Palmer, Nigel, 1946-2022

Nigel Fenton Palmer, who was Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford and Professorial Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1992 until his retirement in 2017, is widely regarded as having been one of the world’s leading experts on medieval German culture and language. Nigel was particularly interested in religious writing, in Latin as well as in German, from the German-speaking lands. An important strand of his research concerned the relationship between text and image, notably in the iconography and layout of blockbooks and prayer books – and one of his most spectacular publications is an edition and commentary on an illustrated prayer book, the ‘Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin’ from Strasbourg (now in Berne). He was also extremely interested in book ownership and its impact on cultural practice, often in a regional context. He was co-founder of the international research project ‘Literary topography of South West Germany in the later Middle Ages’, which aims to establish a literary history of this region on the basis of manuscript sources and library history. He was thus exceptionally well placed to bring together German philology with Anglophone scholarship on materiality. His broad intellectual curiosity and collaborative mindset also meant that he was able to bridge different academic cultures and disciplines more generally. He was profoundly convivial and loved nothing more than to enjoy food, drink and conversation with medievalists of all ages and national backgrounds.

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 21