Doctor Nigel Ramsay
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 1998
Subject Area: Arts and Humanities
The scholarship that I received from the Wingate Trust was to enable me to research the life of an extraordinarily prolific and scholarly bibliographer and art historian, Seymour de Ricci (1881-1942). It enabled me to go to Paris for long stretches of study in the Bibliothèque Nationale (where his papers are housed): I persuaded the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to let me write an entry for him, and that was duly published a couple of years ago. A further study is in progress. I am glad to have seen some justice done to this undervalued genius; for me personally, this Parisian interlude had the effect of leaving me far more confident about reading and even writing in French. It widened my horizons immeasurably. I went on to a Research Fellowship at University College London (researching for a cataloguing project that I had long dreamt of: English Monastic Archives), and am there still.
Just at the moment I am intermitting, with a book about a Tudor herald, Robert Glover (d. 1588), which is to be published next year. Next, an edition of medieval English hospital and other secular library lists. Then, with a final phase of Research Fellowship, I will be writing a book about monastic documents, stressing the pan-European nature of the organizations to which the monks and nuns mostly belonged. I should then be well placed for fresh endeavours in the no-man's-land that is the world of freelance researchers-and which, coincidentally, is the world to which both Glover and de Ricci really belonged.