Memorial: John Hurt Fisher (October 26, 1919–February 17, 2015)

John H. Fisher’s stature and leadership in American education and in medieval English studies are richly evident in many ways: more than a dozen books and some seventy essays; two honorary degrees; assistant secretary, treasurer, executive secretary, vice president, and president of the Modern Language Association of America; editor of PMLA; bibliographer, executive director, and president of the New Chaucer Society; president of the society of Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America; senator-at-large for Phi Beta Kappa; English Consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities; NEH Senior Research Fellow; member of the U.S. Commission for UNESCO; member of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes and FILLM American Vice President; member of the American Committee of the Modern Humanities Research Association; two awards named after him (South Atlantic Association of Departments of English and John Gower Society); head of the English Department at the University of Tennessee; National Council of the Teachers of English Distinguished Lecturer; a world speaking tour with the United States Information Agency; a festschrift edited by Joseph B. Trahern Jr. (Standardizing English, 1989); and more.

John’s numerous books on Chaucer include his well-known edition The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (1977, 1989, 2012); The Essential Chaucer: An Annotated Bibliography of Major Modern Studies (1987, with Mark Allen); The Importance of Chaucer (1992); and the Variorum edition of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (2012, with Mark Allen). Early in his career, John edited The Tretyse of Loue for the Early English Text Society (1951, 1970). John’s wide-ranging research in English linguistic history appears in In Forme of Speche Is Chaunge: Readings in the History of the English Language (1974, 1984, with Diane Bornstein); An Anthology of Chancery English (1984, with Malcolm Richardson and Jane Law Fisher); and The Emergence of Standard English (1996).

John Hurt Fisher, 2004.

Reproduced with permission of the family.

John came from a family of teachers. Both of his parents and various aunts and cousins were educators. His parents taught in the U.S. and in Iran, where they served as lay missionaries and where John spent most of his first fourteen years before returning to the U.S. for further education after initial home schooling. He never completed high school but took his degrees from Maryville College (A.B., 1940) and the University of Pennsylvania (A.M., 1942; Ph.D., 1945). Poor eyesight kept him from military service, but he more than made up for it in service to American education, teaching at eight different American universities during his long career and lecturing at many more. After he retired from teaching at the University of Tennessee in 1988, he volunteered his time in processing interlibrary loan requests at the University Library while continuing his own scholarly pursuits.

In 1942 John married his college sweetheart, Jane Law Fisher, who died in 1993. Jane was the anchor of John’s life for more than fifty years and his collaborator and companion during his most active professional period, from typing his Penn dissertation to co-editing An Anthology of Chancery English, to helping manage the business of the New Chaucer Society from the basement of the Fisher home in Knoxville, Tennessee. The three children survive their parents: Janice Lowe Craven, John C. (Jack) Fisher, and Judith Law Fisher.

In 1997 John married his second sweetheart, Audrey Duncan. Audrey had a long career as a physical therapist, and it is due to her love and care that John thrived as he did so long and so well, despite his fifty-year affliction of diabetes. John and Audrey traveled together recurrently to Audrey’s native Wales, enjoyed the more local scenery of the Great Smoky Mountains, and shared a love of birds and gardening. John shared Audrey’s various fundraising activities in Knoxville that she continues today, particularly Meals on Wheels and those associated with opera and with Celtic traditions.

John was a modest, even shy, man who carried great authority born of...