In Memoriam Frank McMinn Chambers: August 2, 1910-May 7, 1999

Abstract

IN MEMORIAM FRANK McMINN CHAMBERS August 2, 1910-May 7, 1999 We at TENSO have learned recently of the death, on May 7, 1999, ofFrank Chambers, one ofthe leading Provençalists of this country and the world. Indeed, by his decision to focus his research in Provençal, or Occitan as it is called today, Chambersjoined a small group of people, including William Pierce Shepard (18701948 ), Kurt Lewent (1880-1964), Alexander Herman Schutz (18941 964), and Alexander Denomy ( 1904-1 957), who can be said to have created a new field of specialization, in North America, within the broader domain ofRomance Philology. Born in Tyler, Texas, on August 2, 1910, Frank Chambers was educated at Harvard, where he received the B.A. in 1930, the M.A. in 1932, and the Ph.D. in 1935. His dissertation analyzed the "Uses ofthe Subjunctive Mood in the Romance Languages." He must have been influenced by Charles HaU Grandgent, the versatile philologist and great Dantist, Professor ofRomance Languages at Harvard from 1896 to 1932, whose Outline ofthe Phonology and Morphology of Old Provençal had appeared in Heath's Modern Language Series in 1905. Grandgent's little book became the harbingerofHarvard dissertations on other aspects ofProvençal including word formation (Edward L. Adams, 1907), syntax (T. G Wesenberg, 1925), and literary history (Olin H. Moore, 1913; Walter T. Pattison, 1931). Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., had passed through Harvard a decade before Chambers arrived, and Denomy finished the year before Chambers did. When Chambers completed his work, three years after Grandgent's retirement, Harvard ceased to produce Provençal specialists . Chambers went to teach at Colorado College as an Instructor from 1935 to 1939. In August 1938 he traveled to Italy, consulted troubadour manuscript D at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, and signed the "Elenco dei lettori che hanno studiato U manoscritto" as 69 IN MEMORIAM FRANK M. CHAMBERS "Francois Chambers" (sic; Paden 325w25). He was Assistant Professor at Colorado CoUege from 1939 to 1 945, including time spent as a civüian decoder in Washington, D.C., during the war. In 1941 he published his first article, on "Some Legends Concerning Eleanor of Aquitaine," in Speculum. From 1945 to 1950 he was Assistant Professor ofFrench at Northwestern, and in 1950 Northwestern University Press published the edition ofAimeric de PeguUhan that Chambers had completed using the materials left by Shepard when he died in 1948. Then Chambers took a path less traveled, left Academe for almost two decades, and became Associate Editor for modern languages with D. C. Heath and Company, Grandgent's old publishers in Boston, from 1950 to 1967. From this vantage point he published his article on "Imitation ofForm in the Old Provençal Lyric" (1953) in Romance Philology, recently founded by Yakov Malkiel at Berkeley. This article deserves to be regarded as a classic. Chambers prepared for it by performing metrical analysis of the entire lyric corpus in Provençal; in effect, he must have done on index cards what István Frank did in his Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours, the first volume ofwhich appeared in the same year. But Chambers went further by introducing diachronic analysis into his metrical results , and demonstrated for the first time, with meticulous evidence, the vital process of growth and change in the troubadours' formal practice. This is a demonstration which has yet to be fully appreciated in aU its ramifications. Returning frompublishing to teaching, Chambers became Professor ofFrench at the University ofArizona from 1967 untü his retirement in 1978. In 1971 he published his invaluable dictionary of Proper Names in the Lyrics ofthe Troubadours in the series estabUshed by Holmes at North Carolina. Seven years after his retirement, his Introduction to OldProvençal Versification, expanding upon the article on imitation ofform, embraced the entire range offormal practice —not only versification in the narrow sense but phenomena as 70 IN MEMORIAM FRANK M. CHAMBERS diverse as the development of stylistic registers, like trobar leu and trobar clus, and the panoply ofgenres, all seen in historical perspective . At age 79 Chambers had the vim and vigor to assess the corpus ofOccitan compositions by trobairitz, in an article which proved...