|
Obituaries (from SPBS Newsletter 2010) Dr Benedikt Benedikz (1932-2009) Ben Benedikz was among the scholar-librarians who have safeguarded and enhanced the collections of rare books and archives in their care, maintaining their importance both to scholarship and to the reputation of their parent institutions. When his career began they were often regarded as the “ivory tower” of librarianship; when it ended they were firmly in the main stream. Benedikt Sigurdur Benedikz was born in Reykjavik in 1932, the eldest son of the diplomat and bibliophile Eirikur Benedikz. At the age of 12, when his father was appointed chargé d’affaires to the newly established Icelandic Legation in London, he moved to England, which remained his home for the rest of his life. He was educated at Burford Grammar School, Pembroke College Oxford (where he also developed his talent as an operatic tenor) and University College London, where he took his diploma in librarianship in 1956. He was already a formidable linguist, always an asset in a librarian and often in other circumstances, too. His father once sent him round the eastern Mediterranean in a tramp steamer. Obliged to spend a night ashore in Turkey, Benedikz accepted hospitality in the tiny cell of an Orthodox monk, the only language they shared being Latin. His first post was with Buckinghamshire County Library. In 1959 he was offered two positions — one in the chorus at Covent Garden and one in the university library at Durham. He chose the latter and here he met Phyllis Laybourn, also a librarian. They married in 1964, having spent part of their courtship cataloguing the collection of the See of Durham at Auckland Castle. There followed three years in charge of the humanities collections at the New University of Ulster and two teaching bibliography at Leeds Polytechnic. His final move, in 1973, was to the University of Birmingham, as head of special collections, where he remained until his retirement in 1995. Benedikz was equally at home in a library, lecture room or cathedral cloister. His particular forte was in the field of acquisitions. Thousands of rare books and the papers of Charles Masterman, Oliver Lodge, Oswald Mosley and the Church Mission Society came to Birmingham during his tenure. He nurtured and developed the two “star” collections — the Avon and Chamberlain papers — maintaining excellent relations with the families who had donated them. He taught bibliography, palaeography and Old Norse, and he was consultant to the cathedral libraries of Lichfield and Worcester and the magnificent library of Bishop Hurd at Hartlebury Castle. His scholarship was many-sided. He edited On the Novel, a festschrift presented to Walter Allen, in 1971, and published a string of papers on Icelandic history and literature, Byzantine studies, bibliography, modern political papers and medieval manuscripts. The work that gave him most satisfaction was The Varangians of Byzantium. This book was a revision and substantial rewriting of a Væringja saga by Sigfús Blöndal, a history of the Byzantine mercenary regiment that included Norsemen. Blöndal had died before its publication in Reykjavik in 1954, which attracted little attention. In 1960 Blöndal’s widow invited Benedikz to produce an English edition. It was published by Cambridge in 1978 and has recently been issued in paperback. For this and other published work the university awarded Benedikz a doctorate in 1979. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1981 and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1985. In 1999 the University of Nottingham, in acknowledgment of the family’s gift of his father’s outstanding collection of Islandica, made him a member of their College of Benefactors. He became closely involved with Viking studies there and delivered the first of the biennial Fell-Benedikz lectures in 2000. Genuine eccentrics are fast disappearing from academia but Ben Benedikz was certainly one of them. Before his arrival at Birmingham a colleague remarked of him: “Mr Benedikz always strikes me as the sort of person any self-respecting university library ought to have one of.” Snatches of grand opera would waft up and down the lift shaft and imitations of Churchill enlivened the reading room. He was a familiar figure every morning in the senior common room, laden with antiquarian book catalogues, picking up on the gossip and keeping the biscuit suppliers in business. A polymath in the tradition of Dr Johnson, whom he resembled both in build and intellect, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the most diverse facts. He was a walking Who’s Who of theologians, politicians and academics, alive or dead. Cataloguers rarely had to consult reference books, for he could tell them immediately the correct name of a monk on the remote island of Fulda, the author of a long-forgotten Victorian children’s novel or an obscure French dramatist. Occasionally the facts would become tangled. He once memorably confused Virginia Woolf’s Orlando with the children’s classic Orlando the Marmalade Cat. He was not always at home with the more tedious aspects of library management, but his devotion to scholarship was never in doubt. He is survived by his wife Phyllis, and their son and daughter. Benedikt Benedikz, librarian and scholar, was born on April 4, 1932. He died on March 25, 2009, aged 76 © The Times, 28 April 2008. Konstantinos Ikonomopoulos (1980-2009) Originally from Thessaloniki, Konstantinos completed his BA at the American International University in London and took the MA in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King’s College London in 2004-5. He embarked on PhD research at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2005, investigating Byzantine perceptions of Jerusalem and policies towards the city’s Muslim rulers (813-1204). While pursuing his doctoral studies, he also taught ancient history to first-year undergraduates at Royal Holloway. Although his PhD thesis will not now be completed, his article ‘Byzantium and Jerusalem, 813-975: From indifference to intervention’, has been published in Papers from the First and Second Postgraduate Forums in Byzantine Studies: Sailing to Byzantium, ed. Savvas Neocleous (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009) 7-25. Dr Jonathan Harris Profess Ihor Sevcenko (1922-2009) Ihor Sevcenko was a man of many attainments and remarkably wide learning: a Byzantinist, a Slavist, a Classical scholar, a paleographer, an epigraphist and a gifted linguist in addition to being a keen angler. Perhaps he could best be described as a cultural historian. Born of Ukrainian parents in the village of Radosc in east-central Poland, Ihor Ivanovic Sevcenko attended the Adam Mickiewicz Classical Gymnasium in Warsaw, where he acquired a sound grounding in Greek and Latin, and continued his studies at the Charles University of Prague, winning his first doctorate (in Classical philology) in 1945. A refugee at the end of the war, he moved to Belgium and enrolled in the University of Louvain where, in 1949, he was awarded his second doctorate, this time on a recondite topic of Byzantine intellectual history. His thesis, covering what was at the time new ground, was eventually published in 1962 under the title Études sur la polémique entre Théodore Métochite et Nicéphore Choumnos. The high point of his Belgian years was, however, his participation in the lively seminar conducted at Brussels by Henri Grégoire, the doyen of Byzantine studies, whom he came to regard as his master. Sevcenko’s next move was to the US, first to Berkeley, where he joined the circle of the eminent medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz. He then taught at the universities of Michigan and Columbia, before accepting a chair at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Centre in Washington in 1965, where he was for a time director of Byzantine studies. When the research activities of that centre were downgraded in 1973, he transferred to Harvard itself as Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History and Literature until his retirement in 1992. There he helped to found in 1973 the Ukrainian Research Institute, of which he remained associate director until 1989. Always eager to travel, he lectured as visiting professor in Paris, Cologne, Munich, Budapest and Bari, and was a familiar figure at Oxford, having held visiting fellowships at All Souls (1979-80) and Wolfson College (1987, 1993). Sevcenko’s bibliography as at 2003 lists more than 200 titles, starting with a Ukrainian translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1947). Many of his scattered articles, some of them very substantial, have been collected in four volumes devoted in large part to two broad subjects: the intellectual history of Byzantium and its impact on the eastern Slavs. Sevcenko himself described his approach as representing what he called “normal science” (meaning Wissenschaft) based on a close study of texts and their mutual interdependence, and was disappointed when his brand of scholarship, laborious as it was to produce, began to be questioned both for political motives and in the name of various forms of Post-Modernism. One example of his method will suffice, namely his spectacular demolition of the so-called Fragments of Toparcha Gothicus. This enigmatic Greek text, first published in 1819 by the noted Hellenist K. B. Hase and purporting to narrate the experiences of a Byzantine commander faced by unspecified barbarians somewhere on the north coast of the Black Sea, had provoked a plethora of conflicting interpretations not free from national bias. Yet no one was much bothered by the mysterious disappearance of the medieval manuscript that Hase claimed to have used. Relying on the printer’s copy of the editio princeps written in Hase’s own hand, on Hase’s rather scabrous secret diary (composed in Greek) and a minute philological examination of the published text, Sevcenko was inevitably led to the conclusion (since confirmed) that the Fragments were an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Hase himself at the expense of his Russian paymasters. A more erudite and humorous piece of literary detection would be hard to find, but, predictably, not everyone was pleased. As happened to most perfectionists, Sevcenko did not live to complete all the projects he had in mind, but his critical edition of the highly important Life of the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886) ascribed to Constantine Porphyrogenitus is ready for the printer and promises to become a model of its kind. Sevcenko received many distinctions, including three honorary doctorates and festschriften on his 60th and 80th birthdays. He was a member of a dozen academies, including the British Academy (corresponding Fellow) and was from 1986 to 1996 president of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines, in which capacity he presided over the memorable international congress held at Moscow (1991) which happened to coincide with the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. A man of commanding presence and outgoing personality, Sevcenko had a wide circle of friends both in Europe and North America with whom he communicated in French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, modern Greek and occasionally Latin. He made high demands on his graduate students, but obtained excellent results from the few who satisfied his expectations. His marriages to Oksana DrajXmara, Margaret Bentley, an editor of scholarly works, and Nancy Patterson, a distinguished Byzantine art historian, were dissolved. He is survived by two daughters. Professor Ihor Sevcenko, historian, was born on February 10, 1922. He died on December 26, 2009, aged 87. ©The Times, 15 January 2010 Obituaries from BBBS 2009: Obituaries from BBBS 2008: Obituaries from BBBS 2007: Obituaries from BBBS 2006: Obituaries from BBBS 2005: Obituaries from BBBS
2004: Obituaries from BBBS
2003: Obituaries from BBBS
2002: Obituaries from BBBS
2001: |