The English Faculty is honoured to have been left an extremely generous legacy by Professor Anne Hudson, who sadly died last year. Professor Hudson has donated £2.6 million to the Faculty for endowing scholarships for graduate students working on Middle English. We will be advertising the first two of these doctoral scholarships this year: the Anne Hudson scholarship, to be held at Lady Margaret Hall, and the Pamela Gradon scholarship, to be held at St Hugh's College, named after another important female medieval scholar from our faculty, who was Professor Hudson’s tutor, colleague, friend and close collaborator on the enormous Wycliffite sermons project.
Anne Hudson was a University Lecturer in the English Faculty and Tutorial Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall from 1963 and then became Professor of Medieval English at the English Faculty from 1989 to 2003 with a Professorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. On her retirement she was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of Lady Margaret Hall and she was also elected to an Honorary Fellowship of St Hugh's College in 2015. In 1976, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and she became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988. For several years she was Director of the Early English Text Society. Professor Hudson was also Co-Investigator on the 'Towards a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible' research project which ran from 2016-2018. She was particularly well-known for her work on Wycliffe and Wycliffite writing, with many field-changing publications in that area, including The Premature Reformation, Doctors in English: A Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries, and Lollards and Their Books.
Professor Marion Turner, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Chair of the Faculty Board, said, 'This is a transformational legacy, that will help us to support some of the best graduate students working on later medieval literature. Many of us remember Anne Hudson as a crucial presence in our faculty for many decades; her generous gift helps to assure the future of the field to which she committed her life and work.'
