The lectures in this series honour Prof. Dorothy Whitelock’s remarkable contributions to medieval studies and to improving the status of female scholars at Oxford and beyond.
Dorothy Whitelock (1901–1982) was a brilliant interdisciplinary scholar whose pioneering work combined literary, philological, historical and archaeological study. Her editions of Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930), The Peterborough Manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1954), Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (1939) and the monumental English Historical Documents: Volume 1 c. 500–1042 (1955) remain standard reference works. These books, together with her monographs The Beginnings of English Society (1941) and The Audience of ‘Beowulf’ (1951), and dozens of further publications, had a transformative effect on the study of early medieval English culture.
Prof. Whitelock was born in Leeds in 1901. After reading English Literature at Cambridge, she was appointed lecturer in English language at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in 1930, where she would become a Fellow in 1937 and Vice Principal in 1951. In 1946, she was appointed University Lecturer in Old English at the Faculty of English, Oxford. After nearly three decades (1930–57) teaching Old English at Oxford, she took up the Elrington and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge (1957-69), where she remained until her retirement.
For more details about Prof. Whitelock’s life and work, read her obituary in the Old English Newsletter.
To view her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, see here.
The first lecture in this series will take place at 5 pm on the 4th December 2024, in Lecture Theatre 2, St Cross Building. Prof. Gale Owen-Crocker will speak on ‘Social History and False Friends: From Anglo-Saxon Wills to the Bayeux Tapestry via Material Culture’. Registration is required. Book your ticket via Eventbrite.
If you would like to make a donation to support the Dorothy Whitelock lecture and Old English at Oxford, please click here
For further details please contact francis.leneghan@ell.ox.ac.uk
