Helen Waddell: Scholar, Woman of Letters, and Her Notebook Helen Waddell (1889–1965) was once feted across the English-speaking world for her scholarship. Her literary history, The Wandering Scholars (1927), made the best-seller list three days after publication; she was celebrated as a translator of medieval Latin – Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (1929), Beasts and Saints (1934), The Desert Fathers (1936); and her historical novel, Peter Abelard (1933), was hailed as a masterpiece, grounded not only in the original letters of the lovers but in Abelard’s controversial theology and in a wealth of medieval sources. Her productivity spanned only a decade, preceded by “captivity” (her term) until the age of thirty-one to an invalid stepmother and followed, after the Second World War, by the darkness of dementia. She gave a final lecture, Poetry in the Dark Ages, in 1947; More Latin Lyrics appeared posthumously in 1976.

Despite – or more likely because of – her fame, Waddell struggled to find acceptance within the academy. Her publications provoked critical ambivalence: they were too imaginative, too exuberant – and too popular. She was accused of “jazz[ing] the Middle Ages” – and yet there was no gainsaying, as Eileen Power acknowledged, that her work was “the fruit of a wide and solid learning.” Latterly, more flexible readings place her in the medievalist vanguard, while acknowledging the idiosyncrasy of her approach that crossfertilizes scholarship with imagination.

The following text transcribes a notebook she employed during postgraduate research in 1913, containing one of the first English responses to the Debate on the Roman de la Rose, which sparked the centuries-long querelle des femmes. What was the educational trajectory that brought her to this early interest? She studied for her 1911 First Class Honors BA at the Queen’s University Belfast under the Professor of English Literature and Language, G. Gregory Smith, a reputable scholar according to the older tradition of English studies – philology, textual editing, literary history. Smith was also up-to-date with academic developments, publishing in the new field of comparative literature and writing a pioneering study of Scottish literature. In 1909, just in time for Waddell’s cohort, he reorganized English studies at Queen’s as an autonomous discipline offering a specialist curriculum.