Marie-Thérèse D'Alverny (25 January 1903-26 April 1991)

Author(s): Giles Constable

Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 136, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp.
418-422
Published by: American Philosophical Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/986915
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 MARIE-THERESE DALVERNY
(25 January 1903-26 April 1991)

For many visitors to the Bibliotheque Nationale in the 1940s and 1950s,
and especially for young scholars and foreigners, Marie-Therese
d'Alverny was a friend as well as a mentor. She made the Salle des Manu-
scrits into a meeting-point for colleagues and a center for cooperative
research. I first met her there in the early 1950s, when I began to work
with medieval manuscripts, and she immediately took me under her
wing and introduced me to other workers in my field. My diary for 1953
mentions lunching at her apartment on the Rue de Vaugirard, near the
Luxembourg Gardens. Stuffed with papers, books, and photographs,
and with almost a third of the living-room occupied by a gigantic rubber-
plant which she had nurtured from its youth, it was familiar to scholars
in many fields. As for the material aspects of it, as she herself once said,
they were "reduced to the lowest common denominator." But it symbol-
ized her unselfish devotion to scholarship and her love of her family and
friends. She was generous to a fault, always giving and never receiving
(except books and offprints). It was a triumph when she once allowed
me to take her out to dinner in Paris.
Mademoiselle d'Alverny (as I always called her, even after almost forty
years of friendship) was born in 1903 at Boen, in the department of Loire,
between Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand, and she remained attached
throughout her life to that part of France. The family home, where her
mother later lived, was at Besseges, near Ales, in the department of
Gard, and in the late 1960s she herself bought a house at Vieux Clairac,
near Meyrannes, also in the department of Gard. The house was located
inside the town, where no automobile could penetrate, but it looked out
over the countryside. It had previously belonged to silk-growers, and
there were old mulberry trees in the garden and store-rooms for drying
the cocoons. She loved gardening, and the house was a refuge from her
many activities and a place of peace and scholarly work during the last
two decades of her life.
She studied at Aix-en-Provence, Strasbourg, and Paris, where she
earned degrees at the Ecole des Chartes and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
in 1928. Later she received honorary degrees from Oxford, Smith, the
Pontifical Institute in Toronto, Krakow, and Padua. She held a medal
from the Red Cross, was a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and became
an honorary member of St. Hilda's College, in Oxford, and a member,
fellow, or corresponding fellow of the American Philosophical Society,

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 136, NO. 3, 1992

419

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 Courtesy of Giles Constable

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420 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Medieval Academy of

America, the International Academy of the History of Science, the British
Academy, and the academies of Bavaria and Barcelona. These honors
mostly came comparatively late in her life and reflected her reputation
in the international world of scholarship. Her career in France started
somewhat slowly and took off, as it were, only after the Second World
War.
From 1928 until 1946 she worked as a librarian at the Bibliotheque
Nationale. On 1 January 1946 she was appointed conservateur (or con-
servatrice, as she was then called) in the Department of Manuscripts,
with special responsibility for compiling the new catalogue of Latin
manuscripts, of which volumes III, IV, and V were published between
1952 and 1968. In 1957 she took on the additional responsibility of lec-
turing at the new center for medieval studies in Poitiers, with which she
remained associated for the rest of her life. She gave of herself
generously-perhaps too generously-to young scholars at that time.
Her own research certainly suffered, since her job was demanding, and
things were not easy in the library. She decided to leave when she was
passed over for head of the department after Jean Porcher retired in 1962.
"It was decided last summer," she wrote me late that year, "on such scan-
dalous circumstances that it was funny in some ways, and though I was
the victim of a plot, I could realize the humoristic side of the situation.
... I should like to be entirely free, and I have decided to apply for a
long scholarship at the Recherche scientifique, with the support of sev-
eral Sorbonne professors."
The application was successful, as she wrote the following year: "The
members of the medieval commission very generously gave me more
than I asked for, viz. a fellowship, with the possibility to keep my Poitiers
lectures." Thus in 1963, after thirty-five years at the Bibliotheque Nation-
ale, she moved to the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique,
where she served successively as Mailtre de recherche (1963-66), Direc-
teur de recherche (1967-73), and honorary director after her retirement
in 1973. The freedom offered by her new position allowed her to work
and travel in a way which had previously been impossible. Though she
had more privacy, however, and could do more of her own research and
writing, she continued to help countless visitors and friends and to serve
on numerous committees and on the editorial boards of Scriptorium,
Manuscripta, and Vivarium. She attended many conferences and
strengthened her international contacts, especially with the United
States. Already in 1961 she had come to Princeton as a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study, where she visited again in 1971. She was
in New York, at Columbia and Barnard, in 1967-68; at the University of
California in 1974 and 1981; and in Washington, at Dumbarton Oaks, in
1977. On these visits she both saw old friends and made new ones, and
did research in American libraries as well as lecturing and teaching.
Mademoiselle d'Alverny's scholarly works fall into so many areas that
they are hard to classify. At the basis of all her research lay the study of

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 MARIE-THERESE D'ALVERNY 421

manuscripts. The catalogue of Latin manuscripts in the Bibliotheque

Nationale was followed by the catalogue of dated Latin manuscripts, of
which volumes II, III, and IV appeared between 1962 and 1981. Her first
published work consisted of three articles on a twelfth-century pil-
grimage of the soul, the scriptural commentary of Thomas Gallus, and
the preacher Ralph Ardens, all of which appeared in 1942 in the Archives
d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age, of which she became an
editor in 1954. Her later work on western medieval theology and philos-
ophy included several articles and an important book on Alan of Lille,
with a long introduction on Alan's life and works in addition to several
unedited texts. This overlapped with her interest in symbolism and
iconography. In 1946 she published in the Melanges Fc'lix Grat- a form of
publication she usually avoided and against which she warned younger
scholars - an influential article on "La sagesse et ses sept filles. Recherches
sur les allegories de la philosophic et des arts liberaux du IXe au XIIe
siecle," which was followed by an article in the Archives on "Le cosmos
symbolique du XIIe siecle," and, later, by a contribution to the 1976 Spo-
leto Conference entitled "L'homme comme symbole. Le microcosme"
These interests also carried her into the history of science, magic, and
astrology. In 1955 she published an article on divination by the use of
knives with ivory handles, which she amusingly entitled "Recreations
monastiques." In some scholarly circles she was known primarily as an
historian of science, and her extensive bibliographical services to the
International Academy of the History of Science were much appreciated.
This work on medieval science and intellectual history, especially
translations, carried her into Islamic studies. Though she always denied
that she knew Arabic, she had a good working knowledge of the lan-
guage and made some valuable contributions to the history of Islamic
thought and the interaction between Islam and Christendom in the
Middle Ages. She published a long article on two Latin translations of
the Koran in the Archives in 1948 and worked extensively on Avicenna,
Al-Kindi, Ghazzali, and the translations of Aristotle. The eleven articles
on the Latin versions of Avicenna published between 1961 and 1972
deserve to be reprinted as a volume. She contributed a remarkable essay
on "Translations and Translators" to the section on "Philosophy and
Science" in the conference held in 1977 to celebrate the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the publication of Haskins's Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.
In September of 1987 she suffered what she described in a letter dated
16 October as "a kind of stroke": "Though the doctors say that I am recov-
ering, I am not as certain as they are, for I live in a kind of dream. I have
been in hospital and in a rest-house since that time, and I am afraid that
I shall remain an invalid." Her fear was justified, and she spent the rest
of her life, with occasional visits to her family, in the Hopital Sainte-
Perine in Auteuil. Her memory remained good, especially of distant
events, and she enjoyed visits from her friends, with whom she could
walk in the garden and make brief excursions. Life was dull, however,
and the present became increasingly dream-like, since she was unable

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422 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS

to write or do research. "I find it difficult to work in hospital," she wrote,

"no books because there is no room for them; no time, for the day is filled
with futilities." Her faith and spirit remained firm until the end, and she
will live in the minds and hearts of those who loved her as well as in her
scholarly writings. As one of her former students has said, people who
did not know her only thought what a great scholar she was, and people
who did thought principally of what a kind person she was.

ELECTED 1974

GILES CONSTABLE
Professor, School of Historical Studies
The Institute for Advanced Study

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