Brian Woledge

Brian Woledge (born August 16, 1904 in London , † June 3, 2002 in Stoke Mandeville ) was a British Romanist and Medievalist .

life and work

Woledge grew up in Leeds and studied there with Paul Barbier (1873-1947). After graduation (1926) he studied with Mario Roques , Edmond Faral , Alfred Jeanroy and Joseph Vendryes in Paris on a scholarship until 1928 . From 1928 to 1930 he was a teaching assistant at schools in Dijon and Paris. In 1930 he received his doctorate in Paris with the dissertation L'Âtre périlleux. Etudes sur les manuscrits, la langue et l'importance littéraire du poème, avec un spécimen du texte (Paris, Droz, 1930). He taught in Hull from 1930 and went to Aberdeen with Frederick Charles Roe in 1932 . In 1939 he succeeded Louis Brandin (and the first non-French) at University College London to hold the chair of Fielden Professor of French and held it until his retirement in 1971. Woledge was an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-en-Provence (1970) and a member of British Academy (1989). The peculiarity of his medieval research was that he not only recorded the medieval texts philologically, but also took them seriously as beautiful literature.

Works

• (Ed.) L'âtre périlleux. Roman de la Table ronde , Paris Champion, 1936.
• Bibliography des romans et nouvelles en prose française antérieurs à 1500 , Geneva, Droz, 1954, 1975.
  • Supplément 1954-1973 , Geneva, Droz, 1975
  • (with Harry Peter Clive) Répertoire des plus anciens textes en prose française depuis 842 jusqu'aux premières années du XIIIème siècle , Geneva, Droz, 1964.
• (Ed.) The Penguin book of French verse. With plain prose translations of each poem. 1. To the fifteenth century , Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1957.
• La syntaxe des substantifs chez Chrétien de Troyes , Geneva, Droz, 1979.
• Commentaire on "Yvain (le chevalier au lion)" de Chrétien de Troyes , 2 vols., Geneva, Droz, 1986–1988.

literature

• Studies in medieval French language and literature presented to Brian Woledge in honor of his 80th birthday , ed. by Sally Burch North, Geneva, Droz, 1988 (preface by Michael Screech ; with list of publications).
• Tony Hunt, Brian Woledge 1904-200, in: Proceedings of the British Academy 153, 2008, pp. 373-387, with picture ( [1] .
• Elspeth Kennedy, Woledge, Brian, in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online .

Web links

• Literature by and about Brian Woledge in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)