Professor Ann Moss, FBA, 1938–2018

Professor Ann Moss, FBA

It is with great sadness that the Traherne editorial team records the death on 13 August 2018 of our colleague Ann Moss, Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emerita of the University of Durham. Ann was a highly distinguished scholar of international reputation, with wide-ranging interests in French Renaissance literature, the classical tradition, and early modern intellectual culture, and her magisterial works Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (OUP, 1996) and Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (OUP, 2003) had, and continue to have, an immense impact on the understanding of Renaissance literature and thought.

Ann first joined the Oxford Traherne as our consultant in neo-Latin after her retirement from the School of Modern Languages at Durham. An enthusiastic participant in editorial meetings, she soon became so interested in the project that she asked to take on a larger role, and became editor of Traherne’s Ficino

Notebook, collaborating with Angus Vine on volume IV of the edition. It was typical of Ann that  – complaining she was bored with frequent invitations received in retirement to repackage her existing expertise – she relished the entirely new challenge of applying her unrivalled knowledge of European printed commonplace culture to editing an English literary manuscript. She brought to it a sense of intellectual adventure from which we all profited, and it was a privilege to have worked with her.

From the beginning of our project, we have benefited not only from Ann’s world-class expertise, but also from her brisk common sense, her sharp mind, her kind heart, and her generous spirit, the last exemplified by the unstinting support she gave to younger scholars. Her commitment to the highest standards of research was combined with a strong sense of personal and social responsibility, in the best tradition of Renaissance scholarship.