporation’s creation, the efforts to protect itself against burdensome fiscal levies imposed by Florence’s government and by popes. David disentangled this complex mix of local conflicts and wider interests in a ground-breaking and eloquent essay, published in Renaissance Quarterly (1989, pp. 183-226) and co-winner of the 1987 Nelson Prize, “Conciliarism, Republicanism and Corporatism: the 1415-1420 Constitution of the Florentine Clergy.”

David also took the long view. A pervasive theme of his scholarship is his overarching synthesis of the history of Florence and its church from the War of the Eight Saints in 1375-78 through the four decades of the papal schism, the expansion of the Florentine territorial state, and the rise of the Medici, down to the archiepiscopate of Antoninus (1446-59) who re-imposed hierarchical control over the local church. David shows how Florence’s resistance to the aggressive actions of the Avignonese popes who aimed to rebuild papal power in central Italy in the 1370s deeply divided the traditionally pro-papal republic – divisions exacerbated by controversies over whether to obey a papal interdict and by the government’s decision to finance the war by expropriating and selling clerical property. Huge amounts of landed holdings were seized from hundreds of churches, monasteries, the bishopric, and the cathedral chapter and sold to Florentine citizens in what David calls “the most extensive liquidation of an ecclesiastical patrimony carried out anywhere in Europe before the Reformation.” He highlighted the ambivalence and even remorse among many who feared that confiscating ecclesiastical wealth violated the liberties of the Church and endangered the souls of those who purchased the properties. Although in the peace settlement Florence agreed to restore church property in what became a long, halting process, the trauma of the conflict, as David cogently demonstrated, led many Florentines, particularly the humanist historians, to erase the episode from the city’s official collective memory. But he also showed how powerfully these repressed memories shaped Florentine politics, religion, and culture over the next century. He elaborated this thesis in (among other writings) an especially evocative and compelling essay, “The War of the Eight Saints in Florentine Memory and Oblivion” (in Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence, 2002, pp. 173-214), whose central contention is that, to assuage troubled consciences over having waged war against popes and despoiled the local church, Florentines of the next generation sought to “resacralize a city that had recently profaned itself.” The ruling class did so by “appropriating the legitimizing power of local religious life and ecclesiastical institutions,” by “shap[ing] and identify[ing] with . . . public expressions of religious sentiment,” and by expanding the “ritual calendar of public religious holidays” with “dozens of new civic oblations.” From the laity came new penitential confraternities, hospitals, ecclesiastical building projects, and an expansion of “lay benefactions to ecclesiastics” and artistic patronage in churches. Meanwhile, the papal schism weakened the popes and made them dependent on Florentine financial support, which allowed Florence to strengthen its control over the regional church by diminishing the power of bishops, managing appointments to benefices, impounding revenues from absent appointees, taxing the clergy, and preventing laypersons from using benefactions as tax shelters – all policies that contributed to the creation of what David says was becoming a “statist church” that aided the emergence of a stronger regional state. Wealthy Florentines were now eager to resume friendly ties with the papacy to benefit from the lucrative business of lending to popes and collecting papal revenues. These foundations of Medici wealth also enabled the increasingly powerful family and its allies among the elite to extend patronal power over the local church, a process David meticulously elucidates, within the broad context of his interpretation of the history of Florence’s ecclesiastical establishment, in the case of the basilica of San Lorenzo (“San Lorenzo, the Medici, and the Florentine Church in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries,” in San Lorenzo: A Florentine Church, Villa I Tatti, 2017, pp. 62-102).

David’s publications also include an edited volume of twenty-five original essays, Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy (Toronto, 2008, pp. 518), to which he contributed a provocative essay on Machiavelli’s views on papal power, and a translation of Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani’s Il corpo del papa (The Pope’s Body, Chicago, 2000). A list of David’s publications can be viewed here. Sadly, his illness and premature death prevented him from completing and publishing his two-volume work, Power and the Sacred in Renaissance Florence: Religion, Politics, and the Church, 1375-1460. 

David’s teaching and service at Washington and Lee earned him extraordinary accolades. To his colleagues he was unfailingly kind and generous, often putting the interests of other, especially junior, department members before his own. He understood, better than most, the culture of a liberal arts college where teachers are also mentors. He brought genuine dedication to this demanding environment: patient, careful, and meticulous in the classroom, he took justifiable pride in his acumen as a faculty mentor, role model, and administrator. His arrival at Washington and Lee was a “turning point” for the History Department in that he led a more traditional department into the twenty-first century, helping it become more diverse, innovative, and research oriented. He quickly became a vital cog in the leadership of the interdisciplinary program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, conducting audits of the curriculum, revising the requirements of the major, and ratcheting up the standards by which both students and faculty are evaluated. During his tenure the MRST major evolved into one of the most vibrant academic units on campus, attracting exceptionally strong students many of whom continued on to earn advanced degrees elsewhere. David had a profound effect on many students, gaining a following among serious undergraduates in the history program who admired him for his intellect, gravitated toward his gentle humanity, and sought guidance from one of the most pragmatically wise people they had ever met. He supervised fifteen honors theses, was second reader for thirteen others, and mentored five students who went on to pursue doctoral degrees in history.

David’s even-keeled demeanor and unfailing civility, his ability to soothe passions, smooth over rough patches in policy debates, and shepherd ideas over the hurdles and potholes of academic bureaucracies made him an ideal choice to chair the History Department. In concert with his most trusted colleagues, he helped create a vision for the department’s future that resulted in a string of hires of young faculty who have excelled in scholarly productivity, innovative teaching, and social advocacy on campus. He famously hosted a back-to-school reception at his home every year, both when he was chair and not, to bring the department together.

In his all-too-brief retirement David carried out one last project, an endeavor “near and dear to his heart” and deeply appreciated by the entire university: a series of eight one-hour taped interviews with his friend and colleague Edward (“Ted”) DeLaney, a legendary figure at Washington and Lee who, from modest beginnings in Lexington itself, earned a Ph.D. in history, became a tenured member and the first Black chair of the History Department, founded the Africana Studies Program, and did much to heighten awareness of Southern history and race issues in the university’s pedagogy and culture. The interviews, David wrote, “cover the history of Lexington, Washington and Lee, African American issues and, indeed, our national history. What makes them particularly fascinating is seeing them from the unique perspective of a man who was by turns a janitor, lab technician, student, and professor at our university.” The taped interviews and transcriptions are available on the Washington and Lee website.

David is survived by his brothers, Matthew Eric Peterson and John Gunnar Peterson; a sister, Ruth (Anne) Peterson Sumner; a nephew and six nieces. He was predeceased by his sister Martha (Jane) Peterson Mote. David’s family was with him during his final hours as he passed peacefully in his sleep. His untimely death is deeply mourned by legions of students, colleagues, and friends.

George Bent

Margaret Haines

Molly Michelmore

John Najemy

Nicholas Terpstra

You may read Bridget's obituary here.

You can read Meghan's obituary here.

In 2015, the Renaissance Society of America honored Michael Allen with a prize that he cherished: the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award. Well before Kristeller died – near the end of the last millennium – Michael’s work secured what his maestro ideale had sought: that the world’s universities would celebrate the Renaissance not only for splendid art and literature but also as a transformative era in the history of philosophy. Kristeller’s education in Germany was philosophical, and on that foundation he had erected monuments of Renaissance thought. Michael studied literature and the classics in England, where Graces of poetry and wit showed him how to enlarge and enrich those palaces of intellect.

Michael’s peers recognized his remarkable achievements with prizes, awards and distinguished appointments. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Commendatore of the Republic of Italy, an Oxford D. Litt., a UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer and an Eby awardee for Undergraduate Teaching. He served in three UCLA departments as Distinguished Research Professor of English and Italian Renaissance Studies; as Director of UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; on the board of the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL); as Editor of Renaissance Quarterly; and as a board member and President of the RSA.

Born in 1941 in Lewes, East Sussex, he soon contracted polio but recovered and excelled academically – first at Lewes Grammar School and then at Oxford’s Wadham College, where he studied English. After Oxford he taught at Ohio University before earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan in 1970. He met Elena, his wife, in Ann Arbor. Then she and Michael moved to Santa Monica and married in 1972. Their children and family live in the Los Angeles area. Elena is an accomplished painter. Will Nicholas is a Director in LA County’s Public Health Department. And Ben Allen represents Santa Monica in California’s Senate.

Michael’s dazzling classroom performances convinced undergraduates in their thousands that life was pale without Chaucer, Donne and Shakespeare. ‘For God’s sake, let us sit,’ they would beg, ‘let us sit upon our chairs and hear him tell brave stories of the deeds of kings.’ Michael took his deep learning and good humor on stage not only in Westwood but also at the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare summer school, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and in alumni tours organized by UCLA. His sparkling Shakespeare lectures have been taped for on-line teaching.

Many RSA members are admirers and beneficiaries of Michael’s enormous body of published work – more than twenty books and scores of other publications. Experts on his special subject, Marsilio Ficino, revere and rely on these writings, from his pioneering edition of Ficino’s Philebus commentary to more recent studies of the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite in Ficino’s version. In between – and in partnership with Jim Hankins – came the majestic ITRL edition of Ficino’s Platonic Theology in six volumes. Michael interspersed these masterpieces of philology and translation with long- and short-form pieces that decoded Ficino’s arcane poetics of philosophy with arcane instruments of classical philology and turned it all into English prose that honored Ficino’s Latin by surpassing it.

The matter of Ficino’s thought was formidable. But Michael’s manner was relentlessly joyous. Just listen to the music in titles that he chose: here’s a Phaedran Charioteer, there’s a little Nuptial Arithmetic or even a ‘Sibyl in Ficino’s Oak Tree.’ Listen to the music, sonorous at one moment, silly at another – come si fa.

Michael the person – intrepid hiker, quirky talker, stealer of jokes told by Wyglaf, his dog – was a joy-bringer, just like Michael the scholar and teacher. If he approached you on campus and you waited for a ‘hello’ or ‘hi,’ he would say ‘you come most carefully upon your hour.’ You expected an everyday greeting, but he gave you the first scene of Hamlet. Then he would ask ‘what news on the Rialto?’ And there you were with Salanio and Salarino in Venice, where ‘what’s happening?’ wasn’t good enough – not joyous enough.

These were Michael’s many small givings of his very great gift, which was to make the everyday better by bringing joy and poetry to it. He even made music and poetry out of philosophy. So his writings aren’t just remarkable in their scope, depth, number, power, variety and influence. They’re miracles of joyous transformation because they show how philosophy and poetry can be the same. This is a magic that only Michael, μουσοποιὸς, could manage so well. And now, as Auden said in his memorial for Yeats, he becomes his admirers.

Earth, receive an honored guest,

Michael Allen laid to rest.

Let the English vessel be

blesséd by his poetry.

Follow, Michael, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

with your unconstraining voice

still persuade us to rejoice.

In the hollows of the heart,

let the healing fountain start.

Brian Copenhaver

Philosophy Department

UCLA

Craig was born on June 23, 1954, in Cincinnati, Ohio, received his BA in English and Classics at Valparaiso University in 1975, and was awarded MA and PhD degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina in, respectively, 1977 and 1982. He immediately proceeded to the English Department at Texas A&M University, where he remained for the rest of his career, winning distinctive achievement awards in both teaching and research. Beloved of his students both graduate and undergraduate, Craig taught an enormous roster of courses, including Latin and Greek, literature from antiquity to post-modernity, literary criticism, the history of rhetoric, and the history of the book. Craig’s record of service to his own institution, where he served in various administrative capacities, is exemplary. He also supported other institutions of learning in this country and abroad, and especially the RSA, where for nearly thirty years (since 1991) he served as representative to the council, editor of text and reprint series (since 2011), and member of the Executive Board (2009–2015); at the annual RSA meeting in 2021, his work was honored at two special panels. Craig’s scholarship has garnered many awards and prizes, including from the NEH, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation (Harvard).

Along the way, Craig published a prodigious quantity of monographs, edited collections, editions and translations, bibliographies, catalogues, articles, and essays: in all, 26 books and some 175 articles, book chapters, short articles and reference entries, ranging over several domains of scholarship, including the classical tradition, Virgil’s nachleben in the Neo-Latin era, Renaissance humanism, and the history of the book, of libraries, and of education.

Among Craig’s groundbreaking monographs on the Virgilian tradition, special note might be made of his Virgil and the Myth of Venice: Books and Readers in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), which shows how the wide reading of the Aeneid, accessed in both Latin and Italian editions, contributed to Venetian ideology and the so-called “myth of Venice.” With its publication, according to reviewer Diana Robin (Renaissance Quarterly, 55.4 [2002], p. 1394), Kallendorf is to be recognized as “the leading authority on the Virgilian tradition in early modern print culture in Italy.”

Craig’s 2015 monograph, The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press) traces how readers encountered the Virgilian text in a variety of material forms (manuscript, printed book, illustrated edition, and computer file) that each differently conditioned how the work was understood and used. His last monograph, Printing Virgil : The Transformation of the Classics in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2020) studies the interaction between the printing press and the Virgilian text: the press itself determined which constructions of the Virgilian legacy would be most widely disseminated and become authoritative among the European reading audience.

Of great importance for scholars of humanism, as well, is Craig’s new edition and translation (updating the 1897 version of W. H. Woodward) of four pioneering Renaissance pedagogical works: Humanist Educational Treatises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), one of the earliest volumes included in the I Tatti Renaissance Library.

Exceptional, too, is Kallendorf’s work for Oxford Bibliographies (http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/), the online bibliographical database published by Oxford University Press, and specifically for the Renaissance and Reformation module—a project of which the present writer has been editor-in-chief since the project’s inauguration in 2009, with Kallendorf a founding member of the editorial board. He became that body’s most assiduous and prolific member, having contributed bibliographical articles on the Classical Tradition, Libraries, Virgil in Renaissance Thought, Civic Humanism, Ciceronianism, Hans Baron, and the Art of Poetry, in addition to twenty-seven articles on individual humanists, among them such figures as Petrarch, Bruni, Poggio, Poliziano, and Manuzio. Those twenty-seven plus seven by other authors are gathered as a separate online publication, entitled A Bibliographical Introduction to the Italian Humanists (2017; available at http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/obo/page/italian-humanists) with a preface by Kallendorf. In this venture alone, Kallendorf has made a significant contribution to Renaissance studies, one dwarfing in volume as in erudition those by any other single contributor to the Oxford Bibliographies module. 

In 2021, a volume was published by his friends and colleagues celebrating Craig’s achievements: Habent sua fata libelli: Studies in Book History, the Classical Tradition, and Humanism in Honor of Craig Kallendorf (Leiden: Brill). It is an impressive collection of 25 essays by American and European scholars in the fields that Craig’s work had informed and transformed: the history of the book and reading, the classical tradition and reception studies, Renaissance humanism, and the Virgilian tradition. The lead essay by classicist Richard F. Thomas, “Craig Kallendorf: The Man and His Work,” highlights Craig’s achievements in the domain of classical reception from antiquity into modern times. As Thomas writes: “Craig is a figure of the utmost importance in those scholarly developments of the last few decades that have witnessed the collapse of chronological and other boundaries that once separated the world of classical antiquity from those that followed” (p. 8).

As a coda to his essay, Thomas reprints an email exchange with Craig, who informed the author, on June 5, 2018, of the grim diagnosis of brain cancer. Craig was prepared, buttressed by his faith, for whatever was to happen: “I know this will end up as it should, period…. It’s fine, really” (pp. 14–15).

Margaret L. King, Professor emerita, Brooklyn College, City University of New York; Recipient of RSA Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award, 2018

Michael was born on April 1, 1941 in Lewes, East Sussex, England to Frederick “Jack” and Ena Muriel (nee Bridgman) Allen, who imparted to him a love of learning, history, literature and the countryside. Michael contracted polio as a young boy, an ailment that impacted his arm strength for the rest of his life. Nursed back to health by his devoted mother, Michael excelled in school, was one of the top students at Lewes Grammar School and a Queen Scout, eventually enrolling at Wadham College, Oxford University, where he earned his Bachelors (1964) and Masters degrees in English. Many years later, in 1987, he was granted a distinguished D.Litt. in history from his alma mater in recognition of his exceptional academic and scholarly work.

Allen made his way to the United States, teaching at Ohio University before enrolling in the English Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, earning his doctorate in 1970. It was in Ann Arbor where he met Elena, with whom he would share the rest of his life. Their first date? A movie theater visit to see “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” When Michael received a job offer to serve on the faculty at UCLA starting in 1970, he and Elena made their way west together and settled in Santa Monica. They were married in Los Angeles in 1972.

Allen distinguished himself as a teacher and scholar, making past worlds and perspectives come alive in lectures, courses, tours, and books. His teaching focused on the range of English literature from the Anglo-Saxons to Milton, and especially Chaucer, Donne, and Shakespeare. His research focus, however, turned toward the philosophical, theological, magical, and mythological issues explored by the fifteenth century Italian Platonists, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Allen’s perhaps greatest contribution to scholarship was in opening up new access to and analysis of Ficino for the modern era.

Professor Allen’s many prestigious honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Eby Award for Undergraduate Teaching (UCLA’s top teaching honor); UCLA's Faculty Research Lectureship; numerous international guest lectureships; the Commendatore decoration from the Italian Republic (2007); the International Galileo Galilei Prize (2008—for his work on Florentine Platonism); election as Fellow of the British Academy in London (2012); Scholar in Residence, American Academy in Rome (Spring 2013); and the Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award (2015).

In addition to inspiring generations of UCLA students through his legendary English 10A course, where he taught a cross-section of English literature from Beowulf through Milton, along with popular Shakespeare and Chaucer classes, Allen served as a faculty lecturer with UCLA Travel for many years, enthralling alumni travelers with funny, engrossing, and sophisticated but accessible lectures on historical, philosophical, and literary topics relevant to the places they were visiting. His love of travel, adventure, and interesting places, literatures, and cultures was infectious. He also was a fixture at the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare summer school, and then later at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where he held seminars focused on the plays that were being performed that season. Member of the English, Italian, and Comparative Literature Departments, his title upon his retirement from UCLA was Distinguished Research Professor of English and Italian Renaissance Studies.

Allen also took on many leadership roles through his career, serving as Director of UCLA's Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (CMRS) (1988-93); Senior Editor of Renaissance Quarterly (1993-2001); Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar (2007-08) and President of the Renaissance Society of America (2006-08). He was a sought-after lecturer, and his dramatic readings of Pepys’ journals of life in 17th-century London at CMRS dinners became the stuff of legend.

He wrote or edited some 21 books, some of his authoring highlights included: The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, University of California Press (UCP-1984); Icastes: Marsilio Ficino's Interpretation of Plato's Sophist, (UCP-1989); Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic (UCP-1994); Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation. Olschki Press, 1998; Marsilio Ficino: Platonic Theology, 6 vols. with James Hankins, Harvard University Press (HUP-2001-2006); Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on the Phaedrus and Ion (HUP, 2008); and Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols. (HUP, 2015).

Michael was a devoted family man and environmentalist who loved jogging along the beach and hiking with family and friends, both in his beloved South Downs of East Sussex and the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California. He developed a keen eye for local flora and fauna and would read extensively about ecology, botany, and other scientific topics. While generally a talented cook, he was infamous for poorly-cut and exceedingly simple cheese sandwiches that he would serve to fellow hikers. He coached his sons in soccer, winning the Santa Monica City championship with a red-uniformed pre-teen team he had evocatively named “The Blood Demons” in 1990. He was a dear colleague and friend, serious weekly darts player with fellow professors Al Braunmuller, Reg Foakes, and Alan Roper, academic collaborator with friends professors Fredi Chiappelli (who became godfather to his son Ben), Jim Hankins, Brian Copenhaver, Deb Schuger, John Monfasani, Kenneth Muir, Valery Rees, and others. He was a devoted son, bringing his family to spend summers in his beloved hometown Lewes with his mum and dad, with long walks on the Downs with father Jack and son Ben. Michael was proud of his sons’ academic and career achievements, seeing son Will go from earning his doctorate in public health policy to a Directorship of Research with Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health. He played an important role in son Ben’s successful campaign for the California State Senate in 2014, charming friends old and new at events along the campaign trail, while giving advice and strategy. He was also a devoted grandfather, a true pater familias, a funny and deeply wise and comforting presence and father figure for the extended family of Nicholas, Allen, and Bautista in-laws and others at family gatherings and celebrations. His lifelong loving marriage with wife Elena, a teacher and artist, leaves all who knew them with a shining example of love, affection, partnership, and commitment. He will be remembered for his wit, intelligence, dynamism, vivacity, love of storytelling, and perennially sunny disposition.

The family will hold a private funeral ceremony soon, followed by a memorial likely on Sunday, April 2, the day after what would have been Michael’s 82nd birthday—in beautiful Royce Hall on the UCLA campus he loved so much. For more information and opportunities to share your memories of Michael, please visit www.michaeljballen.com. The site is currently under construction but will be available soon. Those interested in making a contribution in Michael’s honor are asked to donate to a fund in his name at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a fund to sponsor a bench for him in his beloved Santa Monica Mountains, or a donation in his name in Lewes through Sussex Past / The Sussex Archaeological Society. More information will be provided soon on the website.

A 1973 graduate of York Community High School in Elmhurst, IL, David Frick received his bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, in 1977. He earned his PhD from Yale University in 1983. In the fall of 1982, he was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1988, Professor in 1994, and Distinguished Professor in 2012. He retired in June 2020. In his nearly forty-year career at Berkeley, he served as advisor and mentor for more than twenty-five PhD students. His five books include Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: Chapters in the History of the Controversies (1551–1632) (Berkeley, 1989), and studies of Meletij Smotryc´kyj and seventeenth-century Wilno. He also produced literary translations, including the first complete English translation of Chopin’s Polish letters. 

In October 2021, the government of the Republic of Poland honored David with its prestigious Benedict of Poland award, bestowed on academics, researchers and explorers who contribute to the interpretation of Polish culture around the world. 

Those who knew David speak of his wit, charm, and laughter. Colleagues, associates, students, and friends of David who wish to commemorate him are invited to support the people of Ukraine through the charity of their choice. The family suggests three particularly effective organizations: United24 (https://u24.gov.ua), Voices of Children (https://voices.org.ua/en), and Razom (https://www.razomforukraine.org).

Warren Boutcher, Queen Mary University of London

w.v.boutcher@qmul.ac.uk

Pullan studied for both his BA and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the tutelage of the great medievalist Walter Ullman as well as John Elliott and Peter Laslett. Pullan then went on to become a research fellow at the College from 1961 to 1963. He moved to a fellowship at Queens College and continued at the University of Cambridge as an assistant lecturer (1964–67) and a full lecturer (1967–72) before accepting the invitation to Manchester University. At Manchester Pullan served as head of department, Dean of Arts and Chairman of Ashburne Hall.

In 1985 Pullan was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and, in 1991, awarded the Academy’s Serena Medal for his contribution to Italian studies. He served on the Academy’s council from 1990 to 1993. His many pioneering works include Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford, Blackwell, and Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1971); The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice 1550-1670 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1983, reprint. London 1997); and Poverty and Charity: Europe, Italy, Venice 1400-1700 (Aldershot, 1994). He was editor (with D. S. Chambers and J. Fletcher) of Venice: A Documentary History 1450-1630 (Oxford, Blackwell, and Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1992). His last work Tolerance, Regulation and Rescue: Dishonoured Women and Abandoned Children in Italy, 1300-1800 (Manchester University Press) was published in 2016.

Brian Pullan founded the Venetian Seminar in 1977, an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging seminar which brought together UK-based scholars whose work related to Venice. It included those whose work focused beyond the Venetian city-state, on the land and sea empires of Venice, as well as those who had comparative or connected interests.  It originally met twice a year, once in London at the Warburg Institute and once elsewhere. It was reconvened by Mary Laven and Filippo de Vivo in 2005 and now meets annually at various locations across the UK.

I was lucky enough to be mentored by Brian for 36 years since I was a student of his in my third year of B.A. (Hons) studies at the University of Manchester. At that time Brian taught two outstanding courses, one a seminar on “Venice 1400-1700” and the other “Religious Change and Non-Conformity in Early Modern Europe.” I went on to study for my M.Phil under his tutelage. After coming to live in Israel, Brian and I kept in touch and he continued to mentor me until his death, reading everything I wrote with patience, dedication and attention to detail. For the past few years Brian and I were writing a book together on conversion in early modern Italy which I hope to publish in his memory.

Brian was the only son of lapsed Methodists and was neither baptized nor confirmed. Although he professed no formal religious faith, he had been sent to an Anglican school with compulsory chapel. His fascination with the history of religion – especially Catholicism and Judaism – stemmed from his belief that all religions had some truth in them.  His interest in Venice started when he played Shylock at school. At that time he portrayed the merchant as a cruel and vindictive man, following Paul Rogers' famous 1950s performance at the Old Vic in London. Later, examining how the great actors of the nineteenth century turned the Jew into a sympathetic, dignified, even tragic figure, emphasising the loss of his daughter and his mistreatment by some Christians, Pullan felt that this was a more appropriate portrayal. It also gave him the lifelong, insoluble problem - was there ever in any sense a real-life Shylock?  He was very fond of Browning's poem, 'A Toccata of Galuppi's' and the lines 'Shylock's bridge, with houses on it, where they kept the carnival'.  When a modern anthologist provided a misleading note saying that this was the Bridge of Sighs and not the Rialto Bridge, Pullan realised that there was a lot to correct in what people said and thought about Venice.

On his first trip to Venice to begin his graduate research project at the Archivio di Stato, he was looking for his hostel at the Madonna dell'Orto when he accidentally walked through a place of very tall houses, like an island within the city, set apart from the rest, which he came to realise was the Ghetto. This, he told me, was a hugely important moment for him. It sparked his interest on those who fitted into Venetian society and those who did not.

Pullan’s reputation as an outstanding scholar of Venice led him to be consulted by the UK Film Council’s producers of the 2004 film version of “The Merchant of Venice,” in which Al Pacino played Shylock. Pullan’s suggestions were followed; these included making the ranting friar at the beginning of the film a Franciscan rather than a Dominican, not having Venetian soldiers parading through the streets of the city-state, and not allowing Lancelot Gobbo to wear a clown’s garb when Shylock would, he believed, have favoured sober dress for his servants as well as himself. 
Pullan was a beloved teacher and mentor with a quiet, humble, witty and warm temperament who inspired all his students.  He is survived by two sons, their wives and his five grandchildren.

Katherine Aron-Beller Ph.D

Visiting Scholar of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University
Lecturer in Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem

Chittolini was a leading figure in international debates about the nature of the late medieval and early modern state. With extensive archival research on the regional Italian powers (mainly Milan, but also Florence) and comparisons to other European case-studies like the Duchy of Burgundy and German cities, he interpreted the varieties and specificities of late medieval Italian political development in ways that shaped a broader rethinking of the process of state-building in Europe. He focused attention on the importance of cities and the multi-layered complexity of power relations between a centre—a princely court, a republican reggimento—and a territory in which other cities, aristocratic lineages, rural communities maintained political agency and autonomy. In his exploration of the dynamics of power, Chittolini also looked at the Church and dissected the complex world of intersecting interests and competing local and supralocal ambitions that linked ecclesiastical benefices—from large bishoprics and abbeys to minor parish churches—to local elites, princely power and the Roman Curia. These research fields proved a fertile ground for studies by many of his students who over generations extended this exploration into the complexities of power by deepening, questioning, and broadening Chittolini’s first insights.

Chittolini loved discussions and collaborations with colleagues and friends in Italy, Europe, and the US. He took part on many research projects on state-building, from La génèse de l’État moderne to The Origins of the Modern State in Europe with Jean-Philippe Genet and Wim Blockmans. He worked closely with scholars gathered in Florence around the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) such as Nicolai Rubinstein, Tony Mohlo, Richard Goldthwaite, John Najemy, and Julius Kirshner. In Florence he also met regularly with his long-time friend Riccardo Fubini, a kindred spirit and colleague despite the many differences in their nature and personality—Riccardo always eager to get into very heated discussions, Giorgio characteristically softspoken and quiet. Chittolini’s first interests and links in Tuscany never faded away: he became the president of the Centro Studi sul tardo Medioevo in San Miniato, and took a leading role in the many conferences organised by the Gruppo Interuniversitario per la storia dell’Europa mediterranea (GISEM) founded by Gabriella Rossetti and based in Pisa. There were few major research projects to which Chittolini did not contribute in those years. He recalled fondly the annual seminars of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, with discussions including Gaetano Cozzi, Aurelio Musi, Gino Benzoni, Mario Mirri, Elena Fasano Guarini, Marino Berengo, Carlo Capra, and a number of younger scholars and PhD students whose interests spanned the late middle ages and the early modern age. He organised together with Dietmar Willoweit a couple of unforgettable Settimane at the Istituto Italo-Germanico in Trento during the years when Paolo Prodi was director. At the Centro Europa delle corti, directed by Cesare Mozzarelli and Amedeo Quondam, Chittolini contributed in the 1980s and 1990s to publishing many volumes on various Italian Renaissance courts that represented a turning point in the field. A pivotal 1992 conference in Chicago on Origini dello Stato. Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed età moderna that brought together Italian and Anglo-American scholars of different generations featured critical discussions on the complexities of state formation, and the Italian and English publications have remained milestones in Renaissance historiography; Chittolini co-edited the Italian version with Tony Mohlo and Pierangelo Schiera, while Julius Kirshner edited the English version.

I would like to close with what may seem only minor detours on this impressive intellectual journey. Although his reputation as an international scholar was undisputable (in 2009 he was awarded the Serena Medal by The British Academy), he seldom refused to take part in even the smallest events in out-of-the-way locales. These might be in Ticino, in a Tuscan village, or in Viadana, the small town in the Po valley where he had gone to primary school and where in 2015 he organised with the Società Storica Viadanese a one-day conference on the town’s passage from the lordship of the Cavalcabò family to the Gonzaga, lords of Mantua. He was on the editorial boards of the Archivio storico ticinese and the Bollettino storico cremonese, and became a member of the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana in Mantua. This attention to the local level of research was characteristic of the man: no historical theme, however small, was uninteresting for him, and no cultural environment unworthy.

Isabella Lazzarini, University of Molise
isabella.lazzarini@unimol.it

Over the course of her career, she authored at least a dozen books on the poetry of Edmund Spense, Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Donne, and was a recipient of nine national fellowships as well as the 2004 International Spenser Society Lifetime Achievement Award. At the same time, Judith gave numerous invited talks and plenary lectures all over the country and held offices not only in the English department and the College of Arts and Sciences at IU, but also in a number of scholarly societies including the Modern Language Association of America, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the international John Donne Society. After thirty-eight years of teaching and service to Indiana University, she retired in May 2013. Taken together, her titles and awards attest to her international stature as a scholar, her generosity as a teacher of graduate and undergraduate students, and her service to both the university and the profession.

After an initial inclination toward post-Reformation Catholicism in Germany for graduate studies, the young O’Malley chose to study Renaissance Italy, at Harvard. Not all of his time was spent on an Ivy League campus, however, as he did much of his research in Rome, and this while the second Vatican Council was underway, in the 1960s. The same city would stand at the heart of his research in various ways later on as well, as in his Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (1979), on preaching before the papal court in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Critical of the terminology of Counter Reformation, O’Malley offered instead "early modern Catholicism" as a more inclusive term that could integrate global Catholicism, and its cultural diversity. Indeed "cultural" history is probably the best way of describing the kind of history Professor O’Malley did throughout his career. His work Four Cultures of the West (2004) is an excellent example, but there are many others such as his co-editorship of two volumes from the University of Toronto Press (1999, 2006) on the Jesuits, cultures, sciences, and the arts.

For over a quarter century O’Malley was a professor at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology. In one of his first years at Weston, I had the good fortune of taking a course from him, one whose title about church reform did not reveal what a treat was in store. For his lectures, O’Malley had but a few notes on the board to work from; but he spoke in such a brilliant, utterly engaging way, overturning stereotypes and naïve constructions of the church’s past, that students were astounded and in awe. Later, as I did a Master’s thesis under his direction and pondered what I might do for a doctorate, Professor O’Malley helped me to make a very good decision. Saying, “you think like a historian,” and you should do a history PhD in preference to one in religion or theology, he urged me to consider going to Cambridge University to work with cultural historian Peter Burke. This was certainly some of the best advice I have ever received or taken.

The history of the Society of Jesus is no longer merely institutional or in-house or apologetic or crudely anti-Jesuit, and this change is due in no small way to O’Malley’s volume The First Jesuits (1993), still in print and published in several languages. Jesuit history is now widely accepted as a mainstream part of history, reaching from Renaissance humanism to European engagement with non-western societies, to a culture of global mobility, and to print culture and what has succeeded it with modern and postmodern media. Jesuit history is even a kind of hot topic, in part because of O’Malley showing how abundant Jesuit sources are, and how valuable they are for understanding the world since the sixteenth century.

John O’Malley was recognized with honorary degrees, distinguished academic titles, various honors and awards, and election or appointment to posts such as RSA president, 1998–2000. In 2005, he was chosen for the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award.

In his later years John O’Malley continued to publish scholarly work, but he also turned to works that made his research accessible to a readership larger than that of other professional historians. Fr. O’Malley will be deeply missed by many, his colleagues, his fellow Jesuits, his students, and a wider public.  

Thomas Worcester, Fordham University

Michael was one of the leading Miltonists of his generation, the author of several important books on the poet, including The Dialectics of Creation (1970), Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of "Paradise Lost" (1981), and Milton and the Culture of Violence (1994). Michael also distinguished himself as a scholar of the Bible and the Jewish and Christian exegetical and mystical traditions in his books The Visionary Mode: Biblical Prophecy, Hermeneutics, and Cultural Change (1991) and Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (1998). In 1986 Michael founded the Newberry Milton Seminar, which continues to this day.

Michael impressed all who knew him not only with his scholarship but with his wisdom, appetite for intellectual conversation, gentleness, and good nature. He had a particular gift for mentoring and encouraging young scholars and was especially welcoming to first-generation students. He will be deeply missed.

Regina Schwartz, Christopher Kendrick, Paula McQuade, and Stephen Fallon
Conveners of the Newberry Milton Seminar

Originally shared by the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies
www.newberry.org

A renowned historian of the Florentine Renaissance and Reformation, Lorenzo was a meticulous, rigorous historian whose relentless questioning of the archive (and of other scholars’ work) combined with his clear prose and imaginative turn of phrase, resulted in a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of the period.

Schooled, along with a generation of Renaissance historians, in the tutorials of Ian Robertson at the University of Melbourne, and then at Westfield College at the University of London under Nicolai Rubinstein and the group of scholars who gathered for Nicolai’s weekly seminars at the Institute of Historical Research, Lorenzo became the foremost scholar of the followers of the millenarian preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

Lorenzo’s attention to archival accuracy and scrupulous scholarship meant that his output was always of enormous value. His early monograph The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence 1494-1545 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) was followed by a series of articles and chapters which increasingly extended the chronology of his main research focus on what had motivated the Savonarolan imperative. A particular interest was the youth who gathered around Savonarola and their ongoing influence on the cultural and social landscape of Florence. This culminated in his 2004 publication Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence 1427-1785 (Oxford: Oxford Warburg Studies).

More latterly he became interested in tracing the history of an investment device of Florentines in the period of the Medici Grand Duchy, the so-called censi. Lorenzo persuasively demonstrated that censi were extensively used in Florence, despite previous assumptions by economic historians to the contrary. Here he combined research from two Australia Research Council Discovery Project Grants, first on the Valori family and then on the censi themselves. The importance of this as the first study of its kind was recognized by the editors of Archivio storico italiano who published a substantial article of some 25,000 words by Lorenzo in 2010, ‘I censi consegnativi bollari nella Firenze granducale: storia di uno strumento di credito trascurato’, Archivio Storico Italiano, 168.2 (624) (2010): 263-324.

Born in Palermo and subsequently emigrating with his family to Melbourne, Lorenzo spent the better part of his academic career in Perth, in the Italian Department at the University of Western Australia. It was there that a new generation of Italianists was trained.

A devoted and proud father and husband, Lorenzo will be missed enormously.

A lengthier tribute to Lorenzo is in preparation. If any readers have particular memories of Lorenzo that they wish to contribute, could you please send them to Catherine Kovesi.

Hugh Hartridge Grady, Jr. was born on 6 October 1947, in Savannah, GA, and died on 8 May 2022, in Philadelphia, PA, due to complications of acute leukemia. He is survived by his spouse, Susan Wells; his daughters, Constance Claire and Laura Rose; his son-in-law, Aaron Linn; his two grandchildren, Abigail Rose and Mason Mark Linn; and his sisters, Sheila Dean, Laura Ann Grady, and Meg Huff. He was Professor of English Emeritus at Arcadia University in Philadelphia, PA.

Hugh never lost that soft Southern drawl, and he played the acoustic guitar: Dylan’s Nashville Skyline was a favorite. After attending Benedictine Military High School, he studied literature at Fordham University in the Bronx during the era of aggiornamento. He loved poetry, especially the Romantics, the modernists, and Shakespeare. Known for his great companionship and thoughtful political debate, he was radicalized during his junior year abroad in France in 1968, and news of his untimely death swept like a desiccating fire through the enduring camaraderie of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS). He and Sue were married straight out of undergraduate school and promptly went to Texas, where he spent two years with VISTA and teaching high school in Houston and then to the University of Texas, Austin, for his doctoral degree.

During the early lean employment years he built his comprehensive knowledge of the Shakespearean critical tradition through editing work on Shakespeare with Gale Research Press. Initially trained in New Critical practices, he never lost that formalist subtlety even while becoming critical of its ideological blinders. He thought large and dialectically. His scholarly reputation was built and rests solidly on the intellectual rigor, lucidity, and courage of his many published books, chapters, and articles in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Shakespeare. From the beginning, he brought to bear a comprehensive understanding of contemporary theoretical and critical approaches to analyzing Shakespeare’s texts, as well as their roots in earlier theory and criticism.

Hugh authored six monographs: Shakespeare’s Dialectic of Hope: From the Political to the Utopian (Cambridge, 2022); John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation (Cambridge, 2017); Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2009); Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford, 2002); Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford, 1996); The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford, 1991).

He edited Empson, Wilson, Knight, Barber, Kott: Great Shakespeareans: Volume XIII (Arden, 2014). He also co-edited or edited three collections of essays: Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now: Criticism and Theory in the 21st Century, with Cary DiPietro (Palgrave, 2013); Presentist Shakespeares, with Terence Hawkes (Routledge, 2007); and Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium (Routledge, 2000). Although Hugh and Terence Hawkes knew each other’s work, they didn’t meet personally until the World Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo, Japan, in 1991. They became intellectual allies working to advance presentism, a new theoretical and critical approach for analyzing Shakespeare’s texts. Hugh coined the term “presentist” in relation to Shakespeare studies in a 1993 article in Textual Practice and in Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf.

Yet Hugh’s reputation as a scholar and a colleague transcends his publications. He is uniformly remembered for his unpretentious, modest demeanor; a low-key attitude that belied his stature in the profession; and his generosity, kindness, and warmth toward junior and senior colleagues alike. In retirement he continued to attend conferences—for example, his attentive presence at the seminar on “Shakespeare and Montaigne” at the 2016 Shakespeare Association of America in New Orleans, where they talked, among other things, about “happiness”—and to publish. Although he and Sue delighted in walking Wissahickon Creek near their home, everyone was delighted to hear that he finally got out of COVID isolation to attend the spring 2022 Renaissance Society of America Conference in Dublin and the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Jacksonville.  When teased that his final book, on Shakespeare’s Dialectic of Hope: From the Political to the Utopian, which will be published on May 22, 2022, seemed unusually mellow, he said “Well, you know, Shakespeare always got there first.” It is dedicated to his grandchildren “with all hope for the future.”

A memorial service was held at Arcadia University on May 26th. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, WHYY, or another cause important to you in Hugh’s honor.

Submitted by Barbara Bono, State University of New York at Buffalo

"Arthur was kind, generous, and indefatigable. He set aside many mornings to write recommendation letters, many of which were crucial in forwarding the careers of young scholars. Under his leadership, English Literary Renaissance was open to all voices, even the not-yet-published ones, including at one point myself. I will miss him not only professionally but personally. In conferences we all aspired to dine at the "Arthur" table. When I was diagnosed with cancer while a fellow at the center in Amherst in 2005, he was unfailingly supportive. He was a presence in our midst. Arthur, I miss you already." [Mary Ellen Lamb]

Image from the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Albert Rabil Jr., a native of Rocky Mount, NC, passed away peacefully in his sleep January 8. He was the son of the late Albert and Sophie Rabil.

After graduating from Rocky Mount High School, he continued his studies at Duke University (BA), Union Theological Seminary (BD), and Columbia University (PhD), where he was awarded the Ansley Award for the year’s best dissertation, “Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World.” He was a founding member of SUNY College at Old Westbury and taught there from 1970 until his retirement in 1998. He earned Best Teacher status from students despite his challenging courses. At SUNY, he was the youngest professor named Distinguished Teaching Professor. Based in humanities, he taught across a wide spectrum of disciplines, regularly offering new courses and challenging both himself and his students. His scholarly focus was the Renaissance. Although he never taught a college course on that subject, he directed intense month-long institutes in Renaissance Studies, sponsored by NEH, which attracted educators from nationwide.

Albert had numerous publications, but his most significant contribution was as co-editor, along with his friend of fifty years, Margaret King, of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. The series aimed, in Margaret’s words, “to recover works by women and by men about women that had been neglected in scholarly discussions of the period 1300–1800.” Originally envisioned as a few dozen volumes, the 156th volume of the series arrived January 8, the day of his death. The project may reshape the canon of modern European literature.

He retired to Chapel Hill, where he kept up his daily three-mile jog and was surrounded by three marvelous libraries and most of his dearest relatives. For many years, he presided over the Rabil clan at joyful Thanksgiving gatherings. He is survived by his wife of sixty-four years, Janet, his son Albert III and wife Tamara, his daughter Alison and her husband David, his sister Carolyn Grant, his brother Jimmy, five grandchildren, and numerous nieces, nephews, and other special people who consider themselves lucky that Albert was part of their lives.

In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made to Duke University Libraries.

The Rabil family is under the care of Walker’s Funeral Home of Chapel Hill.

Phil’s legacy as a careful scholar, committed teacher, warm colleague, and generous friend will remain with us for many years. His dedication to the life of the mind manifested itself in the classroom, where over the course of his career he taught an amazing variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. Phil was well-liked and respected by students, despite being known for demanding standards with heavy doses of primary and secondary reading. Many graduate students blanched at the reading lists he presented them, yet lines of students regularly formed outside his office and he promoted their professional interests with vigor.

Phil was a painstakingly meticulous and productive scholar. His first book, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence (1990), integrated an institutional approach to the foundling home of the Innocenti with analyses of gender, family formation, and civic culture. His second book, Gender, Charity, and Honor in Renaissance Florence (2011), teased out the patterns of social responses to rising numbers of female foundlings by tracing a complex web of institutions and families in a profoundly patrilineal culture. Reviewers praised his analytical depth, skilled archival work, and dexterity in handling multifaceted historical problems by interweaving examinations of charity, statecraft, family lineage, gender, and childhood. Over the life of his career, Phil’s research and writing were funded by numerous prestigious agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

For all of his erudition, we feel the pain of his loss most keenly because of Phil’s wonderful humaneness, his generosity of spirit, his unfailing kindness, and his charming eccentricities. He was devoted to his family; he loved opera and St. Louis Cardinals baseball; he was an avid cyclist and not a bad racquetball player who accepted defeat graciously. Committed to social justice, he also taught in the SLU Prison Program. Phil was a rumpled professor with a gentle, hearty laugh. He never seemed to let deadlines bother him too much, and no one enjoyed a meal and drink with friends and family more than he did. In Phil Gavitt we remember an excellent scholar, a learned humanist, and a stalwart friend.

Charles H. Parker
Konrad Eisenbichler
Nicholas Terpstra

Frank, who was born in the Philippines of missionary parents, grew up there and in New England. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Already as a graduate student he was recognized for his exceptional perceptiveness and judgment as a connoisseur, as his wife, Kathy, noted in describing his candidacy exams. She recounted how, ashen faced, he left the examination room to await the result. When his advisor came to congratulate him, he was disbelieving, since he had been unable to identify several of the works. As his advisor explained, this was unsurprising because a portion of the exam had been made up specifically of difficult attribution problems that the members of the committee had hoped Frank might be able to resolve for them.

Although Frank had wide-ranging interests and expertise in many areas, the primary focus of his research was in the art of the Italian Renaissance, particularly Venetian painting and drawing. His book Andrea Schiavone, published in 1980 in the prestigious series, Oxford Studies in the History of Art, dispelled much confusion about this undervalued Venetian artist and, in the words of one reviewer, provided a “brilliant account of Schiavone’s stylistic development.” Moreover, in the process of presenting its authoritative account of the historical and artistic identity of Schiavone, the book established the artist’s signal contribution to the development of Venetian painting practices. The introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, Splendors of the Renaissance in Venice: Andrea Schiavone among Parmigianino, Tintoretto and Titian (2015), includes sections on only two scholars: Bernard Berenson, the renowned connoisseur and founding figure of Italian Renaissance art history, and Francis Richardson. The former is cited as identifying the artist and compiling the first tentative list of Schiavone’s works, while the latter’s seminal contributions are examined in a section entitled: “L ‘Era’ Richardson.”

Frank was committed to exploring and experiencing the actual objects of his study and much other art as well. Multiple reviewers of Andrea Schiavone noted the author’s deep engagement with the paintings, described by one as demonstrating a “profound firsthand knowledge of and enthusiasm for the original works of art.” Another wrote: “Richardson is an inspired ‘looker’ and writes alluringly of color, texture, paint surface; he has not only given much thought to the process of painting but also to the problems of translating visual creation and visual perception into verbal structures.” These kinds of comments were also reflected in responses to his teaching. One student described Frank as a poetic art historian “who could capture with eloquence the beauty of a work of art.” Several others characterized his lectures as lyrical, and nearly all commented on the time he spent looking, emphasizing the need to “take in the formal properties of an image before ‘learning’ about its meaning or the artist’s place in history.”

The lyrical character of Frank’s lectures was undoubtedly connected to his identity as poet. His poems have been published in numerous poetry journals, in magazines such as The New Yorker, and in collections of his own work, Walking (2007) and What Remains and What Disappears (2017). He was also a revered member of the central Ohio poetry community, and was described by a fellow poet as a giant whose resonant voice will be remembered by all who were fortunate enough to hear it. In addition to these qualities, Frank was loved for his generosity of spirit and encouragement of others.

The lyrical character of Frank’s lectures was undoubtedly connected to his identity as poet. His poems have been published in numerous poetry journals, in magazines such as The New Yorker, and in collections of his own work, Walking (2007) and What Remains and What Disappears (2017). He was also a revered member of the central Ohio poetry community, and was described by a fellow poet as a giant whose resonant voice will be remembered by all who were fortunate enough to hear it. In addition to these qualities, Frank was loved for his generosity of spirit and encouragement of others.

They contributed enormously to the lives of those who knew them and will be deeply missed. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to their son Jon and his family.

—Barbara Haeger, Associate Professor, History of Art, Ohio State University

John N. King passed away suddenly on June 13, 2020. From 1967‑69 he was Lecturer in English at Abdullahi Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria. In 1971 he joined the English faculty at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He held a Visiting Lectureship in English at Oxford University from 1978-79, and from 1981-82 he was Visiting Associate Professor of English at Brown University. In 1989 he was appointed Professor of English at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. In 2003 he was designated Humanities Distinguished Professor of English & of Religious Studies, and in 2004 Distinguished University Professor at OSU. Following his retirement in 2010 he divided his time between Washington, DC, where he was a frequent denizen of both the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress, and his home in Virginia.

An alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science in New York, he received the B.A.  cum laude from Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, in 1965 and the M.A. cum laude from the University of Chicago the following year. He completed his dissertation at the University of Chicago in 1973 under the direction of William A. Ringler, Jr., on “Patronage and Propaganda under Protector Somerset.” Over the course of a career which spanned more than five decades, King produced a remarkable body of scholarship dedicated to the literature produced in England during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. He took as his point of departure C. S. Lewis’s now-infamous dismissal of this material as “drab.” By challenging Lewis’s presupposition, King laid the groundwork for the subsequent development of the study of English Reformation literary culture and Tudor literature as sub-fields within Renaissance literary and cultural studies. These fields would not have attained their present form without his shaping influence. The clearest tribute to his groundbreaking scholarship lies in his ability to foresee the viability of these areas of inquiry decades before they migrated into the mainstream of the wider field. His work remains essential for anyone working on these subjects.

King was one of the first scholars to utilize the STC-II, Katharine F. Pantzer’s revision of the original Pollard & Redgrave Short-title Catalogue, to which he was granted access prior to the publication of volume 2 (I-Z) of STC-II in 1976. His first book, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), was the first major study to locate the origin of the English Protestant literary tradition in the generic and formal experimentation associated with the turbulent reigns of Henry VIII (1509-47) and in particular Edward VI (1547-53). It expanded the scope of earlier work, such as James McConica’s English Humanists and Reformation Politics (1965), and laid essential groundwork for major subsequent developments, including the British Academy John Foxe Project (https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/). King was a member of its Advisory Board and one of its most stalwart defenders. In his review of English Reformation Literature, Douglas Nicholls praised King as a “worthy cartographer” of “one of the least appreciated but most crucial areas of English literature.” I am told by the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (2009) that English Reformation Literature is the most frequently cited monograph in that collection.

King kept his focus on the political aspects of literary production in his three succeeding books, while he simultaneously expanded its scope. They include Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, 1989), Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, 1990), and Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, 2000). These studies situate the achievement of canonical authors within the religious controversies, visual representative traditions, and cultural conflicts of the Tudor era. His was one of the first and most important voices in the so-called “turn to religion” in early modern studies, which now dominates the field. He also appreciated, sooner and more keenly than most, the potential of the interdisciplinary sub-field of the History of the Book to produce new insights within our discipline. His investigation into the relationship between books as material objects and their intellectual contents lies at the heart of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge, 2006), as well as a monograph-in-progress, The Reformation of the Book: 1450-1650, for which he received a Guggenheim fellowship, and which remains unfinished at his death.

His scholarship is as wide-ranging as it is influential. King is editor or co-editor of three collections of scholarly essays: John Foxe and His World (Ashgate, 2002), Henry VIII and His Afterlives (Cambridge, 2009), and Tudor Books and Readers (Cambridge, 2010). His numerous editorial projects include a co-edited edition of John Bale’s Vocacyon (1553), one of the first autobiographical narratives in the language, published by the Renaissance English Text Society (1990); Anne Askew’s Examinations for the Early Modern English Woman series (1996); Voices of the English Reformation, a textbook of sources in English Reformation literature (2006); and an edition of narratives from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments for Oxford World’s Classics (2009). He was co-editor of Literature and History (1989-2010), and editor of Reformation (2005-10). His more than 100 articles and chapters have appeared in virtually every major journal in the field and include important essays on a contemporary bookseller’s manuscript account list (1987), the prominent evangelical printer John Day (2001, 2002), and the English Bible. His research enjoyed the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Philosophical Society; the Bibliographical Society of America; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the Institute for Reformation Studies at the University of St. Andrews, the Huntington Library; the National Humanities Center; the Newberry Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, and more. He mentored dozens of students at Ohio State whose careers continue his legacy. His interest in teaching extended beyond OSU to a series of ten National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers which he directed or co-directed, and one NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers. The topics of these programs included “The English Reformation: Literature, History, and Art,” “Religion in English History and Literature from The Canterbury Tales through Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern English Print Culture,” “The Reformation of the Book,” and “Tudor Books and Readers.”

John King was much more than a pioneering scholar. His eccentricities included a singular plant in his office which was watered by generations of graduate students, and which he dismembered among them at his retirement. I once overheard him explaining to an undergraduate why his office hours were always at 8 o’clock in the morning. “So that I can meet with you,” he deadpanned. He had a striking tendency to offer definitive pronouncements on subjects such as the consumption of cheese. He cultivated hobbies in botany and related outdoor activities and was an accomplished rare book collector and traveler. One of his former students accurately described him as “unstintingly generous in his support of people” whose “joy and glee were remarkable.” Participants in some of his recent NEH programs praise his “mind for detail and scope of knowledge that would be daunting if he were not so good at offering his insights with a touch of humor.” He “turns his erudition into valuable experiences” and proved “a helpful and dedicated mentor” in research as well as “valuable ‘book-related’ [walking] tours.” I have myself designed popular student walking tours of Tudor London and Oxford from John King’s models. He helped make the rare book collection at Ohio State University Libraries into one of the finest John Foxe collections in the world, and he augmented its considerable Reformation holdings with an unparalleled collection of books printed by John Day, the premier Protestant printer of the English Reformation. He was also instrumental in OSU’s fortuitous acquisition of the complete James Stevens-Cox collection of STC-sigla books.

His considerable achievement spanned the classroom and the rare book library, the halls of a major research university and the streets of Europe, where the authors, printers, and patrons we study lived and worked. His knowledge of these contexts was second-to-none, and he was always willing to share that knowledge with anyone who wanted to learn. He was affable to all who knew him, a remarkable man who hosted memorable meetings of Renaissance reading groups at his home and who did everything he could to help others succeed in an increasingly difficult profession. His eager willingness to share his prodigious knowledge over the course of many years was fueled by his striking blend of generosity and humor. John King was a towering presence in the field and in the lives of those who knew him best, an exemplary scholar and supportive mentor, as well as a good friend. He is survived by his wife Pauline, son Jonathan, and other family members.

Lía Schwartz, a prominent Renaissance scholar and Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY), died on May 31, 2020 in New York.

Professor Schwartz was born in Corrientes, Argentina in 1941. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in Classical Literature and Spanish Philology in 1965, and then attended the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz to study Classical Literature. Little did she know that she would only come back to her native Argentina as a visitor and that in the next half century she would become a world-renowned early modern scholar, an international authority on the Spanish Golden Age, and an outstanding professor greatly beloved by peers and students alike.

Professor Schwartz’s international education, no small feat for a woman at the time, continued in the US, where she completed her PhD at the University of Illinois under the direction of James O. Crosby. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), one of the foremost early modern Spanish writers, and an author whose contemporary reception her subsequent research shaped fundamentally. She spent most of her professional career teaching at Fordham University, Dartmouth College and The Graduate Center (CUNY), but she also taught at Princeton University, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her reputation as a leading scholar in early modern literature radiated to Spain, where she was a visiting professor at the universities of Salamanca, Autónoma de Madrid, Zaragoza, La Coruña, and Menéndez Pelayo. She was regularly invited to lecture at various universities across the US, Europe, and Latin America. For decades she played leadership roles in international organizations including the AIH (International Association of Hispanists), the AISO (International Association of the Spanish Golden Age), and other important professional associations. She was chair and deputy chair of both the AIH and the AISO, and she also chaired the Division on 16th and 17th Century Spanish Prose and Poetry of the MLA. From 2005 to 2012 she was an Associate Editor of Renaissance Quarterly, and in 2007 she was elected to the Executive Board of The Renaissance Society of America.

Professor Schwartz is best known for a series of books and critical essays on Spanish Golden Age writer Francisco de Quevedo, in which she explored, among many other topics, the relationship between Quevedo and the classics, the rhetorical tradition of the Spanish Baroque, Neostoicism, history-writing and the power structures shaping most aspects of intellectual production in the Court of the Hapsburgs, to cite just a few. Her research and publications on the Menippean satire in Early Modern Europe and the connections between satire and moral philosophy, as well as the praxis of imitatio in Quevedo and other Spanish early modern writers, were fundamental to understanding how the classical tradition had been received and revived by the Spanish intellectuals in the early modern period. Besides her research and philological editions of Quevedo’s works, her publications on other Spanish heavyweights were also groundbreaking. Her many articles on Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Gracián, and the brothers Argensola attest to the range and depth of her research. Just a brief look at Professor Schwartz’s entries for the Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina suffices to demonstrate the scope of her knowledge: Apuleius, Aristotle, Aquiles Statius, Aristophanes, Ausonius, Boetius, Catullus, Cato, Caesar, Cicero, the Cynics, Demosthenes, Diogenes, Xenophon, Juvenal, Lucian and Ovid—all in relation to Cervantes’ opera.

But all of these, if significant, are widely known facts. I’ll now swerve a little from the conventions of the genre and dwell not only on what she published or where she taught but also on what Professor Schwartz, a beloved professor, mentor and friend, did.

You didn’t know that you wanted to become an early modern scholar before you entered one of Professor Schwartz’s courses. But once you did you were certain that was all you wanted. Genuine erudition has a very powerful appeal, and she won over her students easily with the way she imparted her knowledge. We had been infected with a Rabelaisian thirst for learning, and we would come back for more. It was fairly common to hear CUNY students from all walks of life and countries thanking Professor Schwartz and her late husband, Professor Isaías Lerner, another heavyweight in Renaissance studies, for opening the doors of graduate education to them and changing their lives. Professor Schwartz’s teaching was erudite but accessible, rigorous but not burdensome, and you never felt overwhelmed by her formidable intellect. She considered herself to be, quoting Quevedo’s apprenticeship in Neostoicism, not sapiens but proficiens—a learner—in early modern literature. Her remarks at conferences and talks were master classes on sprezzatura and brainpower, and on many occasions her observations at dissertation defenses were just what was needed to turn a thesis project into a powerful book.

She navigated with confidence the difficult ocean of short-lived critical fashions and trends that would pop up from time to time across campuses, confident that philology as an all-embracing discipline could accommodate them with ease. There was no modern intellectual or critic she didn’t know or had not read. Her graduate seminars displayed an exceptional array of titles and themes, and she offered graduate seminars on Cervantes, Quevedo, Lope de Vega and Góngora, but also on European knights and rogues, love discourses in the Renaissance, Neostoicism and the shaping of the early modern mind, the Humanistic comedia in Spain, Italian and French influences in the Spanish Golden Age, and the European Baroque Imaginary. At the University of Argentina, she had been a student of Jorge Luis Borges, and he was certainly a decisive influence on her career. Professor Schwartz’s course on “Borges and His Precursors,” together with her “Cervantes’s Don Quijote and the Crisis in European Fiction” were among the most popular and sought-after in the Hispanic and the Comparative Literature programs at the Graduate Center.

Neither institutional limitations, nor warnings of the imminent demise of the Humanities, nor failing health could dissuade Professor Schwartz from her commitment to her profession and students. Up until the end she loved being in the classroom, surrounded by her students. She relished directing new thesis projects and enjoyed being in dissertation committees in the USA and abroad. Her door was always open, and her letters of recommendation were always the first to arrive. She brought her students with her to international conferences, where many of us read our first paper with trembling knees but under her encouraging first-row gaze. And she introduced us to all the prominent scholars whose books we had read in awe in order to build connections and keep the profession alive, as she would say. Together with Professor Lerner, she became one of the leading voices of Hispanism in the US. The Graduate Center was turned into a key organizational hub for most Spanish-related events in New York together with the Cervantes Institute, the Queen Sophia Institute, foreign embassies and the Hispanic Society. And their Chelsea home became an extension—and at times an international guesthouse—of that intellectual community they had built from scratch where new book projects were hatched and students’ dissertations celebrated. Professor Schwartz was also instrumental in opening the library of the Hispanic Society, which holds the most important collection of Hispanic manuscripts and books outside of Spain, to scholars and researchers. Many of us benefited from such associations, and many research projects originated from findings in the library of the Hispanic. She was a fierce advocate of the scientific study of literature and a vocal defender of the often-neglected contribution of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain in publications and conferences on early modernity on the US.

Professor Schwartz’s achievements were recognized on many occasions. In 1999 she was awarded the Civil Order Alfonso el Sabio by the Spanish Ministry of Education; in 2013 the Spanish King and Government awarded her the Medal of the Order of Civil Merit; and in 2016 she was elected a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia Española. Last year, the University of La Coruña, and the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid joined forces with the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (New York) and the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute (New York) to edit a volume that pays homage to Professor Schwart’s international career and outstanding accomplishments. The transatlantic endeavor of the Spanish and American institutions, combined with the significant range of the contributions to the volume, mirrors the broad variety of Professor Schwartz’s scholarly interests and achievements. Docta y sabia Atenea. Studia in Honorem Lía Schwartz was launched at the Cervantes Institute of New York in front of a grateful and appreciative crowd of former students—many now renowned scholars in their own right—and friends.

In the end, Professor Schwartz left behind countless generations of proficiens whom she helped to go on to successful careers, live fuller lives, and carry on her legacy. In doing so, she produced her biggest achievement and her lasting testament: non omnis moriar.

On May 24, 2020, Carolyn Newmark (Carolyn C. Wilson) entered into rest in Houston, Texas after a courageous battle with cancer. Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the second child of Ruth Spurlock Wilson and Dr. Robert N. Wilson, Jr., Carolyn excelled academically and graduated at the top of her class from The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr. She continued her studies at Wellesley College where she graduated with High Honors as a Durant Scholar.  She earned an MA and PhD in Art History from The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.  It was in New York City that her dear friend and Wellesley roommate, Sarah Singal, set her up on a blind date with Dr. Michael E. Newmark, who became her loving husband in 1976.

Carolyn dedicated her professional life to art of the Italian Renaissance, publishing numerous articles and books, including Renaissance Small Bronze Sculpture and Associated Decorative Arts while working as the Assistant Curator of Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Italian Paintings, XIV-XVI Centuries in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston while serving as Research Curator for Renaissance Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and St. Joseph in Italian Renaissance Society and Art: New Directions and Interpretations while working independently on her favorite topic, the Italian Renaissance veneration of St. Joseph.  She received numerous book awards including the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, the Vasari Award, and was an Alfred H. Barr, Jr. award finalist. In addition to her museum work, Carolyn taught renaissance art history at the University of Maryland, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Houston.  Carolyn spoke and read several languages, and professional trips took her all over North America and Europe where she found countless friends in foreign museums, universities, and libraries. 

At home, Carolyn dedicated her time to the care of her three daughters as an active parent at St. John’s School for 18 years.  She was a ballet and Suzuki mom in addition to making healthy dinners and sewing numerous Halloween costumes. She loved dance, theater, music, and opera, and enjoyed countless live performances. On vacation, she took her children to visit their grandparents in San Antonio and Bermuda and to Europe to see great palaces and wonderful museums. In recent years, she became a devoted grandmother to seven grandchildren, whom she lavished with love and attention as well as books and nursery rhymes. 

Carolyn is survived by her loving husband, Michael E. Newmark; her three daughters, Georgina Newmark Armstrong, Serena Newmark Mout, and Diana Newmark; her sons-in-law, Thad Armstrong, Edward Mout IV, and Shalev Roisman; her grandchildren, Benjamin, Matthew, and Caroline Armstrong, Madeline and Beatrice Mout, and Noa and Esther Roisman; her siblings, Stephen W. Wilson and Marybelle Macdonald; and her sisters-in-law, Marjorie Wilson and June Newmark, and her many nieces and nephews. 

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a memorial service will be planned at a future date.  In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to the Renaissance Society of America, Wellesley College, or the charity of one’s choice.

Read the original article about Bowen's passing (reprinted below) written by Ann Marie Deer Owens.

Bowen was born in Great Britain on May 4, 1937. She began taking French in school at age 10, and her interest in French literature and culture blossomed. She received a bachelor of arts and a master of arts from Oxford University. She then studied at the University of Paris, receiving her doctorate in 1962.

Bowen was recruited from the University of Illinois to Vanderbilt in 1987, when she was named a professor of French and chair of the Department of French and Italian. She was the first woman to lead a department in College of Arts and Science.

“Barbara Bowen was a distinguished scholar of the French Renaissance who represented qualities not often seen today: immense learning grounded in philological and historical fact combined with a delight in the comic and funny,” said Patricia A. Ward, professor of French and comparative literature, emerita. “Until her death, she took delight in jokes, puns, off-beat greeting cards and images such as Botticelli’s Venus as a cultural icon, which she called ‘Venus on the Half Shell.’

“As department chair, Barbara was very prescient in instituting advanced training in second language acquisition. This training enabled graduate students of all specializations to have a versatility that enhanced their success in job placement. The percentage of doctoral students in French finding positions upon degree completion would become one of the highest in the nation.”

Among Bowen’s research interests were Francois Rabelais and 16th-century French literature, French comic theatre, European Renaissance humor and Renaissance art history. She traced the history of French farce and satire in literature and drama in some of her works.

“Barbara was well known nationally and internationally for her work on Rabelais,” said Virginia M. Scott, professor of French, emerita. “Graduate students were fearful but ultimately grateful for her direct and pointed criticism of their work. Colleagues revered her and feared her—her acerbic humor and unflinchingly critical comments were widely recognized. She was a forceful presence in the lives of many people and will not be forgotten.”

Bowen was the author of five major books, including Enter Rabelais, Laughing (1998) and Humor and Humanism (2004), an anthology of her articles. She also gave many keynote addresses and delivered papers at conferences in the United States, France, Greece and Poland. In addition, Bowen served as president of the Renaissance Society of America.

“Within the profession at large—as at her home university—Barbara Bowen was a formidable and unflinching advocate for social justice, a generous colleague, and a devoted friend whose incisive scholarship and genial wit will be sorely missed,” said William E. Engel, a former Vanderbilt Arts and Science faculty member who is now the Nick B. Williams Professor of Literature at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Bowen received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the latter of which enabled her to spend a year at the Villa I Tatti, a center for advanced research in the humanities in Florence, Italy.

Bowen taught graduate seminars in French and comparative literature and a variety of undergraduate courses ranging from “Renaissance Utopias” to “The Classic French Comic Book.”

She served on the Faculty Senate as well as several university committees, including the Comparative Literature Advisory Committee, the Committee on the Humanities and the Humanities Center Advisory Committee.

In addition to her term as department chair, she served as director of graduate studies, organized the French poetry reading competition and frequently directed the annual French play.

Scott remembers that Bowen was known for her frequent parties for colleagues and friends. “Barbara created a large community of people from across the university, as well as from Nashville, to gather regularly at her home to drink and eat together,” Scott said. “Those who knew her well remember that there was a prompt beginning and end to these social events! Those who dared buy her a gift surely heard her say, ‘For people who like that sort of thing, it’s just the sort of thing they would like.’ It was a hallmark saying of Barbara’s, who was called ‘Ba’ by her friends.”

Bowen became an emerita professor in 2002. After she retired, she continued to spend days reading and writing in her library carrel for her research.

Bowen was predeceased by her husband, Vincent Bowen. She is survived by their two daughters, Sarah L. Wilkinson and Tessa J. Majors, and their families.

Photo: Vanderbilt University

Shelley Perlove
Professor Emerita, History of Art
University of Michigan

Ward Bissell, Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, History of Art, died on October 26, at home with his beloved family as he awaited the start of the Michigan versus Notre Dame football game. His long, productive life was devoted to the University of Michigan, where he studied as an undergraduate, first in pre-dentistry until he discovered History of Art; then as a PhD student under his mentor, Harold E. Wethey. After seven years at the University of Wisconsin, Ward returned to UM where he taught for thirty-five years, until his retirement in 2007. Professor Bissell excelled as a gifted, energetic teacher of undergraduates and graduate students, and served on forty-two doctoral committees. This memoriam addresses his incredible legacy.

Specializing in Italian and Spanish art of the seventeenth century, Professor Bissell ranks among the most prominent scholars of the painters Orazio Gentileschi and his equally, if not more talented daughter Artemisia Gentileschi. Bissell’s first major publication on Artemisia in Art Bulletin in 1968 laid the groundwork for further research on this newly discovered, now justly famous woman artist. Ward’s major monograph, Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, which appeared in 1999 with Penn State University Press, followed the publication of his book, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggesque Painting of 1981, also from Penn State University Press. Both monographs follow the honored tradition of Ward’s mentor at UM, Harold Wethey, by publishing a wealth of documentation. The Artemisia book is magisterial, with well-written and insightful text and detailed, lengthy catalogue entries. Bissell’s seminal publications have long stimulated discussion on the challenges of separating the works of Orazio and Artemisia. He also contributed entries to many exhibition catalogues and continued to offer advice on connoisseurship to collectors, dealers and auction houses, even up to a few weeks before his death.

An inspired and popular teacher, Ward Bissell will long be remembered by his undergraduate and advanced doctoral students. He directed and taught many times in the UM Study Abroad Program in Florence where I had the honor to serve as GSI. When I taught there myself on later dates, I fully adhered to his teaching model by insisting that all lectures take place on site in front of the actual works of art, rather than the lecture hall.

I speak for others when I relate my own experience with Ward as an esteemed mentor. He was always enthusiastic, positive, and exacting in giving advice, permitting me to follow my own path as an emerging scholar, while gently prodding me to dig deeper in my studies. He made it very clear, without even saying so, that archival research was essential to art historical research. This led me to have many crazy adventures in Roman archives, both public and private. Most importantly of all for my subsequent career, Ward was there when I really needed him to read my chapters without delay, in time for a job application deadline. I imagine we all have stories like this to share.

Professor Bissell was very serious about his scholarship and teaching, but was also immense fun at parties. One year the graduate students invited him to come to a costume Halloween party. We laughed hysterically when he solemnly entered the room wearing a bedspread with small, color reproductions (University Prints) of medieval paintings pinned to the border and a tall hat. He also wore sequined, white gloves, before the time of Michael Jackson.

Ward Bissell is survived by his devoted wife of thirty-one years, Tina (Goldstein); their son Alex Alden Bissell; Ward’s daughter Kathryn Reed (Rob); and grandchildren Adam and Lilian Reed. Also surviving are his beloved brother Robin and his wife Sandy and their three children. Professor Bissell was preceded in death by his son Mark Weston Bissell and his parents, Raymond and Irvina Bissell.

Ward’s friends and family were the beneficiaries of his playful wit, bad puns, many acts of kindness, and unbounded enthusiasm for life, including his passion for painting, sculpture, architecture, antiques, gardens, and of course Michigan sports. In retirement he produced finely finished wooden sculptures vaguely reminiscent of the style of Louise Nevelson. The greatest lesson he imparted to all of us was the deep satisfaction and pleasure one derives from studying original works of art.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that any donations be made in Ward Bissell’s name to either the UM Department of History of Art Undergraduate Initiative or to the UM Museum of Art fund for new acquisitions. Both efforts support direct engagement with original works of art, an experience Ward Bissell believed was essential for everyone. For information on a donation contact Professor Christiane Gruber, History of Art Chair, cjgruber@umich.edu.

Sarah was a long-time supporter and member of ATSAH, SECAC, and CAA, in addition to the RSA.

The SECAC 2019 session she was to chair at the upcoming conference in Chattanooga, “The Art of Depicting Paragoni of Life,” will go forward in honor of her memory, and there will be a special session at CAA in 2020.

We are grateful to have known and loved this young, energetic, and accomplished scholar. ATSAH plans to establish an academic fund in her honor. Details will follow.

Liana de Girolami Cheney
President, The Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History (ATSAH)

Janet Cox was born in 1930 in Bronxville, New York. Following in the footsteps of her mother, a Wellesley alumna in art history, Janet attended the same college (class of 1952). A tall blonde, both striking and chic, she was already working as a fashion model and planning a career in that industry, but a course with legendary professor Sydney Freedberg, the doyen of connoisseurship, inspired her shift of professional trajectory to art history. She followed her mentor to Harvard, where she earned her M.A. and Ph.D.; her published dissertation, The Drawings of Pontormo (1963, revised 1981), remains the standard catalog of the artist’s graphic legacy. From 1961–63 she was among the first group of fellows at Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, to which she later returned as visiting faculty. The quality and significance of her work also earned research fellowships from all the major grantors in the field, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery in Washington, and the Guggenheim and Getty Foundations.

Following early curatorial stints at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Frick Collection, Janet joined the faculty of Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1964. Her teaching career at CUNY spanned 42 years, the last six at the university’s Graduate Center, where she coordinated the doctoral Renaissance-Baroque specialization. She inspired her advanced Hunter classes to create ambitious exhibitions in the college gallery, notably Giulio Romano, Master Designer (1999), a drawing show featuring a catalog co-authored with her M.A. advisee at the time, Richard Aste. Outside academia, she co-curated the well-received 2010 exhibition The Drawings of Bronzino at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Besides scores of articles, lectures, and exhibition catalogs, Janet published three more major books. Though she continued to engage with her first love – drawings and connoisseurship – her methodological portfolio expanded into social history, particularly patronage and women’s studies. Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art (1984) connected her favorite artist, Jacopo Pontormo, to the agenda of that ambitious Florentine family; Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio (1993) analyzed a complex program commissioned by Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence; and The Collections of François I: Royal Treasures (1996) assembled a comprehensive study of the patronage of that splendid French monarch and the school of Fontainebleau. I once asked Janet (whom I valued as a gracious, yet strong-willed, CUNY colleague) how an italianista came to study a northern king. She explained that her husband Wiley had been planning a research year in Paris, and she wanted a project of her own that she could work on while she accompanied him there – hence a study of the greatest Gallic supporter of Italian artists. However pragmatic its origins, the resultant sumptuous book earned her the rank of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.

Fittingly, it was at the 2000 RSA conference in Florence that Janet introduced a new research interest that would occupy her for the next decade: costume studies. Her starting point was Agnolo Bronzino’s iconic portrait of Duchess Eleonora, spotlighting her elaborate and costly gown intended to convey wealth and authority. Being a woman who had modeled for a living, and always wore her own elegant wardrobe with the same panache, it came as no surprise that Janet organized several years of RSA panels on clothing as a primary outlet for female self-fashioning, or -- as one of her papers pithily titled it, embodying her culminating synthesis of fashion, patronage, politics, and feminism -- “Power Dressing.” She capped that interest with a delightful exhibition at the CUNY Graduate Center featuring detailed reconstructions of Eleonora’s famous outfit and others renowned from period paintings. It was partly for this work that she received an Annual Recognition Award from the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts in 2002.

Janet’s feminist awareness also made her a pioneering supporter of broader research on sexuality and gender. She chaired the art-history program committee for the 1986 College Art Association conference, which invited proposals for special sessions on wide-ranging methodological themes. Then a newly minted Ph.D. in a fledgling and controversial field, I feared my suggested symposium on homosexuality in art would land in the reject pile, but to my surprise, Janet phoned immediately and summoned me to discuss the proposal at her home. She accepted the idea on the spot, declaring with her customary firm conviction, “It’s about time”; the resultant panel did much to open the formerly conservative discipline to LGBT (later queer) studies. Janet herself subsequently organized a CUNY symposium on sexuality in Bronzino’s art and poetry that acknowledged all facets of the artist’s sometimes homoerotic works.

Janet’s first marriage was to art historian William Roger Rearick. Her second husband was the prominent CUNY musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock, to whose children, Susan and Hugh, Janet became a devoted stepmother; he died in 2007. In 2012, she married Renaissance art historian Louis Waldman, from whom she later separated. He survives her, along with Susan and Hugh Hitchcock, her sister Cynthia Farris, and three nephews.

James M. Saslow
Professor Emeritus of Art History
Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Fubini was born in Trieste in 1934 to a Jewish family that included several distinguished academics and was about to suffer under Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws. How the family responded to a world that was collapsing around them is recounted in the book La via di fuga, written by one of Riccardo’s sons, the journalist Federico Fubini. Removed from the university chair he held at Palermo, Riccardo’s father, the distinguished literary critic Mario Fubini, took the family into exile in Switzerland. Riccardo’s maternal grandparents and his uncle, the economist Renzo Fubini, died at Auschwitz in 1944. Trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Riccardo received his laurea in medieval history in 1958 with a thesis on the writings of Biondo Flavio. In 1964 he published a reprinting of the collected works of Poggio Bracciolini, and his remarkable entry on Biondo was published in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani in 1968. On Felix Gilbert’s recommendation he was assigned to edit the first two volumes (published in 1977) of the Lettere of Lorenzo de’ Medici under the general editorship of Nicolai Rubinstein. The Lettere project was expected to clarify Lorenzo’s role as a diplomat and as a patron of the arts and of literature. Fubini’s painstaking research, attention to prosopographic detail, and remarkable commentary transformed the letters edition into a magnificent window on fifteenth-century Italy, in which diplomacy and arts patronage were embedded in factionalism, clientage, commercial interests, institutional change, strife among generations, campanilismo, and class differences. He came away convinced that Renaissance humanism, even in its literary and philosophical aspects, was best appreciated in the deeper political and social context that other scholars—many of them English speaking, and many of them working on Florence—were then exploring in a series of rich institutional and social histories. In this he differed from many of the academics then studying humanist texts. His essays offering original and exciting interpretations of works by—among others—Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giannozzo Manetti, Annius of Viterbo, and Niccolò Machiavelli were accompanied by quite different ones, equally memorable, on such topics as the role of the Italian ambassador, fifteenth-century conspiracies, Florentine statutory reform, Jewish moneylending, the work of Pollaiuolo, the papacy of Nicholas V, and the career of a provincial chancellor in the Florentine territorial state. His grounding in fifteenth-century realities supplied the tools and confidence behind disagreements on important points with such luminaries as Eugenio Garin and Paul O. Kristeller, while it led to important collaborations in conferences and seminars with historians of politics, society, religion, economics, and, in recent years, art and architecture.

Many of his essays are collected in six important volumes: Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla (1990; published by Duke University Press in an English translation by Martha King in 2003); Italia quattrocentesca: diplomazia nell’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico (1994); Quattrocento fiorentino: politica, diplomazia, cultura (1996); L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: origini rinascimentali—critica moderna (2001); Storiografia dell’umanesimo in Italia: da Leonardo Bruni ad Annio da Viterbo (2003); and Politica e pensiero politico nell’Italia del Rinascimento (2009). A Festschrift dedicated to him, Il laboratorio del Rinascimento. Studi di storia e cultura per Riccardo Fubini (2015), was edited by Lorenzo Tanzini.

Fubini’s warm friendships embraced scholars and students of many generations, in Italy and abroad, in countries that included the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, South Korea, Israel, Australia, and Japan. He is survived by his wife, the historian Maria Fubini Leuzzi; three sons, Renzo, Federico, and Andrea; and several grandchildren.

William J. Connell
Seton Hall University

Anne Jacobson Schutte died from a cerebral hemorrhage on 26 February 2018. With her sudden death, the community of early modern historians lost one of its leading figures in Reformation history, gender studies, Inquisition studies, and Italian history.

Anne was raised in Palo Alto where her father worked for Stanford. After obtaining a BA from Pembroke College in Brown University, she returned to Stanford to earn a PhD in 1969 under the direction of Reformation historian Lewis W. Spitz. She remained fond of Stanford throughout her life and returned regularly to Palo Alto; indeed, just days before her death she commented on a recent article about the history of the university and its relationship to her own experience there as a child and as a student. A life-long lover of Italy, and of cats, Anne owned an apartment in Venice for many years, which she regularly rented to graduate students.  She frequently visited and collaborated with her Italian colleagues and friends, especially Silvana Seidel Menchi and Gabriella Zarri. Toward the end of her life she relocated to Chicago to ensure good medical care and to take advantage of the resources at the Newberry Library.

Anne’s life and career spanned and inspired generations of historians. She brought her rigorous training in German Reformation scholarship to Italian history, making a significant contribution to the field of Italian Reformation history with her first book Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer (1977). She also brought Italian historiography to English readers, introducing and announcing Carlo Ginzburg in an article in the Journal of Modern History (1976).  A recent notice in Rome’s La Repubblica commended the breadth of her knowledge and her work in countless libraries and archives, especially in the State Archives of Venice and the Inquisition archives in Rome. She loved the adventure of discovery, especially of small isolated archives and libraries, and her second book, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books, 1465–1550 (1983), speaks to her scholarly rigor and generosity, providing an invaluable scholarly resource for early modern religious history. 

Recalling the lessons that she had learned from Natalie Zemon Davis as a student at Pembroke, Anne also valued the perspective that stories from little-known repositories could add.  Careful study of individual experiences was at the heart of her books Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice (2001) and By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (2011). Both these prize-winning books challenged easy assumptions and generalizations. Lawsuits to relax monastic vows, for example, were more often brought by men, contrary to what many assumed from reading Manzoni’s description of the “Nun of Monza.” She continued to study unusual individual experiences to the end of her life: her translation and commentary on Cecilia Ferrazzi’s Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint (1996) for the Other Voice series was a notable contribution in that vein. At her death she was working on a project about lay saints, and a book on biographies of early modern saints. Her particular methodological contributions were at the heart of a 2009 festschrift in her honor—Ritratti. La dimensione individuale nella storia. Anne was the author of four books and editor or translator of seven more, including Fulvio Tomizza’s historical and literary reflection on a seventeenth-century Venetian— Heavenly Supper: The Story of Maria Janis (1991). In her books, editions, translations and over seventy articles, she explored the social realities behind the religious behaviors and images of the early modern period.

Anne was an active participant in the profession. She was a member of numerous scholarly organizations, including stints as vice-president and president of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and as a long-time member of the Sixteenth Century Journal editorial board.  She also was one of the American editors of Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte / Archive for Reformation History (1998–2009). In recognition of her contributions as program secretary and member of the executive council, she was honored in 2012 with the Bodo Nischan Award of the Society for Reformation Research.

Anne brought the same dedication and work ethic to her teaching. She began her career at Lawrence University in Wisconsin as an ABD, rising eventually to the rank of Full Professor. In 1992 she moved to the University of Virginia as Professor of History and soon obtained a joint appointment in Religious Studies; she worked closely with Duane Osheim, Erik Midelfort, Carlos Eire, Karen Parshall, Alison Weber, and Mary McKinley.  She was a serious teacher and a thoughtful, loyal mentor to students. Her classes were renowned for their intellectual rigor, and her comments (both written and oral) were frank and invariably on point. The brutal candor of her published book reviews came as no surprise to her students, who recognized her unwavering commitment to accuracy, clarity, and intellectual honesty.  She encouraged her graduate students to plow new scholarly terrain, both methodologically and geographically, supervising dissertations that explored an array of social and religious questions in Treviso, Verona, Bergamo, and other provincial cities of the Veneto.  Anne introduced her doctoral students to leading scholars and the most recent scholarship, and her dedication to archival research inspired numerous dissertations and books.  Leading by example, her professional and personal engagement earned the respect and admiration of students and colleagues.  To the end of her life she remained in contact with undergraduates she had advised at Lawrence and regularly communicated with her graduate students at conferences and in the archive.

Anne was not retiring in retirement. She continued to write, edit, and translate. She maintained an active correspondence with friends around the world.  Although she had recently fallen and worried that her arm was not healing properly, she still was planning another visit to Italy and talking with friends about a visit to China.

Duane J. Osheim (University of Virginia)
Christopher Carlsmith (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
David D’Andrea (Oklahoma State University)

He published sixty books and more than five-hundred essays, articles, and exhibition catalogues in various languages on the many aspects of his specialization. He was a member of the Permanent Commission for the National Edition of Manuscripts and Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. The honors received in Italy and abroad include the Gold Medal for Culture conferred by the President of the Italian Republic in 1972, and in the same year the Congressional Citation, the highest recognition from the government of the United States of America. He is also Honorary Citizen of the cities of Arezzo (2002); Vinci (2008); Romorantin, France (2010); Florence (2010); Lamporecchio (2011); and Pennabilli (2015). He holds the title of doctor honoris causa from three Italian universities, Ferrara (1992), Urbino (1998), and Milan (Cattolica, 1999), as well as one from the University of Caen, France (2003).

Professor Pedretti’s contribution to the knowledge of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings has capital importance. His direct study of the originals enabled him to carry out the lifelong task of reassembling Leonardo’s papers according to their original and chronological order. Hence, his pioneering and prophetic work was the catalogue of 1957 of the fragments of Leonardo drawings at Windsor from the Codex Atlanticus at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The outcome of this approach is the monumental edition of Leonardo drawings at Windsor (1968–69), followed by the edition of drawings by Leonardo and his circle in Florence (1985), in Turin (l990), and in the American collections (1993). His critical and facsimile editions of Leonardo’s texts include the Codex Hammer (1987), the Book on Painting (1995), and also the Codex Arundel (1998). Journalism, the activity that began Pedretti’s career over fifty years ago (he was a regular contributor to the Corriere della Sera, the major Italian newspaper, and L’Osservatore Romano, the prestigious Vatican newspaper), led him to involvement in television and cinema as author, actor, and consultant to producers and directors. He loved to remember his collaboration with his friend Piero Angela for the production of a series of episodes dedicated to Leonardo for the Superquarck broadcast. He was an honorary member of the Accademia degli Euteleti in San Miniato al Tedesco and of the Accademia Raffaello in Urbino. Recently, he was nominated honorary member of the Accademia Nazionale di Scienze Lettere ed Arti in Modena.

Carlo Pedretti’s publications are collected and commented upon in two books, as follows:

Joyce Pellerano Ludmer, Carlo Pedretti. A Bibliography of his Work on Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance [1944-1984]. Compiled by Joyce Pellerano Ludmer, The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana. Foreword by Kenneth Clark. In Celebration of His Twenty-Five Years with the University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.

Nathalie Guttmann. Carlo Pedretti’s Publications 1985-1995, with an Aftermath & a Supplement [1946-1998]. Florence, 1998.

A third publication, that includes the publications between 1999 up until today and edited by Margherita Melani, is to be added to this prolific list.

See also the Festschriften dedicated to him:

“Tutte le opere non son per istancarmi.” Raccolta di scritti per i settant’anni di Carlo Pedretti. Edited by Fabio Frosini. Rome: Edizioni Associate, 1998.

The Brill Series of Leonardo Studies: 1. Carlo Pedretti. Seventy years of his Leonardo Scholarship (1944–2014). A Festschrift edited by Constance Moffatt & Sara Taglialagamba. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

From the Rossana and Carlo Pedretti Foundation

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University
Pamela O. Long, Independent scholar and fellow of the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, 2015–20
Benjamin Weiss, Director of Collections and Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Visual Culture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Co-authors with Brian A. Curran of Obelisk: A History (MIT Press, 2009).

Many scholars from the US and abroad who have done research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, will remember fondly Elizabeth Walsh—known as “Betsy”—who was Head of Reader Services and worked at the Folger for forty-three years. Betsy passed away in September after a brief and heroic struggle with cancer.

As a native Washingtonian whose family lived and worked east of the capitol, Betsy spent much of her life in and around the Folger. She visited on high school trips to see student matinees, and in the summer of 1974 before her senior year as an English major at Trinity College, she worked as a circulation page. She continued working at the Folger part-time while earning a master’s in library science at the University of Maryland, and in 1986 she became Head of Reader Services.

Betsy’s knowledge of the Folger’s collections was broad and deep, enabling her to point many scholars in the direction they needed to go, often before they knew it themselves. She knew all the obscure corners of the collection, the old files, and the uncatalogued materials, and she shared this knowledge freely and gracefully with staff and readers. Betsy was never hierarchal or judgmental about giving out information. The woman who called because she wanted to name her cats after the witches in Macbeth received the same kind attention as a scholar in the reading room who needed to find early newsbooks or the high school teacher who was using primary source material for the first time. Betsy’s kindness meant that she was often the recipient of long disquisitions by researchers on their book topics or even on various theories about the Shakespeare authorship question. She would listen patiently and never let her good humor slip.

Betsy generously gave many tours, delighting in choosing just the right items from the collection that would interest visiting dignitaries, groups of actors, high school students, or readers and their families. She also worked on a number of exhibitions at the Folger; she co-curated Cathedral: Faith in Stone (1990), Yesterday’s News: Seventeenth-Century English Broadsides and Newsbooks (1995), and Voices for Tolerance in an Age of Persecution (2004). She was also a consultant on Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper (2008) and Open City: London 1500–1700 (2012).

Betsy’s longtime knowledge of Washington, DC, also made her an amazing resource for anyone who needed information on how to obtain special parking permits, or the best way to get onto I-95 from the Folger. Many readers learned their way around from Betsy; she referred them to local stores, or to dentists or clinics when they had a medical emergency. Betsy always cared about the whole person no matter what their academic degree or place of origin.            

Most of all, it was Betsy who, over the years, created the very special atmosphere felt by all those who came to use the Folger. She was warm and welcoming, and instilled those values into every generation of reading room staff, so that readers have felt they truly had a home in the Folger. When things were tough in their personal worlds, they knew they had another place to come. One scholar wrote in her book, “My home away from home has been the Folger Shakespeare Library,” as she acknowledged Betsy and the reading room staff in furthering her research. Betsy Walsh will be missed by many Folger readers and visitors, but her influence on generations of scholars endures as a tangible part of her memory.

Georgianna Ziegler
Associate Librarian and Head of Reference Emerita
Folger Shakespeare Library

Born on October 23, 1929 in New York City to his late parents Peter Sanford Ross Headley and Beatrice Miles Headley, he was preceded in death by his brother Peter Ogden Headley, of Richmond, Virginia. He earned his Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in History at Princeton University, 1951. He received his Master of Arts in History from Yale University in 1953 and subsequently served with the US Army Signal Corps, 1953–55. He returned to Yale and was awarded his PhD in History in 1960. He was an Instructor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1959–61 and Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, B.C., 1962–64. In 1964 he joined the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, remaining there until his retirement in 2003 as Distinguished University Professor.

Over his career he published widely in the fields of the European Renaissance and Reformation and global history. In November 2011, friends and colleagues honored him with a symposium, "From the Renaissance to the Modern World." His other academic honors included a Guggenheim fellowship (1974). His book Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (1997) won the Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association, the American Catholic Historical Association and the Society for Italian Historical Studies as well as the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. His other major books include The Problem with Multiculturalism: The Uniqueness and Universality of Western Civilization (2012); The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (2008); Church, Empire, and World: The Quest for Universal Order, 1520–1640 (1997); The Emperor and his Chancellor: A Study of the Imperial Chancellors under Gattinara (1983); Responsio ad Luterum, vol. 5 of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More (1969); and Luther's View of Church History (1963).

John is remembered for his dedication to his classes and to his students for generations. The high standards of his teachings and the quality of his scholarship remain an inspiration to them and to many others. He is survived by his two nephews Peter Mitchell Headley and Jonathan Miles Headley of Richmond, Virginia and his niece Elizabeth Headley Pearson of Deltaville, Virginia and eight grandnieces and nephews. The Headley family will receive family and friends at a memorial service at Walker's Funeral Home in Chapel Hill on Friday, October 6, 2017 at 4:00 p.m. with a reception to follow. In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the Frank Ryan and John Headley Dissertation Fellowship Fund of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Online condolences may be sent to the Headley family by visiting www.walkersfuneralservice.com.

Born in Paris, young George and his family moved to New York in that awful year of 1939, and in New York he grew to become a fixture of cultural commitment. He met and married Patsy Hochschild, who took her PhD in History at Harvard, wrote distinguished work on Venetian humanism, and was a pioneer in what we would now call Queer studies. Through her George entered the world of the Renaissance and the humanities, but he became more than a tag-along husband. He served as the vice president of the New York Public Library; dedicated himself along with Patsy to helping the Brearley School, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the American Academy in Rome; was a trustee of several museums and foundations including The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports scholarship about and art restoration in Venice; and for many years benefited the RSA as its Treasurer. The financial strength of the RSA owes a great deal to George’s friendship, and I would venture that most scholars of the Renaissance today are unaware of how much George Labalme has assisted their work.

To define George’s relationship to Renaissance studies by listing his institutional commitments, however, would miss the heart of the matter. George was a larger-than-life figure with his hearty laugh, his openhearted manner, and his love of doing good deeds. I first met George and Patsy when I was still a mere graduate student. The late Myron Gilmore invited me to a private dinner at I Tatti to meet them, and although I felt completely out of my element, the Labalmes made me feel comfortable and at home. Over the years there were many other meetings with George at his favorite haunts, including one when he advised Bill Kennedy and me about how to raise money for the RSA. George very carefully cultivated scholars, scholarly associations, and cultural figures that were of immense importance to Renaissance studies, US and beyond. He served a critical function as broker, connecting scholars to funders in the US, UK, Italy, and worldwide. Without that networking, Renaissance studies would be nothing like the flourishing field that it is today.

For many years we worked together to sustain the American (now International) Friends of the Marciana Library, an organization George cooked up to help that venerable but beleaguered institution. George became a great lover of all things Venetian and spent weeks there every year. One of his recent singular achievements was the Poetry of Light exhibition in 2014–15 of 140 drawings from the National Gallery put on at the Correr Museum in Venice. George died the gentleman he was, strolling on the streets of New York dressed in an elegant suit complete with his Venetian suspenders.

Edward Muir
Northwestern University

New York Times obituary

Margaret was exemplary on personal as well as professional levels. She was so wise, and her wisdom was so much part of her character—thoughtful and reflective, able to see various perspectives at once, calm when those around her were anxious. One of several occasions when I was privileged to encounter her wisdom firsthand was when we were coediting the Ashgate Research Companion to the Sidneys with Michael Brennan. She was always able to see through the surface noise to the deeper issues. She was never overly concerned with the little glitches that always come up in a large editing project; she had faith that all would turn out right as of course it did. Whatever her health concerns, she set her worries aside to answer emails about what were sometimes trivial matters (whether to capitalize a lord’s title in this vs. that circumstance). She was always dependable and ever encouraging. I was privileged to encounter her wisdom on a personal level as well. Long ago, when I was considering marriage to my current husband, who is a mathematician, she asserted, “Well, mathematicians make excellent husbands, but you do have to dress them.” She was of course right. I miss her so much, and I am still trying to pretend that she is right there, on the other side of my email, ready to advise me on anything from husbands to capitalizations.

Mary Ellen Lamb
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Born in Bergamo on 22 February 1943, Germana often recalled with fond memories her first teaching assignment at a secondary school in the Alpine town of Bormio, while still a student at the Università Statale di Milano. After graduating with a thesis on Campanella’s Apologia pro Galileo, written under the supervision of her mentor Mario dal Pra, she dedicated most of her academic career to research on the philosopher’s life, texts, and thought. Her stated aim in the introduction to her edition of Campanella’s Lettere (2010), which takes its cue from a self-referential metaphor employed by the philosopher himself, may be extended to describe her lifelong scholarly activities: “to remove some of the layers of rust so as to allow the bell [‘campanella’] to regain its silvery sound.”

Through her many articles, books, and editions of primary texts, Germana Ernst made important and original contributions to all the main aspects of Campanella’s elaborate philosophical enterprise: natural philosophy, metaphysics, theology, natural magic, prophecy, astrology, ethics, and politics. She privileged the text as the basis for any meaningful interpretation, and insisted on the importance of reading each one of Campanella’s writings within the unitary context of his entire corpus. Her editions of Campanella’s published and unpublished works include Articuli prophetales (1977), Città del sole (1996), Monarchia di Spagna (1997), Opuscoli astrologici (2003), De libris propriis et de recta studendi syntagma (2007), Del senso delle cose e della magia (2007), Lettere (2010), Ethica; Quaestiones super ethicam (2012), Tre Questioni politiche contro Aristotele (2013), and Economica; Questioni economiche (2016). Her Tommaso Campanella: il libro e il corpo della natura (2002), the most comprehensive intellectual biography of the Calabrian philosopher, traces “the origins, development and persistence of some of the fundamental themes of his philosophy.” It has since been translated into French (2007) and English (2010).

One of “the greatest emotions of [her] life,” she wrote very recently, was her discovery of the autograph Italian manuscript of Ateismo trionfato, which appeared in 2004 as the inaugural text in an ongoing series of Campanella’s works published by the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The Ateismo, the work closest to Campanella’s heart, fascinated Germana on account of both the complexity of its contents and its tortuous history, which accompanied and mirrored the tragic life story of its author. When she got wind of preliminary plans to publish a Festschrift to mark her retirement, Germana actively dissuaded friends and colleagues from going to such lengths. This was typical of her genuine unpretentiousness as well as her endearing tenacity. As a compromise of sorts, she agreed to the publication of the anastatic reproduction of the 1631 Latin edition of Atheismus triumphatus (2013), which was dedicated to her and included a tabula gratulatoria featuring many friends and colleagues. This initiative had pleased her immensely.

Together with Eugenio Canone, in 1995 Germana Ernst founded Bruniana & Campanelliana, which has since established itself as a leading journal on Renaissance and early modern philosophy and history of ideas. Indefatigable as always, as its coeditor she was still soliciting submissions and reviewing articles until a few days before her untimely passing.

Besides her work on Campanella, Germana Ernst wrote about Bruno, Cardano, Della Porta, Galileo, and Vanini. She also dealt with various aspects of Renaissance thought and intellectual culture, particularly magic and astrology. She was appointed a corresponding member of the Académie Internationale des Sciences in 2006. The town of Stilo, Campanella’s birthplace, conferred her with honorary citizenship in 2007. She had been a member of the RSA for many years.

Germana was a brilliant scholar, a formidable teacher, a generous mentor, and a treasured friend to many. She will be remembered above all as a person of great wisdom and humanity, admirable simplicity, and contagious enthusiasm.

Jean-Paul De Lucca
University of Malta

Beyond his books and many articles, Dan’s research and scholarship helped to shape the entire discipline of emblem studies over the decades by establishing its key journal, hosting an international conference, organizing an exhibition, and teaching courses on emblems, among the many other, often invisible tasks that initiate new directions in research and support new fields of scholarly research. Dan’s efforts did much to elevate the status of emblem studies worldwide: he was co-founder of Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, which he co-edited for many years. A sign of his generosity to the field and to his students, he co-taught with me a semester-long consortium seminar on emblems at the Newberry Library, in 2005, for which he regularly commuted to Chicago. He was a noted and well-liked teacher and gave very generously of his time to younger scholars, read dissertations from around the world, advised and planned the discipline, and saw to good succession plans at various stages of the discipline’s growth, the early part of which he established and oversaw. He enjoyed introducing students to emblem studies, mentoring younger colleagues, and doing the work of the discipline. He often did the heavy lifting. While he was the leading emblem scholar in the US for a number of years, he was also widely respected internationally as indicated by his position as president of the international Society for Emblem Studies, an honorary title that colleagues bestow selectively and at infrequent intervals for contributions to all areas of emblem studies.

Dan was a good friend and mentor.  He helped put emblem studies on the radar for all Renaissance scholars.

Mara Renée Wade

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Eisenstein earned her BA at Vassar College in 1944 and her PhD at Radcliffe College in 1953 with a dissertation entitled "The evolution of the Jacobin tradition in France, the survival and revival of the ethos of 1793 under the Bourbon and Orleanist regimes," supervised by Crane Brinton. She developed one of its chapters into her first book: The first professional revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761–1837) (Harvard University Press, 1959) in which she traced the career of this Italian transplant to revolutionary Paris. She returned to the history of France after her books on printing, in her Lyell Lectures published in Grub Street Abroad. Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (1992). Eisenstein excelled at close readings of the works of other scholars, engaging both with the evidence they provided and with their arguments. Her earliest article, published in The American Historical Review (1965), attacked Georges Lefebvre's Marxist interpretation of the source of French revolutionary initiative in 1789. Lefebvre had died some years before, but her article triggered rebuttals from two scholars to whom Eisenstein replied in turn, with sharp judgments. Similarly Eisenstein conceded nothing to her critics in the debates that accompanied the reception of her arguments about printing, notably in a forum of the American Historical Review in 2002.

Eisenstein's prophetic focus on printing, first visible in her articles in History and Theory (1966), the Journal of Modern History (1968) and Past and Present (1969), originated from a position of marginalization within the profession. She encountered a sexist job market in the 1950s when she sought employment alongside her physicist husband on a variety of campuses. When the family settled in Washington DC, she held a part-time lectureship at American University starting in 1959. In 1975 she was offered the University of Michigan's Alice Freeman Palmer Chair of History—appropriately named after a great champion of women’s higher learning—which she held until 1988. Throughout her fifty-seven years of residence in Washington, DC (including years of commuting to Michigan), Betty Eisenstein was an active participant in the activities of the Folger Library and the Library of Congress. In 1973 she directed one of the first semester-long seminars at the recently founded Folger Institute, entitled “Early Printers and Cultural Change (1470–1570)." In 1999 she directed a second such seminar on what became the topic of her last book, Divine Art, Infernal Machine. The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (2011). Three participants in that Folger seminar, inspired by her work and mentorship, went on to coedit a volume of essays in her honor: Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 2007). That collection of twenty essays attests to the broad reach of Eisenstein's work across multiple disciplinary and geographical specialties and includes a full bibliography and detailed interview in which Eisenstein reflected on her remarkable career and the many strands of work in book history and print culture studies, which she did so much to inspire. Her energy was boundless, as is evident from her distinguished record in senior women's tennis and her infectious enthusiasm for learning new things and conversing with younger scholars at conferences. She received many honors and awards, including the American Historical Association Award for Scholarly Distinction (2002), an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan (2004), and the Gutenberg Award from the City of Mainz in 2012.

Julian Eisenstein, her husband of 68 years, followed her in death on April 27, 2016. They are survived by a son, Edward Eisenstein, and a daughter, Margaret Eisenstein DeLacy, and their families. A joint memorial service will be held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, in late summer. 

Ann Blair

His skill at interrelating the religious and the secular emerged again in a co-authored book with his former Rutgers colleague Rudolph Bell that used quantitative data to explore the social factors at work (class, gender, geography) in how the Catholic Church canonized its saints from 1000 to 1700. Their research revealed a surprising increase in the declaration of new saints, including many women, during this very same “secular” fifteenth century. Saints and Society moved the study of saints’ lives away from the exclusive terrain of hagiographers and devotees into the mainstream of historical inquiry. Returning to Savonarola almost 20 years after his retirement, Weinstein examined the evolution of the religious thinker become political leader in a 2011 biography Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet. Savonarola believed, Weinstein says, “he was leading Florence to the New Jerusalem, but he was also traveling a path of increasing fanaticism that could only take him to desperation, delusion, and disaster. Still, it is unhelpful to dismiss Savonarola as a fanatic or a charlatan; this obscures his noble vision and slights his strenuous efforts on behalf of social justice and political liberty.” Thus, Savonarola alienated patricians by introducing a popular government and sacrificing their treasures in a bonfire of “vanities.” In 1498, he was arrested, and under torture confessed to heresy, recanted, and then was hanged and burned. By examining Savonarola’s mysticism, Weinstein showed the increasingly political prophet being finally undone by politics and his own millenarian visions. “The challenge is to integrate—as he himself never ceased trying to do—the irascible puritan at war with his world, the charismatic preacher who, as Machiavelli would have it, adapted ‘his lies’ to the times, the ascetic contemplative enraptured by divine love, and the militant herald of a new age.”

Weinstein almost necessarily concerned himself with the impact of religious faith on political realities as his Orthodox Jewish father Harris (Avram Zvi), immigrated from a shtetl near Minsk to the United States to escape the Tsar’s armies. Weinstein himself, born and raised in Rochester, NY, joined the army to oppose Nazism. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his combat with the 4th Division in the invasion of Germany that followed the Battle of the Bulge. After the war the far-sighted G.I. bill allowed him to attend the University of Chicago, where he took the famous Core designed by Robert Maynard Hutchins—two circumstances whose importance he stressed throughout his life. He earned his B.A. and M.A. at Chicago and his doctorate at Iowa.

A Fulbright grant allowed his initial exposure to the immense manuscript riches of the National Library and Archives and to study at the University of Florence in 1953–55. It was there that he married his first wife, Anne Kingsley, the mother of his two children, Jonathan and Elizabeth. After receiving the Ph.D. in 1957, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin in 1957–58, and was a lecturer in history at the University of Iowa in 1958–59. He taught for two years at Roosevelt University, in Chicago, an institution rooted in social justice principles, making that, he said later, some of his most important work as a teacher. He moved to Rutgers for the next eighteen years where he advanced from Assistant Professor to Distinguished Professor. In that period he earned fellowships at the Villa I Tatti in Florence (1962–63) and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1964–65). At Rutgers, he met his wife, Beverly Parker. Thus began a partnership involving Weinstein’s writing and extensive political activism and community service. The couple moved to Tucson when Weinstein took on the headship of the History Department at the University of Arizona. He was Head from 1978–87 and retired in 1992.

As department Head, he brought Heiko A. Oberman, the prominent historian of the Protestant Reformation, to Tucson and thus helped form the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, which still functions in active cooperation with the Department of History. He taught night school classes at Fort Huachuca where he commuted an hour each way from Tucson twice a week even as he ran the department. In partnership with the Arizona Historical Society, he brought Tucson’s high schools into the national “History Day,” in which students competed by writing research papers on historical subjects. He devised an interdisciplinary outreach series of round tables and lectures to involve the community in university-level discussions of current issues.

After retiring, he continued to teach. He devised a new course on Italian Renaissance great books. He attended oral exams and served on dissertation committees. He continued to publish. Building on a dossier of depositions he found in the archives of Pisa, he wrote a micro-history, The Captain’s Concubine, about the trial growing out of a 1578 street brawl. He edited Heiko Oberman’s The Two Reformations when the author’s death prevented the conclusion of that work. He translated L’Assassino del Duca: Esilio e Morte di Lorenzo de’ Medici by Stefano Dall’Aglio. Beyond all this, he completed his own magisterial biography of Savonarola.

After moving with Beverly to Sonoita, Arizona, in 1996, he joined the Crossroads Community Forum and worked on a Master Plan for development. He volunteered as a dispatcher with the local fire department. He opposed creating an open pit mine in the beautiful Santa Rita Mountains. He defended Southern Arizona’s natural environment by opposing roads through canyons and new power lines.

From the battlefield to the library, from Florence to Arizona, from prophecy to politics, from leadership to service, Don Weinstein lived a full life. He combined academic achievement and civic commitment to a very high degree of excellence and effectiveness.

Edward Muir

New York Times obituary

One of the most original and influential Renaissance scholars of the last half-century, Lisa studied at Cambridge and Essex: first mathematics, then literature. As that start suggests, her work always crossed borders—something she was encouraged to do at the Warburg Institute, where she spent three years as a senior research fellow. Her first book, a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, dealt with Francis Bacon’s efforts to reform the arts of argument. It illuminated not only his writings, but also the teaching of dialectic in Cambridge—a subject that became one of her lasting interests.

Over the next forty years, Lisa published a massive series of books and articles, on subjects as varied as the history of education in the Renaissance and the future of progressive politics in the UK, Renaissance literature and the scientific pursuits of the Royal Society, the literary career of Erasmus and the lives and work of Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. Everything she wrote came from new research, and every new book or article revealed new ways of imagining and understanding the past.

Lisa could transform materials that everyone else found dull and forbidding into richly human sources. Her studies of Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia opened up what is now a central field in Renaissance Studies, the history of reading. An expert user of libraries and archives, she created and directed the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, which combines the traditional methods of philology and bibliography with cutting-edge information technology to build new kinds of archive and critical edition. But she was equally at home in very different realms. One of the most popular of her many writings for a large public eloquently evoked the power of wearing red.

With Worldly Goods Lisa made the material turn, well ahead of most other historians of the Renaissance. In her studies of Hooke, Wren and Constantijn Huyghens, one of the heroes of Going Dutch, she followed her protagonists out of the archive into gardens, churches and even up the Monument, which Hooke and Wren tried to use as a zenith observatory. These accomplishments brought her many honors: she was made a CBE, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded the Francis Bacon Prize by Caltech.

Honors mattered less to Lisa than what she called, echoing Erasmus, her familia: the group of younger scholars that always seemed to surround her. A dedicated mentor, she not only trained extraordinary students, but also often took them on as collaborators. Though her formal teaching career unrolled in the United Kingdom, at Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, and University College London, she spent a number of happy periods teaching and doing research in the United States, at Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Caltech. Both Americans who studied with her at Cambridge and London and those who met her during her American trips benefited immensely from her painstaking criticism of their work and her unstinting moral support. A number of them became her research and writing partners.

Lisa’s public engagements were as many—and as formidable—as her academic posts and honors. She broadcast as a writer and presenter for the BBC 4 program A Point of View, and often wrote for newspapers and for the BBC website. She acted as a judge for a number of literary prizes, including what was then the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for fiction. With characteristic public spirit and generosity, she served for many years as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and as chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

It is a principle universally acknowledged that one looks in vain in university faculties for public spirit and civil courage. Lisa was a great exception to this melancholy rule. Always deeply engaged in teaching and scholarship, she somehow found time to serve her universities and a vast range of other institutions as well. Often the first woman to hold a particular position, give an endowed lecture or chair a distinguished group, she always did the job brilliantly and effectively—and always, as she did in Berlin, stood up for those without privileges and power.

Anthony Grafton

“What you want to study, you first need to love it” – she once said to her colleague and friend Gian Carlo Alessio. Proofs of this love are – among other things – decades of painstaking research in the archives of Venice, the publication of four influential monographs and dozens of articles, the foundation of the internationally renowned Centro di Studi Medievali e Rinascimentali “Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna”, the organization of conferences in Italy and abroad, and the careful supervision of countless doctoral students.

The single-handed reappraisal of Marin Sanudo, however, is perhaps the finest product of Prof. Caracciolo’s passionate scholarship. By lovingly unearthing Sanudo’s habitation, library, circle of friends, artistic taste and unpublished works, she rediscovered a great man and intellectual, where historians had only seen a documentary source.

The East Hampton Star published an obituary.

Artnet News obituary

Wall Street Journal

Save Venice Inc.

Paul Alpers, a UC Berkeley professor of English for 38 years, died 19 May 2013 at his home in Northampton, Mass. He was the husband of Smith College President Carol Christ, who served as Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost from 1994 to 2000.

Alpers, who had been battling cancer, was the founding director of UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, a former chair of the English Department, a 1972 winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Class of 1942 Professor of English Emeritus. He retired from the faculty in 2002, the year his wife began her new post at Smith. At Smith, Alpers was a professor in residence in the Department of English Language and Literature.

Alpers’ first book, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene, introduced a new way of reading English poet Edmund Spenser. In his second book, on Virgil’s Eclogues, he initiated his work on the pastoral genre of literature, art and music. His next book, What is Pastoral? was a foundational work that won both the Christian Gauss Award and the Harry Levin Award. He also was a founding editor of the journal Representations, which was first published by UC Press in 1983.

Alpers was born on Oct.16, 1932, and received his B.A. and Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. During his career, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Philosophical Society.

He is survived by his wife, Carol Christ; his sons, Benjamin and Nicholas Alpers; his stepchildren Jonathan and Elizabeth Sklute; four grandchildren; two brothers, David and Edward Alpers; and his former wife, Svetlana Alpers.

The Amici Thomae Mori Society, Moreana’s Editorial Board, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissnace Studies wish to honor the memory of Clare M. Murphy, who passed away on June 22, 2013, the feast of St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher. She had been a Thomas More scholar for the past thirty years, and a member of the RSA since 1962. She died in hospice in Phoenix, Arizona at age 80 of ovarian cancer after a brief hospitalization.

Clare was born in Cleveland and earned her B. A. and M. A. in English from Case Western Reserve. She took her PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1964.

Clare was Professor Emerita of English from the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where she worked from 1964 until 1990, after teaching at Tufts University (1961-64). Taking early retirement, she then joined the Moreanum Center in Angers, France, working with Abbé Germain Marc’hadour and succeeding him as Editor of the journal Moreana from 1992 until 2002. She continued to live in Angers, publishing and conferencing, until 2010.

With Henri Gibaud and Mario A. di Cesare, she was editor of Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, 1989 (also published as Moreana 100: Mélanges Marc’hadour). She also was in the midst of editing a collection of new essays on Margaret More Roper, Thomas More’s daughter, by well-known scholars. This collection is in progress and will be completed in Clare’s honor.

Clare M. Murphy was a specialist of Thomas More and early Tudor humanism, Erasmus, John Fisher, and John Colet. She presented papers in many conferences around the world and wrote a number of articles in such journals as The Catholic Historical Review, Sixteenth Century Journal, Moreana, and Autrement Dire (U. of Nancy, France). She was a long-time member and participant in the triennial conference of the International Association of Neo-Latin Studies and published regularly in its proceedings. An indefatigable champion of excellent scholarship in More studies, she co-organized international conferences on Thomas More in Maynooth, Ireland (1998), Fontevrault, France (2001), Santa Fe, Argentina (2004), and Amherst, Massachusetts (2007). She was planning another international conference on More in Victoria, Canada in the near future. She was also the founder of the International Association for Thomas More Scholarship, an official RSA Associate Organization.

In 2010, she joined the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) in Tempe as an Adjunct Scholar and continued organizing sessions for the RSA’s Annual Conferences and writing reviews in the Renaissance Quarterly. She was an active member of ACMRS, attending lectures and other functions, and she served as a session chair for panels at its annual conference. ACMRS is pleased to have supported her scholarly endeavors for the past three-plus years. Clare was also a member of the Arizona State University Newman Center community.

A number of scholars owe her their first participation in international conferences, and she will be missed by her friends among the Thomas More scholars.

Memorials may be mailed, in support of the Margaret Roper volume (donors will be listed in the publication), to the Clare Murphy Memorial Fund, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), Arizona State University, P. O. Box 874402, Tempe, AZ, 852878-4402 (donation is tax-deductible; check payable to the "ASU Foundation,” which exists to support ASU); or the Amici Thomae Mori Society (see http://www.amici-thomae-mori.com/uk/association.asp?rub=4 for check, bank transfer, or online payment instructions).

Prof. Philip J. Ford, FBA died on 8 April 2013, aged just 64. Educated at the University of Cambridge, where he pursued most of his professional career, Philip Ford was an internationally distinguished specialist of sixteenth-century French and Neo-Latin poetry. The Scottish humanist George Buchanan and French poet Pierre de Ronsard constituted particular foci of research; however, Philip Ford also explored the broader correlation between humanism and writing; Renaissance mythography; and the reception of Ancient Latin and Greek literature, particularly Homer.

Philip published five monographs, two critical editions, as well as numerous articles; he was also the editor or co-editor of a staggering fourteen collective volumes, including the ‘Cambridge French Colloquia’ series. His latest book The Judgment of Palaemon. The Contest between Neo-Latin and Vernacular Poetry in Renaissance France (Leiden, 2013) is a particularly apposite witness to his long-standing interest in the interaction between the two competing modes of literary expression in the Renaissance.

Vice-President of the Société Française pour l’étude du Seizième Siècle (2006-2009), and President of the Fédération internationale des Instituts et Société pour l’Étude de la Renaissance (2007-2013), Philip Ford served on the Executive Board of the of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies for fifteen years (IANLS President, 2006-2009). He tirelessly organised conferences and workshops at Cambridge and elsewhere and coordinated panels at several RSA meetings. Philip Ford is remembered for his dedication, energy and critical poise as a scholar, but also for his fine human qualities, including his love of languages and the genuine interest and encouragement he extended to many a student and early career researcher.

Ingrid De Smet – July 2012

For more and fuller obituaries, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-philip-ford-scholar-of-the-renaissance-8616082.html (M. Moriarty); http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3795350.ece (John O’Brien); obituaries by Ingrid De Smet are in press in Renaissance, Humanisme, Réforme (in French) and the Neulateinisches Jahrbuch (in English).

Argentinian by birth and upbringing, Dr. Lerner taught in Buenos Aires until the 1966 military coup drove him into exile. After teaching at Lehman College for seven years, he was appointed to the doctoral faculty in 1978, served as executive officer from 1985 to1993, and transferred full-time to the Graduate Center in 1992. In 1999 he was appointed Distinguished Professor.

Acclaimed internationally for his work on sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish literature, colonial Latin American literature, and the history of the Spanish language, Dr. Lerner was the author and editor of thirteen books and over a hundred articles and reviews. The two-volume annotated edition of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (a collaboration with another great scholar, Celina Sabor de Cortazar) is one of the great editions of Cervantes’ master work. His book Arcaísmos léxicos del español de América won the Augusto Malaret Prize from the Royal Spanish Academy.

The brilliance of his wide-ranging scholarship was matched by his dedication to his students. During his thirty-four years of service to the Graduate Center, he chaired thirty dissertations and served as second reader for forty-two.

We extend deep sympathies to his wife, Lía Schwartz, Distinguished Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and former executive officer of the HLBLL program, and their daughter Bettina. A tribute at the Graduate Center is being planned for this Spring.  

(Written by William P. Kelly, CUNY Graduate Center, President)

Following brief apprenticeships in Rome and Lyon, in 1961 Costa joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Italian, where he served until his retirement in 1991 first as instructor, then as assistant, associate, and full professor, with two terms as department chair.  

Gustavo’s scholarly accomplishments were extraordinary, both in quality and in quantity.  Perhaps best known for his work on the literary, intellectual and cultural milieu of Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries (and its relationship to the European Enlightenment more generally—including Locke, Montesquieu, Descartes and many, many others), and above all on Vico, he published as well on Dante, Pontano, Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Foscolo, Mazzini, and Pirandello, among many others.  His oeuvre includes 3 long monographic essays, 111 articles and review articles, 52 notes, and 332 reviews.  His books number nine, six of which, remarkably, appeared in the years since his retirement.  (See below for bibliographic references.)  

Costa’s vast learning and incisive intellect, his attention both to the great questions and to the crucial details of Italian culture, were, and are, an inspiration to his colleagues and former students, as, indeed, was his extraordinary dedication to our profession, a dedication that continued to shine out until the very hour of his death.  He is survived by his widow, the scholar Natalia Costa-Zalessow, by his daughter Dora, and his grandson Alexander.   

Books by Gustavo Costa

1. La critica omerica di Thomas Blackwell (1701-1757) (Florence: G.C. Sansoni 1959).
2. La leggenda dei secoli d’oro nella letteratura italiana (Bari: Laterza, 1972). 
3. Le antichità germaniche nella cultura italiana da Machiavelli a Vico (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1977).
4. Il sublime e la magia da Dante a Tasso (Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1994).
5. Vico e l’Europa: Contro «la boria delle nazioni» (Milan: Guerini, 1996).
6. Malebranche e Roma: Documenti dell’Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2003).
7. Thomas Burnet e la censura pontificia (con documenti inediti) (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2006)
8. Celestino Galiani e la Sacra Scrittura: Alle radici del pensiero napolitano del Settecento, Pref. by Farizio Lomonaco. (Rome: Aracne, 2011).
9. Epicureismo e pederastia: Il «Lucrezio» e l’ «Anacreonte» di Alessandro Marchetti secondo il Sant’Uffizio (Florence:L.S. Olschki, 2012).

 [Obituary by Albert R. Ascoli, University of California, Berkeley]

Shona Kelly Wray, who died unexpectedly in early May in Florence, Italy, was Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she taught courses and conducted research in late medieval Italian history. She earned her BA from the University of California at Davis (1986), an MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1990), and a PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1999). She was a Fulbright student at the University of Bologna, Italy (1986–87) and Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2002–03); in 2011–12 she was a Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. Her research examined the social history of late medieval Italy, focusing on social responses to the Black Death, notarial culture and testaments, peace settlements and conflict resolution, women's property issues, and faculty families in Bologna.

Her publications included Communities and Crisis: Bologna during the Black Death (Leiden: Brill, 2009), Across the Religious Divide: Women, Gender, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800), coedited with Jutta Sperling (New York: Routledge, 2010), and articles in books and journals such as the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Medieval History, the Journal of Medieval Prosopography. She taught courses on the Black Death, gender and family in medieval and early modern Europe, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and world history.

Shona was a brilliant scholar-teacher, beloved by her colleagues and students. A student of medieval and Renaissance Italy, medieval feminist scholarship, medical history, and more, Shona was one of the brightest lights of her generation. She was in Florence at Villa I Tatti during AY 2011–2012 doing research for what promised to be a groundbreaking social history of the households and family of faculty at the University of Bologna in the fourteenth century.

A native Californian, her peregrinatio academica began early with sojourns in New Zealand and England as a child in the company of her sister Maggi and her parents while they were on sabbatical. Her love of the outdoors was also kindled in those years, and she later reveled in the chance to enjoy the mountains of Colorado during her graduate school years. An accomplished swimmer and a graceful dancer, Shona was able to achieve excellence in both mind and body. She delighted in the company of her husband, economist Randall Wray, and her two teenage children, Shane and Alina. The outpouring of affection from colleagues and friends in the wake of her death focused primarily upon Shona’s laughter, generosity, and kindness, traits evident to everyone who knew her. Her intellectual curiosity encompassed not just Italian history, but a myriad of other topics too, from Colorado mining towns to the creation of fine wine. Testaments from colleagues, family, and friends, as well as a listing of memorial services, conferences, and scholarships planned in Shona’s honor, are available at a website created by Shona’s sister Maggi, at http://shonakellywray.squarespace.com.

Submitted by Christopher Carlsmith (30 May 2012)

He was a retired Professor of History and Political Science from the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He served as President of the American Cusanus Society from 1983-2008 and was also editor of the American Cusanus Society Newsletter from its debut in 1984 to the present. His research on the historical context of the life and political thought of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) set the standard for all work done in this field in the English language. Professor Watanabe was a RSA member since 1962.

Professor Watanabe's works include:

Nicholas of Cusa: A Companion to his Life and his Times, Morimichi Watanabe; edited by Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki (Ashgate, 2011).

Concord and Reform. Nicholas of Cusa and Legal and Political Thought in the Fifteenth Century, edited by Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki (Ashgate, 2001).

The Political Ideas of Nicholas of Cusa, with Special Reference to his De concordantia catholica (Droz, 1963.)

Also: Press Release from LIU Post.

Sella took his Laurea at the University of Milan in 1949, a MA (1951) from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana and his doctorate from the University of Milan (1954). Published works include Commerci e industrie a Venezia nel secolo XVII (1961), Salari e lavoro nell’edilizia Lombarda nel secolo XVII (1968), Crisis and Continuity: The Economy of Spanish Lombardy in the Seventeenth Century (1979) and Italy in the Seventeenth Century (1997).

He was preceded in death by his wife, Annamaria.  He is survived by his older brother, Francesco, in Lausanne, and his sister, Cristiana, in Milan, his four children, Barbara, Monica, Antonio and Roberto, and ten grandchildren.   

Please see here and here.

Kingdon received his B.A. in 1949 from Oberlin College and his M.A. (1950) and Ph.D. (1955) in History from Columbia University.  His published works include Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555-1563 (1956; 2007), Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564-1571 (1967); Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572-1576 (1988); and Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva (1995).

He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Iowa before joining the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as full professor in 1965. 

He is survived by his sister, Anna Carol Dudley of Berkeley, California, and his brothers, Henry Shannon Kingdon of Drummond, Wisconsin, John Wells Kingdon of Washington, D.C., and Arthur McAfee Kingdon of Vassalboro, Maine.

Please also see the obituaries in the March 2011 issue of AHA's Perspectives and from the University of Wisconsin.

Sally Scully, professor emerita of San Francisco State University, died very peacefully at her San Francisco home on April 15, 2011, with her husband, children, and sister attending. The cause was multiple organ failure from metastatic breast cancer, which had first been diagnosed in 1993.

Sally was a member of the SF State history faculty from 1974 to 2005. She did her graduate work at Harvard, where she was among the first female history Ph.D. recipients (1975), writing on lawyers at Paris and Bologna in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She was particularly proud of her undergraduate years at Smith College (B.A. 1961), where she won the Annual Prize for the outstanding work in History Honors. She was an inspiring role model for a generation of women students and scholars. Before joining the SF State faculty, she also taught at Harvard College, the City College of New York, and the College of the Holy Cross, and held a Robbins Fellowship at the Institute for Medieval Canon Law at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law (1972-74).

After a formative visit to Italy, Sally’s main intellectual interests shifted to Renaissance Florence and Venice, whose histories she taught for many years. She received several grants for archival work in Venice, working mainly on the life and times of a seventeenth-century woman who endured three Inquisition trials on charges of witchcraft. She also wrote on Venetian travel literature and Renaissance historiography. Her most recent article (2010) was on "Carnality and the Venetian Inquisition."

In 1981 in Venice she married her husband, David McNeil (now professor emeritus of history at San José State University); their son Trevor McNeil is currently working in the Middle East with the National Democratic Institute. In later years, she and David enjoyed exotic travel, along with frequent stays in their "little stone house" in eastern Tuscany.

At San Francisco State, Sally played leadership roles in Phi Beta Kappa and the United Professors of California. As the first faculty director of the campus Presidential Scholars Program, a post she held from 1996-2002, she created a model "college within a college" program. For the California State University System, she twice directed the overseas campus in Florence (1994-95 and 2002-03). She of course accompanied David when he directed the CSU campus in France (Aix-en-Provence, 1983-84).

Sally had a number of passions, which her international circle of friends found delightful and infectious. She entertained with warmth and elegance, cooked with professional skill and was the very embodiment of "bella figura." She was widely and impressively knowledgeable about art, literature, and jazz. A passionate supporter of movements for social justice, she was often moved to participate in demonstrations. She delighted in her friends (many of them former students) and, even in illness, retained her tremendous sense of humor and interest in the larger world.

In addition to her husband and son, she leaves a daughter, Nadja Jackson, of Los Altos; a sister, Susan Scully Troy of Wellesley MA; a granddaughter; and several nieces and nephews.