Peter Thomas Ricketts (1933-2013)

With the death of Peter Ricketts on 7 May 2013 the study of Occitan language and literature lost one of its most dedicated and prolific practitioners. Advancing years in no way dimmed his commitment or his output, nor was he any less keen to visit places or people in order to discuss his research and maintain his many close friendships.

Peter was born on 14 December 1933 in Birmingham, the city that was his home for most of his life. He attended King Edward's (Camp Hill) Boy's School and, for both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies, the University of Birmingham. He was awarded his PhD in 1960, by which time his academic career had already begun, with a one-year temporary lectureship in 1958 at Victoria College, University of Toronto. After two years of national service as Instructor in the Royal Army Educational Corps he spent three further years at Victoria College before returning to Birmingham in 1964 as Lecturer in Romance Philology in the Department of Latin, later transferring to the Department of Linguistics. With the exception of a year spent as Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia (1967-68), he remained in Birmingham, rising to the rank of Reader. In 1980 he was appointed James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, but his growing reputation soon led to a further move. In 1983 he was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at Westfield College, London. Sadly, ill health cut short his tenure of this prestigious Chair and he took the title of Emeritus Professor in 1991. After his recovery he became in 1994 a member of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities at the University of Birmingham, and since 1997 had been Honorary Professor in the Department of French.

Peter's work was wide-ranging, covering not only Occitan studies, for which he is principally known, but also Anglo-Norman language and literature. He was one of the team of four who worked on the remarkable edition of Fouke le Fitz Waryn (Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1976), and one of his last publications, in 2011, was Three Anglo-Norman Chronicles, edited for the Anglo-Norman Text Society's Plain Texts series. His first book-length publication was on an Occitan topic, the well-received Introduction à l'étude de l'ancien provençal: textes d'étude (Geneva: Droz, 1967), on which he collaborated with Frank Hamlin and John Hathaway. But two Occitan projects dominated much of his scholarly career. At an early stage he began the task of editing Matfré Ermengaud's encyclopedic Breviari d'amor (35, 600 lines and extant in twelve manuscripts). The first volume to be published (actually volume 5 of the projected work, since this late section of the Breviari, the Perilhous Tractat d'Amor de Donnas, had at the time attracted the greatest scholarly interest as it dealt with troubadour poetry) appeared in 1976; Peter was never happy with this volume and a thoroughly revised version was published by Brepols in 2011. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 appeared in 1989, 1998, and 2004 respectively (volume 1, the Introduction, close to completion, is being written by Cyril Hershon). Peter's second major project was the Concordance de l'Occitan Médiéval (COM), a project conceived in his early years in Birmingham and launched fully at Westfield College in the 1980s, unfortunately not long before his illness. The aim of this monumental work was to provide a database of all extant Occitan texts, from the earliest to the end of the fifteenth century. If the texts he needed to key in were not available in satisfactory editions, Peter would edit them himself. After his recovery he was able to pick up this project again with full vigour. The first volume was published by Brepols in 2001 and the second in 2005 (at the time of his death volume 3 was also ready for publication).

Peter was a member of a broad range of societies, among them the Société archéologique, scientifique et littéraire de Béziers, the Centre de recherche et d'expression des musiques m...