Professor Vincent Gillespie, FSA, FBA, b. 11 February 1954, d. 13 March 2025
Vincent Gillespie, who has died aged 71, was well known to scholars in Europe and America and is receiving many tributes. A striking aspect of these is a positive emphasis on personal character over and above scholarship. Such an emphasis is normal in the necrologies of lesser scholars, but Vincent was hardly one of those, as anyone who has read his work will know. Indeed, it is reasonable to call him one of the most perceptive, subtle, versatile thinkers about late medieval literature of his generation. It would not be enough to consider Vincent a brilliant textual critic in a pure sense. In the cause of interpretation, he consistently delved into the language of late medieval religious writers to get at the images and other cultural forms underlying the words. He loved what was eloquent in that language for its own sake, just as he loved good modern poetry, and for that matter good jokes. But fundamentally, he was a religious historian who knew a lot about texts, art and cultural theory. The Harlaxton Symposium, which was founded in cross-disciplinary interests, thus has special reason to regret his death.
The emphasis being placed on Vincent’s character is appropriate and almost certainly what he would have wanted, since he was a warm-hearted and emotionally honest man. He was also witty with a well-developed sense of humour and a poetic choice of vocabulary. The titles (and often the first paragraphs) of his essays reveal this well, for example, ‘Chapter and Worse’ (2008), ‘Dial M for Mystic’ (2009), or (for the unexpected choice of word) ‘The Nearly Man’ (2017) and ‘The Permeable Cloister?’ (2019), the last two delivered at, and written for, Harlaxton conferences. He was also a very good listener: this, plus his curiosity of mind and remarkable general knowledge, made him the ideal person to talk to about research problems or to sit with in the pub or at dinner. Vincent’s sympathy for the challenges faced by younger scholars, and his concomitant willingness to help, inspired a vast affection. (One of his obituaries states that he supervised some forty PhDs and just as many MA theses.) Established colleagues found him equally generous with his time. As well as much committee work for his Oxford colleges (St Anne’s, then Lady Margaret Hall) and his faculty (English), he took on many external service roles, including a decade as secretary of the Early English Text Society and eleven years – six as chair – on the committee of the British Academy’s Neil Ker Fund.
Vincent’s social compass, of which humour enjoyed and shared was but one aspect, would have made him welcome every summer at Harlaxton. He spoke there three times, in 2015 at ‘Saints and Cults’, in 2017 at the symposium in honour of Clive Burgess, and again in 2019, at ‘Medieval Book’. The paper dedicated to Clive resulted in a superb essay on the London Charterhouse, in which he argued for his long-held view of Carthusian aloofness in the teeth of fifteenth-century Londoners’ importunity: a corrective, as he thought, to recent scholarly over-emphasis on the monks’ involvement with the laity. The essay was topped and tailed by quotations from a contemporary poet and former St Anne’s student, U.A. Fanthorpe (1929-2009), whose poetry Vincent admired. Her lines on the Carthusians with which Vincent chose to end his essay give an insight into the man:
They are out of reach. We can walk where they did,
But the guts and the goodness are beyond us.
Julian Luxford