Valerie Flint

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 3 February 2009

Professor Valerie Flint: historian with an incisive mind and a sometimes outrageous sense of fun

Valerie Flint was an outstanding scholar of medieval intellectual and cultural history. Her books, especially Ideas in the Medieval West, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe and The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, demonstrate her mastery across several disciplines of a huge range of sources, and an ability to create new and exciting syntheses. A wide range of friends and colleagues on three continents were drawn to her by her incisive mind and by her abiding love of life and her (sometimes outrageous) sense of fun.

Valerie Irene Jane Flint was born in Derby, the elder daughter of Herbert and Irene (née Pullen) Flint. The family moved to London and then to Doncaster, South Yorkshire, where Herbert Flint (who had an impoverished childhood, and left school at 13) worked first for the railways and subsequently as a Coal Board manager. Although her family was not Roman Catholic, Valerie went to the Doncaster convent of the Sisters of Mercy, Rutland House School. The convent was not accustomed to sending girls to university, nor was the Flint family: but in 1955 Valerie won an open scholarship to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, together with a state scholarship.

She found life at Oxford, in the hothouse of an all-woman college, difficult at first. Her friends, however, remember her as not only formidably intelligent and capable but also as having a splendid sense of humour. In her third year everything fell into place, and she determined (not without some hesitation) on an academic career.

After Schools, she took an MPhil, which she said was the most rigorous intellectual challenge she ever experienced. The 12th century as a special subject was taught by Beryl Smalley, Richard Southern, Richard Hunt and Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. Flint, like many others, fell under the spell of Southern, and the Southerns and the Hunts became her lifelong friends. Southern supervised her DPhil thesis on Honorius Augustodunensis. This 12th-century encyclopaedist’s works survive in hundreds of manuscripts scattered across Europe, and the discipline of collating, analysing and interpreting Honorius, although it seemed uncongenial at the time, provided the firm foundations of her later methods of work. She learnt how to look beyond the words and sources to the intellectual world in which the text had been created.

There was the search for an academic post, still difficult for women. She began at Bedford College, London, went to University College, Dublin, to the University of Liverpool, and to the University of Auckland, where she made medieval history a subject of compelling interest for generations of students and postgraduates. Finally in 1995 she came to the G. F. Grant chair at the University of Hull.

These were her formal posts: but within that framework she held visiting fellowships all over the world: Canberra, Princeton, Clare Hall, Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, Trinity College, Cambridge, and finally All Souls, Oxford. Auckland was particularly generous with study leaves, and her colleagues alleged that she was the only member of faculty whose after-hours address was Princeton. She came to love the small New Jersey town as much as she loved Oxford; and from Princeton she could visit her favourite city, New York, to which she travelled sitting excitedly in the front seat of a New Jersey Transit bus.

Her first visit to Princeton, to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1982-83, provided ideal working conditions and contact with such distinguished faculty members as Giles Constable, Glen Bowersock, Homer Thompson and Marshall Clagett. She returned to Princeton as a Fellow of the Davis Centre at the university in 1987-88.

In a wide-ranging, powerfully argued paper presented to the centre’s famous weekly seminar (then chaired by Lawrence Stone) she demonstrated the assimilation by the early medieval church of elements of non-Christian “magical” practices, in preference to leaving these to “growl about” on the fringes of society (rather as Pope Gregory directed Augustine to build churches on pagan temple sites to assimilate them). This thesis became the theme of her most important book, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe.

The friendships established with Peter Brown, Tony Grafton and other Princeton scholars; with her editor at the University Press, Joanna Hitchcock; with Lisa Jardine and other Davis Fellows meant much to her, and she returned to Princeton again and again. She was famed for her learning, conviviality, refusal to honour sacred cows, skilful and affectionate caricatures of other scholars — and her distinctive way of driving a large, ancient American car down the British side of the road.

There was nothing boring or earnest about Val Flint. She saw scholarship as important and enjoyable, but not the sum of one’s life. In literature, music and art, her tastes were remarkable, including a passion for kitsch, Dinky toys, neon signs and extending to Elvis Presley as well as Schubert. The careful intricacy of her arguments will be treasured by historians, but everyone who knew her will remember the sheer fun of her personality.

While at Princeton in 1999, she was found to be suffering from a virulent form of cancer. American medicine and a new drug saved her, and when the same drug became available in England she came home to Beverley in the East Riding. She had ten more years, during which time she worked on the Hereford Mappa Mundi and gave many papers around the world. She died at home, in her library. She had been received into the Catholic Church in 1960. She never married, proclaiming that “marriage is for men”. She had an ambivalent attitude to children in general, mischievously promoting the “Friends of King Herod”, while in practice she was charming (and exciting and unpredictable) to the young.

The following obituary first appeared in The Guardian on 26 February 2009

Professor Valerie Irene Jane Flint, historian (born 5 July 1936; died on 7 January 2009, aged 72)

Valerie Flint, who has died aged 72, was one of the most original and interesting medieval historians of her time. She brought together apparently disparate materials in syntheses which were always striking and often startling, and published several important books, including Ideas in the Medieval West, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe and The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus.

Flint was brought up in Yorkshire, to which she was deeply attached, and returned there towards the end of her life. In 1955 she gained a scholarship in history to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and found her vocation while working for a BLitt. She was taught by Richard Southern and Richard Hunt, both of whom remained her close friends until their deaths. Under Southern, she undertook doctoral research on the 12th-century scholar and writer Honorius Augustodunensis.

In the meantime she held a number of teaching posts in London, Dublin and Liverpool before completing her thesis and taking up a post in 1971 at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where I first encountered her. In partnership with Philip Rousseau, she made medieval studies there a subject of compelling interest, and many of her students have gone on to do important work in the subject. From 1995 she held a chair at the University of Hull before ill health persuaded her to take formal retirement in 1999.

Throughout her career she travelled widely and was a source of delight wherever she went, for her unquenchable capacity to enjoy life and to share that enjoyment with a circle of devoted friends. There was nothing frivolous, however, about her work, elegant and accessible though it was.

Her original topic for research might seem ill-suited to her bold and lively mind. Honorius was a disciple of Anselm of Canterbury and a copious writer of conservative and robustly commonsensical inclinations. Though much about his life was wrapped in obscurity and controversy, he was one of the most widely read of all medieval European authors, and about 1,000 manuscripts of his works have survived. The early stages of Flint's work had elements that were uncongenial and frustrating, made the more so since the abbot of an Austrian abbey, where she went to study, had decamped with an important Honorius manuscript and several others from the library.

Yet she persisted, publishing a string of rigorous papers much more entertaining than their subject in a scrupulous edition of his Imago Mundi (1982). She brought together the fruits of years of intense study in a volume of collected essays, Ideas in the Middle Ages (1988), and in Authors of the Middle Ages 6 (1995), which was part of the series Historical and Religious Writers of the Latin West.

Surprisingly, these struggles were to have the happiest of outcomes. Faced by unpromising material, she developed a characteristic technique in exploring her texts. She sought constantly to go beyond the words and their sources to the larger context in which they were written, to identify the circumstances in which they became resonant. This was a very bold enterprise, for the materials for making such judgments are often uncertain and treacherous, yet her combination of panache and good sense made it illuminating and convincing. Further, in her exploration of the background to 12th-century cosmography, she came to appreciate as few others have the fascination of this world in which marvels and legends are contained within a formal framework of moral and exegetical purpose.

The potential of the foundations laid at Oxford was brought to fruition during a series of visits to the School of Advanced Studies and the history department at Princeton, and owed much to her contacts with the scholars Giles Constable and Peter Brown, beginning in 1982. This led to her most extended work, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991), which was to be a powerful influence in all subsequent discussion.

Here Flint went far beyond a conventional polarity between orthodox Christianity confronting resilient and persistent paganism. She held that the most rigorous of Christian apologists came to appropriate much that they thought valuable from the rituals and habits of their parishioners, and with a clear understanding of what they were doing and why. "The Church supported this hope and happiness, and it could find echoes of this magic, furthermore, when it looked for them, within its own dispensation," she wrote. "Much magic was, then, rescued in the service of human aspiration, and certainly in defiance of certain aspects of reason and regulation."

In a typically heroic leap, she used her study of the history of the reading of Honorius to explore a neglected topic. In The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (1992), she set out "to reconstruct and understand, not the New World Columbus found, but the Old World which he carried with him in his head". In doing so, she showed that the materials Columbus had gathered and studied before he set sail had a pervasive influence on both his conduct and the way in which he saw and reported what he found. In a powerful last chapter, she alluded to the emotional tensions generated by his constant study of 13th-century confessional literature, going far to explain the apparent inconsistencies in the admiral's words and actions which have troubled so many biographers.

In 1999 she contracted a virulent form of cancer. Skilled treatment and her own gallantry held it at bay, and she continued to reach out into new areas in a number of lively studies that centred on the Hereford Mappa Mundi but extended far beyond it. Her capacity to move easily across the centuries and fields of action remained undimmed, as was her power to light up the most unpromising material in a way that forced one to rethink much that had seemed self-evident. She made every topic she touched more interesting than it had been, and much more fun too.