Remembering
Those Who Have Gone Before

[Posted on 22 July 2024]

In our 2025 Anniversary Year, the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence reflects on people who have gone before us and whom we wish to recollect as companions or mentors, advisers, colleagues, and friends contributing to the origins, history, and growth of our organization across the years.

Part of that process has yielded the formation of our own nonprofit educational publishing house.  Our books and booklets in printed form and digital formats include Memoirs, to which we add this year.

1. Oleg Andreevich Grabar

The first of these Memoirs appeared quietly in 2015 as a 4-page booklet.  It offers a Memorial for Oleg Grabar, art historian and archaeologist:

In Memory of
Oleg Andreevich Grabar
[Олег Андреевич Грабар]
(3 November 1929 – 8 January 2011)

Composed by Leonid A. Beliaev, the text was published first in Russian. By request, it was translated from the Russian into English, set in multi-lingual RGME Bembino, provided with a photograph by permission, and laid out as a booklet corresponding with our RGME Style Manifesto.

Although Oleg did not participate in RGME activities, he generously gave advice for our research over several years while our Director worked as a part-time research assistant for his colleague Giles Constable (see below).  The translation and publication of the English version of the Memoir in Russian were carried out for its author, an RGME Associate, at the request and with the assistance of a long-term supporter and advisor of the RGME.  Note that the RGME font Bembino supports the Cyrillic font appropriate for portions of the text of the published Memoir.

The booklet can freely be downloaded:

• Memorial for Oleg Grabar.

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2. Vivien Anne Law

For our blog on Manuscript Studies, in 2014 our Director, Mildred Budny, provided a blogpost called Memorials.  Principally it shares recollections of friend, colleague, and long-time RGME participant (first as Associate of our international scholarly organization in England and then as Trustee of our non-profit corporation), Vivien Anne Law (1954–2002). This forms part of a larger report or Memoir responding, in part, to the opportunity to examine and advise on Vivien’s archives in late 2005 at the request of her widower, Sir Nicholas Shackleton (1937–2006).

Our Director’s paper for our 2002 Colloquium at the British Museum in London in March (a month after Vivien’s death) is dedicated to her memory, as well as that of another, dear, friend and mentor.

• 2002 Colloquium on “Shaping Understanding: Form and Order in the Anglo-Saxon World (400–1100)”.

Vivien Law in her Cambridge Garden in June 1996 (Photograph © Mildred Budny)

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3. Giles Constable

Also for our blog Manuscript Studies, this year we posted a set of recollections about of Giles Constable (1 June 1929 — 17 January 2021), friend, colleague, mentor, and RGME Associate and Honorary Trustee.  These recollections do not comprise an obituary as such, because Giles often and firmly expressed his wish for no such thing, nor any Memorial Service or Festschrift for him in his honor.

Instead, after an interval of mourning, we record appreciation for his contributions as a presence and guiding force for our organization since its early years in the United States, following the move of our principal base from the United Kingdom to Princeton, New Jersey, in October of 1994.

• Recollections for the 2024 RGME Anniversary Year, Part 1. Giles Constable.

Giles Constable reading in his office at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Photograph by Mildred Budny.

Also, his generous encouragement of our work for manuscript studies by long-term loans or gifts made it possible closely to examine, over time, groups of original specimens of medieval manuscripts, manuscript fragments, documents, seals in metal or wax, early printed materials, bindings, and associated records.  The work included conservation, photography, research, seminars, display, and publication in our blog and other forms.

Discoveries abounded, and found expression in those publications as well as in various of our RGME events. For example:

• 2014 Seminar on Manuscripts and Their Photographs, held at the Index of Christian Art of Princeton University in its Seminar Room.

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5. Patrick Wormald

Now, in preparation for our Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections” in September 2024, our RGME Associate and Trustee David Ganz offers a Memoir of our RGME Associate Patrick Wormald (1947–2004).

Patrick Wormald at the 2002 Colloquium

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In Memoriam

See also RGME Officers, Associates, and Volunteers: In Memoriam.

Another Memoir composed by our Director in booklet format, published in a limited edition:

• “The Guessing Game:  A Memoir of My Uncle Bob, Robert Roger McEwan (1918‒2007)” (Princeton, New Jersey:  Milly Budny Designs, 2017)

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Others?

Are there others whom you wish to remember?  Please let us know.  Would you like to contribute a Memoir of some kind about someone you recall with appreciation and seek to record?

For example, you could Contact Us or write to the director@manuscriptevidence.org with your requests or suggestions.

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Episode 17 of “The Research Group Speaks”

As part of our anniversary celebrations, the RGME prepares an Episode in our online series “The Research Group Speaks” to consider our past, present, and future.

• Episode 17. “RGME Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections”

It will, for example, offer recollections of people who have loomed large in our history, and whom we remember with affection, admiration, and gratitude.  Among them are Giles Constable, Vivien Law, and Patrick Wormald (see above).  Please join us.

To register:

• Episode 17. Retrospect and Prospects: Anniversary Reflections
  Saturday 21 September 2024, 1:00–2:30 EDT (GMT-4) online via Zoom

See you there?

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