Leslie J. Workman

Leslie J. Workman (5 March 1927 in Hanwell, London, England – 1 April 2001 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA) was an independent scholar and founder of academic medievalism.

Workman received his education at the Russell School, London, studied at Kings College, University of London (B.A. in History), and then served in the British Army in Egypt, Palestine, and Sudan from 1945 to 1948. In 1954 he emigrated to the United States and studied History at Columbia University and Ohio State University. Later he taught at Queens College of The City University of New York, Muhlenberg College, (Allentown, PA), and Western College for Women (Oxford, OH). In 1983 he married Kathleen Verduin, a Professor of American Literature at Hope College, Holland, MI.

Workman’s original contribution to the academy is the establishing of a network of scholars who studied the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times. Although without academic appointment since the early 1980s, he managed to convince numerous colleagues of the value of the paradigm of medievalism studies. He began to organize the first conference sections on the topic in 1971 at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan), founded the leading academic journal, Studies in Medievalism, in 1979, and started the annual International Conference on Medievalism in 1986. In 1998, colleagues and students recognized his extraordinary achievements with a Festschrift, Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie J. Workman.

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