University of California: In Memoriam, 1948

John Strong Perry Tatlock, English: Berkeley

1876-1948

John Strong Perry Tatlock, Professor of English Emeritus, died on June 24, 1948. Professor Tatlock was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 24, 1876. He was a graduate of Harvard College, Class of 1896, and from Harvard in 1903 received his Ph.D. In 1938 the University of Michigan conferred on him the Litt.D. and in 1939 Kenyon College the LL.D. In 1945, he was Faculty Research Lecturer on this campus. His academic career began at Michigan in 1897; he served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1915 to 1925, as Professor of English at Harvard from 1925 to 1929, and finally as Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1929 until he retired in 1946; in 1936-37 he was Visiting Professor at Columbia.

As scholar, as teacher and as leader in the learned world, Professor Tatlock stood in the forefront of his generation. Though he was most widely known as a mediaevalist, he had been President of the Modern Language Association of America before he was elected President of the Mediaeval Academy. The American Council of Learned Societies leaned heavily upon him; the American Association of University Professors

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and the College English Association gave him important assignments. These posts were equally evidences of his leadership and recognition of his distinguished scholarship. He never lost faith in the worth of austere scholarship, indeed among his publications are some of an apparently inert and narrow precision, but he himself never lost the sight and the feel of the life that went into a work of literature. The long array of his mediaeval studies, some pushing through to the Renaissance, reveal his absorption in research but also his absorption in the ways of men in that age. He was as learned in the daily humor and pain of secular living as in the doctrine, structure, and ritual of the church; the stories of prelates which he delighted to tell brought the two together. Middle English, Old French, Mediaeval Latin were his languages; of Dante he was perhaps as profound a student as of Chaucer. The archives of European and American libraries were as well known to him as printed books.

From 1903, when he published a paper on “The Dates of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women” in the first volume of Modern Philology, almost to the time of his death, when he was correcting the proofs of The Legendary History of Britain, Professor Tatlock was steadily productive. The last work, to be published in 1949, is his major single contribution to mediaeval scholarship. In nearly 600 pages

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focussed on Geoffrey of Monmouth, it throws floods of light on scores of questions and problems, particularly of Twelfth-Century Europe. Between the first publication and this last, more than a hundred titles are of record. Major items show the range and variety of his attack: The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works; The Modern Reader's Chaucer (with Percy MacKaye); The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature; A Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose (with A. G. Kennedy); Mohammed and his Followers in Dante.

Outside the field of his specialization, as within, Professor Tatlock is remembered as a man of vigorous and positive personality; as a scholar whose prose had something of the gay defiance which marked his driving of a car; as a man of gallant courage and tartly wise, begetting devotion in others as he gave devotion. He went his own way as a teacher, chiefly of advanced students, and in all parts of the nation his loyal followers carry on; he conveyed his enthusiasm to them.

About this text
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9p300969&brand=oac4
Title: 1948, University of California: In Memoriam
By:  University of California (System) Academic Senate, Author
Date: 1948
Contributing Institution:  University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-6000; http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/info
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