Marcia L. Colish (1937–2024)

Abstract

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• Marcia L. Colish (1937–2024)
• Cary J. Nederman

The death of Marcia L. Colish on April 9, 2024, a little shy of her 87th birthday, comes as a deep blow to all intellectual historians, especially those with close ties to the Journal of the History of Ideas. Widely known for her penetrating intelligence, her unfailing support of colleagues and students alike, and her incisive interventions on a wide variety of topics, her passing deprives our community of a consummate scholar and an exemplary human being. She was not only respected, but truly beloved.

Colish’s association with JHI runs back more than a half-century. She first contributed an article here (on Vives) in 1962 while still pursuing her doctorate at Yale, in the days when graduate students were generally not expected to publish before completing their degrees. She went on to contribute several more papers to the journal, including signal work on Machiavelli and her 2015 Arthur O. Lovejoy Lecture on infant baptism. Her presentation of the latter is an event memorable to many of us present in the audience. Colish joined JHI’s Board of Editors in 1986, was chosen as a member of the Board of Directors in 1997, and was elected its Vice President in 2005. In all of these roles, she cheerfully accepted time-consuming tasks, such as organizing the journal’s ongoing fundraising campaign and reviewing numerous manuscripts submitted for publication (including at least one by yours truly, then a neophyte, in the late 1980s).

The range of Colish’s own scholarly inquiries and the depth of her learning were truly remarkable. In an age when disciplinary specialization (and sub-specialization) and the ever-narrowing foci of knowledge acquisition are all but de rigueur, she cast a broad net over centuries (indeed, more than a millennium) of debate in the fields of epistemology, theology, cultural history, literary aesthetics, and political philosophy. The wide scope of her vision was already on display in her Yale dissertation, published in 1968 by University of Nebraska Press (with a second, revised edition released in 1983), in which she effortlessly spanned the era from the fifth to the fourteenth century, through late antique Neoplatonism, monastic learning, scholastic Aristotelianism, and Renaissance Humanism. The protagonists Colish highlighted in this volume—especially Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, [End Page iii] Dante—became among her interlocutors over a career that witnessed the production of two weighty multivolume studies: The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Brill, 1985, an updated edition of which appeared in 1990) and Peter Lombard (Brill, 1993), the latter of which was awarded the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious Haskins Prize.

In my view, the crowning achievement of Colish’s long and storied career was Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (Yale, 1999), a stunning synthesis of the many threads of her scholarship. One great virtue of this volume is the scale of its readership. On the one hand, it is a work of such erudition that it must be found on the bookshelf of any serious scholar of the history of ideas during the Middle Ages. On the other hand, it is written in a style so clear and accessible that even undergraduates (and the general reading public, for that matter) might benefit from it. (Colish once remarked to me, perhaps only half joking, that the book paid for the little BMW in which she used to tear around.) She wrote several other volumes as well, all of which remain greatly admired.

Befitting her esteemed status in the profession, Colish was feted with numerous accolades from all quarters, including doctorates honoris causa, prominent lectureships, and major fellowships. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 1988, and served in leading roles in that organization, which culminated in her election as President in 1991–92 (only the fourth woman to occupy that office over the course of the Academy’s century-long history).

Colish was also a legendary teacher during her nearly four decades at Oberlin College, from which she retired in 2001 as the Frederick B. Artz Professor of History. Those fortunate enough to study under her (I, alas, was not...