ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1479-4441
ISSN: Print 2754-4575
ISSN: Online 2754-4583
DOI: 10.57686/256204/24

© 2022 Alaric Hall
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Introduction

Aims of this study

Leeds Medieval Studies is the successor to and continuation of two journals: The Bulletin of International Medieval Research (hereafter the Bulletin), founded in 1995, and Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages (hereafter LSE&KL), founded in 1932 and refounded as Leeds Studies in English (new series) (hereafter LSE) in 1967.¹ It also inherits the associated book series Leeds Texts and Monographs (which ran 1935–40 and 1966–2009, hereafter LTM) and Leeds Texts and Monographs Facsimiles (which ran 1973–84). The present article is a history of LSE and to some extent LTM and LTM Facsimiles, thus addressing the period 1967–2019. The journal’s earlier history entails quite a different historical moment and source-base, and will be addressed in a separate study.²

The history of one relatively small academic journal is undeniably a niche concern, yet it offers a valuable perspective on the history of both Medieval and English Studies. The study of medievalism is now an integral part of academic Medieval Studies, and researchers have explored the cultural and political importance of medievalism outside the academy extensively.³ Researchers have also traced in detail the emergence of what we currently call Medieval Studies as an academic field during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the history of academic Medieval Studies over the last century or so has received far less attention; moreover, those histories that move beyond surveying the research itself to examine the institutional structures that supported that research are mostly articulated as prosopographies or biographies of individual scholars.⁴ Meanwhile, the general history of English Studies has — despite, or perhaps because of, the far greater number of departments and scholars inhabiting this field — probably attracted even less commentary than Medieval Studies. Again, the research that has been done on English Studies focuses on the early stages of the discipline, mostly prior to the First World War and certainly the Second.⁵ And whereas the histories of English Studies that exist for the USA do frequently attend to the quotidian institutional structures through which university English Studies exist, research into English Studies in Britain is mostly more abstract, analysing ‘the intellectual content of the discipline in direct relation to social forces’ without addressing ‘the mediatory role of the academic institution and the academic profession’.⁶ Following the dictum of Keith Robbins that ‘the study of change through the study of particular institutions retains a value that is apt to be lost amidst broad sweeps and comprehensive generalizations’, the present article helps to fill these gaps by providing one case-study of how English Studies and Medieval Studies have changed and interacted across the last seventy years or so.⁷ While this article attests to the degree to which academic journals must be understood through biography, we also emphasise the importance of constructing histories of Medieval Studies and English Studies in terms of the intergenerational institutions that individual scholars have made and continually remade. As the journal on which we focus was based in the University of Leeds, the history of the journal necessitates — and provides one perspective on — a history of what are currently Leeds’s School of English and Institute for Medieval Studies. Indeed, however incomplete, this article provides the fullest account so far published of the latter, and one of the fullest of the former.⁸

In particular, LSE affords a perspective on the history of the discipline that was in the late nineteenth century called philology, exposing the tripartite disciplinary tensions between ‘language’, ‘literature’ and ‘linguistics’ in English Studies, along with the tensions between English Studies and Medieval Studies. For most of the twentieth century, schools and universities in majority-Anglophone countries have generally put a belletristic conception of English Studies at the heart of their curricula: scholars focusing on the linguistic side of the subject have in the postwar period either decamped to linguistics departments or otherwise been overshadowed by their literary colleagues. Correspondingly, research on the history of English Studies has at times normalised a literary focus.⁹ The history of LSE provides one useful perspective from the margins, on how the field once constituted at Leeds and at various other universities as ‘English Language and Medieval Literature’ has negotiated its position in English Studies more generally.

This article is also a contribution to the history of academic publishing (particularly, though not only, journal publishing). Academic publishing is the subject of huge amounts of research, as befits a phenomenon economically significant and epistemologically foundational. But deep historical study of journal publishing is rare, and research has focused on journals of the hard sciences. In 2015, Aileen Fyfe, Julie McDougall-Waters and Noah Moxham felt able to say that ‘we are now rich in snapshots of the history of scientific periodicals — we have studies of specific editors, and specific journals, at particular points in time — but, except for the rhetoric of scientific articles, we lack the big picture’.¹⁰ But although there is a significant seam of extended editorials and anecdotal accounts of journals’ histories waiting to be mined , thorough histories of humanities journals across a long time-span are thin on the ground.¹¹ Fyfe and her colleagues have shown that problems and possibilities in the present concerning, say, the tensions between financial viability and facilitating access to a wide readership,¹² journals’ reliance on volunteer labour,¹³ or experimentation with the circulation of ‘pre-publication’ texts,¹⁴ are not new and can be understood better in a historical perspective. Fyfe has also emphasised that 'we know far too little about the distribution, circulation and readership of scientific journals’,¹⁵ while she and Anna Gielas have called attention to a lack of work on the role of journal editors (in academic publishing and beyond).¹⁶ For much of its history, LSE has archives that could shed light on all these questions in relation to the Arts, but a general history of the journal is a prerequisite for assessing and utilising them.

Sprawling though this study is, tales which we could have told but do not announce themselves at every turn: a School of English comprising over forty intellectually fissiparous staff members would fit into a unitary narrative only of the most abstract kind. We have therefore focused throughout on the journal’s lead editors (listed in Table 1), while recognising that this reinforces the systemic lack of credit accorded to other editorial board members and peer-reviewers. We have been able to give some recognition to the clerical staff who have made the journal possible, however, and have tried at least to advert to the wives whose labour must often have facilitated male scholars’ editorial work. In keeping with the free-access philosophy of Leeds Medieval Studies, the preparation of this article has involved the creation and improvement of English-language Wikipedia articles on many of the individuals and organisations named; though their levels of detail and thoroughness vary, we trust that readers struggling to navigate the extensive dramatis personae of this article, or wishing further to research them, will find Wikipedia a helpful aid.¹⁷

Sources and methods

From around the later 1960s, substantial, albeit patchy, archives for the LSE operation survive. Alongside fuller sequences of correspondence, several reams of carbon copies of outgoing letters — of which only the top copy was usually signed, leaving us now to guess the authors — run for certain stretches through to the advent of email; extensive, though incomplete, records of payments and invoices exist; and, for a period in the 1980s, minutes of meetings.¹⁸ The material would permit insights into processes of peer-review; the proposed monographs considered, accepted, and rejected; the conferences organised; and the ups and downs of the operation’s finances. It is to be hoped that researchers will one day sift them. But it is also from the early 1970s that work on LSE emerges into living memory, and it is by oral accounts, and the evidence of the publications themselves, that the present history is primarily constructed. Key informants are Peter Meredith (1933–) and Pam Armitage. Meredith (interviewed 23 April 2020) proceeded from postgraduate study at the University College of North Staffordshire (now the University of Keele) to the University of Adelaide in 1961 (accompanied by his ‘equally adventurous’ wife Greta), before joining Leeds in 1969.¹⁹ Meanwhile, whereas earlier numbers of LSE are silent on the subject of clerical work, editorial notes from 1986 and 1991 attest to the importance of Pam Armitage (interviewed 4 June 2020);²⁰ in 1995, she finally made it onto the list of editorial board members, remaining there up to 2002. In Meredith’s words, ‘she was amazing; she really was, you know, everybody’s ideal secretary’. Following her A-levels (where her English curriculum included Chaucer, which was to prove useful), she took a one-year course in administration at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University), and joined Leeds University’s School of English in September 1972, taking over from Christine Eastwood as secretary to Arthur Cawley, the Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature. Andrew Wawn (1944–), who came to Leeds in 1983, has also contributed welcome insights (21 June 2021).²¹ We have also benefited from archival and oral accounts assembled by postgraduates of the Institute for Medieval Studies in connection with its fiftieth anniversary in 2017.²² Coming into the present century, we rely primarily on the memories of Leeds Medieval Studies’s current editors, along with their electronic access to institutional documents.

Robbins has emphasised the uneasiness that attends academics writing the histories of their own institutions. On the one hand, such people handily combine research skills with ready access to archives, oral sources, and personal experience of relevant events and institutions. On the other hand,

while universities may parade the fact that they give their historians open access to archives, in reality they may not be anxious to see too frank an airing of personal disputes and policy differences. Sometimes, this job is allocated to senior professors as a joyous retirement task. Others will have to go on teaching and administering. They are perhaps not unmindful of this in what they write.²³

We can affirm both that the present study was not a joyous retirement task and that Robbins’s caveats apply. It will not, for example, have escaped the reader that including in the second volume of Leeds Medieval Studies a history of a predecessor journal is part of a wider trend of publishers bolstering their prestige with ambitious claims to antiquity.²⁴ Yet as Jane Chance recognised in her Women Medievalists and the Academy, a willingness to write academic autobiography enables us to write institutional histories that articulate the relationship between the more distant past and our own moment — a practice whose value in medieval English studies specifically has recently been emphasised by scholars responding to deployments of medieval texts in the service of populist politics;²⁵ to the Black Lives Matter movement, and its implications for our implicit commitments to ‘Anglo-Saxonism’;²⁶ and to sexual abuse in the academy,²⁷ amongst other forces. As David Matthews — echoing in particular the seminal insights of Kathleen Biddick — has argued in relation to the vexed distinction between medievalism and Medieval Studies,

a purer, disinterested medieval studies seems to be what we do now; medievalism is always a generation ago […] Hence what tends to happen over time is that medieval studies passes into medievalism; as it ceaselessly updates itself, medieval studies expels what it no longer wishes to recognise as part of itself.²⁸

Integrating our understanding of Medieval Studies now into the longer history of academic medievalism is, therefore, a necessary part of understanding both phenomena. Robbins even hinted that histories of universities might ‘guide or instruct university presidents, vice-chancellors, or rectors in the way they should go’.²⁹ While no such elevated figures are likely to read the present article, it does strive to develop a disinterested history of LSE that can usefully inform the development of Leeds Medieval Studies and other publications in its field.³⁰

(Re)starting a journal

Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages

Figure 1. Traditional typesetting, here on p. 5 of volume 7–8 (1952) of LMSKL

Properly, the LSE story begins around 1931, when Bruce Dickins (1889–1978) took up the chair of English Language at Leeds and founded the journal LSE&KL, along with its associated monograph series, with the help of Alan Strode Campbell Ross (1907–80, appointed to Leeds straight out of his Oxford BA in 1929) and Richard (Dick) Middlewood Wilson (1908–70, appointed in 1931 on completing his MA at Leeds in the same year).³¹ As mentioned above, the story of LSE&KL will be told elsewhere, but that story has a coda that is the necessary prelude to the history of LSE. The Second World War led to a hiatus in publishing the older journal, and around the end of the War the editorial triumvirate all left Leeds (Dickins to Cambridge, Wilson to Sheffield, and Ross to Birmingham). Harold Orton succeeded Dickins as Leeds’s Professor of English Language in 1946 and, with the great post-war expansion of UK higher education underway, recruited an entirely new English Language team: Arthur Clare Cawley (1913–93), Arnold Rodgers Taylor (also 1913–93), Walter Alfred George Doyle-Davidson (1906–97), and David Abercrombie (1909–92).

Arriving at Leeds in 1947, at the age of 34, Arthur Cawley was an exceptionally well travelled person (as was his wife, fellow-traveller, fellow-teacher, and novelist Winifred, whom Arthur had married in 1939). Born in Kent, Cawley had taken a BA and MA at University College London (meeting Winifred there); held academic positions in Hull, Harvard, and Sheffield; and, from around 1938 to 1946, taught for the British Council in Romania, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, and Iceland — moves determined partly by fleeing the German advance during the Second World War. The get-up-and-go evidenced by Cawley’s migrations was also apparent at Leeds, where he took a stab at reviving LSE&KL. When, in 1952, he and Orton issued the first volume of the journal since 1937, they elicited a short preface from Dickins about the journal’s history. Dickins ended that preface by saying ‘its ways will not, I know, be our ways, but variety is the spice of life, and with its new captain and its new crew I wish it a prosperous voyage’. This statement is in one respect misleading and in another respect revealing. What is revealing is the phrase ‘its new captain’: the editorial note is signed by Cawley and Orton, but Dickins evidently thought that there was one ‘captain’; subsequent history shows that this must have been Cawley. Misleadingly, Dickins’s note implies that the revived journal was to be different from its predecessor, but the editorial note by Cawley and Orton that follows Dickins’s preface promises the old formula, and the volume follows it faithfully. Like its predecessors, it was ‘printed by Titus Wilson and Son, Ltd., of Kendal’, and its physical appearance is identical to earlier numbers; the contributors, as under Dickins’s editorship, were staff, students, and graduates of the department. The only real hint of change was that rather than being printed ‘for members of the School of English Language’, as the 1930s LSE&KL volumes declared, the 1952 volume was printed ‘for members of the School of English Language and Medieval Literature’ — perhaps an early hint that medieval literature was no longer quite synonymous with English Language.

The volume was not a clear-out of material that had been awaiting publication since the War: alongside contributions from the new English Language staff, most of the graduates’ work was recent, deriving from theses dating from 1947–50.³² Yet no new number followed. It is not clear why the volume was issued as a double issue (being numbered 7–8), but perhaps a promised volume 7 overran and the editors decided to roll it into a volume 8, which might suggest difficulty finding time for the editorial work. Money was probably a concern too: the editorial note says ‘we hope to issue a new number of LSE at fairly frequent intervals […] We shall also endeavour, with sufficient financial support, to publish new numbers of Leeds Texts and Monographs’, which all sounds suspiciously circumspect.³³ The volume was warmly received by reviewers, but other demands on the editors were evidently more pressing, and the journal went quiet.³⁴ LSE&KL had come to an end.

One of the demands on Cawley’s time that must have distracted him from LSE&KL was that in 1952 he became secretary of the Leeds University Medieval Group. The English Language department was not the only one that had seen a thoroughgoing turnover in staffing around the end of the War: staff in the Department of History also changed dramatically during the war years, and in 1945 a new ‘Professor of Mediaeval History’ was appointed: John le Patourel (1909–81). Keen to foster the study of his period not only within his department but across the University, Le Patourel founded Medieval Group in October 1951 and served as its chair until 1971, shortly after his retirement. The group’s members would gather to hear academic papers, preceded by ‘sherry in the Chairman’s room’ and followed ‘by supper’.³⁵ Le Patourel’s recently appointed colleague Glanville Rees Jeffreys Jones (1923–96) became treasurer and remained so throughout Le Patourel’s chairmanship. For the first year, the group’s secretary was Kenneth William Humphreys (1916–72), deputy librarian of Leeds’s Brotherton Library and an honorary lecturer in palaeography at Leeds during 1950–52, but on his departure to Birmingham in 1952, Cawley took over.³⁶ Medieval Group — ‘that enormously civilised meeting’, as Cawley’s obiturist Stanley Ellis later characterised it — was the starting point for the concerted inter-departmental and interdisciplinary pursuit of Medieval Studies at Leeds, and Cawley was evidently committed to it, perhaps at the expense of his journal-editing.³⁷ The post-War history of Leeds Studies in English, then, was in some way entwined from its inception with the emergence of Medieval Studies as a field.

1966 and all that

Figure 2. Flyer from around 1967 advertising LSE and LTM

Well travelled though Arthur and Winifred Cawley were, however, their travels were not yet over: in 1959 they left Britain again as Arthur took up the Darnell Chair of English at the University of Queensland. But, following Harold Orton’s retirement in 1964, Cawley returned to Leeds as Professor of English Language and Medieval English Literature in autumn 1965.³⁸ He found plenty of familiar faces: all six of his Department of English Language and Medieval English Literature colleagues from 1958–59 were still around (including Orton, still editor-in-chief of the Survey of English Dialects). Likewise, seven of the twelve 1958–59 staff of the Department of English Literature were still at Leeds. But the situation was in other respects transformed. Having split in 1949, the two departments had merged back into a unitary School of English in 1961, and expanded from sixteen to forty-one academic staff, and from two to nine administrative and clerical staff — at which size the School has more or less remained since, albeit with radical shifts in staff expertise. Although there were now staff who taught English Language without teaching medieval English literature, no fewer than ten, including Cawley, had ‘English Language and Medieval English Literature’ in their job title. The School was home to the newly founded Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, established, after a long gestation, in 1964 (running until 1983).³⁹ The School’s first female staff member had been its first clerk, Vera Cracknell, appointed in 1947, and the expansion in clerical staffing had dramatically increased the number of women in the School’s employ. But even the academic staff now included three women, readily identifiable in the University of Leeds Calendar by the fact that, whereas male staff are given no titles and their first names reduced to initials, women are prefixed ‘Miss’ and their first names are given in full, as if ‘Miss’ were not enough to avert the risk of them being supposed to be men. These groundbreaking academics were Betty Hill (1925–2016, appointed in 1963),⁴⁰ Christine Fell (1938–98, appointed in 1965),⁴¹ and Elizabeth (Libby) Williams (1938–2012, also appointed in 1965).⁴² Curiously, all were medievalists, suggesting that the field was somehow more accessible to female scholars than other areas.

Other schools in the Faculty of Arts were also expanding dramatically, and the sense of dynamism must have been tremendous. Already on 12 November 1965, Le Patourel and Cawley were building on the informal tradition of Medieval Group and writing to colleagues, saying

we would like to explore the possibility of establishing an ‘Institute of Medieval Studies’ in this University, consisting of teachers who are interested in medieval subjects whether as part of their professional interests or not. The object of such an Institute would be to establish post-graduate courses leading to a higher degree or diploma through co-operation between the different departments concerned […] We have heard of developments of this kind in Toronto and Manchester, and we shall circulate such literature as we can obtain on these two before the meeting.⁴³

The reference points of Toronto and Manchester are unsurprising: the Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto (now the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies), the first of its kind, had been founded already in 1929 (and its journal Mediaeval Studies in 1939), and helped to inspire the foundation of the more secular-minded Toronto Center for Medieval Studies in 1964, while Manchester’s history department had long been a kind of senior partner to Leeds’s and the Manchester Medieval Society had been founded already as an offshoot of the Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature in 1933.⁴⁴ Le Patourel and Cawley could also have noted another precursor which is worth mentioning here because of its later importance to developments at Leeds: the Medieval Institute founded at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in 1962, which became home to the enormously significant International Congress on Medieval Studies. By 1967, the Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies had been established, with Le Patourel as the director from 1967–70, followed by Cawley from 1970–72 and then his School of English colleague Robert (Bob) L. Thomson (1924–2006) from 1972–77.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, Asa Briggs (1921–2016), newly arrived as Professor of Modern History, had in 1956 set up a group for discussing ‘problems of North of England history’. Briggs left Leeds for Sussex University in 1961, but from the group emerged the journal Northern History, which first appeared in 1966. Edited by Gordon Colin Fawcett Forster (1928–2017), it had a medievally-inclined editorial board (including Le Patourel) whose legacy includes strong medieval representation in the journal to the present day.⁴⁶ Moreover, in 1966–67, one of its board, Peter Sawyer (1928–2018), who had joined the School of History from Birmingham in 1964, spent a year working with R. Stuart Hoyt (1918–71), Professor of Medieval History at the University of Minnesota, from which visit emerged the decision to create what became the International Medieval Bibliography, to help cope with ‘the growing flood of articles on medieval topics in periodicals, Festschriften and conference reports’. By 1969, the Bibliography’s base had settled in Leeds, moving from the top floor of Sawyer’s house to Leeds University’s Parkinson Building in 1970.³⁷ Changes were underway in the School of English too. The Survey of English Dialects was chugging along. A 1964 conference at Leeds led to the foundation of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and, in 1966, the first, Leeds-based issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.⁴⁸ In 1967 the innovative Workshop Theatre was taking shape, consolidating an interest in humanities study through theatre practice that would be influential, inter alia, in the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.⁴⁹ Moves were also afoot to create what in the academic year 1969–70 became the Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, which also involved issuing the first volume of a book-series called Leeds Studies in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, echoing the LSE brand (though no further volumes appeared).⁵⁰

As all these new activities unfolded, Cawley tried again to restart LSE. Besides the generally lively context, the other key new factor in explaining the success of this second run was undoubtedly that the School of English had in Cawley’s absence appointed Robin Carfrae Alston (1933–2011), born in the Caribbean and educated in England and British Columbia, newly graduated from his Ph.D. at King’s College London on early-modern spelling reform in English. Alongside his interest in historical linguistics, Alston was passionate about bibliography and was, in the words of Peter Meredith, ‘a very, very live wire indeed’.⁵¹ Alston’s three marriages might suggest the same: one of his obiturists opined that ‘Alston was no saint, but a gallant adventurer who often broke rules (and hearts) in the intense pursuit of his truth’.⁵² ‘Restless, visionary, and endlessly inventive, Alston did not always make an easy colleague, and he stayed with few employers for long’, comments another.⁵³ Alston was dedicated to enabling undergraduates to read set texts in their original editions. In 1966, he founded the Scolar Press, harnessing new technology to produce inexpensive facsimiles of over two thousand texts of importance to the history of the English language. The 1930s LTM tradition of publishing editions must have appealed to him, and he no doubt saw in both LSE and LTM the opportunity to bring business to his press. There was clearly a meeting of minds between Alston and Cawley and already in its first year the Scolar Press was publishing the founding volume of what they labelled Leeds Texts and Monographs: New Series, the first of the four-volume Works of William Bullokar, in which Alston and Bror Axel Danielsson (1905–88) edited the writings of a sixteenth-century printer and orthographic innovator. It seems likely that it was also Alston who lined up the next volume, a facsimile and English translation of John Caius’s 1574 De pronunciatione Graecae et Latinae linguae cum scriptione nova libellus by John Butler Gable, which appeared in 1968; he certainly contributed to the first volume of the ‘new series’ of LSE, co-edited by Cawley and himself in 1967.⁵⁴

Correspondence in the archive enables us to reconstruct a moderately detailed story of how these first volumes were capitalised and printed. The publisher of both LTM and the renewed LSE was given as the School of English, but the printer was the Scolar Press. By 7 July 1966, Alston had engaged Ken Holmes of the Scarborough company Filmtype Services for the photosetting of the first volume of The Works of William Bullokar, and was seeking a quote from him for setting the proposed LSE.⁵⁵ Exactly how much the Bullokar volume cost to produce or how it was capitalised is not clear, but one source of capital is clear: subsequent correspondence concerning the first volume mentions that ‘we were able to avoid asking the University for a subsidy towards the Bullokar version, thanks partly to the University Librarian, who ordered 100 copies for exchange purposes’: essentially, then, the Library diverted funds that it might have used to buy other universities’ publications directly, funding LTM in the expectation of exchanging it for publications from elsewhere.⁵⁶ One hundred is a suspiciously round number, hinting that the Librarian (then Bertram Samuel (Tony) Page, 1904–93) was partly supporting the LTM operation as a point of principle. The same purchase of one hundred copies by the Library was agreed for LSE; in January 1967, Cawley envisaged a cover price of thirty shillings, which, if the library paid this rate, would imply revenue of £150 (though the eventual official cover price was forty-two shillings, implying £210). ‘But even so we are in urgent need of financial assistance’, Cawley wrote on 16 January 1967 in an application to the University Publications Committee, explaining that the cost of typesetting (technically speaking photosetting) the first volume would be £225, while the cost of printing and binding a run of five hundred copies would be £125.⁵⁷ Cawley’s application to the Publications Committee for a £200, non-recurrent capital subsidy was clearly not unreasonable: in 1966 the first issue of Northern History was ‘facilitated by a guarantee from the publications fund of the University of Leeds, and by donations from local firms and individuals’.⁵⁸ By comparison with the capitalisation which The Journal of Commonwealth Literature was thought to require in the same year, Cawley’s request was small: before agreeing to publish the new journal, with a print run of 2000, Heinemann wanted a subsidy; the journal’s first editor, Arthur Ravenscroft, recalled thinking that £700 would be right and in the event Norman Jeffares negotiated £1420 from the British Council.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, for reasons unknown, the Committee demurred to subsidise LSE — but the School of English stepped in, apparently to the tune of £250.⁶⁰ The LSE operation was underway.

A venture philological: setting the editorial agenda (1966–76)

Figure 3. Photosetting, here on p. 1 of volume 3 (1969) of LSE

Alston relinquished his lectureship in 1969 to concentrate on his business activities;⁶¹ though Scolar Press continued to print LSE and LTM until 1977, and Alston continued teaching at Leeds until 1976 and completed his four-volume Bullokar edition in 1980, he ceased co-editing the journal after the third, 1970, volume. For the four years following Alston’s departure, Cawley co-edited LSE with Stanley Ellis (1926–2009), whose work was closely associated with the Survey of English Dialects, while Betty Hill assisted in 1971. Having built up colleagues’ involvement in the journal, Cawley stepped back in 1975, but continued to lead Texts and Monographs projects. By the end of his time with the journal, its intellectual course was well established, making this a good moment in the chronology of LSE to explore the relationship between the institutions which housed it and its editorial scope.

Some journals carry elaborate manifestos to spell out their intellectual agendas. The editors of LSE and its associated projects have, however, bequeathed little commentary of this sort. Writing to the University Registrar in search of capital funding, Cawley wrote:

as you probably know, the School of English has long had two series of publications on the language and medieval literature side of the School of English. […] These two publications, which were started by Professor Bruce Dickins, brought considerable prestige to the School of English and so to the University. It is unfortunate that they were allowed to lapse, and we (my colleagues and I) are determined to revive them and publish each of them annually.⁶²

We should probably take Cawley at his word that he saw the publications bringing prestige to the School, and also infer that their revival represented for Cawley a matter of unfinished business. But it seems unlikely that prestige alone motivated him (the argument evidently did not motivate the Publications Committee). Yet in terms of intellectual motivations, the brief editorial note with which the 1967 LSE volume begins offers only:

it should be pointed out that the title of the periodical has been shortened to Leeds Studies in English, and that contributions are now invited not only from graduates and teachers of Leeds University but from scholars working in the field of early English and Icelandic studies in any part of the world. The new LSE is bound to be different from the old. Its editors can but hope that it will prove a worthy successor.

In terms of intellectual content, nothing here has really changed: LSE&KL had always focused on (mostly medieval) English and Old Norse (though ‘Icelandic studies’ does fly a flag for the specific commitment to Old and Modern Icelandic in the School of English at Leeds). Thus the key policy change was to open up the journal to contributors from outside Leeds, situating the journal firmly in the post-war landscape of international, peer-reviewed academic publishing — but again revealing rather little about the journal’s intellectual agenda.

Yet the journal’s shifting content does afford a case-study of the changing disciplinary and institutional structures of both English and Medieval Studies through the last century. It is helpful for various reasons to begin exploring the editorial agenda of the Leeds Studies project by glancing back to 1932, characterised by the Leeds student newspaper at the time as ‘a venture (philological, not like the former one, poetical) by the Department of English Language’.⁶³

The break-up of English philology

The title of Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages surely indicates Bruce Dickins’s intellectual programme in at least a couple of ways. First, the title implied that the scope of the English Language part of the Leeds English Department (that is, coverage of the first thousand of the then thirteen-hundred years of written English literature and general coverage of English Language) was sufficient for the journal to claim to represent English Studies. While one can see the argument here, given the infamous tensions between ‘lit. and lang.’ in UK English departments, the title looks rather like a land-grab by an editor not noted for his tact in university politics.⁶⁴ Notwithstanding the obviously catholic interests and talents of individual staff members, tension between the English Literature and English Language sides of English at Leeds is apparent from at least the 1920s. George Stuart Gordon (1881–1942), Professor of English Language and Literature at Leeds 1919–22, wrote in 1925 that he had wanted ‘to bring the linguistic and literary interests of the Department into more natural and friendly association: the hardest task, as a rule, which such Departments present’.⁶⁵ Gordon’s concerns reflected discourse in the discipline generally in Britain, not least at Oxford, the alma mater of the vast majority of Leeds’s inter-War English staff;⁶⁶ J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), for example, by turns both promoted and discouraged this ‘friendly association’, both during his tenure at Leeds (1920–25) and subsequently at Oxford.⁶⁷ Officially, there was a single department of ‘English Language and Literature’ at Leeds from 1898 through to 1948, but throughout the 1930s LSE&KL proclaimed itself as ‘printed […] for Members of the School of English Language in the University of Leeds’. This surely reflects the academic identity-politics of Dickins’s professorship, and it certainly foreshadowed the official split in October 1948, when the Faculty formed separate Departments of English Literature on the one hand and English Language and Medieval English Literature on the other.⁶⁸ Correspondingly, the content of LSE&KL never addressed students of literature later than about 1600.

Conversely, LSE&KL accommodated the interests of its ‘School of English Language’ editors without apparent strain; yet the second way in which its title is informative is that it implicitly sought to disabuse readers of the implicit expectation that English Studies might be a monoglot enterprise. The journal overwhelmingly carried articles focused on English, generally venturing beyond only when contributors discussed cognates and loanwords, or Old Norse; this Anglocentric manifestation of philology recalls the situation of the Transactions of the Philological Society in (at least) the mid-nineteenth century, when the journal mostly attracted contributions on the history of English.⁶⁹ And yet a search for the word philology and its derivatives in the journal is instructive, not least since it was around the 1930s that British scholars, desperate to distance themselves from German nationalist philology, were starting to view the word as a term of opprobrium (while not necessarily abandoning the multi-disciplinary, text-led cultural studies that it could denote).⁷⁰ It was usually A. S. C. Ross who used the word, explicitly to mean ‘the study of language’;⁷¹ thus there is a sense in the journal that philology no longer embraced literary or cultural-history studies, yet that Ross did not perceive the disciplinary split that was implied by the instituting in 1928 of the International Congress of Linguists as a break from traditional philology. The fact that Dickins began the first volume of LSE with Ross’s ostentatiously (if hubristically) Saussurian ‘Outline of a Theory of Language’ implies that he did not recognise a fracturing of ‘philology’ either, and Ross’s various contributions show him drawing on both pre- and post-Saussurian approaches with vigour. Still, the willingness of scholars in the field to accept Ross’s linguistic range had its limits. The 1934 volume contained a note on ‘A Collection of Books in the Non-Slavonic Languages of Russia’ at Leeds which, though unsigned, was clearly by Ross (and conceivably also his wife, the energetic Elizabeth Stefanyja Olsewska, 1907–73). This note undeniably ranged beyond any likely denotation of ‘English and kindred languages’; reviewing the volume, C. L. Wrenn (1895–1969) griped that

the quality of the number is as uneven as is the importance of the subjects treated; and one is tempted to suggest that in a periodical of very limited space the non-Indo-European languages of Russia should have been omitted — even if there is a special interest in the Finno-Ugrian languages (as we are told there is) in Leeds University.⁷²

These intersecting tensions between lang. and lit. and between monoglot and polyglot portended future developments in English Studies. Indeed, a three-way Medieval Literature–English Language–Linguistics split played out in the history of the chairs to which Dickins, Wilson, and Ross departed after the War: at Cambridge, Dickins’s successor as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Dorothy Whitelock (1901–82), brought the Department of Anglo-Saxon from the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology into the determinedly literary Faculty of English in 1967, representing the ‘medieval literature’ dimension of English philological tradition.⁷³ After moving to Sheffield, R. M. Wilson became Professor of English Language in 1955. Yet at Birmingham, after a few years with the same title, Ross became Professor of Linguistics in 1951.⁷⁴

Likewise, the 1948 splitting of the Leeds English department went three ways, producing not only Departments of English Language and English Literature but also a Department of Phonetics. However hard G. S. Gordon found it to bring the linguistic and literary interests of the Department into natural and friendly association, bringing the linguistic interests into natural and friendly association with other linguistic interests was to prove even harder. The raft of new English Language staff appointed by Orton in 1947 had included a graduate of the department, David Abercrombie, with the then unusually specific job title of ‘lecturer in phonetics’. Abercrombie left English Language at Leeds after just a year because Edinburgh had offered him the chance to start an independent phonetics department.⁷⁵ Coincidentally or otherwise, Leeds then appointed Peter Arthur Desmond MacCarthy (1912–79) to start a separate phonetics department in Leeds in 1948.⁷⁶ This began to institutionalise linguistics as a discipline distinct from the language-specific, ‘philological’ study of language at Leeds. Within a decade of English Language and Literature coming back together as the School of English in 1961, Terence Frederick Mitchell (1919–2007) had been appointed as Professor of Contemporary English (1964), renamed his chair to English Language and General Linguistics (1966), served as head of school (1967–70) and then, in 1971, led the creation of a new Department of Linguistics, taking with him four of the School’s five lecturers in English Language and General Linguistics. In 1978 he merged Linguistics with the Department of Phonetics to create the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, an arrangement which persists to the present day. The identitarian angst (intellectual and institutional) associated with the split was acute.⁷⁷

When Cawley and Alston revived LSE and removed ‘and kindred languages’, it looks like they largely shared Wrenn’s critique of LSE&KL’s tendency to multilingualism; their editorial policy made a concession to the School’s long tradition of Icelandic studies, but they demurred to welcome in Celtic, despite its representation in the School by Bob Thomson. On 15 December 1966, Cawley wrote to Gerhard Nickel, evidently in response to a submission which had some connection with his Habilitation thesis Die Expanded Form im Altenglischen,⁷⁸ that

the editorial committee here have all read it and have requested me to tell you that it is less suitable, in its present modern linguistic framework, for Leeds Studies in English than (say) for Language or Neuphilologische Mitteilungen […] After all, LSE is primarily concerned with the historical study of English and with medieval literature. I think we should be departing from our aims if we admitted articles on transformative grammar (which is in any case well catered for in other periodicals.)⁷⁹

Thus Leeds Studies in English instituted in 1960s scholarly publishing the language/linguistics split that was slowly working through Leeds’s post-war departmental structures.

From English Language to Medieval Studies

While effectively endorsing the split of Linguistics from English Language, Cawley looks in both 1952 and 1967 to have been committed to sustaining the integrity of ‘English Language and Medieval Literature’, and even to reaching out to post-medieval literature. The 1952 LSE&KL volume had a fairly even balance of medieval and dialectological articles; the 1967 volume was quite literary, including significant post-medieval contributions; and the 1968 volume was a Festschrift for Harold Orton and firmly dialectological. But from 1969, the contributions, with occasional exceptions, were almost uniformly on medieval topics, mostly literature. The fact that Cawley’s co-editors Orton, Alston, and then, in 1971–77, Ellis, were all English Language specialists, is telling: all would have been well placed to solicit material from that field. That the journal swiftly settled to medieval research shows that the editors, potential contributors, or both, implicitly found that the old edifice of English Language and Medieval Literature no longer constituted a coherent research area, and perhaps equally there was also little appetite for a new journal with a Review of English Studies-style purview reaching across the whole span of English literature.

Effectively, then, the new series of LSE focused on studies — literary and sometimes linguistic — in medieval English. Identifying trends in the changing scope of other journals is beyond our present remit, but it is worth noting that, albeit decades after 1967, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology undertook a similar refocusing: founded in 1897 as The Journal of Germanic Philology, it took its present name in 1903, presumably because, just as LSE originally felt the need to spell out its welcome to ‘kindred languages’, the Journal of Germanic Philology found it necessary to spell out that Germanic included English. The linguistics element in JEGP was never strong, but the journal’s chronological coverage of literature ran from the Middle Ages to the present until 2004, when the journal’s self-characterisation changed from ‘a quarterly devoted to the English, German, and Scandinavian languages and literatures’ to add ‘focusing on northern European cultures of the Middle Ages’.⁸⁰ Once more, there is a sense of a tightening of research fields and a consolidation of the Germanic-speaking Middle Ages as a focus for journals.

Cawley and his successors were also negotiating yet another identitarian and institutional divergence, though, this time between medieval English Studies and a conception of Medieval Studies broader in both its disciplinary and linguistic scope. Like linguistics, the field of Medieval Studies was in 1932 only just starting to form a distinct identity, and was evidently not yet exerting institutional force on the self-perception of people like Dickins, Ross, and Wilson.⁸¹ Even in 1952, Leeds’s Medieval Group was far from being an institution. But the picture in 1966 was rather different. Meredith speculates on Cawley’s return to Leeds as a professor and his relationship with LSE:

whether he then thought ‘now’s the time to revive it’, and if he did, why, I don't exactly know; but it’s kind of tied up, I think, with what became the Centre for Medieval Studies: he and John Le Patourel in History got together to create the Centre, and I think this was all part of a feeling that Medieval Studies needed to get a strong establishment in Leeds. Not just that — the Medieval Group too, which when we first came was very lively indeed, and that again was something which Le Patourel and Arthur were much involved with.

For this reason, and given that LSE has now been reincarnated as Leeds Medieval Studies, one wonders whether Cawley might not have chosen to create a Medieval Studies journal from the start. But whereas the Institute for Medieval Studies is today well embedded at Leeds, while individually the Schools of English and of Languages, Cultures and Societies host few medievalists, these were not the contours in the late 1960s. Meredith again:

when I came, in 1969, I wasn’t I think aware of the changes that were taking place — of the gradual diminution of Medieval Studies in the School of English. You know, I came; there was Arnold Taylor in Icelandic; there was Doyle-Davidson who was doing Anglo-Saxon art and archaeology; there was Bob Thomson who was in Celtic Studies — a huge range of medieval stuff — and it just seemed, you know, that this was it, this was how it was going to be. Looking back, I can see that there was pressure, partly from Linguistics, because that was quite a new element which had been set up, and that was in the School of English; and what I was less aware of, I suppose, was the extent to which modern literature was extending and expanding and, er, getting belligerent — there was a touch of that. There was that sense that everything — the status quo — was fixed, and that was how it was going to be.

Meanwhile, the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, ‘I think, was thought to be a bit of a lame duck to start with — I don’t think it was thought to be anything very much’. The function of the Centre was specifically to host a cross-departmental master’s degree, and the University’s main forum for medievalist staff to exchange ideas remained Medieval Group.

These topographies, and the ways in which they started to shift, are apparent in the remarkable work that took place on medieval drama at Leeds in the 1970s. Cawley and Meredith were both leading figures in this area, and other members of the School of English were involved. LSE published significant work on English drama on an annual basis; LTM published volumes in the same area in 1974 and 1985;⁸² and, perhaps most impressively, the team founded Leeds Texts and Monographs Facsimiles: New Series, which, across eight volumes from 1973 to 1984 published facsimiles of most of the major manuscripts of medieval English drama.⁸³ At the same time, as Meredith recalls,

the great thing as far as medieval drama was concerned […] was that the whole University — all the humanities side anyway — could produce somebody who was interested in medieval drama. I mean, we had somebody in German, somebody in French, somebody in Italian, somebody in Spanish, and it was absolutely amazing. So my sense of a community within Leeds was very much based in medieval drama — it was brilliant! I mean, absolutely wonderful. But it didn’t have any impact on Leeds Studies — Leeds Studies was very much English.

A key figure here is Lynette (Lyne) R. Muir (1930–2007). ‘She was very lively, good with students: it was people like her that made it [the Centre for Medieval Studies] a force to be reckoned with’. Muir and the Wednesday Lunchtime Group met weekly in termtime and arranged a four-day international colloquium on medieval drama in September 1974 that led three years later to the formation of the Société Internationale pour l’étude du théâtre médiéval,⁸⁴ and in 1975 Jane Oakshott (1946–), a graduate of the CMS, devised and directed a thirty-six-pageant performance of the York Cycle of mystery plays with the support of the Wednesday Lunchtime Group on campus as part of the centenary anniversary of the foundation of the Yorkshire College, Leeds University’s principal institutional ancestor.⁸⁵ These activities were under the auspices of the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, which was thus starting to position itself as a hub not only for interdepartmental teaching, but also interdepartmental and international research collaboration. In 1977, Muir became the Centre’s first female director, removed the word ‘Graduate’ from the name, and in 1979 won a dedicated room, christened ‘The Le Patourel Room’, in a one-time church building (currently the home of the University’s Workshop Theatre). The colloquium’s proceedings were edited by Rastall and emerged, with impressive alacrity, in 1975, beginning a new book series, Leeds Medieval Studies. Produced as a camera-ready typescript and printed by Leeds’s University Printing Service, it foreshadowed production methods for LSE, and was followed in 1977 by The Tristan Legend: Texts from Northern and Eastern Europe in Modern English Translation, edited by Joyce Hill (1947–), and a 1981 edition of the French play The Passion de Semur by Muir and Peter Durbin, based on Durbin’s 1974 Leeds M.Phil. thesis.⁸⁶ As Muir’s obituary puts it, ‘that essential and, it is not too much to say, at the time revolutionary emphasis on the value of crossing national boundaries and on practical drama was at the centre of her vision’.⁸⁷ This fits with the overall sense that the Centre for Medieval Studies had an interdisciplinary, international remit, and that its role was to host students and research to which that breadth was central, while individual departments — most of which essentially shared their names with A-level subjects and recruited school-leavers on that basis — should house work in traditional silos of disciplines and languages.

In retrospect, Muir’s activities clearly indicate the direction in which Medieval Studies at Leeds was heading, but the path from the 1970s to the present was not a straight one. By the 1980s, as state funding per student plummeted, staff were stretched.⁸⁸ Muir took early retirement in 1983, to be succeeded as director of the Centre for Medieval Studies by Meredith, but by then he already had plenty of other editorial work on his plate. In Meredith’s words, LSE,

I think, was very much, to start with, Arthur’s own baby, you know, and maybe he, maybe others felt — there’s a sort of emerging feeling at the back of my mind that I felt — that there ought to be a slightly broader-based editorship.

At the same time, Meredith wonders if Cawley was himself getting fed up with editing. ‘This fascsimile series is becoming something of a burden to me — a sign of age!’, Cawley wrote to Donald C. Baker (co-editor of the 1976 Facsimile 3, The Digby Plays) on 14 April 1977. Whatever the motivations, Cawley successfully weaned both the journal and LTM from his own editorship. The 1975 volume of the journal was co-edited by Betty Hill and Stanley Ellis, with Meredith as assistant editor, an arrangement which held for three years. A document dated 6 June 1978 spells out a kind of constitution, specifying the composition of an editorial committee, an editorial board, and the offices of editor (‘who will normally have acted as Assistant Editor […] and will serve for a period of three years’), business editor, and assistant editor. Accordingly, Meredith edited the 1978–81 numbers, and chaired its editorial committee from 1985 until around his retirement in 1998. Meredith does not remember the editorship as an imposition: ‘it was good — I and others were probably glad to be involved’. The editing of LSE and LTM proceeded apace, but, although hopes to continue it persisted for many years, the drama facsimile series came to an end with Cawley’s departure. From the mid-1980s into the mid-1990s, Meredith led efforts to develop locally, and co-ordinate nationally, cheap editions of medieval English texts for students. These efforts only produced a couple of Leeds publications (bearing ‘Leeds Studies in English’ as a series-name),⁸⁹ though similar projects show that the idea was a good one.⁹⁰ It is no surprise, then, that the fledgling Leeds Medieval Studies series did not survive Muir’s departure. By the late 1970s, though, LSE was firmly in place as a journal for medieval English and, every few years, Old Norse/Icelandic, and its intellectual agenda for the next few decades was set.

‘By scholars, for scholars’: the business of publishing

After the Scolar Press, 1977–2008

Figure 4. Camera-ready, typewritten text, here on p. 1 of volume 10 (1978) of LSE

 With the intellectual scope of LSE sketched out, we turn to the journal’s day-to-day running, and the important relationship this has with questions of the accessibility of research that have become salient in the last couple of decades. Compared with commentary on the journal’s intellectual aspects, both oral histories and the journal’s published editorials have quite a lot to say about the quotidian side of publishing. For example, when asked why Cawley might have felt the need to reinstitute LSE, Meredith recalls him complaining about the length of time that journals took to turn submissions around — implicitly Cawley and Alston believed that they could do better. The prominence of such mundane, if not banal, concerns may seem odd given the highbrow character of the publications, but they remind us of the importance of the material and the institutional to histories of the Republic of Letters. From 1966 to 1972, LSE and related publications were photoset and printed via Alston’s company Scolar Press. From 1973 onwards the journal was printed, at first by Scolar Press, from camera-ready copy; in 1978 printing was moved to the University’s own printing service, an arrangement that lasted up to and including the 1999 volume. Though prompted primarily by an economic challenge, this transition from Scolar Press marks a crucial development in the journal’s character.

Although the marginal cost of each extra volume in a print run was relatively low, the labour of typesetting and to some extent the cost of materials still made printing capital-intensive — especially against the backdrop of the oil shocks, high inflation and general industrial unrest of the 1970s, not to mention financial crises in the UK university sector, including at Leeds.⁹¹ On 16 May 1974, A. S. C. Ross wrote to Cawley asking if his 1937 and 1940 LTM volumes could be reprinted. Cawley replied on 13 June:

I have discussed your proposal […] with Stanley Ellis, my co-editor who is largely responsible for looking after the business side of LSE and Leeds Texts and Monographs. He tells me that we just haven’t got the money to reprint earlier volumes in either of our Leeds series. Printing costs have gone up so enormously that we are struggling to keep our heads above water.

On 19 November, Larry Clopper wrote to Cawley, evidently asking whether LTM would be interested in publishing what became Records of Early English Drama: Chester, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1979. ‘I am very sorry to have to tell you this, but LSE finances are now in a perilous state, and we shall need some help from you if we are to publish your Chester documents’, Cawley replied on 2 December. Scolar Press itself was short of capital: Alston sold it to Bemrose Corporation for this reason;⁹² ‘all the proceeds from one published volume are used to pay for the next volume’, Cawley explained on 17 September 1979. ‘The cost of type-setting seemed likely to put the whole Leeds Studies enterprise out of business’, recalled Ellis.⁹³ The approach taken by LSE in the face of these financial pressures set the tone for future policy. Rather than seeking dramatically to raise prices or to find an alternative commercial printer (The Journal of Commonwealth Literature had begun at Heinemann Educational Books, while Northern History used the Leeds-based W. S. Maney & Son, as for a time did the International Medieval Bibliography), LSE turned to new technology and in-house expertise.

Keeping the journal in-house enabled some financial flexibility: ‘Arthur was able […] to revive Leeds Studies in English’ by, Ellis reported, ‘setting a subscription price per volume instead of an annual rapidly inadequate sum’.⁹⁴ But technological innovation was also key. Alston’s enthusiasm for innovative printing technology had set the mood here.⁹⁵ In this he was succeeded by Ellis, who, as well as taking pride in LSE generally,⁹⁶ was enthusiastic about technology; a letter of 5 June 1995 shows him still providing detailed specifications for a new Apple Macintosh computer for LSE use, twelve years after his retirement. But at least some of the groundwork for innovation had also been laid by the series Leeds Medieval Studies, which started in 1975 and used the University Printing Service and, for the first volume, type-written camera-ready copy. It is in this phase of LSE history that Pam Armitage comes into her own. Typing up the copy for the new series of LSE ahead of typesetting was, according to Meredith, first the work of Cawley’s secretary Christine M. Eastwood and then her successor, Armitage. Armitage reports that she would work on LSE as well as Yorkshire Dialect Society publications in her University hours when possible, or by coming into work early or on holidays and being paid overtime by the journal itself when necessary to get publications out on schedule (which the team did not always manage; ‘the Orton Festschrift volume is only now going to Press’, wrote Ellis on 18 November 1968, perilously close to the end of the year of publication, eventually saying ‘it is hoped that the eventual appearance of this birthday present compensates for its lateness’ in the volume’s preface, dated September 1969; ‘I should be grateful if you would correct and return the enclosed galleys without delay by air mail’ reads a Cawley letter of 27 June 1973, with a footnoted ‘Please!’). Pam also handled the subscriptions and mailouts for the LSE stable. ‘I probably shouldn’t say this, but my heart sank when the copies arrived in the School’, she says: at the time, School staff each had a tiny office near the University’s then new and today still brutalist Roger Stevens Building, so her office would be crammed with volumes till she had finished packaging and dispatching them. ‘Then cheques would roll back in and Stanley would bank them’.

Armitage associates the real beginning of her work at LSE, however, with the end of the Scolar Press days, as it became her job to produce camera-ready copy — a task requiring great care, not to mention artistry and craft. The shift to camera-ready copy was facilitated by the arrival of the ‘IBM golf ball’. Everyone interviewed for this article reminisces about this fabled device, which was also the subject of at least one enquiry in the correspondence.⁹⁷ Precisely what model of IBM Selectric typewriter Leeds Studies was deploying we do not know, but all informants marvel at its capacity to hold a removable typeface element which could be replaced with alternative character sets, enabling the typing of the full range of characters needed by the journal; for Armitage, working from home meant taking the ‘golfball’ home. The production of camera-ready copy still involved literal cutting-and-pasting though: if she made a mistake, Armitage would have to retype the line, or several lines, and stick the corrected text on top, and authors’ corrections to proofs were implemented in the same way.

Armitage remained in the English Language and Medieval section of the School of English until autumn 1983, when she left work to concentrate on parenting; but she enjoyed the happy, informal environment of LSE and continued to produce the journal: ‘I got on very well with everyone’, which was ‘the reason I stayed as long as I did’. 1986 saw the introduction of a logo for the journal, based on a panel from an early medieval cross-shaft from Otley Parish Church, and in that year Armitage, along with the editors of the time, Elizabeth Williams and Joyce Hill, oversaw a transition to word-processed text,⁹⁸ with the new format being finalised in 1991 with the introduction of a book reviews section.⁹⁹ For this purpose, LSE bought an Apple Macintosh computer for Armitage to use, and she recalls an entertaining drive down to St Albans with Ellis to buy it. The Mac lacked the special characters needed by the journal, and the team had to buy the programme Fontographer to design them. Type design ‘was far too complicated’ as far as Armitage was concerned, but her husband Mike set to it and with great effort eventually produced the characters they needed, meaning that in this period LSE had a partly bespoke typeface. During the 1990s, Armitage returned to work, in a secretarial role at her children’s old primary school, and ended her LSE labours; but by this stage desktop publishing had advanced enough that editors themselves — variously Andrew Wawn, Lesley Johnson (1957–), Catherine Batt (1960–), and Alfred Hiatt (1972–) — could handle the production of camera-ready copy, paying postgraduate students to help with the office work and also benefiting from School of English clerical support.

Figure 5. Reproduction of camera-ready, word-processed text, here on p. 1 of volume 22 (1991) of LSE

Compared with professionally typeset journals, LSE had a bit of a homespun feel from 1977 through to 2008. In the latter part of that period, Microsoft Word’s shaky justification and kerning shows; the use of endnotes rather than footnotes — useful when copy was still produced on a typewriter — was inconvenient for the reader, and the straight apostrophes and quotation marks were particularly hard on the eye. But, since medieval English-orientated journals in the UK were few, LSE filled an important niche. Meredith recalls the upsides of in-house production more than the downsides: ‘it wasn't the perfect answer, I don’t think, but it did mean that everything was under our control, so that we could — no, Pam, Pam would type it up, and we would check it and go through it and then everything could just be printed off’. This enthusiasm for academic editorial control overlapped with a commitment to academic quality; in Ellis’s words, printed in 1981, Cawley ‘insisted that cheaper should not mean shabbier productions and we can be proud today that the production of the works is still attractive in spite of being produced at much less cost’.¹⁰⁰ In their efforts to keep costs down, the editors evidently shopped around: after using the Scolar Press in the 1970s, printing of LTM moved to the Moxon Press in 1984–85, the University Printing Service from 1987–95, and then Smith Settle in the late 1990s. As Ellis also said, regarding the drama facsimiles, Cawley’s

contacts in libraries and universities throughout the world have always been close, personal and happy […] Few others would have received permission to reproduce these materials so readily and it was surely the knowledge that the request was made in the interests of scholarship that caused librarians and authorities to respond favourably.¹⁰¹

LSE, then, stands as an interesting example of a fairly prominent academic journal that has for decades favoured maximising in-house production at the expense of professional typesetting in order to maintain editorial control and low costs.

2009 and moving towards free access

Figure 6. PDF text typeset using LaTeX, here on p. 1 of volume 40 (2009) of LSE

From a technical point of view, the final major development for LSE before the transition to Leeds Medieval Studies can be associated with 2009, when a conspiracy of developments came to a head. Locally, falling numbers of medievalists in English and the withdrawal of School administrative support for the journal intersected with the remarkable development of the Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies. Globally, technological advances concerning desktop publishing, print-on-demand, and online distribution intersected with the extensive privatisation of scholarly journal publishing and the emergence of open-access publishing. In the background too was the fact that the UK government audit of research, the Research Assessment Exercise (known since 2008 as the Research Excellence Framework), while reliant on the work of academic editors and peer-reviewers, offers infamously little incentive for this labour.

The attrition of Medieval Studies in the School of English at Leeds began in the early 1980s. Reflecting in 1982 on the English curriculum of the 1930s, Douglas Jefferson wrote:

it was assumed that at eighteen we were ready for Old English and Middle English, a reasonable viewpoint since we had read enough literature of other periods at school to have a basis of appreciation. I wonder whether that assumption is justified today! The whole question of ‘Language’ (that is, the English Language and Mediaeval part of the syllabus) is, or was[,] so political that sentiments like these could cause acute distress and acrimony in staff discussions.¹⁰²

As financial pressures on UK universities mounted and members of Leeds’s School of English tussled over a gradual shift in the weighting of the curriculum from language to literature, and from the study of pre-1900 to post-1900 texts, the expansive title of what was effectively a journal of medieval English literature started to rankle. Andrew Wawn, who joined the School in 1983 and was involved in editing LSE from 1988 to his retirement in 2009, recalls a meal in the 1980s with Inga-Stina Ewbank (1932–2004, who served in the School 1985–97) and Sally Shuttleworth (1952–, in the School from 1983 to the mid-1990s) at which Shuttleworth pointedly asked why the journal was called LSE; ‘as I said, sourly, at least Leeds Studies in English made a profit’.¹⁰³

Keeping LSE editions emerging on time was not light work, and the three-year rota for editors shifted from 2003 to a more ad hoc co-editing arrangement. Recalling how article-collections in book-form, produced by commercial academic publishers, began to vie with journals for the attention of researchers in the 1990s, Andrew Wawn comments that ‘my ignoble single aim was to make sure it didn’t die on my watch’. That said, looking at the publications themselves, the period from the later 1980s through into the early twenty-first century reads as a time of stability for both LSE and LTM. The latter series steadily produced volumes up to 2000 — variously editions, facsimiles, conference proceedings, and single-author studies — which, for the specialist audiences whom they served, provided high value for money while doing their bit to keep the Leeds Studies operation in the black (when the journal’s account was renamed to Leeds Medieval Studies, in 2020, it stood at £18,331.07).

By the twenty-first century, with dominance in the School’s expertise located firmly in post-1900 literature (and department budgets temporarily cushioned by a shift in funding to high student fees facilitated by a shaky scaffolding of state-backed private loans), irritation at the title of LSE was succeeded, among staff who had heard of the journal at all, by bemusement. In 2006–7, the number of permanent, non-emeritus medievalists in the School of English stood at four: Rory McTurk (appointed 1978), Andrew Wawn (appointed 1983), Catherine Batt (appointed 1995) and Alfred Hiatt (appointed 2002). In 2007, McTurk retired, being replaced by Alaric Hall (1979–). This was the last like-for-like replacement of a permanent medievalist in English up to the present time: in 2009, during a period of budgetary austerity in the School, Wawn retired and Hiatt left for Queen Mary University of London, and neither was replaced by a permanent medievalist. The retirement of Oliver Pickering from Leeds University Library in the same year,¹⁰⁴ and Mary Swan’s departure from the Institute for Medieval Studies the next,¹⁰⁵ further reduced the Faculty’s capacity for medieval English teaching. Although a budget line for one medievalist was kept open for some years through a series of temporary appointments (most of whom took other positions before completing their contracts),¹⁰⁶ by 2016 the School (and higher tiers of the University, which took a growing hand in hiring decisions) had shifted hiring and curricular planning away from a period-based conception of the discipline and towards thematic appointments which, while not in theory opposed to recruiting medievalists, also did not prove very conducive to it. When Hall accepted the editorship of LSE for the 2009 volume, it was theoretically possible that he would be starting a traditional three-year stint; in the event, he became by default the journal’s longest-running editor.

The degree to which School of English administrative staff time has been allowed to LSE business over the years is not entirely clear, but up to 2009 there was a general sense that supporting the journal administratively was implicitly as natural a part of the School’s work as supporting the academic work of editing. In the early part of the century, the role of LSE secretary passed between various unsung heroes on the School administrative staff — records include Juliette Taylor, who handed over to Louise Ward in summer 2004, who handed over to Zoë Thompson by March 2005, who was already sharing the work with Lawrence Stephen Cook by summer 2005. Having taken up the reins, Stephen handled subscriptions and mailouts with fabulous diligence. He spent around 20–30% of his time on the journal, latterly with extra support from Liz Mylod, then a Ph.D. student in the Institute for Medieval Studies, paid for from the journal’s income (2008–2012). Cook’s support was withdrawn at the end of the 2008–9 academic year (and Cook retired in 2010).¹⁰⁷ When the seventeenth volume of LTM emerged in 2009, it was already an outlier, since the previous one had come out in 2000, but in retrospect it was definitively the last in the series.

The obvious response to these pressures would have been to bring LSE to an end; the editorial team was clear that pietas alone was not enough to keep it running. The main attraction to Hall of maintaining the journal was a commitment to the free-access publication of research, and a belief that the young, online-only free-access journals that were springing up to fill this need in Anglophone publishing lacked the status to promote free-access publishing effectively: their novelty made it harder for them to attract researchers who prioritised respectability of venue over accessibility or contributors for whom accessibility was not even a variable that they would think to consider.¹⁰⁸ LSE had the advantage of a reasonable degree of venerability and an editorial tradition conducive to exploring free-access publishing models.

The motivation of taking LSE in a free-access direction foreclosed the second most obvious response to the withdrawal of School of English support, which would have been to accept one of several enquiries from publishers seeking to acquire LSE and to give it a subscription-only online incarnation as part of the great enclosure of humanities journal publishing that unfolded from the 1990s onwards. By the early twenty-first century, the most profitable journals had largely been acquired, and publishers were competing over journals promising narrower margins, LSE among them. The first such enquiry came to the journal in 2007 from Maney, by that time the publisher rather than merely the printer of Northern History. The LSE editorial board had weighed up the pros and cons of handing over to a commercial publisher at that stage and seen no great benefits to diverting the journal’s revenue and a measure of editorial independence — a decision reflecting the journal’s long-standing by-scholars-for-scholars approach. (Maney was acquired in 2015 by Taylor & Francis, one of the world’s four dominant academic journal publishers, itself a subsidiary of Informa Plc.)¹⁰⁹ After some shopping around, the board found LSE an arrangement with Abramis Academic, the publishing wing of a small print-on-demand business, whereby Abramis handled printing and Stephen Cook’s one-time role of subscriptions and distribution but were happy for the editors to have a free hand in typesetting and online distribution. Of the cover price, one third was to pay basic costs, one third income for Abramis, and one third income for LSE. After checking the value-for-money of contracting out digitisation, the journal paid a team of postgraduates to digitise the LSE back-catalogue, and a fledging digital repository run by Leeds University Library (then called Leeds University Digital Objects or LUDOS, now Digital Library) agreed to host the journal before the University had started contemplating its own publishing operation, the White Rose University Press.¹¹⁰ With perhaps undue timidity, LSE sought to sustain hard-copy subscriptions and therefore revenue by imposing a two-year embargo on online publication, which prevented inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals. But a major step had still been taken. Unable to face being the editor of a journal with straight apostrophes, Hall also moved typesetting to LaTeX, sometimes employing postgraduate editorial assistants to undertake this work, while Batt continued to chair the editorial board.

From LSE to LMS

Viewed in retrospect, the emergence of the Leeds Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies in the later 1960s, with its Europeanist curriculum and its enthusiasm for studying drama through practice, seems obviously of a piece with the wider questioning of pre-War orthodoxies. When asked, Meredith did not remember any self-consciously political agenda for the CMS:

you’re absolutely right, there were things going on: we had our strikes and we had our student invasions of the Registry and all that kind of thing, but it was — I won’t say it was sidelined, it was important — but it didn’t affect what was going on on the academic side; not as far as I was concerned.

On the academic side, there was rather a sense of ‘quietly getting on with things’; politics ‘would come and go, but’ — he says with a chuckle — ‘Leeds Studies in English would go on forever’. Nonetheless, by the 1990s, the challenge to nationalist curricula that was inherent in Medieval Studies was starting to correlate with visibly changed research agendas. In 1990–92, the Centre for Medieval Studies hosted three annual conferences and, in 1991, a session at the Kalamazoo International Medieval Congress on Medieval Studies, all on ‘concepts of nationality and national identity’ — a topic characteristic of Medieval Studies’ problematisation of nationalist historiographies in that period — and the proceedings emerged in 1995 as the fourteenth volume of LTM.¹¹¹ From these activities, associated particularly with Simon Forde (1960–), who edited the International Medieval Bibliography from 1988 to 1996 and was deputy director of the Centre for Medieval Studies from 1989 to 1996, arose the International Medieval Congress in 1994, with an associated book series, International Medieval Research, published by Brepols. Alan Murray, then assistant editor of the Bibliography, founded the Bulletin of International Medieval Research in 1995, and the same year saw an expansion in staffing and the formation of an International Medieval Institute within the School of History.¹¹² Developments were also afoot in the Centre for Medieval Studies: Joyce Hill, from the School of English, took over the directorship in 1993, supported the inception of the Congress, and in 1996 oversaw the appointment of Mary Swan (1963–2020), who had been teaching on fixed-term contracts in English during 1992–95, as Director of Studies in the Centre, its first dedicated member of staff.¹¹³ In turn, Swan oversaw, in 1999, the addition of a Ph.D. programme to the Centre’s MA in Medieval Studies, and her appointment was followed in 2000 by William (Bill) T. Flynn (1956–) as lecturer in Latin and, no less importantly, Alison Martin as departmental secretary.

Clearly these developments at Leeds were partly sui generis; nowhere else is the base for the International Medieval Bibliography or the International Medieval Congress. Yet in other ways they are representative of wider shifts in Medieval Studies; in the same year as the first Congress, for example, the British Academy merged its Medieval History and Medieval Language and Literature section to create a Medieval Studies section.¹¹⁴ An error-prone but evocative article in the Times Higher Education entitled ‘Renaissance of the Middle Ages’, which used the fourth (1998) International Medieval Congress as its hook, gives a sense of the growing buzz in Medieval Studies at the time. It quotes the Congress’s director, Axel Müller:

‘some universities were too complacent for too long about the study of the medieval period,’ Muller says. Students’ lack of enthusiasm is attributed largely to teaching methods: many English graduates can recall being handed a Middle English text and glossary in the first year and told to get on with it. This quickly snuffed out the interest of all but the more scholarly. But change is on the way. Muller says a new method of teaching has sprung up at interdisciplinary centres set up in the 1960s at newer universities such as York, Leeds and Reading, and also in Canada and Australia. By teaching the period across subjects — the medieval period in art, music, literature, history, even physics — the new breed of medievalists has mastered the alchemy involved in turning popular interest into scholarly activity. Student numbers on these new courses are growing. This way of teaching also alleviates the foreigness [sic] of medieval culture and enables students to think themselves into the medieval mind-set when scholars were generalists, not specialists.¹¹⁵

While such claims were no doubt viewed at the time as hype by sceptics — the Congress certainly came to be recognised as a flagship for the arts and humanities at Leeds more swiftly outside the University than within — the developments described by Müller really were a trend.¹¹⁶ By 2003, the research-orientated International Medieval Institute and the teaching-focused Centre for Medieval Studies were being combined into the Institute for Medieval Studies under the newly appointed Institute director Richard K. Morris (1947–), initially as an independent entity within Leeds’s Faculty of Arts.¹¹⁷ Leeds’s bureaucratic structures struggled to cope with a body not housed within a School. In a pattern quite characteristic of European Medieval Studies and by contrast with the field in much of North America, the School of History had elected systematically to sustain a critical mass of medievalist teaching staff while other Leeds schools did not, and so across 2010–12 the Institute moved back into the School of History. These organisational changes were not without friction; here it is enough to note that 2010 saw the departure of both Morris (to a research-focused professorship at Huddersfield) and the long-standing LSE board member Mary Swan (to a new career, in horticulture).¹¹⁸ But the School of History proved a benevolent host to the Institute, and the Institute continued to thrive under a series of directors based there (Graham Loud 2010–12, Julia Barrow 2012–16, and Emilia Jamroziak 2016–19). Meanwhile, the International Medieval Bibliography and International Medieval Congress enabled the presence of a wider body of medievalist staff which student demand for medievalist teaching would not alone facilitate. Together, these History-based staff have provided an anchor for collaboration between medievalists elsewhere in the University, increasingly hired by schools not seeking to recruit medievalists as such but getting them anyway under non-period-specific job descriptions. Though the number of medievalists on academic contracts at Leeds is lower than the combined Centre for Medieval Studies and International Medieval Institute at their peak, numbers still compare favourably with the balmy climate of the late 1960s.

The development of the Institute for Medieval Studies was not always welcomed by medievalists elsewhere in the University. Not everyone at Leeds was happy to give up the first week or two of their summer research time to the International Medieval Congress. Whereas Meredith recalls no particular tensions surrounding the existence of the Centre for Medieval Studies in its early decades, by the early twenty-first century, at least, some staff were concerned that the Medieval Studies MA was undermining medieval MAs in individual schools; perhaps in earlier times, with more tolerance of small tutorial groups, there had been a sense that there were plenty of medievalist students to go round, but that sense was fading. Likewise, although the Medieval Studies Ph.D. programme was designed to host specifically interdisciplinary Ph.D. projects that could not be housed in the traditional schools, already by the 1990s humanities postgraduates who would profess not to be doing interdisciplinary research were vanishingly rare, so the Institute for Medieval Studies became progressively more central to hosting the Faculty’s growing population of medievalist Ph.D. students, again ruffling feathers. Yet to a generation of Leeds academics whose first acquaintance with both the city and University of Leeds came via the Congress, and who were often themselves graduates of Medieval Studies degrees, the Institute for Medieval Studies seemed a core part of the University rather than a peripheral one, and increasingly the locus for an intellectual identity that was hard to sustain in individual schools.

Accordingly, LSE began inviting medievalist colleagues outside English onto its editorial board, with Catherine Karkov appearing on the list of board members for 2017 and Rosalind (Ros) Brown-Grant (1962–) for 2018. In 2019 the author of this paper became the first Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies from outside the School of History since the Institute became part of that school in 2010, and suggested that consolidating LSE with the Bulletin of International Medieval Research would be a good way to improve the usefulness of the two journals both to the University of Leeds and to the wider Medieval Studies community. The principal editors of LSE still at the University joined with the editor of the Bulletin to form those journals into Leeds Medieval Studies, outlining their aspirations for its wide-ranging scope in an editorial in the first volume — aspirations informed by the research reported in the present article.¹¹⁹ Amidst the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a 2020 editorial note to the forty-ninth volume of LSE (for 2018), Hall declared that volume the last of LSE and the plans for its successor, LMS.¹²⁰

Conclusions

Despite the centrality of academic journals to the infrastructure for advancing knowledge, few have been the subject of detailed historical research, especially in the arts and humanities. This article has presented one case-study of how an arts and humanities journal was (re)founded during the 1960s (which should, in turn, facilitate effective use of the LSE archive by future researchers probing aspects of its practices in more depth). This history particularly calls attention to the prominence of material and economic constraints in the editors’ experience of their ostensibly primarily intellectual role. Correspondingly, it shows how the journal sought to maximise both its academic rigour and its accessibility to readers by regularly adopting new desktop-publishing technology in order to keep production in-house, attesting to a different model from coeval Leeds journals which either sought commercial publication from the start (The Journal of Commonwealth Literature) or later in their history (Northern History). Although the degree to which LSE developed its in-house and low-cost model has probably been at the extreme end of practice among scholarly journals, it stands as a useful example of a by-scholars-for-scholars model of print-journal publishing which retains an important place in the arts and humanities yet is afforded scant attention in current debates about the future of academic publishing. We have shown, for example, that a guaranteed purchase of volumes by Leeds University Library, for exchange with other institutions, was essential to the capitalising of LSE, reminding us that the current rethinking of library budgets as a mechanism to pay for open-access publication rather than to purchase closed-access publications has deep roots. LSE also shows how a journal sought to maintain its combined commitments to accessibility and to print publication in the twenty-first century while still embracing the possibilities offered by the Internet for spectacularly low-cost distribution and archiving.

This article has also used LSE and its relationship to Leeds departmental structures to present a local history of the three-way split of English philology in England into English Literature, English Language, and Linguistics over the last seventy years. In key respects, the journal promoted disciplinary segmentation, in the 1930s proclaiming a distinct identity for English Language and Medieval English Literature in contradistinction to (post-medieval) English Literature. Yet at the same time it worked to avert a split between English Language and Linguistics. From the late 1960s, however, the journal helped inscribe the split between English Language and Linguistics while working to maintain the cohesion of an empiricist variety of English historical linguistics with the study of medieval English literature. In these respects, then, the journal represents the familiar trend of disciplinary specialisation over time. That said, the intellectual parameters into which LSE had settled by the early 1970s proved remarkably stable, well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, while not all of the Leeds University institutions that emerged from the ferment of the 1960s remain — Leeds’s Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism and Institute for Folk Life Studies, for example, did not survive the 1980s — it is striking how influential the 1960s were in determining the distinctive characteristics of the schools of English and History in the University today. However shaky their beginnings or however meandering their path, 1960s foundations such as LSE, the International Medieval Bibliography, Northern History, the Workshop Theatre, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and what is now called the Institute for Medieval Studies have remained anchor-points for the Leeds intellectual scene for sixty years.

Nevertheless, change has come to LSE through the rise of Medieval Studies as a disciplinary practice that sought to accommodate the methodological range and commitment to historicism associated with nineteenth-century philology, to Europeanise English Studies for the medieval period, and latterly to consolidate staff members who lacked critical mass for period-based study within their individual departments. The outlines of the rise of Medieval Studies as an academic institution in the Anglosphere are well known, with pioneering developments around 1930 reflecting the cultural dynamism (amidst economic hardship) of inter-War USA and Britain, a new wave of institution-building around the 1960s reflecting the post-War economic and higher-education booms, and cross-departmental collaboration consolidated in the 1990s by threats to the sustainability of Medieval Studies at department level. However, moving away from the tendency to write disciplinary histories through the biographies of scholars in favour of focusing on institutions (in this case a journal and its relationship to the structures of a university), this study has provided a granular insight into the development of Medieval Studies at Leeds, and in particular its curiously intimate-yet-distant relationship with English Studies, in the post-War period.

One way to conceptualise the merger of two Leeds Medieval Studies journals, LSE and The Bulletin of International Medieval Research, would undeniably be as part of a century-long rise and decline of Medieval Studies in the School of English at Leeds. This narrative would not be without political usefulness for actors in Medieval Studies today: the previous section, in particular, hints at how the inventiveness in Medieval Studies around the 1990s owed something to the (perceived or actual) existential challenge to the field, and continued wariness should pay continued dividends. Leeds’s neighbouring universities certainly encourage such wariness: in 2020, for example, the University of Leicester tackled budgetary difficulties partly by systematically ‘closing English Language’ and opting ‘to cease teaching Medieval Literature and reduce the size of Early Modern Literature’;¹²¹ some canny tweeting by David Clark, one of the affected employees, brought extensive media coverage to the decision, but similar changes proceed elsewhere without fanfare through the quiet non-replacement of retiring staff.¹²² The same year saw Sheffield pressing on with plans to close its archaeology department, whose fate is at the time of writing uncertain.¹²³ But another way to conceptualise the merger of LSE and The Bulletin of International Medieval Research is not as a story of ever narrower disciplinary segmentation, but as a story of disciplinary and departmental reconfigurations in which Medieval Studies at one particular university has through a mixture of inventiveness and luck managed to adapt to changing circumstances, harnessing an intellectual reconfiguration that has in fact been proceeding since the foundation of Medieval Group in 1951. As the editors of Leeds Medieval Studies noted in their inaugural editorial, Medieval Studies has never stood still, and part of the challenge for the new journal is to move decisively beyond its Anglocentric heritage, and the Eurocentric heritage of post-War Medieval Studies, to publish

research that challenges the borders of a still Eurocentric field. Those borders are most obviously geographical but may also be chronological: both manuscript and oral cultures, for example, can at times helpfully be understood as part of what, in the terminology of Medieval Studies, we might think of as a ‘long Middle Ages’, despite falling outside the ‘medieval’ millennium.¹²⁴

In this second reading, then, the transformations of LSE&KL into LSE into Leeds Medieval Studies are a case-study for the survival mechanisms that medieval English found as philology fractured and both English Studies and History became more presentist. The study of the Middle Ages — and the Arts in general — has, after all, had to be fought for at the University of Leeds before. Michael Sanderson described the University’s nineteenth-century precursor institutions as ‘frankly philistine’;¹²⁵ exactly a century ago, J. R. R. Tolkien parodied the opening of The Canterbury Tales in an anonymous contribution to the Leeds student newspaper The Gryphon, portraying himself at the beginning of the academic year seeking to recruit ‘newe clerkes’ to study

Langages old […]
Of Fraunce or Engelonde or Spayne or Ruce,
Tho tonges hard of Hygh Almaine and Pruce,
Or historye, or termes queinte of lawe

but being outcompeted by ‘mani uncouth science’. Failing to meet his targets for fee income, the narrator is ejected from the University, to wait outside the gates to try recruiting again another year.¹²⁶ Though Tolkien wrote in jest (and for the extremely limited audience who were willing to grapple with his Middle English), the worry that arts subjects, and within them langages old, will not thrive in a market-based higher-education system was and remains a serious matter; but success in the past indicates possibilities for success in the future.

1 I am grateful to Alan Murray, Catherine Batt, and Paul Hammond for commenting on drafts of this article, and to Iain Dyson, Harriet Allen, Lucy Guest and Sunny Page for assistance in identifying archival material.

2 A working paper towards this publication will be found as Alaric Hall, ‘Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages: The Founding of a Journal’, <https://alarichall.org.uk/working_paper_LSE>, accessed 5 April 2023.

3 For a synoptic and penetrating study focusing on the Anglophone world, see David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History, Medievalism, 6 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015). For a survey with a helpfully German inflection, see Ulrich Müller, ‘Medievalism’, in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms — Methods — Trends, ed. by Albrecht Classen, 5 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 850–65. See also The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. by Louise D'Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

4 Cf. Matthews, Medievalism, 174–78 and Richard Utz, ‘Academic Medievalism and Nationalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, ed. by Louise D'Arcens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 119–34. The seminal volume for the biographical approach was Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1992); other key examples include Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, ed. by Helen Damico and others, 3 vols (New York: Garland, 1995–2000); Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. by Jane Chance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); A Century of British Medieval Studies, ed. by Alan Deyermond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms, Methods, Trends, ed. by Albrecht Classen, 3 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), III 2145–736.

5 See the survey of research on the UK, USA, Continental Europe, and India in Suman Gupta, Philology and Global English Studies: Retracings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 69–119.

6 Gupta, Philology, p. 84 (the italics are Gupta’s).

7 Keith Robbins, ‘Universities: Past, Present, and Future’, Minerva, 41 (2003), 397–406 (p. 404).

8 Major studies of the School of English are Craig Fees, The Imperilled Inheritance: Dialect and Folklife Studies at the University of Leeds 1946–1962 (London: Folklore Society Library, 1991); Nina Kane, ‘Humani Nil Alienum: A Post-War History of Theatre at Leeds University’, unpublished article, <https://www.academia.edu/5913339>, accessed 8 May 2023. See also James Walsh and Vanessa Rosenthal, Under the Apple Boughs: The Life of Dr James Walsh ([n.p.]: Royd Press, 2010) and the account of the German Department in the period covered by this article: LektorInnenlob: 45 Years Applied ‘Völkerverständigung’ at Leeds University, ed. by Richard Byrn and Lilias Byrn ([n.p.]: [n.pub.], 2003), <http://richardbyrn.co.uk/LekLob/lekloboverview.htm>, accessed 8 May 2023. For general histories of the University, see A. N. Shinman, The University of Leeds: The First Half-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954); Studies in the History of a University, 1874–1974: To Commemorate the Centenary of the University of Leeds, ed. by P. H. J. H. Gosden and A. J. Taylor (Leeds: Arnold, 1975); Peter Gosden, ‘From County College to Civic University, Leeds, 1904’, Northern History, 42 (2005), 317–32; Simon Dixon, ‘The University of Leeds and the British Higher Education System, 1963–2004’, Northern History, 43 (2006), 303–25.

9 E.g. M. H. Abrams, ‘The Transformation of English Studies: 1930–1995’, Daedalus, 126 (1997), 105–31.

10 Aileen Fyfe, Julie McDougall-Waters and Noah Moxham, ‘350 Years of Scientific Periodicals’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 69 (2015), 227–39 (p. 228). Cf. Aileen Fyfe, ‘Journals and Periodicals’, in A Companion to the History of Science, ed. by Bernard Lightman (Chichester: Wiley, 2016), pp. 387–99 and ‘Scientific Publications, c. 1500–2000’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2020), II 691–704 for surveys of past research.

11 A notable exception with particular relevance to Medieval Studies is Colin Jones, ‘Les Annales et Past & Present: Une Histoire Croisée’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 75 (2020), 693–707 (which can be supplemented by the comments on Past & Present by Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 58–82). An exception with particular relevance to Leeds is the series of articles on the originally Leeds-based Journal of Commonwealth Literature contained in 50.3 (September 2015) of that journal. See also Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin, Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 79–96 (on Reader); Roy Lowe, ‘The Changing Role of the Academic Journal: The Coverage of Higher Education in History of Education as a Case Study, 1972–2011’, History of Education, 41 (2012), 103–15; Ryan Schumacher, ‘The Wisconsin Magazine of History: A Case Study in Scholarly and Popular Approaches to American State Historical Society Publishing, 1917–2000’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 44 (2012–13), 114–41; Cheryl L. Sheridan, ‘National Journals and Centering Institutions: A Historiography of an English Language Teaching Journal in Taiwan’, English for Specific Purposes, 38 (2015), 70–84.

12 Aileen Fyfe, ‘Journals, Learned Societies and Money: Philosophical Transactions ca.1750–1900’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 69 (2015), 277–99.

13 Aileen Fyfe, Flaminio Squazzoni, Didier Torny, and Pierpaolo Dondio, ‘Managing the Growth of Peer Review at the Royal Society Journals, 1865–1965’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 45 (2020), 405–29; Aileen Fyfe, ‘Editors, Referees, and Committees: Distributing Editorial Work at the Royal Society Journals in the Late 19th and 20th Centuries’, Centaurus: An International Journal of the History of Science and its Cultural Aspects, 62 (2020), 125–40; cf. Benjamin Newman, ‘Authorising Geographical Knowledge: The Development of Peer Review in The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830–c.1880’, Journal of Historical Geography, 64 (2019), 85–97.

14 Aileen Fyfe and Noah Moxham, ‘Making Public Ahead of Print: Meetings and Publications at the Royal Society, 1752–1892’, Notes and Records, 70 (2016), 361–79.

15 Fyfe, ‘Journals and Periodicals’, p. 395.

16 Aileen Fyfe and Anna Gielas, ‘Introduction: Editorship and the Editing of Scientific Journals, 1750–1950’, Centaurus, 62 (2020), 5–20.

17 Cf. Alaric Hall, ‘How to Change (Medieval) History’, Public Medievalist (7 February 2019), <https://www.publicmedievalist.com/change-history>, accessed 8 May 2023. Readers should also not be surprised to encounter occasional identical prose between this article and associated Wikipedia entries. This reuse of Wikipedia material is consistent with its publication under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 — but since academics are not accustomed to remixing others’ prose, it is also worth adding that prose reused here was mostly or entirely contributed to Wikipedia by Hall in the first place.

18 Much of this material is already lodged at the University of Leeds, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, English, School of (incl. Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism; Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies; Leeds Studies in English[LSE]), <https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/4097>, accessed 8 May 2023. We hope that the remainder of the material will be accepted into the collection. We provide full shelfmarks for material already archived; for the rest, the dates and correspondents of letters necessarily suffice.

19 Ralph W. V. Elliott, ‘Peter Meredith in Australia’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 29 (1998), 5–6; cf. John Marshall, 'Introduction', in Peter Meredith, The Practicalities of Early English Performance: Manuscripts, Records, and Staging: Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies, ed. by John Marshall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. xiii–xvii; Peter Meredith, Irmgard Tailby and Alaric Hall, ‘John Edward Tailby (18 April 1938–16 July 2022)’, Leeds Medieval Studies, 2 (2022), 151–55. Interviewed for the current article, Meredith suggested that the path to his appointment began in 1967: the tenants of the Merediths’ UK house were friends from Adelaide who took the opportunity of Peter returning to the UK while on study leave to invite Arthur Cawley, A. Norman (Derry) Jeffares (1920–2005), and the Merediths to dinner; ‘I suspect there was something they planned, you know, that knowing that I was quite interested in coming back to England, they thought, well, it would be useful if I were more of a face than just a name […] I always suspect that this was very useful in me getting the job’.

20 Joyce Hill, ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 19 (1988), vi; Elizabeth Williams, ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 17 (1986), [viii].

21 ‘Andrew Wawn’, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wawn>, accessed 8 May 2023.

22 50 Years of Medieval Studies at Leeds ([2018]), <https://50years.ims.leeds.ac.uk>, accessed 5 April 2023. Much of the research for and writing of this website is to be credited to Lucy Guest and Sunny Page.

23 ‘Universities’, p. 399.

24 Alistair McCleery, ‘Publishing History’, in The Oxford Handbook of Publishing, ed. by Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 21–37.

25 E.g. Richard Utz, Medievalism: A Manifesto (Kalamazoo: ARC Humanities Press, 2017).

26 E.g. Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures (Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books, 2020), esp. pp. 19–60.

27 E.g. Irina Dumitrescu, ‘The Professor’, Longreads (November 2021), <https://longreads.com/2021/11/17/the-professor>, accessed 5 April 2023.

28 Medievalism, p. 176. Cf. Biddick, The Shock.

29 ‘Universities’, p. 398.

30 Cf. Catherine Batt, Alaric Hall, and Alan V. Murray, ‘Editorial Note: Introducing Leeds Medieval Studies’, Leeds Medieval Studies, 1 (2021), vii–xi.

31 These and other records of the comings and goings of University of Leeds staff and the departments that employed them are unless otherwise stated derived from the annual University of Leeds Calendar, digitised at <https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/55926>, accessed 8 May 2023.

32 Cf. ‘Theses Added to Leeds University Library’, Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages, 7–8 (1952), 129.

33 A. C. Cawley and Harold Orton, ‘Editorial Note: Leeds Studies in English, 1952’, Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages, 7–8 (1952), 3.

34 R. Vleeskruyer, ‘Recent Work at Leeds’, Neophilologus, 37 (1953), 174–75; [J. A. Sheard], ‘Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages’, The Modern Language Review, 48 (1953), 451–52.

35 R. L. Thomson, ‘Preface’, A Medieval Miscellany: Essays by Past and Present Members of the Staff Medieval Group and the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Leeds in Honour of Professor John Le Patourel, ed. by R. L. Thomson, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Literary and Historical Section, 18 pt. 1 ([Leeds]: [Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society], 1982), pp. 5–6.

36 Thomson, ‘Preface’, pp. 5–6.

37 ‘Arthur Cawley: 1913–1993’, p. 4, Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, box 1.

38 Stanley Ellis, ‘Arthur Cawley: A Biographical Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 12 (1981), 1–2.

39 Fees, The Imperilled Inheritance.

40 ‘Betty Hill’, St. Hilda’s College Chronicle (2016), 24.

41 Kathryn A. Lowe, ‘In Memoriam: Christine Elizabeth Fell (1938–1998)’, Old English Newsletter, 32.1 (1998), 10–11.

42 ‘Miss Elizabeth Williams’ (29 May 2012), <https://forstaff.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3249/miss_elizabeth_williams>, accessed 1 April 2023).

43 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA-DEP-031.

44 G. B. Flahiff, ‘The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto’, Speculum, 24 (1949), 251–55; ‘Graduate Center for Mediaeval Studies: University of Toronto’ Speculum, 38 (1963), 678–81; A. J. Taylor, ‘History at Leeds 1877–1974: The Evolution of a Discipline’, Northern History, 10 (1975), 141–64 (esp. pp. 141–47); ‘About Us’, Manchester Medieval Society <http://medievalsociety.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html>, accessed 18 December 2022.

45 Thomson, ‘Preface’.

46 &lsquoEditorial Note’, Northern History: A Review of the History of the North of England, 1 (1966), v; Malcolm Chase, ‘Gordon Colin Fawcett Forster (1928–2017)’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 90 (2018), 223–24.

47 Peter Sawyer, ‘The Origins of the International Medieval Bibliography: Its Unwritten History (as Told by its Founder)’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 14 (2009), 57–61 (quoting p. 57); Alan V. Murray, ‘Thirty-Five Years of the International Medieval Bibliography (1967–2002)’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 7 (2001), 1–9 (p. 1). Cf. Ian N. Wood, ‘Peter Hayes Sawyer (25 June 1928–7 July 2018)’, Leeds Medieval Studies, 1 (2021), 101–4.

48 A. Norman Jeffares, ‘Arthur Ravenscroft, 1924–1989’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 24 (1989), vii–ix; Gail Low, ‘Professing the Common Wealth of Literature, Leeds 1957–1969’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50 (2015), 267–81.

49 Kane, ‘Humani Nil Alienum’.

50 John Horden, ‘The Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, Leeds’, The Library, series 5, volume 27 (1972), 293–301; Trevor H. Hall, Mathematicall Recreations: An Exercise in Seventeenth-century Bibliography, Leeds Studies in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, Occasional Paper, 1 (Leeds: Bibliography Room, School of English, University of Leeds, 1969).

51 Cawley recruited Meredith to Leeds in 1969 to replace Alston; ‘I mean, this is crazy because there was no way in which I could have replaced him!’

52 Stephen Green, ‘Robin Alston Obituary: Scholar Behind The Bibliography of the English Language’, The Guardian (2 October 2011), <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/robin-alston-obituary>, accessed 1 April 2023.

53 David McKitterick, 'Alston, Robin Carfrae (1933–2011)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (8 January 2015).

54 R. C. Alston and J. L. Rosier, ‘Rhetoric and Style: A Bibliographical Guide’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 1 (1967), 137–59.

55 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1.

56 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1, letter of 16 January 1967.

57 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1, letter of 16 January 1967. Roughly similar sums are suggested by correspondence concerning the fourth LTM volume, which was subsidised to the tune of three hundred Canadian dollars (then worth around £120) by its author: Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1, letters of 23 December 1970 (Benzie to Alston), 31 December 1970 (Alston to Cawley), 6 January 1971 ([Cawley] to Alston).

58 ‘Editorial Note’, Northern History, 1 (1966), v.

59 Low, ‘Professing the Common Wealth’, pp. 276–77.

60 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1, letters of 6 January (Cawley to Douglas Grant, Head of School), 14 January 1967 (Grant to Cawley), 19 January 1967 (Cawley to Grant).

61 McKitterick, ‘Alston’.

62 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 4 folder 1 (letter of 16 January 1967).

63 ‘The Leeds Language Schools’, The Gryphon, second series, 14.2 (November 1932), 70–71 (p. 71), <https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/24773>, accessed 8 May 2023. The ‘former, poetical’ English Language publication is surely A Northern Venture, published in 1923.

64 See in particular Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men's University—Though of a Mixed Type (London: Gollancz, 1975), pp. 210–11, on Dickins’s failed opposition to women gaining full membership of Cambridge University; cf. Hall, ‘Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages’.

65 Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, rev. edn, 3 vols (London: HarperCollins, 2017), II s.v. Leeds, University of.

66 Gupta, Philology.

67 Jill Fitzgerald, ‘A “Clerkes Compleinte”: Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang’, Tolkien Studies, 6 (2009), 41–57.

68 Craig Fees, The Imperilled Inheritance: Dialect and Folklife Studies at the University of Leeds 1946–1962 (London: Folklore Society Library, 1991).

69 Fiona Carolyn Marshall, ‘Edwin Guest: Philologist, Historian, and Founder of the Philological Society of London’, Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas: Bulletin, 42 (2004), 11–30 (pp. 18–19).

70 John Walmsley, ‘“A Term of Opprobrium”: Twentieth Century Linguistics and English Philology’, in History of Linguistics 2008: Selected Papers from the 11th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHOLS XI), Potsdam, 28 August–2 September 2008, ed. by Gerda Hassler and Gesina Volkmann, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 115 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011), pp. 35–47. One attestation of related sentiments at Leeds is afforded by A. H. Cooper’s reminiscence on studying Old English at the Yorkshire College sometime between 1894 and 1899: ‘Dr. Schüddekopf, a lecturer in German, took a class in Anglo-Saxon. There was extraordinary difficulty in fitting this into the timetable, and we turned up at some outlandish hour in the morning — 8.30, I believe. My only other recollection of the class is a vague annoyance that it had to be taken by a German, and that the text-book was written by a German and translated by an American’. ‘A Student’s Retrospect’, The University of Leeds Review, 1 (1948–49), 176–81 (p. 179).

71 Alan S. C. Ross, ‘Outline of a Theory of Language’, Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages, 1 (1932), 1–14 (p. 12).

72 C. L. W[renn], ‘Leeds Studies in English and Kindred languages. No. 3’, The Review of English Studies, o.s. 14, Issue 54 (April 1938), 243.

73 Michel Lapidge, ‘Introduction: The Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, 1878–1999’, in H. M. Chadwick and the Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, ed. by Michael Lapidge [=Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 69–70] (Aberystwyth: Department of Welsh, Aberystwyth University, 2015), pp. 1–58 (pp. 31–32).

74 ‘Chair for a Leeds Lecturer’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (9 July 1955), 12. Stanley, ‘Ross’.

75 Peter Ladefoged, ‘David Abercrombie 1909–1992’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 90 (1996), 239–48 (p. 241).

76 ‘Peter Arthur Desmond MacCarthy (1912–1979)’, English Language Teaching Journal, 34 (1980), 230–31.

77 For present purposes, it is enough to note the brooding tone in the University’s obituary of Mitchell’s successor as head of Linguistics and Phonetics, William (Bill) Robert O’Donnell (1925–2006): ‘Bill was not a natural university politician, but he supported Professor Mitchell closely at the time when the independent Department of Linguistics split off from the School of English in 1971, and again when that Department was combined with the Department of Phonetics to form the Department of Linguistics & Phonetics in 1978. He did not love the diplomatic manoeuvres these organisational changes made necessary, but he carried them out with a strong sense of duty’: 'Obituary: William R O'Donnell' (8 June 2006), <https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/obituaries/2006/obituary3918.html>, accessed 1 April 2023.

78 Kieler Beiträge zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 3 (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1966).

79 Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 3 folder 1.

80 Achsah Guibbory and Marianne E. Kalinke, ‘JEGP at One Hundred Years’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 96 (1997), 481–85; cf. C. Stephen Jaeger, ‘Introduction’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 105 (2006), 1–4.

81 The handiest Anglophone case-study for the emergence of Medieval Studies as a recognised field is the historiography of the Mediaeval (now Medieval) Academy of America, founded in 1925, followed by its journal Speculum in 1926: George R. Coffman, ‘The Mediaeval Academy of America: Historical Background and Prospect’, Speculum, 1 (1926), 5–18; William J. Courtenay, ‘The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Growth of Medieval Studies in North America: 1870–1930’, in Medieval Studies in North America: Past, Present, and Future, ed. by Francis G. Gentry and Christopher Kleinhenz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), pp. 5–22 and, in the same volume, Luke Wenger, ‘The Medieval Academy and Medieval Studies in North America’, pp. 23–40. In England, Dickins’s old teacher at Cambridge, and predecessor as Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Hector Monroe Chadwick (1870–1947), had founded the idiosyncratic Department of Anglo-Saxon and Kindred Studies in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1927; but the department did not yet think of its field as Medieval Studies (if indeed it does today). The Oxford-based Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature and its journal Medium Ævum were constituted in the same year as LSE, 1932.

82 Merle Fifield, The Rhetoric of Free Will: The Five-Action Structure of the English Morality Play, Leeds Texts and Monographs, 5 (Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1974); Staging the Chester Cycle: Lectures Given on the Occasion of the Production of the Cycle at Leeds in 1983, ed. by David Mills, Leeds Texts and Monographs, 9 (Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1985).

83 ‘Robin Alston has asked me to act as general editor of a series of photographic facsimiles of medieval drama MSS. in England to be published by Scolar Press’, wrote Cawley to Arthur Brown at University College London on 22 April 1969, but it seems unlikely that Cawley was merely acting at Alston’s behest; Leeds, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Archive Series: LUA/DEP/012, Leeds Studies in English boxes, box 3 folder 1.

84 The organising committee is named in the proceedings as Muir (French), Alan Fletcher (English), Meredith (English), Oakshott (French), Richard Rastall (Music), Margaret Sleeman (Spanish and Portuguese) and John Tailby (German): The Drama of Medieval Europe: Proceedings of the Colloquium Held at the University of Leeds 10–13 September 1974, Leeds Medieval Studies, 1 (Leeds: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, 1975), p. iv.

85 Jane Oakshott, Centenary Play-cycle and Fair: Centenary of the Yorkshire College of Science 1874–1974: York Mystery-cycle in the Modernised Text by J. S. Purvis. Organised by Jane Oakshott for the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Leeds (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1975) (Leeds, Brotherton Library, Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture PRI/2/391). For Oakshott see further Margaret Rogerson, Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries, 1951–2006, Studies in Early English Drama, 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 180–83 et passim.

86 Muir also aspired to publish a Classified Index of Medieval Drama in the series, which eventually transmuted into her 1995 Cambridge University Press monograph The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe: see The Drama, pp. 93, 101.

87 ‘Lynette Muir: Full Obituary and Funeral Address’ (6 July 2007), <https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/obituaries/2007/obituary4891.html>, accessed 1 April 2023.

88 Dixon, ‘The University of Leeds’.

89 Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, ed. by Lesley Johnson and Elizabeth Williams, Leeds Studies in English (Leeds: The University of Leeds, School of English, 1984); cf. Joyce Hill, A. R. Taylor, and R. L. Thomson, Beginning Old English: Materials for a One-Year Course, Leeds Studies in English (Leeds: The University of Leeds, School of English, 1977), which names Cawley and Ellis as ‘General Editors’ of the series; The Towneley Cycle, ed. by Peter Meredith, 3 vols ([no place]: [no publisher], 1989–90), a comb-bound glossed modern-spelling edition.

90 Similar student editions and translations, first led by Gabriel Turville-Petre, became a success for the UK-based Viking Society for Northern Research from 1951. Likewise the series Durham and St Andrews Medieval Texts successfully produced four volumes in 1978–83 while its successor Durham Medieval Texts produced as many as eight into the mid-1990s, albeit including some reprints from the earlier series. And from 1990 for the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series by the USA-based collaboration of the Teaching Association for Medieval Studies, University of Rochester, and Medieval Institute Publications of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, has thrived.

91 Dixon, ‘The University of Leeds’, 315–16.

92 McKitterick, ‘Alston’.

93 Stanley Ellis, ‘Arthur Cawley’, p. 2.

94 ‘Arthur Cawley: 1913–1993’, p. 3.

95 ‘Arthur Cawley: 1913–1993’, p. 3.

96 ‘Arthur Cawley: 1913–1993’, pp. 3–4.

97 Attested by a now anonymous reply of 15 December 1983 to a question from Paul Bibire (1945–, then at St Andrews).

98 Elizabeth Williams, ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 17 (1986), [viii].

99 Joyce Hill, ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 19 (1988), vi; ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 21 (1990), [vii]; ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 22 (1991), [iii].

100 Stanley Ellis, ‘Arthur Cawley’, p. 2.

101 ‘Arthur Cawley’, p. 2.

102 ‘English Studies at Leeds: 1930–33’, p. 6.

103 For further glimpses of developments at this time, see Andrew Wawn, ‘Foreword’, in Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth: Essays in Honour of T. A. Shippey, Making the Middle Ages, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), xiii–xvii; Óli Kári Ólason, ‘“Það er ekkert gaman hér í bullandi sólskini”: Viðtal við Dr. Andrew Wawn’, Sagnir, 20 (1999), 18–21; Þröstur Helgason, ‘Viktoríumenn með víkingablóð’, Lesbók Morgunblaðsins: Menning/listir (18 August 2001), 4–5.

104 Janet Burton, William Marx, and Veronica O’Mara, ‘Editorial Introduction’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 41 (2010), x–xvi (pp. x–xiv).

105 John Anderson, Alaric Hall, Joyce Hill, and Elaine Treharne, ‘Mary Swan (18 December 1963–19 October 2020)’, Leeds Medieval Studies, 1 (2021), 102–9.

106 Cathy Hume 2009–10 (reviews editor 2009–12), Slavica Ranković 2013–14, James Paz 2014, Venetia Bridges 2015–16.

107 Presented with the opportunity to consider hosting the Institute for Medieval Studies as part of the School of English during the 2010 Faculty audit of the Institute, the same head opined that it was best closed down.

108 Cf. Alaric Hall, ‘Editorial Preface’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 40 (2009), [iii].

109 The most recent of these enquiries came when the University of Leeds, in collaboration with York and Sheffield, set up the White Rose University Press in 2016, supposedly to support open-access publication. But the press’s article-processing fees made this an impractical route for a humanities journal focused on publishing research that is not generally funded by large grants.

110 <http://digital.library.leeds.ac.uk/view/lse/>, accessed 8 May 2023.

111 Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, ‘Preface’, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. by Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n. s. 14 (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995), pp. vii–viii; cf. 26th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 9–12 1991 ([Kalamazoo, MI]: The Medieval Institute, 1991), p. 16.

112 Simon N. Forde, ‘Millennial Opportunities for Medieval Studies’, The Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 1 (1995), 13–17 (p. 13); Robert Hall and Ian N. Wood, ‘International Medieval Institute Newsletter’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 2–3 (1996–97), 50–51.

113 Anderson, Hall, Hill, and Treharne, ‘Mary Swan’, p. 105. Hill herself was appointed to the School of English as a lecturer in 1971, replacing both Christine Fell, who had moved to Nottingham, and W. A. G. Doyle-Davidson, who had retired. She was director of the Centre for Medieval Studies 1993–98 and Head of the School of English 1999–2001, when she was seconded to a national higher education policy position in London (2001–2002), to which she was subsequently appointed (2002–2005). Following Tom Shippey's departure, she had been appointed to an externally advertised professorship in 1995; was Visiting Professor from 2002–8; and remains Emeritus Professor 2008–.

114 Alan Deyermond, ‘Introduction’, in A Century of British Medieval Studies, ed. by Alan Deyermond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–5 (p. 1).

115 ‘Renaissance of the Middle Ages’, Times Higher Education Supplement (10 July 1998).

116 See for example the essays in Vital Signs: English in Medieval Studies in Twenty-First Century Higher Education, ed. by Elaine Treharne, English Association Issues in English, 2 (Leicester: English Association, 2002).

117 Morris appears as ‘Director of Institute for Medieval Studies’ already for 2003–4 in the University of Leeds Calendar under the Centre for Medieval Studies, but the Institute itself only appears the next year.

118 Anderson, Hall, Hill, and Treharne, ‘Mary Swan’, p. 106.

119 Batt, Hall, and Murray, ‘Editorial Note’.

120 Alaric Hall, ‘Editorial Note’, Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 49 (2018), [iii].

121 The quotations are as cited by Brooke Cadwell, ‘Universities Don’t Understand the Importance of Arts Education’, The Indiependent (4 February 2021), <https://www.indiependent.co.uk/universities-dont-understand-the-importance-of-arts-education>, accessed 5 April 2023.

122 A key detail was the implication in a document tweeted by Clark that these cuts would help to produce ‘a decolonised curriculum’, which successfully offended commentators on the right (alarmed that the canon was under threat) and on the left (who objected to the implication that decolonisation was a good reason to sack staff and reduce diachronic diversity). See for example Craig Simpson, ‘Chaucer Courses to be Replaced by Modules on Race and Sexuality under University of Leicester Plans’, The Telegraph (20 January 2021); Neil Johnston and Nicola Woolcock, ‘Leicester University Considers Lessons in Diversity as Medieval Studies Axed’, The Sunday Times (5 February 2021); Shazia Jagot, ‘Students from All Backgrounds Need Access to the Literature of Every Age’, Times Higher Education (31 January 2021).

123 The most up-to-date and thoroughly referenced account at this time is ‘Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield’, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Archaeology,_University_of_Sheffield>, accessed 8 May 2023.

124 Batt, Hall, and Murray, ‘Editorial Note’, p. x.

125 Michael Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, 1850–1970 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 104.

126 ‘The Clerke’s Compleinte’, The Gryphon, n. s. 4.3 (December 1922), 95. Cf. Tolkien’s later reminiscence, to Michael Tolkien, on ‘the words of warning given me by old Joseph Wright. “What do you take Oxford for, lad?” “A university, a place of learning.” “Nay, lad, it’s a factory! And what’s it making? I’ll tell you. It’s making fees. Get that in your head, and you'll begin to understand what goes on.”’ Tolkien’s letter places these words in 1925, just after his appointment to Oxford from his lectureship at Leeds, though he claims that some years passed thereafter before ‘I now knew that it was perfectly true’. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Selection, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 336 [letter no. 250].