Larry Dean Benson: A Tribute

Larry Dean Benson, one of the most accomplished American medievalists of the twentieth century, died on February 16, 2015. He was eighty-six years old. He will be best remembered as the General Editor of The Riverside Chaucer (1987), a monumental accomplishment that succeeded only because Larry’s efforts ensured a productive collaboration among the many contributors. Few people could have managed it so expertly. While the editing of individual works was distributed among a team of editors, Larry attended to details in every part to ensure that the final product met his demanding standards. Now, almost thirty years on, it continues to serve as the standard critical edition of Chaucer.

Larry attended high school in Tempe, Arizona. After enlisting in the Marines for a five-year tour in China and Korea, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and completed his Ph.D. in 1959 under the direction of Charles Muscatine. In that year he accepted a position as Instructor at Harvard University, where he remained for forty years, retiring in 1999 as the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English. Over his career he taught everything from specialized graduate seminars to a Chaucer lecture course that at its peak enrolled over a hundred students. In the late 1970s he began an informal weekly meeting that he called the Medieval Doctoral Conference, where professors and graduate students would gather to hear and discuss a paper. It soon expanded to include participants beyond the Harvard medieval community and became a forum to welcome visiting scholars. Whenever the occasion needed a talk, Larry would dip into his files for an “Adventure in Philology,” which was never destined to see the light of publication. In one memorable presentation about American medievalism, Larry explained with great comic timing and a philologist’s love of detail how “jousting” became the state sport of Maryland.

Larry Dean Benson, ca. 1980.

Reproduced with permission ofthefamily.

Larry’s publications were wide-ranging. His first book on Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1965) remains essential reading for that poem. In exploring the French tradition informing Sir Gawain, it shows the influence of his early mentor Muscatine, but it also benefited from the encyclopedic range of Morton Bloomfield, his senior colleague at Harvard. It combines two topics that would persist through his career: alliterative verse and chivalry. Early in his career Larry also published three articles on Old English that remain influential. One of these, “The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry” (PMLA 81 [1966]: 334–41), is remarkable not only because it continues to be frequently cited but also because it attacked the scholarship of a senior colleague, Francis P. Magoun Jr., who (as everyone knew) would be in a position to influence Larry’s imminent tenure review. Larry coedited with Ted Andersson The Literary Context of Chaucer’s Fabliaux (1971), and he edited King Arthur’s Death: The Stanzaic Morte Arthure and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (1974). In 1976 he published Malory’s Morte Darthur, a critical study that places Malory in the larger tradition of French chivalric literature. He also edited several collections of essays. Among his many articles (including ten on Chaucer) special notice should go to “The Authorship of St. Erkenwald” (JEGP 64 [1965]: 393–405), which established the current consensus that the Gawain poet was not the author of Erkenwald. In 2012 Larry rounded out his publishing career by returning to the subject of his first book, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Close Verse Translation. His translation was based on an innovative procedure: it gives the modern form of every Middle English word and substitutes a new one only if the original word became obsolete. Larry knew it would allow students a reading experience close to the texture and rhythm of the original poem.

Larry was ahead of his time in pursuing the digital humanities before anyone thought of calling it the digital humanities. After The Riverside Chaucer was printed, he took the computerized tapes...