Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Fant Cottage, Garford, near Afoingdon, Berkshire
Mildred Katherine Pope (1872 – 16 September 1956) was an English scholar
of Anglo-Norman
England. She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford
University, where she taught at Somerville
College.
Eleanor Rathbone chose to go to
Oxford for her university education and at the age of twenty-one at Somerville
College met significant friends,
Hilda Oakley and
Barbara Bradley, who were
to last a lifetime. Other women in Eleanor’s circle of friends included Agnes Catherine
Maitland, the Principal of Somerville,
Alice Bruce, the Vice-Principal,
Mildred
Pope, the modern language tutor, and
Sara Melhuish, the history tutor.
Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston
High School, Birmingham.
She read French at Somerville
College, Oxford, and in 1893 was placed in the first-class of the Oxford
University women's examination. Interested in Old
French philology, as
an undergraduate "she had to rely mainly on tuition by correspondence from Paget
Toynbee at Cambridge".[1] She
taught at Somerville
College, Oxford, first as a librarian, and from 1894 as a lecturer.[2] She
spent the 1894 summer vacation studying with Fritz
Neumann at Heidelberg.
In 1902-3 she spent a sabbatical year working in Paris under Gaston
Paris and Paul
Meyer,[1] gaining
a doctoral degree from the University
of Paris in 1904, with a dissertation on Frère
Angier.[3]
Given Oxford's policy on admitting women she was not granted a degree from
Oxford until after World
War I.[4] She
was appointed lecturer, then university reader (in 1928—the first woman at
Oxford to achieve that position[2]),
and became vice-principal of Somerville in 1929.[3] She
left Oxford for Manchester in 1934 and was later honored with emeritate.[5] At
the University
of Manchester, she was appointed professor of French language and romance
philology. In 1939, she became the first woman to receive an honorary
doctorate from a French university, in her case the University
of Bordeaux.[2] After
her death in 1956, The
Oxford Magazine, in an obituary, called her one of Somerville's "oldest,
most distinguished and well-loved members."[5]
Pope taught a number of notable medievalists including Eugène
Vinaver,[6] Dominica
Legge and Dorothy
Sayers; the character Miss Lydgate in Sayers' Gaudy
Night (1935) is based on Pope.[3] One
of her most enduring achievements was the foundation in 1937 of the Anglo-Norman
Text Society, a learned society dedicated to the promotion of the study of
Anglo-Norman language and literature which is still operating today. In the
Society's Annual Texts series, she contributed to critical editions of La
Seinte Resureccion and the Romance of Horn. Her most important publication
was From Latin to Modern French, with Especial Consideration of
Anglo-Norman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934; revised reprints
1952 and 1956), which over seventy years after its original publication has
been described as 'classic and still indispensable'.[7]
Mildred Katherine Pope, Vice-Principal (1929–1934)
Herbert James Gunn (1893–1964)
Somerville College, University of Oxford
My published books:
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