Barbara Harvey, CBE, FBA, Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History, 1955-1993, has died at the age of 97.
She had also been an undergraduate and graduate student at Somerville between 1946 and 1951, before returning to succeed her own tutor, May McKisack.
Barbara was a distinguished medieval historian. Her work was based on a lifelong engagement with the rich archives of Westminster Abbey, through which she creatively illuminated a wide array of features of medieval (and later) social and economic life. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1982 and appointed CBE in 1997; and she won the Wolfson Prize for History in 1993 for her work, Living and Dying in Medieval England (OUP, 1993). It was a fitting end to her active career at Oxford, although she continued to research and write until the end of her ninth decade, editing the medieval sections of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and producing further works on the Westminster records. A brief summary of her life and career to 1996 appeared here in her festschrift.
At Somerville she was one of the most engaged and reliable fellows over nearly four decades, holding with diligence and integrity many of the major offices that fellows were then required to fill, above all Vice Principal for an unprecedented three separate terms. She always contributed calm wisdom to discussion of the many issues which confronted the college throughout that period. She was also very kind to younger fellows, befriending and supporting them as they began their careers.
And she was a similarly supportive tutor, including to our previous Principal, Alice Proschaska, who remembers the deep interest and respect with which she treated all her students from day one: she made medieval history come alive for her pupils, guided them through the shoals of undergraduate life with judicious encouragement, and became friends to many once they had gone down.
Throughout her life she cared deeply about the college, her colleagues, its staff and its students. Joanna Innes, Barbara’s tutorial colleague in her last decade in post, writes that “she was a very kind, thoughtful, resilient person, who took seriously her responsibilities to her friends and colleagues, the profession and its institutions. A punctilious, imaginative historian. Always very erect in posture, bluntish in manner, self-deprecating, and with a ready, slightly cheeky smile.”
Barbara’s funeral will take place on Wednesday 24 September at 1.30pm, at The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, The High Street, Oxford OX1 4 BJ, followed by refreshments at the church. No flowers, please, but donations to either The Alzheimer’s Society or RNLI.