In Memoriam John N. King (2 February 1945–13 June 2020)

Abstract

The late John N. King was an innovative, courageous, and pioneering scholar of tremendous stature. He was also a firm believer in this journal, and served as its Editor from vols. 11–14 (2006–09). He published in Reformation more frequently than nearly any other academic journal, with articles or notes in vols. 6, 7, 10, and 25, and reviews in vols. 7, 16, and 22. His work in the literature and culture of the English Reformation and in Tudor non-dramatic literature, book history, and iconography charted the influence of the Reformation upon early modern English authors, even as he found himself sometimes at odds with an academic establishment which he felt remained unproductively bound to aesthetic criteria which posited a “Renaissance” in literary creativity only associated with the Elizabethan era (1558–1603) and the careers of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser. While not neglecting these authors, his work situated their writing on a wider canvas, one much more closely aligned to their actual intellectual, religious, and political contexts. Above all, he dedicated his career to explaining how the Reformation produced the soil from which sprung not only major canonical figures, but also a host of other writers whose work is essential for any understanding the period’s literature. He made major contributions in the study of figures who are now central to the field, including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, John Foxe, Thomas More, William Tyndale, and more. His work opened up the study of Tudor literature to an entire generation of younger scholars, some of whom are themselves now leaders in the field. John began his teaching career at Abdullahi Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria, where he resided from 1967 to 1969 as Lecturer in English. In 1971 he joined the English faculty at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. He held a Visiting Lectureship in English at Oxford University from 1978 to 1979, and from 1981 to 1982 he was Visiting Associate Professor of English at Brown University. In 1989 he was appointed Professor of English at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. In 2003 he was designated Humanities Distinguished Professor of English & of Religious Studies, and in 2004 Distinguished University Professor at OSU. Following his retirement in 2010 he divided his time between Washington, DC, where he was a frequent denizen of both the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress, and his home in Virginia. He received an honorary Litt.D. degree from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, in 2018. An alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science in New York, he received the B.A. cum laude from Randolph Macon in 1965 and the M.A. cum laude from the University of Chicago the following year. He completed his dissertation at Chicago in 1973, under the direction of William A. Ringler, Jr., on “Protector Somerset and his Propagandists.” Over the course of a career which spanned more than five decades, he produced a remarkable body of scholarship dedicated to the literature produced in England during the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. He took as his point of departure C. S. Lewis’s now-infamous dismissal of