In Memoriam: John Anthony Burrow (1932–2017)

With the death on October 22, 2017, of Professor John Burrow after a short illness, the world of medieval English scholarship has lost one of its most erudite and humane voices and a man whom many were proud to call friend. Born in Essex, his academic career began at Oxford, where he went up to Christ Church as an undergraduate. Graduating with first-class honors, his first lectureship was held at King's College London from 1955–57, after which time he returned to Oxford to become Lecturer in English at his old college and at Brasenose (the latter post he held from 1957–59). He was elected Fellow in English at Jesus College in 1961. Having taught many undergraduates, several of whom went on to become successful medievalists in their own right, he left Oxford in 1976 to take up the Winterstoke Chair in English Literature at the University of Bristol, in which city he remained for the rest of his life, together with his wife, the award-winning children's author Diana Wynne Jones, whom he had married in 1956. He was Visiting Professor at Yale University during the academic year 1968–69, but it was Bristol which came to exert the greatest hold upon him.

Whilst for John the acts of research and writing, closely followed by that of teaching, probably provided him with the deepest satisfaction, he was never one to shirk the more formal responsibilities commensurate with his position and reputation in the academic world. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1986 and served as a Member of Council from 1989–92, and he was Honorary Director of the Early English Text Society from 1983–2006. In his own institution, he acted both as Head of the English Department and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, the latter from 1990–93.

As an author his written style was both elegant and eloquent. Books that he wrote primarily for an undergraduate audience, such as Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background 1100–1500 (1982), were breathtaking in their scope and ease of expression, whereas his early work, A Reading of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (1965, 1977) broke with the previous, primarily philological examinations of the poem to treat it as a work of art. It is still recommended reading for undergraduates. His Oxford training did not, however, go to waste: A Book of Middle English, cowritten with Thorlac Turville-Petre, is now in its third edition, giving a comprehensible introduction to language and again offering an awe-inspiring collection of texts for study. His intellectual range—from the classics to the whole of the Anglo-Saxon corpus to Dante and his French counterparts to Middle English and Scots to more modern poets (his first published article was on Keats and Edward Thomas [1957])—was that of a scholar who knew no boundaries in his pursuit of intellectual pleasure. The books that he wrote on seemingly more erudite topics—The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (1986, 1988), Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (2002), and The Poetry of Praise (2008)—were all ground-breaking yet accessible. Although perhaps best known latterly for his work on William Langland (see, for example, Langland's Fictions [1993]) he is, possibly singly, responsible for the renewed interest in the neglected poetry and prose and life of Chaucer's follower, Thomas Hoccleve. To read John's work, whether on an established topic, or on something more obscure, or to know the man, was to participate in a constant act of learning. It is notable how, after his retirement from the University in 1998, his academic output became ever more prolific and he was never without a project. His resistance to modern technology in the form of word processing, though, was a subject of fond exasperation, but he was never short of willing helpers to convert his typewritten pages to digital format. On retirement he was made Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in the University. Although in...