Simon Gaunt (4 July 1959–4 December 2021)

Abstract

Simon Gaunt (4 July 1959–4 December 2021) Sarah Kay Simon Gaunt's death at the age of only 62, of complications arising from the treatment of multiple myeloma, was as shocking as it was unexpected. Within days, as the sad news rapidly spread, all the institutions he had worked for published notices of his passing. His funeral was an occasion for much grief and since then, the many communities of which he was a vital member have struggled to come to terms with their loss: his college, King's College London; the medievalist community in the United Kingdom and beyond; the world of French Studies. Simon's capacity to unite the personal with the professional, which was born of personal temperament and fostered by social conviction, meant that everyone he had worked with felt they had lost a friend as much as a colleague or mentor. For readers of Tenso, Simon Gaunt was above all a leading scholar of medieval Occitan studies, and it is this aspect of his life and legacy that this necrology highlights. Simon graduated with highest honors in French from the University of Warwick in 1985. As an undergraduate, he had benefited from the teaching of distinguished Occitanist Linda Paterson, and he stayed at Warwick to work with her on the doctoral dissertation which subsequently became Troubadours and Irony. The title of this, his first book, inscribed it in a lineage of British Occitan studies that began with Leslie Topsfield's Troubadours and Love, continued through Paterson's Troubadours and Eloquence (originally a doctoral dissertation directed by Topsfield), and was concluded by Troubadours and Irony. Essentially the structure of all three is the same: a series of chapters, each addressed to an individual troubadour, weave their way between closely argued readings of selected songs, which are often re-edited and always illuminatingly retranslated in the process. Their procession from love to irony via eloquence pinpoints significant developments in troubadour studies between the 1970s and 1980s. Troubadours are carefully individualized, the literary artistry of their compositions explored, and their sophistication demonstrated. Effectively this put an end to the still prevalent dismissiveness of the likes of Jeanroy [End Page 269] and provided an important counterweight to the contemporary systematic formalism of Zumthor and Bec. Following his contribution to this epoch-making inflection of the field, Simon Gaunt was elected in 1986 to a postdoctoral fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge, and would remain at Cambridge in one capacity or another for the next 12 years. This was a transformative period intellectually, thanks in part to the number of talented students with whom he worked, and also to the group of stimulating young medievalists with whom he bonded, all of whom went on to distinguished careers. His next monograph broke completely with the formula of The Troubadours and. … Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature is powered by a theoretical argument about how genres are ideological constructions that create and perpetuate power structures, notably those of gender. The book is mainly about French, although Occitan songs dominate the chapter on lyric. The best chapters, to my mind, are those on narrative genres, especially the fabliau and hagiography; the romance chapter has also been widely influential. The success of Gender and Genre established Simon as an international scholar of Medieval French. The project that cemented his international standing as an Occitanist was the collaborative edition of Marcabru undertaken with Linda Paterson and Ruth Harvey, which took a decade to produce and was published in 2000; only a year before, in 1999, another collaborative volume, co-edited (with myself), The Troubadours: An Introduction, appeared with Cambridge University Press. The Marcabru edition, a formidable achievement by any standards, built on the editorial innovations of Aurelio Roncaglia and Peter Ricketts to replace the confessedly interim edition by Dejeanne. The Gaunt–Harvey–Paterson text is now also publicly available (though without translation or notes) on the RIALTO site; no one would think of working seriously on Marcabru without it. (The 1990s, incidentally, saw the name "Marcabru" feature more than any other writer of France in the title of Cambridge PhD dissertations!) The Troubadours: An Introduction also proved to be a widely used handbook. Simon...