Professor Vincent Gillespie, FBA (11 February 1954–13 March 2025)

It is with great sadness that we report the news that Professor Vincent Gillespie, FBA, FSA, FRHistS, FEA, the emeritus J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language, died at home on 13 March 2025, accompanied by his family.  He is survived by his wife Peggy and sons Thomas and Edward and grandchildren.

Vincent grew up in Liverpool where he attended his local Catholic boys’ grammar school, thriving in the opportunities for social mobility and public service of mid-century Britain. He arrived at Keble College in Oxford in 1972 and threw himself into his studies and all the literary and dramatic activities of the University, such as an oft-remembered tea party with W.  H. Auden. He was guided in his studies in particular by M. B. Parkes, a brilliant and quirky Fellow in English at Keble, who was at the time developing bold ideas about medieval textuality, that combined close attention to manuscript forms with medieval literary theory.  Vincent did his doctorate with Douglas Gray, his predecessor but one as Tolkien Professor, but Parkes remained the prevailing inspiration. (His obituary of Parkes in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 17 (2018), 71–87, is a masterpiece of potted biography.) Thereafter, for twenty-four years, he was a much-loved Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College, before his election to the Tolkien Chair in 2004, which he held alongside a Professorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall, for seventeen years.

Vincent’s knowledge of later medieval European literature and thought was encyclopaedic. He researched a number of different areas; he himself summed up his interests like this: ‘At the core of most of what I do is a curiosity about the psychology of literary response: the ways in which writers struggle to express experiences and acts of imagination, the strategies they use to articulate their understanding of these experiences and imaginative acts, and the codes and conventions that develop between texts and readers to allow communication and understanding to develop and to be manipulated.’ He was fundamentally a theorist, interested in how language and literature work. He published on the modern playwright Harold Pinter, and many of his essays on medieval literature engage with modern poets and poetics too; one essay on medieval poetic theory starts with Walt Whitman and ends with W. H. Auden; another ends with a quotation from Don Paterson, ‘Poetry is a dark art, a form of magic.’

Vincent published extraordinarily widely. He is very well known for his work on devotional writing and mysticism. Many of his essays – including field-defining pieces such as ‘The Apophatic Image,’ ‘Postcards from the Edge,’ and ‘Strange Images of Death’ – are collected in the magisterial volume, Looking in Holy Books. (He himself suggests in the preface, that when putting the collection together, he toyed with the title A Dog Returns to his Vomit but happily he decided against it in the end.) His essays on the female mystic, Julian of Norwich, the fruit of a profound collaboration with Maggie Ross, engage in forensic detail with how the language and imagery of Julian’s texts struggle with the ineffable and the thresholds of revelation. Vincent’s work on Syon Abbey (the only house of the Bridgettine order in England), brought together his interest in religious communities, especially the Carthusians and Bridgettines, and his interest in material texts. He edited the early-sixteenth-century catalogue of Syon, and also published multiple articles on Syon, exploring what the sisters were reading and where they got their books. Another important book was After Arundel (co-edited with Kantik Ghosh), which emerged from a massive conference in Oxford and revisited fifteenth-century writing in the wake of censorship and radical religious and political change.

Vincent also published on secular medieval literature: his work on Chaucer included a brilliant article on Chaucer’s engagement with Italian ideas of laureate poets, and, as co-editor, the multi-volume Chaucer Encyclopaedia. He published on Langland and Skelton. He wrote an essay about medieval understanding of poetic theory and thought-experiments that he structured as a thought experiment itself. Indeed, his essays, while deeply scholarly, were also witty and attention-grabbing. He had an eye for a catchy title (‘Dial M for Mystic’, ‘Chapter and Worse’, ‘Never Look a Gift Horace in the Mouth’) and a genius for first lines (‘At the heart of Scripture stand two empty spaces’, ‘It is, of course, partly Shakespeare’s fault’). Vincent’s ideal form was the long essay: there is more learning in many of his individual essays than can be found in most full monographs.

His intellectual power dazzles in his work on later medieval literary theory, particularly in a tour-de-force of an essay published in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vincent’s close engagement with classical and medieval understanding of how poetry works, of rhetoric and poetics, of ethics, of genre, and of the imagination, makes a vital contribution to our understanding of the history of ideas about literature. In another article, he cites the classical and medieval idea that an orator should be a ‘vir bonus dicendi peritus’ – a good man, skilled in speech. There is no doubt that Vincent himself was a good man, and a man skilled in speech, in writing, in communicating his learning, his insights, and his intellectual passions to all who were lucky enough to know him.

As an undergraduate tutor and a graduate supervisor, he was peerless. Tutorials always over-ran, conversations went in totally unexpected directions, students learnt more than they could have imagined possible (in earlier years, through a haze of pipe smoke). His intellect was intimidating at first but was accompanied by so much warmth and kindness that students knew that he was there to help them and that he would always have time for them. He cared about people. And he was also great fun, charming, interested in others, very funny. He had an anecdote for all occasions and a delight in academic news and gossip. (Like Chaucer’s friar, he knew the tenure-track in every town.) For colleagues, one of his preferred modes of operating was the encouraging or the persuasive lunch: a trip to somewhere elegant in north Oxford, a slightly naughty glass of Picpoul de Pinet, and then the question how you would stand on such-and-such policy decision, or the flattering hint that ‘you would be perfect’ for this or that promotion or duty.

Vincent had a great sense of academic duties and never shirked from shouldering roles, in the two Colleges where he worked, the Faculty, and the wider academic bodies in the UK and abroad. For many years he enjoyed travelling as external examiner and committee member, not least to the University of the West Indies, as well as in less sun-kissed places. Among his longest commitments were one decade as Secretary of the Early English Text Society and another as its Honorary Director, in which offices he secured that ancient society’s running for the future. Within Oxford, he held innumerable roles, including Chair of Faculty Board, and shaped many appointments, a task he relished. With his great personal warmth, he also negotiated large endowments to the Faculty for graduate scholarships and academic posts—around nine million pounds all told. He hosted seminars and conferences over many years, bringing together his vast body of acquaintances to make connections between people and between ideas. He recognized that academia—like the monastic communities he studied—thrives through informal friendship and formal office-holding; that the garden needs tending through careful planning and labour; and that an eye must be cast on the world without, if the mind is to be free to contemplate within.

Vincent had been unwell for a decade yet had continued through the vicissitudes of treatment in his busy round of teaching, research and administration with inspiring energy, until he retired in the summer of 2021. He had written of the experience of ‘ease and disease’ in a heartfelt essay on Julian of Norwich, perhaps the writer whom he most often quoted. He ended with Julian’s quotation of God’s words: ‘He seid not “Thou shalt not be tempesteid, thou shalt not be travelled, thou shalt not be disesid”, but he seid “Thou shalt not be overcome.”’ (Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 39, 2017.)