D. W. Robertson, Jr.
 Photo of D. W. Robertson Jr. from Princeton Alumni Weekly October 21 1998
|
Durant Waite Robertson Jr. (Washington, D.C. October 11, 1914 – Chapel Hill, North Carolina, July 26, 1992) was a scholar of medieval English literature and especially Geoffrey Chaucer. He taught at Princeton University from 1946 until his retirement in 1980 as the Murray Professor of English, and was "widely regarded as this [the twentieth] century's most influential Chaucer scholar".
Robertson studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1944. His dissertation on the work of Robert Mannyng, A Study of Certain Aspects of the Cultural Tradition of Handlyng Synne, was written under the direction of G. R. Coffman and Urban Tigner Holmes Jr. Subsequently he revised and published three important articles from it.
Robertson taught briefly at the University of Maryland before joining the faculty at Princeton in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Robertson’s deeply historical approach to medieval English literature challenged and even angered many of the leading medievalists of the mid-20th century. Opposition to Robertson’s critical approach at length took the form of a scholarly debate at the meeting of the English Institute of 1958–59. The book of papers published from that event proved that Robertson's "exegetical criticism", sometimes simply called "Robertsonianism", had many learned supporters as well as opponents.
Robertson’s magnum opus was published in 1962 by Princeton University Press: A Preface to Chaucer. Studies in Medieval Perspectives, a massive work of 500 pages of text and 118 illustrations from medieval monastic manuscripts and religious sculpture and art. Critics were impressed by the extent of Robertson’s reading in and grasp of primary sources, mainly in Latin and French, and secondary literature in every major European language as far back as the 19th century. Lynn Staley, Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities and Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Colgate University and one of Robertson’s students, described it thus:
...
Wikipedia