Michael Freeman (1942–2009)

Michael Freeman, who died unexpectedly on 30 April 2009 at the age of 67, pursued a varied and fulfilling career as teacher, researcher, scholar and editor. He was a wise, witty and learned man, with a zestful love of scholarship, on which he drew over a period of 20 years in giving service as disinterested as it was unstinting to this journal and to the Society for French Studies. Yet these qualities, though widely admired among his many friends, were practically eclipsed by his unfailing good humour: he brought to his work the urbane detachment of a lively and cultivated mind, and would have dismissed with a characteristic laugh any evocation of his many achievements. His death, coming only a year after his retirement, seemed painfully improbable: though he had experienced one or two moments of medical alarm, nothing ever appeared to deflect him from his exemplary enjoyment of every facet of a life lived to the full.

Michael John Freeman was born in north London on 20 April 1942. He revelled in the life of the city and it contributed something to the ease and bonhomie he habitually displayed. He manifested an early flair for languages, learning both French and Portuguese as a teenager, before going on to study in the University of Leeds, graduating in 1964 with a first-class honours degree in both languages. After a spell spent teaching in Portugal, he returned to Leeds to begin work on his Ph.D., which was to be an edition of the works of Coquillart. This was a project full of challenges and it was in Paris that the decisive work was done. In the Réserve of the BN, Mike immersed himself in the all too mysterious world of Coquillart's poems: no manuscripts survive, the early printed editions are variously unreliable, and, because of their use of legal and other discourses in the satirical treatment of largely licentious themes, the works present formidable lexical as well as textual problems. But the rationale of the project was literary as much as philological: Mike was able to establish how in his 'mondaines plaisances' the poet portrayed an urban society undergoing rapid transformation to a youthful, self-confident and self-aware audience. Completed as a Ph.D. in 1972, this far-reaching venture found its proper outlet in a critical edition published by Droz in 1975.

By then, Mike had also begun to publish on a range of issues which were broader but no less intricate: the history of the book, the evolution of genre in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poetry and drama, the literary culture of early French humanists. He had been appointed Lecturer in the University of Leicester in 1968, and was to work there for nearly 30 years, progressing to Senior Lecturer and, in 1990, to Professor. After the appearance of his Coquillart, he produced editions of works for the theatre by Larivey and Jodelle. Mike would continue to range over an extended period that embraced what were conventionally thought of as two distinct historical moments: the late medieval and the Renaissance. He published a series of essays in which he undertook what amounted to a full-blown reappraisal of this complex literary culture, showing how it was transformed in tandem with a series of sweeping social changes. Typical of these was a bracing and irreverent rebuttal of Huizinga's pessimistic view of late medieval society. Mike demonstrated with dead-pan acuity just how untenable is the commonplace image of this as a period of decline and of ennui: 'Unaware, as they went about their lives in a bustling and prosperous city, that they were living at the end of the Middle Ages, many Parisians of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries cheerfully set about laughing it into its grave'.

Mike did not abide by conventional divisions of the canon into major and minor authors, though in his writing he was inevitably drawn to figures of the stature of Rabelais and Ronsard. Over the last 20 years of his career, it was Villon who was to be the main focus of his efforts. A first article...