Jennifer Britnell (1943-2011)

The French studies community, particularly for those working in the Renaissance area, has been much diminished by Professor Jennifer Britnell's untimely death. Not only was she an excellent scholar, her expertise much besought by colleagues finding their way in her specialist field, but her cheerful disposition and her warm and generous personality were guaranteed to enliven any academic gathering.

Jenny happily spent all her career in Durham. She married a University colleague with complementary interests in late medieval and Renaissance history. She brought up her two sons there, and through her church and various local organizations she was actively involved in the life of the city, as well as of the university. Nevertheless, Jenny was very much a Londoner, as she would confess. A wartime child there, then a grammar school girl, she did not have an obviously academic background, but she blossomed at University College. Under Brian Woledge she gained expertise in the history of the French language, a discipline that she was later to make the subject of innovative and popular courses at Durham. But the scholar who formed her at the deepest level was Michael Screech. Working closely with him, she honed her redoubtable editorial and scholarly skills. And she developed an ethos that was to shape her life in research, combining total commitment, both intellectual and emotional, with integrity, unremitting pursuit of accuracy, generosity towards companion scholars, and a joyfully accepted obligation to make her findings and her expertise available to the community.

Michael Screech supervised her PhD thesis on the work of Jean Bouchet. It was to lead to the publication, in 1986, of what is still to date the authoritative book on that early sixteenth-century writer. Although, under pressure, Jenny would concede that Bouchet was not a poet of the first rank, she had been quick to see how well his prolific output reflected concerns and tensions current in France on the eve of the Reformation. His versified instructions on moral behaviour addressed to individuals and social groups, his strictures on church abuses, tempered by fear of heresy, his allegorical mapping of the paths of lay piety, and his encomia of kings and great ones opened to Jenny a rich vein of research. She went on to explore the more controversial religious and political views of a greater writer, Jean Lemaire de Belges, the propaganda industry launched by the anti-papal policy of Louis XII, and, among other topics, the role of prophecy in the political arena. Her many publications have an enduring value, not least because she not only described, contextualized, and analysed perceptively the material she presented, but also provided rigorously accurate and carefully annotated editions of the texts she had demonstrated were crucial to her debate. She employed this valuable procedure in her last book, on the combination of politics, polemic, poetry, and prophecy so characteristic of the period: Le Roi très chrétien contre le pape: écrits antipapaux en français sous le règne de Louis XII (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011). It appeared just in time for her to see it before she died.

Jenny will live long in the affections of her Durham colleagues and students. She was very good with people. Many remain grateful for her staunch support in difficulties, her tactful resolution of conflicts, and her managerial efficiency and foresight, especially when she was Head of the French Department and, latterly, Head of the School of Modern Languages. Right from her earliest years in Durham, Jenny herself had benefited enormously from being part of its small but very active group of Renaissance specialists nurtured so effectively by Dudley Wilson. Later, she was to replicate his role, organizing opportunities for lively and productive conversations between older and younger researchers with common interests. She was a devoted mentor and a marvellous encouragement to her own research students and to the many young scholars whom she first met at conferences and continued to support. And she was a superb teacher of undergraduates. Many will recall with joy her enthusiasm for the rollicking exploits of Rabelais's giants, by no means inconsistent with her frequent bursts of happy...