In Memoriam: John C. Hirsh (1942–2024)

I write to share the sad news that John C. Hirsh, Professor of English at Georgetown University, died unexpectedly at age 81 on December 6, 2023. Having taught at Georgetown for fifty-three years, John was preparing to retire in the spring of 2024. John was admired and loved by the many communities of which he was a part, including Georgetown University, the Sursum Corda literacy and tutoring program, affiliations of medievalists in the U.S. and the U.K., the Epiphany Catholic Church congregation in Washington, D.C., and his extended family.John Campion Hirsh was born on June 26, 1942. He received his B.A. from Boston College in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Lehigh University in 1970. He began teaching at Georgetown in 1970 and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1984. He held numerous fellowships in the U.K. over the years, at Pembroke College, Wadham College, St. Edmund Hall, and Campion Hall, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His personal and scholarly style was inflected by a distinctive blend of American and British cultural influences. He was as happy taking kids out for hot dogs and a baseball game as he was inviting students and colleagues to his cozy Georgetown house for tea and a chat. His interest in fostering connections across the Atlantic extended to his work as advisor for the Marshall Scholarships at Georgetown for nearly three decades.Readers of the The Chaucer Review will be familiar with John’s expertise in Middle English literature, especially Chaucer, the medieval lyric, and medieval devotional and mystical writings. The bibliography appended below, compiled by A. S. G. Edwards, testifies to the range of John’s interests. His training in manuscript study and textual criticism led to an important discovery early in his career: a previously unknown Middle English prose life of Barlaam and Josaphat in Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Peterhouse 257. To take a keen interest in this English life of the Buddha, and to edit it for the Early English Text Society in 1986, was a prescient move on John’s part, anticipating the later interest in Global Medieval Studies. Prescient, too, was John’s interest in the Book of Margery Kempe: his monograph, The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England (1989), was among the first full-length studies of the Book and its contexts. John continued to identify and edit Middle English texts throughout his career, especially lyrics. His edited collection Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols (2005), is, like much of his work, valuable to both seasoned scholars and beginning students. Pedagogy was never far from his sights, which made him an ideal choice as author of Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales (2003), commissioned for the Blackwell Introductions to Literature series. Clear, accessible, and judicious, Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales announces in its first line one of John’s chief aims: that students learn to read Chaucer with pleasure. And students evidently did so under John’s guidance: at Georgetown, John’s course on Chaucer and the Fourteenth Century was one of the most popular courses in the English Department up until the very last semester he taught it, in the spring of 2023.For those who knew John chiefly through his scholarship in Middle English, several aspects of his life and work may come as a surprise. For one thing, he had a secondary area of expertise in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature: he published articles on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Dreiser, Amy Lowell, and Robert Lowell, taught courses on American literature and culture, and served as a core member of Georgetown’s interdisciplinary American Studies faculty. For another, he was an avid collector of manuscript leaves and fragments. He began cataloguing Lehigh University’s manuscripts as a doctoral student, publishing Medieval Manuscripts in Lehigh University Libraries in 1970—a significant accomplishment that he referred to with characteristic humility as his “little handbook.” Over the ensuing decades he assembled a significant private collection; and in a gesture characteristic of his generosity and loyalty, he was preparing to donate his collection of more than 135 medieval leaves, fragments, and volumes to Lehigh University upon his retirement. Lois Fischer Black, Director of Library Special Collections at Lehigh, describes the preparations for this donation in terms that convey something of John’s warmth, kindness, and enthusiasm:John also donated a substantial number of items—including nineteenth-century British letters, scrapbooks, and photograph albums and dozens of manuscript leaves—to Georgetown University, where they are housed at the Booth Family Special Collections at Lauinger Library. Archivist Jay Sylvestre is currently preparing to mount a small exhibit from the John C. Hirsh collection in the fall of 2024. Georgetown’s Global Medieval Studies program will be arranging an event in conjunction with this exhibit to celebrate John’s donation and his legacy.Many interests, indeed. But John’s greatest passion from the late 1980s on was Sursum Corda, the literacy and tutoring program he directed with unwavering energy and commitment until the very end of his life. Called after a low-income housing project of that name in Washington, D.C., Sursum Corda became a shining example of engaged scholarship and learning. John’s devotion to this work included developing an additional area of expertise in the field of Education, for which he took courses as a postdoctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley; developing a collaborative course with Georgetown Law School faculty on “Literacy and Law”; and teaching an array of courses ranging from “Community Tutoring” to “Reading, Teaching, and Social Reflection” to “Issues in Education.” At its heart, this work involved one-on-one tutoring of young children several times a week. In a series of five books—beginning with Sursum Corda: Teaching Urban Youth to Read, with a preface by Robert Coles (1991)—John recounted the challenges and rewards of engaging with children learning to read and grow intellectually and personally even as they navigated extraordinary inner-city precarities, including that of housing itself. Indeed, in 2017, despite great resistance from the community, the Sursum Corda housing project was razed and its population displaced, an anguished process that John recounts in Power and Probity in a DC Cooperative: The Life and Death of Sursum Corda (2018). That John resurrected the tutoring program at a similar low-income housing site in the District of Columbia, with a new generation of Georgetown students, is a testament to his commitment. At John’s memorial service at Georgetown’s Dahlgren Chapel in January of this year, a more personal dimension of John’s commitment to serving his community became evident. Two former students from Sursum Corda, now in their early thirties, spoke of the difference John had made in their lives as tutor, mentor, coach, and steadfast fatherly friend. His devotion to them extended to helping them obtain scholarships and funding for college.John is survived by his sisters Margo Kelly, Elizabeth Hirsh, and Jane Hirsh, and their families. The photograph above was shared by Elizabeth, who says that this photo of John with her beloved pup Nico is one of her favorites. As this photo suggests, John’s life included much love, lightness, and joy, even as he maintained unwavering commitments to serious scholarship and to improving the lives of underprivileged children. He enjoyed Chaucer, appreciated fine food, and was always on the lookout for beautiful books. As his colleague I was often the fortunate recipient of his company and his gifts. Meeting for lunch would be an occasion for gift-giving, and John would often arrive with a beautiful tome pitched to my interests. One time it was Italian Medieval Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters; another, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. He was a kind and thoughtful colleague in the English Department, and one who continued to serve our community until the very end. He was planning to attend an important department meeting on the new curriculum on the morning he died.John C. Hirsh was a gentle man, in the best Chaucerian sense of that word. He contributed much to many, and he will be deeply missed.