Obituary: Keith Val Sinclair AO (1926-99)

Obituary Keith Val Sinclair AO (1926-99) Obituary XI —Obituary— Keith Val Sinclair AO (1926-99) The death occurred in Canberra, on 25th January 1999, of Emeritus Professor Keith Val Sinclair, after a year-long battle with cancer. Professor Sinclair was perhaps the doyen of Australia's medievalists and was certainly Australia's leading scholar in the fields of Medieval French and Anglo-Norman studies. O n Monday, 1st February, mourners attended an impressive funeral service at St. John the Baptist's Anglican Church in Reid, during which Emeritus Professor Derek Scales presented the eulogy. Long-standing members of A N Z A M E M S will know of Sinclair's long association with medieval studies in this country, begjrming with his appointment in 1955 at A.N.U. (at that time s t i l l 'Canberra University College'). His discovery in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, of a magnificently illuminated manuscript of Pierre Bersuire's Middle French translation of Livy i s to be situated in this period, the details of the discovery being published by the xn Obituary then 'Australian Humanities Research Council' as a monograph, The Melbourne Livy, in 1961. Readers of Parergon will be well-acquainted with Sinclair's incisive reviews, which the journal has published over the years, of books related to Medieval French language and literature. During his time at the University of Sydney from 1963 to 1971, first as a Senior Lecturer then as Associate Professor, in the Department of French, Sinclair was working on his m a g n u m opus, his Descriptive Catalogue ofMedieval and Renaissance Western Manuscrip in Australia, which was to be published in 1969. H e opened the eyes of m a n y an Honours student to the excitement of Old French texts, pointing out the strong tradition of studies in this domain that Sydney had always had. Postgraduate students w h o had the good fortune to prepare a thesis under Sinclair's supervision, or colleagues from other disciplines w h o had an interest in medieval matters, aways knew they could ring Keith for advice, as he kept at h o m e an amazingly complete and up-to-date fichier giving access to all manner of detailed references on medieval topics. If you happened not to have an exact notion of what area to read in for a post-graduate degree, Professor Sinclair had a drawer full of suggested topics that could be tailored to suit the level of the degree and the interests of the candidate. His major contributions to Old French scholarship include an edition of the late Old French epic, Tristan de Nanteuil (1971) and, later, a separate monograph on this fascinating text, Thematic Infrastructure and Literary Creation (1983). Numerous articles an reviews of books in the domain of Old French language and literature can be found from the early sixties on, in important journals ranging from Speculum and Romania, through Mediaeval Studies and Romanische Forschungen, to Studi Francesi and The Library Quarterly. Sinclair penned his articles in English, French, Italian or German, an accomplishment that could well be valued and aspired to by today'sfledglingscholars in Medieval Studies. Obituary x i n After his moving to Storrs and the University of Connecticut as Full Professor of French, in 1972, Sinclair's attention was drawn to prayers in Old French. His interest in this field was to lead to many important publications, including his Prieres en ancien francais: Nouvelles references, renseignements complementaires, indications raphiques (1978), which afforded important corrections and supplements to the classic text in this area by Sonet. Sinclair subsequently published his French Devotional Texts ofthe Middle Ages (1979) which together with two Supplements (1982 and 1987), established him as one of the leading authorities on prayers in Old French. Over the years, in the field of Anglo-Norman, Sinclair wrote many seminal articles and published two texts (The Hospitallers' Riwl and Corset) for the Anglo-Norman Text Society. H e had worked at Oxford in the 1950s with the eminent Anglo-Norman specialists Alfred Ewert and T.B.W. Reid, and collaborated closely while in America with Ruth J. Dean. It is interesting to...