Book of essays honours medieval scholar

Book of essays honours medieval scholar

The career of a New Zealand medieval scholar with an international reputation has been honoured in a book released by Canterbury University Press.

L’Offrande Du Coeur is a collection of essays offered by former colleagues of Glynnis Cropp, who retired from Massey University in 2001 after nearly 40 years as a lecturer, reader and professor of French.

She is one of the foremost international scholars in medieval French and Occitan studies, specialising in the writings of Christine de Pizan and the medieval adaptations of Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae.

It was during the 1960s that she developed her interest in French medieval translations, after discovering a manuscript of a translation of the Consolatio Philosophiae in the Auckland Public Library.

It had been deposited there in 1887 by Sir George Grey, who had acquired it in London.

This prompted further research during the 1970s into medieval French translations of Boethius’ works, which led her to several previously unidentified translations. Since officially retiring nearly three years ago, Glynnis Cropp has continued teaching and researching. She has not long returned from a research fellowship at Cambridge University where she was a Quatercentenary Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College. In the book’s forward notes, a senior lecturer in French and Spanish at Massey University, Colin Anderson, says he is privileged to have worked with someone he describes as an eminent scholar, superb teacher and committed academic.

L’Offrande Du Coeur, Edited by Margaret Burrell and Judith Grant. Canterbury University Press, 2004; paperback 210 x 150mm, 160pp, ISBN 1-877257-12-5, RRP $39.95

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