Peter Dronke was a wide-ranging scholar of literature and thought from c. 200 to c. 1400, in Latin, Greek and the whole gamut of European vernaculars. Educated in New Zealand, he came to Oxford in the 1950s and, from 1961 to 2001, he was University Lecturer, Reader and finally Professor of Medieval Latin at Cambridge. His earliest work was on love lyric, but he had a lifelong interest, predominant in his later work, in late ancient and medieval philosophers, especially Calcidius, Boethius, Abelard, William of Conches, Bernardus Silvestris and Dante. He was also a pioneer in appreciating the work of medieval women writers, such as Heloise and Hildegard of Bingen.
Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 22