David Andrew Trotter (1957–2015)

Rarely, in my experience, has the death of an academic colleague caused such grief as the untimely passing, on 24 August 2015, of David Trotter. Professor of French and Head of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University, David was born on 27 July 1957, the second child of Mary Yvonne Kirkpatrick and George Douglas Trotter, a Lecturer at the University of Bristol. He graduated with first-class honours in French and German from the Queen’s College, Oxford, where he remained to write his DPhil thesis, subsequently published as Medieval French Literature and the Crusades (1100–1300) (Geneva: Droz, 1988). He was able to complete this research in Paris with the aid of a Laming Junior Travel Fellowship, and in 1985 he became a Lecturer in Linguistics and Medieval French at Exeter University. In 1993 he was appointed to the Aberystwyth Chair, previously held by Glanville Price, and he remained in that position for the rest of his career. He became an editor of the Journal of French Language Studies ten years later.

A bibliometric analysis of David’s publications, lectures, and conference contributions would instantly reveal his intellectual and, indeed, physical energy, but it would barely capture the extent of his perceptiveness and intellectual courage. Throughout his career, his focus was on the languages and cultures of medieval Europe, particularly those of France and Britain. An initial interest in the literature of Old French led to the edition of medieval texts in French, Latin, and Middle English (Jean de Vignay’s Les Merveilles de la Terre d’Outremer (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), and part of Alexander of Canterbury’s Dicta Anselmi (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1994)). Ever fascinated by the multi-dimensional and multi-faceted nature of medieval French, he returned to editing in 2005 with a twelfth-century translation (from Arabic) of the Traitier de Cyrurgie by the Andalusian surgeon Albucasis (936–1013). David’s elucidation of the wealth of lexicological material contained in this text and the dialectological data embodied in the translation (Lorraine French) earned him the Prix de La Grange in 2007.

Through his close textual work David came to understand the sociolinguistic complexity of medieval Europe, before language standardization ironed it all out and made medieval variability so very difficult for us moderns to comprehend. Nowhere was this complexity more intractable than in the field of lexis, where language and society are the most directly connected. The early 1990s were a difficult time for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. Lexicographical methods and the range of documentation had changed radically since the project had been conceived in the 1950s by Timothy Reid and Louise Stone, but Anglo-Norman studies were still rather looked down upon by Anglicistes in the UK and Francisants in France. The project was taken to completion by William Rothwell, who in the process became acutely aware that the first two volumes (A–E) needed a complete revision. Funding was extremely tight but, working with William Rothwell and Stewart Gregory, David ensured that the revised volumes were duly published in 2005. By now, however, medieval lexicography was being revolutionized by the computer. In a remarkable collaboration with Michael Beddow and Andrew Rothwell, David turned the Anglo-Norman Dictionary into a major online research tool for linguists, historians, and literary scholars, through the digitization of the whole dictionary and its source materials. The transformation has caused us to rethink the fundamentals of the history not only of medieval French, but of medieval English too. This work gained for David a second award from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 2011, this time the Prix Honoré Chavée.

David was the antithesis of the lone scholar, for he loved working with others, and others loved working with him. In his departmental and faculty work in Aberystwyth, he was an inspiring and effective leader, and a tough promoter of languages (French in particular). The successful publication of the second edition of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (A–E) (London: Maney, 2005) owed as much to his collaborative and negotiating skills as to his lexicographical prowess. David happily followed a...