Barbara Josephine Lewalski (; February 22, 1931 – March 2, 2018)Roberts, Sam (March 29, 2018).

. ''

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''. nytimes.com. Retrieved 2018-03-30.Barbara Lewalski profile
legacy.com. Retrieved 2018-03-10. was an American academic, an authority on

Renaissance literature Renaissance literature refers to European literature which was influenced by the intellectual and cultural tendencies associated with the Renaissance. The literature of the Renaissance was written within the general movement of the Renaissance ...

particularly known for her work on John Milton.

Early life

Born in

Topeka, Kansas Topeka ( ; Kansa: ; iow, Dópikˀe, script=Latn or ) is the capital city A capital city or capital is the municipality holding primary status in a country, state, province, department, or other subnational entity, usually as its seat ...

, to John Kiefer, a farmer, and Vivo (), an elementary schoolteacher and speech therapist, she received her BSE at Emporia State University in 1950 and her AM in 1951. She went on to earn a PhD at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

in 1956.

Career

Her first book, ''Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained'', has been praised as a "trail-blazing" work that marshals "great learning in the service of understanding a specific artefact, without swamping the artefact." Lewalski was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1967, and was elected a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

in 1980 and a member of the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communi ...

in 1986. From 1983 to 2010 she was the

William R. Kenan, Jr. William Rand Kenan Jr. (April 30, 1872 – July 28, 1965) was an American chemist, engineer, manufacturer, dairy farmer, and philanthropist. Early life William Rand Kenan Jr. was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on April 30, 1872., son of Willi ...

, Professor of English Literature and of History and Literature at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. From 1956 to 1982 she taught at Brown University, holding the positions of Alumni-Alumnae University Professor (1976–82), Director of Graduate Studies in English (1968–72), and Chair of the Renaissance Studies Program (1976–80). In 2016, the Renaissance Society of America awarded her the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award for recognition of her decades of scholarship. Lewalski died in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...

, at the age of 87. She had congestive heart failure and died of a heart attack on March 2, 2018.

Works

*''Milton's Brief Epic'' (1966) *''Donne's "Anniversaries" and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode'' (1973) *''Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric'' (1979) *''Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms'' (1985) *''Writing Women in Jacobean England'' (1993) *(editor) ''The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght'' (1996) *''The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography'' (2000) *(editor) John Milton, ''Paradise Lost'' (2007)

Early life

Career

Works

References

Further reading