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Medieval Academy Dissertation Grant Honorees
Hope Emily Allen
(1883-1960) was born in Oneida, N.Y., where her parents had
been members of the millenarian Oneida Community. She obtained
her bachelor's and master's degrees at Bryn Mawr College and
there, under the teaching of Carleton Brown, developed her
life-long interest in religious and mystical literature. Although
Allen went on to study at Radcliffe College and at Newnham
College, Cambridge, she never obtained a doctorate, nor did
she ever hold a professorial post. Nonetheless, as an independent
scholar she was recognized in both Britain and in North America
as a leading expert in her field, particularly on the Ancrene
Riwle, the subject of many of her articles, and on Richard
Rolle; her Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of
Hampole, and Materials for His Biography (1927) and English
Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (1931) remain
starting points of Rolle research. In 1934 Allen's opinion
was sought about a manuscript that had been owned for generations
by a Norfolk family. She quickly identified the contents as
the complete text of a work previously known only through
a 1501 excerpt, The Book of Margery Kempe; in 1940
Allen and Sanford Meech published a scholarly edition of the
work, which is regarded as the first autobiography in English.
Helen Maud Cam (1885-1968), one of
nine children, was educated at home by her parents before
attending Royal Holloway College in London. After receiving
first-class honors in history in 1907, she studied for a year
at Bryn Mawr College. Cam's first teaching position was at
Royal Holloway; in 1921 she moved to Girton College, Cambridge,
and in 1930 was made a University Lecturer. Cam's research
interests were in English history, especially legal and constitutional
history; she was a prolific writer of articles and books,
including Studies in the Hundred Rolls: Some Aspects of
Thirteenth-Century Administration (1921); The Hundred
and the Hundred Rolls: An Outline of Local Government in Medieval
England (1930); and England before Elizabeth (1950).
Cam's interests were not purely academic: she was active in
the Cambridge Labour Party and in youth organizations, and
she encouraged her students to take an interest in local government.
In 1948 Cam moved across the Atlantic, becoming the first
woman professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard
University.
Grace Frank (1886-1978), a founding
member of the Medieval Academy, grew up in Chicago and received
her bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1907.
After graduate study and research at Bryn Mawr, Göttingen,
Berlin, and the Vatican Library-and a stint as a Red Cross
nurse in an Army hospital in Italy during World War I-Frank
began her teaching career at Bryn Mawr. As part of a "two-career
couple" (her husband was a professor of classics at Johns
Hopkins), Frank lived in Baltimore and commuted weekly to
Bryn Mawr, a routine that she maintained for a quarter of
a century, before retiring in 1952. In spite of the heavy
demands imposed by this schedule, Frank was an active teacher,
supervising numerous doctoral dissertations at Bryn Mawr.
She was also an active participant in the intellectual and
cultural life of both Bryn Mawr and Baltimore and served the
Academy as Third Vice-President from 1948 to 1951. Frank's
first book (1922) was an edition of the recently discovered
Passion du Palatinus; this was followed by editions
of Le miracle de Théophile by Rutebeuf (1925), Le
livre de la Passion (1930), and La Passion d'Autun
(1934) and over forty articles on Villon, Marie de France,
Jean Bodel, and others. Her best-known book, reprinted several
times, is The Medieval French Drama (1954), a comprehensive
survey of the topic.
Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) was born
in Paris, the third son of a shopkeeper. After attending Catholic
schools, he studied at the Sorbonne under Emile Durkheim,
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and others; he also attended Henri Bergson's
lectures at the Collège de France. Gilson's teaching career
was interrupted by World War I, during which he became a prisoner
of war; he put his time in various German camps to good use
by perfecting his English and German and learning Russian.
After the war Gilson took a teaching position at the University
of Strasbourg, where his colleagues included Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre; from 1921 to 1932 he held appointments at the
Sorbonne and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. While at
Strasbourg Gilson had become convinced of the necessity of
an interdisciplinary approach to medieval philosophy and to
medieval culture in general; in 1929 he was able to put his
beliefs into practice as one of the founders of the Institute
of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, and he continued his active
association with Toronto even after his election to the Collège
de France in 1932. In the dozens of books he wrote during
his long career Gilson tackled large issues-the relation of
reason and revelation, aesthetics, linguistics, among others;
he also produced studies of individual thinkers, including
Descartes, Bonaventure, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante,
and, especially, Thomas Aquinas.
E. K. Rand (1871-1945) was born in
Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1894. After completing
his doctoral work on Boethius at Munich, he returned to Harvard,
which remained his academic home for the rest of his career.
Rand's publications display a remarkable flexibility in scholarly
temperament. His two-volume Studies in the Script of Tours
(1929 and 1934), a book by a specialist for other specialists,
was based on years of painstaking, folio-by-folio examination
of the manuscripts; and his nearly six-hundred-page concordance
of the Latin works of Dante (1912), compiled with E. H. Wilkins,
must, in a pre-computer era, have required an equal tenacity
and dedication to the production of sound scholarship. But
Rand was also a gifted teacher and advocate for the classics,
as shown by his Founders of the Middle Ages (1st ed.
1928), read by generations of undergraduates, and his travelogues,
In Quest of Virgil's Birthplace and A Walk to Horace's
Farm (both 1930). Rand was a leader in the discussions
that led to the founding of the Medieval Academy in 1925;
he was the Academy's first president and also the first editor
of Speculum.
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