20th March 2025
The LMH community is immensely saddened by the death on 13 March of Professor Vincent Gillespie at the age of 71. He is survived by his wife, Peggy, sons, Thomas and Edward, and grandchildren.
Vincent joined LMH as a Fellow in 2004 when he was appointed to the J.R.R. Tolkien Chair in English Literature, coming here from St Anne’s, where he had been a long standing and highly valued Tutorial Fellow in English. St Anne’s loss was LMH’s gain. In Vincent LMH acquired not only a scholar of towering academic distinction, but a colleague whose warmth, compassion and humanity shone through all that he undertook. It’s no small measure of his loss that he is deeply mourned not only by family, academic colleagues and former students, but by the gardeners, maintenance and catering staff who make up the very fabric of LMH, who knew Vincent well, as he did them and their families. One of his most prized possessions on his retirement was their gift to him of a chef’s hat and coat with his name embroidered under the LMH logo.
Vincent’s career as a scholar and teacher of medieval literature was both prolific and distinguished. He published extraordinarily widely. He is very well known for his work on devotional writing and mysticism. Many of his essays – including field-defining pieces such as ‘The Apophatic Image,’ ‘Postcards from the Edge,’ and ‘Strange Images of Death’ – are collected in the magisterial volume, Looking in Holy Books. Vincent’s work on Syon Abbey (the only house of the Bridgettine order in England), brought together his interest in religious communities, especially the Carthusians and Bridgettines, and his interest in material texts. Another important book was After Arundel (co-edited with Kantik Ghosh, and arising from a seminal conference held here in Oxford), which revisited fifteenth-century writing in the wake of censorship and radical religious and political change.
Vincent also published on secular medieval literature, on Langland, Skelton and a brilliant article on Chaucer’s engagement with Italian ideas of laureate poets, as well as co-editing the multi-volume Chaucer Encyclopaedia. His essay on medieval understanding of poetic theory and thought-experiments was structured as a thought experiment itself. Indeed, his essays, while deeply scholarly, were also witty and attention-grabbing. He had an eye for a catchy title (‘Dial M for Mystic’, ‘Chapter and Worse’, ‘Never Look a Gift Horace in the Mouth’). His working title for Looking into Holy Books, ‘A Dog Returns to its Vomit’, was, he tells us in his preface, perhaps a step too far. His intellectual power dazzles in his work on later medieval literary theory. Across all his works Vincent identified a common thread: ‘At the core of most of what I do is a curiosity about the psychology of literary response: the ways in which writers struggle to express experiences and acts of imagination, the strategies they use to articulate their understanding of these experiences and imaginative acts, and the codes and conventions that develop between texts and readers to allow communication and understanding to develop and to be manipulated.’ He was fundamentally a theorist, interested in how language and literature work.
Vincent’s extraordinary academic productivity is all the more remarkable set within the context of sometimes close to full-time roles of academic citizenship and leadership, including Chair of the Faculty Board. He was editor of the Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies Series, and the executive secretary and then director of the Early English Text Society. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. As J.R.R. Tolkien Chair he undertook numerous University and Faculty roles: Curator of the Bodleian; Co-ordinator for the English Research Excellence Framework; Membership of the Humanities Divisional Board and Chair of Masters’ Examiners to name but a few. Fund-raising for medieval studies in Oxford was also a time-consuming activity. Overall, he raised £9M and part of that was the £4.2M needed to endow the Tolkien chair. Vincent played an important role in supervising and mentoring numerous graduate students in his field, and acting as personal tutor to LMH graduate students both within and outside medieval literature. He supervised over 80 DPhil and Master’s theses. Students, initially daunted by his intellect, were quickly overcome by his warmth, kindness and genuine concern for their lives and careers.
Vincent also cared deeply about college life, governance and finance. He took his role as Fellow and Trustee of the College very seriously and valued Governing Body as a place for the open expression of informed opinion on college business. He was never afraid to speak out in Governing Body meetings and to hold processes and decision-making to account. He was also great fun as a lunch and dinner companion, charming and playful, able to move easily across a dazzling array of cultural forms. Conversations that ranged from Tarantino to Shakespeare, from medieval architecture to modern jazz, made one realise that there was little that Vincent had not read, seen or heard. Following a conversation which ranged across all of Jane Austen’s novels, he graciously accepted a birthday gift of the one Austen screen adaptation he hadn’t yet seen: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He later donated this to the LMH Library.
Tribute written by Professor Christine Gerrard, Barbara Scott Fellow and Tutor in English and Professor Marion Turner, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language.