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Obituaries (from SPBS Newsletter 2009) John Barron (1934-2008) John Barron was a leading classical scholar and college head who played an important role in the transformation of the British university system in the 1980s and 1990s. His personal qualities made him a natural leader in many academic projects and institutions in the universities of London and Oxford, and also nationally. He recognised that the relatively small and enclosed university system which had nurtured him had to expand, and was successful in persuading colleagues that institutional change should be embraced rather than fought. John Penrose Barron was an only child, born in Morley, West Yorkshire, in 1934. His father, George Barron, was head of mathematics at Morley Grammar School. His mother, (Minnie) Leslie Marks, the daughter of a builder, was from a deeply rooted Cornish family, and Barron spent childhood holidays by the sea at St Just in Penwith. From Wakefield Grammar School he moved to Clifton College. Later he was to advise Clifton as its president. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953 where he read classical honour moderations and literae humaniores and was close to two of his tutors, Kenneth Dover and Russell Meiggs, the historian. His doctoral work was on the early history of Samos and led to his most important publication, The Silver Coins of Samos, in 1966. In this Barron displayed his aptitude and passion for hunting down scraps of evidence, making sense of them, and connecting them together. His talent for making connections, indeed, whether across the breadth of his academic interests or between different elements of his academic career or among colleagues, friends and students, was a feature of his approach to scholarship and to life. Towards the end of his doctoral research, when already a lecturer at Bedford College, London, he met an undergraduate historian from Somerville College, Oxford, Caroline Hogarth, and they were married on her graduation in 1962. As Caroline Barron she became a leading historian of medieval London and held a chair at Royal Holloway College. Together they made a remarkable academic team, encouraging and inspiring their students and offering joyous hospitality to friends in London and Oxford. John’s support for Caroline’s career led him to take a lifelong interest in the promotion of academic opportunities for women, both as students and lecturers. Barron had wide interests as a classicist. His study of Greek Sculpture (1965, revised in 1981) was a distinguished introduction to the subject. His work on numismatics, concerning the ancient coins of Kos as well as Samos, demonstrated the significance of coins to the broader understanding of the Ancient World. In Greek literature his focus was on the era from Hesiod to the early classical period of the first half of the 5th century BC, and he collaborated with Professor Patricia Easterling in writing on some of the authors of this period for the Cambridge History of Classical Literature in 1985. His interest in Greece extended to every aspect of its subsequent history and contemporary culture. He loved to travel there and was close to leading figures in the Greek community in London. After periods at Bedford College and then University College, London, Barron was elected to the chair of Greek at King’s College London, at the age of 37. He held the chair for 20 years. He became director of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, 1984-91, and dean of the several London Institutes for Advanced Studies, 1989-91. He was twice public orator in the university, crafting his biographical portraits of those awarded honorary degrees to entertain the university’s Chancellor, the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who presided at the ceremonies. More difficult commissions followed, however. Between 1989 and 1993 Barron was a member of the University Funding Council (UFC), established by the Conservative Government at the end of the 1980s to take the place of the old University Grants Committee and oversee changes to the British university system. The UFC included a majority of non-academic members drawn from business and public life and was unpopular with academics, some of whom questioned Barron’s decision to join it. Barron believed that it was better to influence an institution from the inside, protecting what was most valuable in the process, than to raise impotent opposition from without. Put honestly and straightforwardly, with the charm and courtesy that characterised everything he did, this argument was unanswerable. Using those same qualities he was able to persuade colleagues to accept the UFC’s decision to protect the study of classics by concentrating it in fewer university departments, a move which was, in retrospect, undoubtedly correct. Barron also supported the overall expansion of the university system which was planned and set in motion while he was a member of the UFC, and which saw participation rates rise from under 10 per cent to more than 30 per cent in less than a decade. At St Peter’s College, Oxford, where he became Master in 1991, he encouraged many different initiatives to increase access to the university, especially when he served as chairman of the Oxford Colleges’ Admissions Committee, (1997-2000. During his mastership the proportion of women students at St Peter’s increased from fewer than 30 per cent to nearly 50 per cent and the number of female tutors and fellows increased as well. It was also during his mastership that it came of age: founded as recently as 1928 and with only limited resources, under Barron’s guidance St Peter’s became more self-confident and assured. Student numbers increased and the college’s academic position improved, not least because of his insistence that he meet every student at the end of each term to review progress. In reality these were often light-hearted conversations about books read and travels to be undertaken. St Peter’s also expanded physically in this period. Barron had a sharp eye for architecture and design and was involved from the outset in plans to redevelop the site of the Castle to the west of Oxford city centre, close to St Peter’s. He accepted that this was too big a project for the college to manage alone, but his interest led St Peter’s to build and purchase three elegant student residences, thereby contributing to the regeneration of this previously run-down quarter of the city. It was a mark of Barron’s success at the head of the college that the Fellows extended his term as Master beyond the usual retiring age. He stood down in 2003 and devoted himself to the many educational organisations which valued his membership and advice, including Lambeth Palace Library, whose committee he chaired latterly. He published articles on the very first institution of higher learning in Oxford, the house of scholars, situated in St George’s collegiate church in the Castle, founded in 1074. Barron is survived by his wife and two daughters. Professor John Barron, classical scholar, was born on April 27, 1934. He died on August 16, 2008, aged 74 © The Times, August 29, 2008 Julian Chrysostomides (1927-2008) Julian Chrysostomides was a scholar who chose exile from her native Constantinople and won the admiration of her tutor, Iris Murdoch For nearly 30 years, as a lecturer at Royal Holloway College in the University of London, she was instrumental in establishing it as a centre of Byzantine studies. Her self-adopted mission was to salvage and resurrect lost records of the East Roman Empire, a task she pursued with singular tenacity. Herself an authentic "Byzantine", Julian (or Iouliane) Chrysostomides was to a large extent driven by her own troubled past as a member of Constantinople's persecuted Greek minority, which had survived there since the fall of the city to the Turks in 1453. At the time of her birth, on April 21 1928, there were some 150,000 Greeks living in the city, which had remained the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch. Harassed by the police as a schoolgirl for speaking Greek, Julian had learned to avoid them. Equally fluent in French and Turkish, she proceeded from the Zappeion, the Greek Lyceum for Girls, to the Sorbonne, but found it uncongenial. With the encouragement of her father, a Cappadocian businessman who believed that Oxford was the proper place to study Classical Greek, she applied in person for a place at St Hugh's College, and was mortified to be turned down on the ground of her poor English. She had better luck at St Anne's, where she was accepted to read Greats in 1951, despite her ignorance of Latin. Julian's tutor was Iris Murdoch, who took her under her wing. Murdoch described Julian as "a magical girl" and referred to her "detached integrity and pride...she is warmth, simplicity, & a kind of small fierce strength like a beast". The intrepid Julian, who had braved the isolation of being in a foreign land, was the model for Rain Carter in Iris Murdoch's novel The Sandcastle (1957), who is a shy, diminutive girl who "spoke with pedantic solemnity" and had a "sense of vocation like a steam hammer". By describing the frustrations of building sandcastles on Mediterranean beaches, Julian had, moreover, supplied Murdoch with the central motif of the novel. The September Riots in Constantinople, soon after her graduation in 1955, helped to decide Julian Chrysostomides' future. Factory workers shipped in from Asia Minor had rampaged through her native quarter, the Pera, beating, raping and – in a few cases – killing Greeks, smashing their property and shouting "Death to the Giaours [infidels]!" Julian Chrysostomides was appalled by their senseless vandalism, and particularly by an incident of which she heard with horror, when rioters dragged a grand piano to the upper floor of her old school and threw it into the street below. Her family remained in the city while their fellow Greeks deserted it in droves, but it was years before she returned, so fearful was she of being detained in Turkey. In her early years in England she had instinctively kept away from policemen, even crossing the road to avoid them. One day she stopped to help a woman who had fallen off her bicycle. As Julian Chrysostomides gathered up the spilled contents of the woman's basket, she was asked what country she came from. Unwilling to own up to Turkey, she declared herself to be Greek. "How lovely to be Greek!" said the woman. It was a seminal moment for Julian Chrysostomides. She realised that in England she would be free to take full pride in her heritage. She threw herself into research for a BLitt, supervised by the formidable Professor Joan Hussey of Royal Holloway College. Armed with dazzling references from Iris Murdoch, she took work as a librarian, latterly at the Society of Antiquaries, until the award of an international fellowship enabled her to live in Venice for a year. The Venetian State Archives were trawled for new sources on the late-Byzantine Aegean world, and the results published. By then a naturalised British subject, Julian Chrysostomides was appointed in 1965 to a lectureship in History at Royal Holloway. She became senior lecturer in 1983, reader in 1992 and emeritus reader on her retirement in 1993, by which time she had established her department as a centre for Byzantine scholarship to rival King's College. In collaboration with Professor DM Nicol of King's, she had taught a testing and prestigious special paper for undergraduates entitled "Byzantium, Italy and the First Crusade". Her students were expected to master the original sources in both Latin and Greek. With quiet authority and the perspective of a true Byzantine, Julian Chrysostomides brought the urbane, cynical memoirist Michael Psellos, the wily Patriarch Keroularios, and the erudite, "purple-born" Anna Komnene vividly to life before her students, who almost felt that she had known these people personally. Her best-known work was an edition, published in Greece, of the oration given by the Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos at the funeral of his brother Theodore, the Despot of Mistra. Julian Chrysostomides felt particular sympathy for Manuel, whose comments about militant Islam were quoted, controversially, by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. Soldier, scholar and theologian, Manuel was the only Byzantine emperor to have visited England (in 1400-01) and had also for a period been a hostage of the Ottoman Sultan, Bayezid I, at Bursa. With characteristic single-mindedness, Julian Chrysostomides overcame the reluctance of conventional publishers to produce specialist scholarly editions, in 1987 founding her own publishing house, Porphyrogenitus (the surname traditionally given to the offspring of reigning emperors, meaning "born in the purple"). Its list has included her own collaboration, The Letter of the Three Patriarchs to Emperor Theophilos, her invaluable Monumenta Peloponnesiaca and a festschrift in honour of Joan Hussey. As someone whose favourite novel was Middlemarch, she had latterly undertaken an essential but unglamorous task worthy of Casaubon, editing, with Charalambos Dendrinos, the monumental Lexicon of Abbreviations and Ligatures in Greek Minuscule Hands (c8th century to c1600). It was a project that, happily, she saw through almost to the end. Julian Chrysostomides was a gentle and reserved person of great courage and unassailable integrity, whose "proud humility" was tempered by a sharp sense of humour. She was a doughty champion of her students, who adored her in return and invariably became friends for life. She had been set a fine example by her own tutors, and was one of a number of close friends who rallied to Iris Murdoch in her distressed old age. She felt very keenly the need to preserve and defend civilised values, whether Byzantine or British, and deplored the sale by Royal Holloway College, in the mid-1990s, of a Gainsborough, a Turner and a Constable, part of the founder's original endowment. The sale raised £21 million for the redevelopment of the college; but she felt that "we have taught the young the wrong lesson. That it is all right for an affluent society to run through the alleys of the world with a begging bowl. This is not the vision of England I grew up with – that Byronic vision – and which I found when I first came to this country." Whilst judging herself to have been "passable" as a teacher, she claimed therefore to have failed as an educator: "For I cannot say 'I was not here.' " Julian Chrysostomides, who died on October 18, never married; but in 1979 she adopted the orphaned son of her adored twin brother Nikos, and he survives her. She shared a large house at Camberley, Surrey, with her life-long friend Joan Richmond, and the devoted students who visited her there – together with what she called "the brotherhood of scholars" – constituted her wider family. ©The Daily Telegraph, November 26, 2008 Zaga Gavrilović (1926-2009) Zaga was born in Belgrade in 1926 and received her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of Belgrade in 1949, studying Serbian medieval and Byzantine art under Professors S. Radojčić and G. Ostrogorski. After completing her degree, she worked in the Institute for the Preservation of Monuments until 1950 when she was selected to be a guide and interpreter at the large exhibition of Yugoslav Art in Paris. However, she was being put under increasing pressure to talk positively about communism in Yugoslavia to exhibition visitors and decided to seek political asylum in France. She managed to get a grant and began her postgraduate studies under the supervision of the eminent professor of Byzantine art and iconography, André Grabar. Zaga always looked back to her time in Paris with affection and happiness. She held her supervisor in the greatest esteem, regarding him throughout her life as one of the scholars who laid the foundations for the study of Byzantine Art History. At the same time she worked on the documentation of the large G. Millet collection of photographs and documents from Serbia, which was kept in the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. (G. Millet, L’ancien art serbe [Paris, 1917]and idem, L’Ancien art serbe: les églises [Paris, 1919]). The Centre for Byzantine Studies (now the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies) at the University of Birmingham, was only thirty miles from Zaga’s home. She was given library privileges and other facilities enjoyed by University staff. Occasionally she was pressed to supervise or assess a thesis. It is at the University of Birmingham that I first met Zaga, when I came to England in 1977 to undertake my postgraduate studies. I remember that Zaga faithfully attended seminars in the Centre, often asking pertinent and searching questions of the speakers. She was also generous with her time and knowledge, which was huge, to postgraduate students like myself. Whenever I had a question about Byzantine theology, liturgy, iconography or art history, Zaga usually had the answer or was at least able to point me towards the relevant bibliography. She and Aleksa also opened their house frequently to students: I remember many happy lunches in their spacious and comfortable house in Stafford. Their garden, to which we would repair on sunny afternoons, was particularly beautiful and stocked with well-tended shrubs and flowers. Towards the end of the 1980s, Zaga was invited to become an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. This was a particularly congenial organisation, conceived by the university as a way to accommodate independent scholars such as Zaga—and by that time, myself as well. In return only for our willingness to attend weekly seminars and occasionally to present papers, we were given library privileges and parking rights. Many of the other Fellows were (and still are) retired members of staff, but a number of independent scholars such as Zaga also benefited from this arrangement. Zaga enjoyed her membership of the Institute as much as she did her involvement in the CBOMGS. She was on good terms with the other Fellows and enjoyed the interdisciplinary nature of the seminars and lectures that the Institute provided. Mary B. Cunningham (University of Nottingham) Michael Hendy (1942-2008) Michael Hendy was a precocious scholar who reshaped our entire understanding of the economy of medieval Byzantium and made a lasting contribution to the history of coinage and monetary studies. Born in Newhaven, East Sussex, in 1942, the son of a merchant sea captain, Michael Hendy graduated from Oxford in 1964. As an undergraduate at The Queen’s College, he once went to Cambridge to look at Byzantine coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum and expressed such an unusual interest in those minted by the Comnenian and Palaeologan emperors that the great numismatist and historian Philip Grierson (1910-1995) kept in touch with him, even inviting him to a feast at his college, a privilege generally reserved for distinguished academics. More importantly, Grierson also recommended him for a two-year fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine Studies, Washington, and a five-year assistant curatorship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1967-72. In 1964-65 a British Council scholarship had enabled Hendy to study coin finds in Bulgaria, which proved to be the starting point for the large volume, Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire (1081-1261), published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1969, when he was 27. This pathbreaking and revolutionary study brought order to the previously misunderstood coinage of this period. Where the British Museum catalogue saw a chaotic series of debased coins of varying intrinsic value, Hendy identified a decisive monetary reform that replaced the debased issues of the late 11th century with a new system of denominations, including a restored pure gold coin, the hyperpyron, at the top. He solved the mystery of the elusive coinage of the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261) by identifying and dating, on the basis of coin finds, small bronze pieces that imitated, more or less faithfully, 12th-century Byzantine types that had previously been confused with Comnenian issues. Such discoveries went far beyond the “internalities” for which Hendy later blamed numismatists; they allowed a reassessment of the economy of Byzantium in the first stages of the so-called “commercial revolution” that opened up the Mediterranean market. Hendy argued rightly that the economy was expanding and not in decline. This proved a turning point in Byzantine historiography. In 1972 he moved to Birmingham where he became curator of the important Byzantine coin collection in the Barber Institute. From 1978 until 1987 he was lecturer in Numismatics in the University’s Department of Medieval History. During that period he often travelled to and from Dumbarton Oaks, as visiting Fellow in 1976 and as associate adviser for Byzantine Numismatics in 1980-1981 and 1982-1984; his second great book was researched on both sides of the Atlantic. This other magnum opus, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300-1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), was not only a detailed history of Byzantine money, its production, circulation and the administration of mints but also an economic assessment of the role of money in the economy. Twenty-five years later it remains an often-cited reference work. Under the influence of the “Cambridge school”, notably of Hugo Jones, Moses Finley and Philip Grierson, to all of whom he acknowledged his scholarly and intellectual debt, Hendy systematically downgraded the role of cash and exchanges and the level of monetisation of Byzantium, although that is now believed to have been relatively high for the period and one of the great strengths of the empire. With these credentials, enhanced by the publication of a volume of collected studies that included several unpublished chapters (The Economy, Fiscal Administration and Coinage of Byzantium, Ashgate, 1989) and his important fieldwork on the coin finds from the excavations at Aphrodisias, Saraçhane (Saint Polyeuktos) and Kalenderhane in Istanbul, and Kourion in Cyprus, he might have been expected to start a new career after his voluntary severance from Birmingham. In 1987 he moved to Princeton and then joined his partner and future wife, Professor Meg Alexiou, in Harvard in 1989. But perhaps as the unhappy consequence of an unusual personality, his aversion to the demands of daily professional responsibilities and general contrariness, which contrasted with his culinary skills and generous hospitality, he never received the high academic recognition he deserved. He felt unappreciated. The scientific loss that his death brings to the field of Byzantine studies is irreparable. His wife survives him. Michael Hendy, economic historian, was born on April 16, 1942. He died of a heart attack on May 13, 2008, at 66 ©The Times, June 12, 2008 Angeliki Laiou (1941-2008) Professor Angeliki Laiou: expert on women in the Byzantine empire Professor Angeliki E. Laiou was a distinguished historian who pioneered the study of the social and economic history of the Byzantine Empire — the medieval successor to the Roman Empire in the East. She was born in Athens in 1941. Her family originated partly from the Greek communities of the western Black Sea coast. She began her university studies in 1958-59 at the University of Athens (where the leading Greek Byzantinist, Dionysios Zakythenos, kindled her interest in Byzantium). She then moved to the US, where she obtained her BA from Brandeis University in 1961 and PhD from Harvard in 1966 under the supervision of Robert Lee Wolff, a historian of the Latin empire of Constantinople. Except for a stint as instructor at the University of Louisiana in 1962, Laiou’s academic career was confined to New England: instructor and then assistant professor at Harvard, 1966-72; associate professor, professor and distinguished professor at Brandeis University, 1972-81; and finally Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History, a prestigious position which she held from 1981 until her death. As a historian Laiou had the gift of an original and associative intellect in rare combination with uncompromising analytical rigour. But her accomplishments went beyond academia. She was a strong-willed leader who broke new ground for women historians, an inspiring teacher and, briefly, a prominent figure on the political arena in her native Greece. The first of the 14 books that she wrote or edited, Constantinople and the Latins (1972), discussed Byzantium’s foreign policy in the critical decades of the late 13th and the early 14th centuries. The book’s focus on diplomatic relations with predatory Western powers — Venice, Genoa and the Angevin kingdom of Naples — shaped Laiou’s future interest in trade networks in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine economy at large. Interestingly, this particular study also foreshadowed Laiou’s own role as a diplomat in the service of the Hellenic Republic. Her sense of social justice coupled with her coming of age in the 1960s led her to turn her analytical eye on marginal social groups ignored by historians of Byzantium. The result was a massive series of pioneering books and articles. A monograph, Peasant Society in the Late Byzantine Empire (1977), was among the first studies on Byzantine demography. An article on Byzantine women published in 1981 opened a new field for scholars of Byzantium. Laiou returned to women’s studies several times, including her monograph Mariage, amour et parenté à Byzance (1992). The scholarly achievement of which she was especially proud late in her life was the three-volume Economic History of Byzantium (2002), a landmark study which she initiated, edited and contributed several chapters to. A shorter synthesis (2007) was co-written by the French numismatist and historian Cécile Morrisson. Laiou was among the first female academics in the US and Greece to attain high posts and honours previously closed to women. In 1985 she became the first woman chair of the Harvard history department and in 1989 she was the first woman director of Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s research outpost in Washington devoted to the study of Byzantine civilisation as well as pre-Columbian, garden and landscape studies. She was one of a handful of women to be elected permanent member of the Academy of Athens in 1998. Her nine years as Dumbarton Oaks director (1989-98) were marked by several important publications, including the monumental Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (1991) edited by Alexander Kazhdan. A tireless organiser of conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, and later at the Academy of Athens, Laiou was able to draw together the leading minds in the field and to swiftly edit the resulting volumes with an ever-critical mind. A true cosmopolitan, fluent in several languages, she had the stamina to enjoy her peripatetic life. For years she divided her week between Washington and Boston; she felt at home in Paris, and she spent part of every year in Greece, including visits to Athens to attend meetings at the academy. Laiou always maintained close ties with Greece, not the least through the translation of her books into Greek and her acquaintance with leading personalities in Greek academic and political life. Her international recognition and acute political instinct did not go unnoticed in Greece. In 2000 she was elected member of parliament for the Panhellenic Socialist Party (Pasok) and served as Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs from May to November 2000. In the end she found politics less stimulating than her academic pursuits, while the opportunities for bringing about real change proved minimal. In the autumn of 2001 she returned to full-time duty at Harvard. Her teaching at Harvard included a popular undergraduate core course on the Crusades and seminars on Byzantine and Balkan history. A talented public speaker with an impressive stage presence, she lectured passionately and with a sense of mission. Her graduate students knew her as a demanding mentor who introduced in seminars close and meticulous reading of Byzantine documents — in her own words, “the clearing of the ground” for the kind of conclusions she was able to draw in her books and articles. Laiou’s public persona was always imposing, an impression reinforced by her elegant style, which remained unmistakably Athenian. She regularly intervened at conferences to correct an error or misinterpretation. At the same time she was diplomatic when the circumstances required it. Behind her public persona she was an affectionate and warm mentor, colleague and friend who will be remembered for her love of life, sense of humour and irony, and unflinching loyalty. Laiou’s other honours included appointment as Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic; she was corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences and honorary professor, Nankai University, China. Professor Angeliki Laiou, historian, was born on April 6, 1941. She died of cancer on December 11, 2008, aged 67. © The Times, December 17, 2008 Geoffrey Lewis (1920- 2008) It was a chance remark most students would probably dismiss scornfully. But when in early 1939 the eighteen year old Geoffrey Lewis, who died on 12 February at the age of 87, was told by his university Latin teacher “You’re getting stale. You need a hobby. Um…try Turkish.” the advice led to his eventually becoming the acknowledged doyen of Turkish Studies in the UK, the first ever professor of Turkish at Oxford, and the author of numerous works, both popular and learned, on Turkish history and language. More than anyone else in Britain, Geoffrey Lewis presided over the establishment and growth of Turkish studies from virtually nothing in the UK over the last six or seven decades. Though Arabic and Persian studies date back to the seventeenth century in Britain, there were no corresponding posts in Turkish. When Lewis began to consider studying Turkish, Atatürk had been dead only a few months and British academia had still to catch up with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic. When in 1945, he went to consult H.A.R. Gibb, the Laudian Professor of Arabic, Lewis was told “For years I’ve been looking for someone to teach Turkish. But you can’t call yourself a Turkish scholar unless you know Arabic and Persian.” Lewis then embarked on a second undergraduate degree in those language, emerging in 1947 after only two years with a first Class degree—the only “first” in that subject obtained by anyone at Oxford since Anthony Eden a quarter of a century earlier. Geoffrey Lewis Lewis was born in London in 1920. He was educated in at University College School, followed by St. John’s College Oxford where his first degree was in Classics. After Oxford, he went into the RAF in 1942 as a radar operator and later in the war worked on detection of incoming V1 and V2 missiles. Serving first in Egypt, he made friends with an elderly Turkish gentleman in Alexandria, a human relic of the country’s Ottoman past, and so began teaching himself Turkish. In 1941, while still an undergraduate, Lewis married Raphaela Seideman. For the next six decades Raphaela, known to friends as “Raff”, was at his side in what was not just an exceptionally close and happy marriage, but also a true partnership of minds. Raphaela not only shared his Turkish interests but herself wrote an engaging book on “Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey.” In 1950, Lewis landed a newly created lectureship in Turkish at Oxford and went on to be Senior Lecturer first in Islamic Studies and then in Turkish. He became a Fellow of St. Antony’s in 1961 and Oxford’s first-ever (and so far the university’s only) Professor of Turkish Studies in 1986. In 1953, Lewis went to live in Turkey for six months and fell in love with the country, regarding even the plainclothesman who kept an eye on him with affection, recalling him years afterwards in gentle anecdotes to Ankara audiences. During the decades of Lewis’s career, Turkish studies began to take root in Oxford and the UK, mirroring transformations under way in Turkey which was growing from an isolated agrarian country into a large industrial multiparty democracy. With an unerring eye for the strengths and underlying cohesion of the country, Lewis was never misled by the surface turbulence of life in Turkey. It is hard to think of a wrong judgment that he made—while in forecasting trends (including the rise of political Islam) he was sometimes decades ahead of others. His written work divides rather sharply between scholarly works on recondite topics (Arabic studies of the philosopher Plotinus, Islamic surgery, and Arab alchemy, and of course Turkish etymology and grammar) and books addressing general readers in easy to understand and often quietly droll terms. In 1953 he published “Teach Yourself Turkish” which was for many years almost the only easily available work on the subject. It was at first refused by the publishers as too expensive and might never have appeared if Raphaela had not suggested that they might be unaware that Turkish was now written in Latin rather than Arabic script and prodded Lewis to write back drawing this fact to their attention. In 1955 came “Turkey”, a masterly one volume introduction to the country, and in 1967 Turkish Grammar. Both books filled serious gaps in Western European understanding of Turkey. Though many later grammars of Turkish have been written, forty years on, Lewis’s is still regarded as the best. It is unusual among books on linguistics in making entertaining reading. Turkish, like Turkey itself, altered dramatically during Lewis’s academic life, with the purging of Ottoman-Oriental words and their widespread replacement by futuristic neologisms coined by purist linguists. In response, Lewis produced in 1999 a witty study of the changes, entitled Turkish Language Reform: a Catastrophic Success. It was translated into Turkish and enthusiastically received by opponents of the movement. Throughout these years, Lewis was active in the British Academy, the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and Anglo-Turkish relations. His contributions to the latter were rewarded in the UK with a CMG in 1990 and by three Turkish government awards. When the late President Turgut Özal wrote a book on his vision of Turkey’s place in Europe, he asked Geoffrey Lewis to write the foreword. In 1976, Lally, the Lewis’s daughter, died a few months after giving birth, leaving two infants. Raphaela and Geoffrey joined their son-in-law, Mark, in raising the children until university age. Despite this, they never effectively retired in the usual sense from their public or academic life which remained crowded with travel, lecturing, and writing. Raphaela’s sudden death in 2004, meant Lewis faced his final years without her, but he continued to write and lecture. His final visit to Turkey, in February 2007, as a guest of the British Council was characteristically both energetic and humorous. He traveled amid the winter snow to the remote Hittite capital of Boğazkale, while his lectures in Ankara to audiences some sixty five years his junior, were notable not just for their pithiness but also for provoking gales of happy laughter on a scale a professional stand-up comedian would envy. He is survived by one son, his wife and daughter having predeceased him. David Barchard Evelyn Patlagean It is extremely difficult, nearly impossible, to write about Prof. Evelyne Patlagean in the past tense. It is also difficult to talk about her in the past tense, but writing, as she used to say, is the way in which we convey our understanding of reality. Writing about her makes her absence even more concrete and unbearable. My task is all the more difficult since Evelyne did not like eulogies, which were indeed strange to her nature. But how else one can write about her scholarship, which transformed the way in which we think about Byzantium? Evelyne Patlagean’s numerous publications include studies of different aspects of the Byzantine civilization and challenge the way in which historians have treated subjects such as social structures, economics, commerce, culture and power relations. She starts her academic route at the École Normale Superieure, but breaks away from the tradition of Byzantine studies at the Sorbonne. Educated by Louis Robert, Jacque Le Goff, Frenand Braudel, she finds in the Annales her natural home. She dedicates her dissertation to the question of poverty as a historical phenomenon, and publishes it as her first book, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siècles (Le Mouton, 1977). From the moment of its publication it brings her the recognition of a pioneer historian throughout the academic world of medievalists and historians of Antiquity alike, and is acclaimed as a sui generis work. It is a fine example of her innovative approach to social history, in which she shows how poverty proves to have more than one definition. But though society may define it according to its cultural and social agenda, the economic conjuncture and the historical circumstances will nevertheless determine its situation and social position. Patlagean chooses for this work the historical context of Late Antiquity. But if others saw it as a period of decline, she reveals it to be a period of renovation in social and economic structures, a beginning of a new and stimulating historical period, and not an end. She makes the period that started with Late Antiquity her main field of research. Nevertheless, characteristically of Evelyne Patlagean’s unique approach, the understanding of Byzantium is not the only objective, nor the most important one. Although the book is limited to the study of specific society in a specific historical framework, the deeper goal is to present an example of society as an ever changing system. It is here as well, that her great contribution to the social sciences lies. Being influenced by the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Evelyne Patlagean develops her own approach to his anthropologie structurale, an approach that we may name histoire structurale. The historians can limit themselves to study the static structure of a certain society in order to construct a model of social behavior, but they lose the most important tool in doing that: the chronological axis along which society develops. As a historian, Patlagean adds to the structuralist analysis of the social sciences the chronological dimension. In this way she renovates the social science line of thought of historians such as Duby, Braudel and Marc Bloch. An excellent example is her article on kinship: “Une représentation byzantine de la parenté et ses origines occidentales” (L’Homme 1966), in which she not only responds to the anthropologic studies on the subject, but also provides Anthropology with the historical depth it lacks. On her academic route she stops in England and Italy, where she becomes greatly admired. After positions in the universities of Dijon and Caen, she arrives in 1975 at Paris X-Nanterre, which remains her academic home and where she becomes a Professor Emeritus in 1997. Many of her articles have appeared in collective volumes, such as Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance : IVe-XIe siècle (Variorum Reprints, 1981), Figures du pouvoir à Byzance (IXe-XII siècle) (Centro italiano di studi sull'alto Medioevo, 2001, translated into Italian in 2002). In them she shows not only that the study of the Byzantine world evokes unique and stimulating subjects of investigation, but also that these subjects are important and extremely relevant to historians of other fields. While most Byzantine historians still prefer to cultivate an image of a world apart for their subject of research, Evelyne Patlagean reveals Byzantium as a dynamic civilization and an essential factor of the medieval historical evolution. She thus does more than any other scholar to open the Byzantine world to other branches of historical research, as well as to other disciplines. The recognition she receives both as a leading Byzantinist and as a leading social historian makes her famous both in French academia as well as elsewhere. Her pioneering work on hagiography is an example of her innovative scholarship. She is one of the first social historians to use hagiographic texts, and develops a methodology to adapt the anthropological models to the discipline of history. Anthropology is not the only social science that she finds relevant to the study of history. Being influenced by the writing of the economist Karl Polanyi, she dedicates a comprehensive study to the analysis of the Byzantine market economy in the Mediterranean, in which she reveals a ‘global’ medieval economy, enacted by and planned according to imperial politics. Here too, her study offers a unique reply of a historian to economic theorists. Besides her collections of articles, she edits volumes on Maladie et société à Byzance (Centro italiano di studi sull'alto Medioevo, 1993); with Atlain Le Boulluec, Retours aux écritures : fondamentalismes présents et passés (Peeters, 1993). She also publishes collected essays of Israël Levi: Israël Levi. Le ravissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essays (Peeters, 1994). This publication portrays her special interest in Jewish thought and in French Judaism. Together with Benjamin Lellouch and Antoine Germa she edits a collective historical survey, Les Juifs dans l’histoire (Champvallon, forthcoming). Although she was greatly influenced by Arnaldo Momigliano, Braudel and Le Goff, Marc Bloch remains one of her most important points of reference, particularly because of her great interest in the relationship between power relations and the social structure. It is by responding to the challenge set in his La Société féodale (Albin Michel, 1939) that she finds her last large study. Sixty-eight years after the publication of La Société féodale, she publishes in the same collection at Albin Michel her last book: Un Moyen Âge grec. Byzance IXe-XVe siècle. In it she studies the political and social structures of the Late medieval Byzantine world. A path-breaking contribution to current historical interpretations of the period, her study sheds light on the less known part of medieval societies: the transformation of the public power, and provides medievalists with an elucidated point of reference to examine the historical evolution of the societies they study. But just like her other great works, this book is not only about medieval societies, but about our own. Evelyne Patlagean reveals to her readers the dialectics between the private and the public, which proves to be a part of the definition of any power. Our political perception of public power as static receives here a revolutionary analysis which reveals it as a living organism that cannot but change in order to stay faithful to its own definition. At Nanterre she finds excellent colleagues and friends, and also many of her students. She attracts numerous students from other universities as well, whom she trains as historians to be. The range of the subjects of dissertations that she supervises is as vast as her own interests and studies, and includes different aspects of Byzantine history, but also relationships between Byzantium and the Latin West, Jewry and modern forms of sanctity. Her unique scholarship and her character make her teaching an experience of excellent pedagogy. She uses her seminars and courses (on both Roman and Byzantine history) to develop a historical way of thinking for her students, and to question subjects she deals with in her own work. Paying specific attention to the methodological needs of each of her students, her seminars become an engaging stimulating framework and attract students from other universities in Paris. She uses the same approach in her supervision of Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations, providing much intellectual and personal care, but insisting that her students develop their own way of thinking. Her professional supervision together with her unique warm character make her a one of a kind mentor, in whom her students and disciples recognize their good fortune. Upon her retirement they refuse to end her seminars at Nanterre. The research seminar hence continues, first at Nanterre, and then at 219 Boulevard Raspail, her residence. Evelyne Patlagean is not satisfied only with contributing to the education and knowledge of academics. She also spends many hours with less advantaged undergraduate students, whom she tutors for exams on a regular basis. The subject of her instruction ranges from spelling, up to literature, history and political thought. Education, as she used to say, is the only means to change not only the individual perception but also the social entourage. She also offers similar lessons to her grandchildren in the form of regular correspondence over many years, portraying her conviction that everyone can benefit from the study of history, and that making it accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. To her family, friends, colleagues, former students, and disciples, her absence is unbearable. As a close friend put it: “I was so used to keeping every thought aside to discuss it with her, that I am now at a complete loss.” We were all used to doing that; we are all at a loss. Youval Rotman Obituaries from BBBS 2008: Obituaries from BBBS 2007: Obituaries from BBBS 2006: Obituaries from BBBS 2005: Obituaries from BBBS
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