Marjorie Reeves
| Marjorie Ethel Reeves | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 July 1905 Bratton, Wiltshire, England |
| Died | 27 November 2003 (aged 98) Oxford, Oxfordshire, England |
| Occupation | historian and educationalist |
| Nationality | British |
Marjorie Ethel Reeves, CBE, FBA (17 July 1905 – 27 November 2003) was a British historian and educationalist. She served on several national committees and was a major contributor to the education of history in Britain. She helped create St Anne's College as part of Oxford University in 1952. She led a revival of interest in the work of Joachim of Fiore.
Marjorie Ethel Reeves was born in 1905 in Bratton in Wiltshire where her father made agricultural machinery. The family were Baptists and her mother was said to have come from a family known for its independent women. She was inspired by the headteacher at the girl's high school in Trowbridge to study history at Oxford University. After graduating with a first-class honours degree (having attended St Hugh's College) she stayed on to take a teaching diploma. Reeves taught for just two years in Greenwich at the Roan School for Girls as an assistant mistress before becoming a research fellow at Westfield College in London in 1929. At Westfield she made the unusual choice of studying Joachim of Fiore whose works she had found at Corpus Christi Library. This medieval mystic was to be the subject of her doctorate in 1932 and of her book, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: a Study in Joachimism (1969). Her interest in Abbot Joachim inspired other academics to study his symbolic figurae and to decipher his writing. This interest led to regular congresses and journal papers. Reeves drew attention to Leone Tondelli who had deciphered Joachim peculiar diagrams in 1937. In the 1970s an international study centre for Joachim of Fiore was created in San Giovanni in Fiore. The community also rebuilt Joachim's church. Reeves was to be awarded an honorary citizenship of the commune of San Giovanni.
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