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  • ObituaryRichard Sharpe (17 February 1954 – 21 March 2020)
  • Paul Russell (bio)

The sudden death of Richard Sharpe on 21 March 2020 was a blow not only to his friends and colleagues, but to the wider scholarly world. Richard's range was so extraordinarily wide that numerous fields of study (apparently unrelated) will keenly feel the loss of his encyclopaedic knowledge, his breadth of experience, and his unyielding rigour. No sufferer of fools, gladly or otherwise, he was, however, a man of deep humanity and kindness, and there are many who will deeply miss his friendship.

Educated at St Peter's School, York, said to have been founded by St. Paulinus in 627, he went on to read Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge for Part I, and then moved to Classics for Part II (ASNC being, at that time in the seventies, a single-part subject). He thus controlled both the classical languages and the medieval Celtic languages and literatures, and his interest in the latter continued to surface in his publications throughout his life (cf. his work in Llywarch Hen [Sharpe 2009], and the forthcoming volume on early printed books in Irish [Sharpe & Hoyne 2021]). But, fundamentally, he was a historian with a relentless and inexhaustible interest in sources and texts. At Cambridge, he was taught by Kathleen Hughes, who ignited his interest in the Christianity and hagiography of early medieval Ireland, an interest which is manifested in his work on the Irish saints' lives and the workings of the Irish church (Sharpe 1991) and also in the unpublished editions of the Vita prima and Vita secunda of St. Brigit. But underlying this was a deep love of Scottish medieval history marked notably by his work [End Page 112] on St. Columba, and especially his Penguin translation (Sharpe 1995), which is striking for its compendious notes and discussion of all aspects of Columba and Iona, and not least its real sense of place: he had sailed those waters and knew the islands intimately. Even as an undergraduate, he wrote a book on the history of Raasay with a companion volume of documents and sources appearing a year later (Sharpe 1977 & 1978), and in its introduction we can see the germs of his preoccupation with the accurate and meticulous gathering and recording of sources: 'the importance of thorough source work cannot be overstated, and since I am as fallible as some of the writers I have criticised, it has seemed best to produce as much as possible of the sources for the reader' (1977: 7). The chronological range of his interests is also evident; the volumes range from prehistory to the early twentieth century by way of epigraphic, Gaelic, and Scandinavian sources.

In the context of an obituary in a Celtic journal, I can only touch briefly on his enormous contribution to the Latin writings of medieval Britain and Ireland more generally. It took its impetus from his work on the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British sources, which he joined as an assistant in 1981, and where clearly felt the need to map out and explore the scholarly terrain in a more rigorous way. One early product, in collaboration with his former teacher, Michael Lapidge, was the Bibliography of Celtic-Latin literature (Lapidge & Sharpe 1985), an essential work now badly in need of an update. The result was A handlist of Latin writers (Sharpe 1997; repr. with additions and corrections in 2001), a work of huge learning and critical reading. Related to this was his short work Titulus which was intended as a methodological guide to identifying the works (Sharpe 2003). His appointment to Reader in Diplomatic (the study of charters) at Oxford (and subsequent promotion to Professor) brought him into the world of historical writing and to several substantial and important projects: editing the writs and charters of William ii and Henry i, and his editorship of the Corpus of British Monastic Library Catalogues (begun in 1991 and running so far to some 20 or more volumes). This is work which would daunt most mortals, both in terms of length (these are lifetime-length projects) and complexity; in fact, only he had the range...

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