Professor Eric Stanley
Scholar of medieval English literature who ranged from Beowulf to accounts of trial by jury
PROFESSOR ERIC STANLEY, who has died aged 94, was a scholar of medieval English literature who held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship in Anglo-saxon at the University of Oxford from 1977 to 1991.
Stanley did not suffer fools. A student who neglected his studies might be told that “your indifference to your own success is exceeded only by mine”. But the more assiduous who attended tutorials in his rooms in Pembroke College and latterly at his home in Walton Street, might have entered filled with trepidation, but they came back out after an hour or so filled with knowledge, a sceptical attitude to cherished theories, and an extensive list of references – many of them in German.
Stanley’s work ethic was prodigious. His métier was the long, discursive article, generally well over ten thousand words, concerning such matters as prose words in Old English poetry, vowel alliteration, the history of trial by jury in English texts, or the search for Anglo-saxon paganism. Even his In the Foreground: Beowulf (1994) had the flavour of a series of individual studies of different aspects of the poem. He was particularly acute on historiography and style, but he wrote well on themes and approaches, on John Audelay and Layamon, on the history of rhyme and the editing of medieval texts.
The journal Notes and Queries was part of his life for 55 years; he began as one of three editors in 1963, and was still a very active associate editor at his death. He had a discriminating eye for submissions and for good research, based on a vast amount of knowledge and a massive private library.
Much of Stanley’s work, however, was unknown even to fellow scholars. He was a staunch supporter of the Dictionary of Old English, published by the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, reading and commenting on every entry, and even occasionally turning up in Toronto and asking what he could do to help.
He began collecting materials and reading draft entries for the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957, and was still doing so in May 2018. He was not just an expert in the English language, but an indefatigable proposer of new quotations, new nuances, unexpected perceptions. (Robert Burchfield, later the editor of the OED, was his best man when he married Mary Bateman, a neurologist, in 1959.)
Stanley did his duty by college and university, and although he did not enjoy paperwork, he never missed a deadline and could be counted on for trenchant but unexpected views. A staunch conservative (he described himself as being to the right of Genghis Khan), on social matters he was (though he would shudder to hear it) liberal-minded, his kindness to individuals balancing out some of his stronger views.
Eric Gerald Stanley was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, on October 19 1923 and educated at the town’s Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he took tutorials with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.
He obtained his first teaching post in 1951 at Birmingham University, where his colleagues in medieval English were Derek Brewer and Geoffrey Shepherd. Stanley credited Shepherd in particular as a great influence on his own teaching and scholarship, and, through long conversations, in turning him into a man of deep religious faith.
In 1962 Stanley moved to Queen Mary College, London, where he was Reader in English Language and Literature until 1964, and Professor until 1975. He then accepted a professorship at Yale University, but taught there for only a year, as he was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship at Oxford, with an associated fellowship at Pembroke College, beginning in 1977.
He remained busy after his official retirement in 1991 and would travel anywhere to give a paper that would be helpful to one of his “young friends” as he called his junior scholars, trips which took him several times to Japan, to Canada, and often to France and Italy. His dinner parties at Oxford were famous, particularly his chocolate marquise.
Stanley was forbiddingly private about some elements of his life. He admitted to loving Jane Austen, but his liking for Sir Walter Scott was a secret. He was reticent about his family background and never spoke of his war service. Nor did he often speak of his daily visits during the long decline in health of his wife Mary, who died in 2016; or the death in 2017 of his only child, Ann Stanley, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, leaving two grandchildren.
Stanley was still holding forth, with ramrod-straight back and erudite conviction, at graduate seminars only days before his death.