Obituaries
Our condolences go out to the family and friends of the following:
George Sommer
George Sommer, of South Dennis, and formerly of Hyde Park, N.Y., died on Friday, July 10, 2009. He is survived by his wife, Anne. Also surviving are sons Robert of Overland Park, Kan., and Christopher of Huntington Beach, Calif.; and daughters Nancy Allen of Aliso Viejo, Calif., and Catherine Brawner of Saugerties, N.Y. He is also survived by nine grandchildren. George retired from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he taught literature for 39 years. During that time he established the Mid-Hudson Modern Language Association, which ran for 16 years. In his retirement on Cape Cod he taught at the Academy for Lifelong Learning for more than 10 years, offering at least 20 different courses. George's family would like to thank the staff of Hospice of Cape Cod and Bayview of Epoch of Harwich for their caring support over the last months.
Derek Brewer
Robert Correale
George Kane
Barbara Nolan
Barbara Nolan, a medievalist of great distinction who was Robert C. Taylor Professor of English until her retirement in 2008, died in Charlottesville on February 7, 2009, after a prolonged and immensely courageous struggle with illness.
She was born in Indianapolis in 1941, and received her BA from Trinity College in 1962, and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. After an appointment at Washington University, St Louis, where she became Associate Professor of English, she came to the University of Virginia in 1978 as the first woman to be appointed to a tenured position in the English Department. During her thirty years at the University, after a year as Interim Chair of the English Department, she spent ten years as Vice Provost for Instructional Development, a position which enabled her to play an important and energetic part in faculty recruitment and development and in the advancement of opportunities for student learning. An especially significant innovation, which she played a major role in bringing about, was the establishment of the USEM program, in which established faculty offer seminars for first-year undergraduates, designed to initiate them in modes of critical thinking which they might not otherwise encounter until later in their student careers. She contributed in important ways to the UniversityÕs educational mission, as a teacher, an administrator, and above all by her very presence as an embodiment of civilized learning.
Barbara received notable external awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Fulbright Scholarships to the University of London. She published many scholarly articles and two substantial books, both based on a broad sense of medieval European culture, on a keen sensitivity to literature and to other arts, and on wide reading in several languages. The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1977) begins with the conceptions of vision and spiritual quest that emerge in 12th-century religious writings, and moves through the visionary arts of the 13th century to an acute analysis of Dante's Vita Nuova, to culminate in penetrating studies of two classics of 14th-century visionary poetry in English, Pearl and Piers Plowman. T his book demonstrates qualities found throughout Barbara's work, lucid analysis of difficult writings and exact but never narrow scholarship. Her second book, Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique (Cambridge University Press, 1992), is a groundbreaking study of the continental origins of Chaucer's major works of the 1380s, Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's Tale, both adapted from poems by Boccaccio set in the pagan past. Barbara shows in persuasive detail how much Boccaccio's and in turn Chaucer's imaginative apprehension and philosophical reconstruction of classical antiquity owe to the 12th-century French romans d'antiquite that preceded the more famous Arthurian romances. She succeeds in defining a tradition, at once learned and passionate, never previously understood, and her book was received with admiring praise by reviewers in learned journals. In the years after 1992, Barbara was doing original work in two fields: French fabliaux and the manuscript contexts in which they appear, and the part played by the evocation of space, especially architectural space, in medieval literary texts. Some of this work was published in articles, but it is sad indeed to think that her long illness and death have deprived us of the books in which these studies would have achieved fruition.
Chaucer was Barbara Nolan's great love: she had been a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society, and her courses on Chaucer at both undergraduate and graduate level
were an inspiration to many students. She had a special affinity for the way Chaucer's poetry combines genial comedy with philosophical depth and, like him, she
loved life, and her love included architecture, the decorative arts, wine, cuisine, and travel, as well as literature and learning. It is hard to believe that so
vivid and elegant a colleague is lost to us. Barbara was always aware, with Chaucer, that "Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse", but one of her favourite
quotations, from the medieval English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, was that "all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."
(A. C. Spearing)