A. A. Vasiliev

The ‘Life’ of St. Peter of Argos and Its Historical Significance

The Life of the Peloponnesian saint, Peter of Argos, which was first published in the original Greek in 1888, is very little known in spite of its historical interest. If I am not mistaken, I was the first among scholars to make use of it, in 1898 in my Russian study, The Slavs in Greece . In 1908 a monograph in Modern Greek came out in Athens on the subject of Peter of Argos, written by Ch. Papaoi-konomos: . This monograph has remained entirely unknown to European scholars; strangely enough, it was mentioned neither in the detailed bibliography of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, nor in the Vizantisky Vremennik, nor in the , where Greek publications are listed with reasonable accuracy. For myself, I was unable to find the book anywhere in America, and it was only recently that I received it directly from Greece. Since 1915 the indefatigable Greek scholar Nikos A. Bees has employed the Life of Peter of Argos in several studies, of which I shall speak later. Up to this time, nothing on the Life of Peter of Argos has been written in English.

Memoirs of Fellows of the Mediaeval Academy of America

IN the death of Professor Gerould mediaeval studies have lost a distinguished scholar and an inspiring teacher. Those who have been so fortunate as to know him will recall his personal charm, much of which he communicated to his writings, without however sacrificing accuracy to geniality. He was born in Goffstown, New Hamsphire, on 4 October 1877, the son of the Reverend Samuel Lankton Gerould and Laura Etta (Thayer) Gerould. In his twenty-second year he graduated from Dartmouth College. He then went to England, and enrolled as a student at Oxford, where he received the Bachelor of Letters degree in 1901. In that year he was appointed Reader in English at Bryn Mawr, and later Associate in English Philology. In 1905 he was called to Princeton as Assistant Professor of English, one of the group of brilliant young men assembled by Woodrow Wilson in the establisbment of the preceptorial system. He was made full professor in 1916, and Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres, Princetons oldest endowed chair, in 1938. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1946. In the year 1918 he served as Captain in the United States Army. In 1910 he married Miss Katherine Fullerton, well known as an essayist and storyteller of distinction. The home of the Geroulds was a delightful and hospitable place, and it was blessed by the advent of two children. He was also happy in his long and intimate association with a prominent Fellow of the Mediaeval Academy, Robert Kilburn Root. In 1902 he edited the North English Homily Collection, and in 1908 published an exhaustive study: The Grateful Dead, the History of a Folk-Story. Particularly noteworthy was his volume Saints Legends (1916). As he noted in the preface, no study of these legends in relation to one another and to their historical background had hitherto been made. Later he essayed another difficult task in The Ballad of Tradition (1932). These books are all noteworthy for clear and graceful exposition and expert handling of scholarly problems. His last work, Chaucerian Essays (1952), was the crown of his long interest in that poet. He had a versatile mind, contributing articles on a variety of subjects to magazines and journals, editing extracts from English literature of different periods, and also the poems of James Thomson. Between 1917 and 1925 he wrote several novels, and later two useful books on the art of fiction. As a Fellow of the Mediaeval Academy since 1926 he was active in its development. At the time of his death he was President of the Fellows. He was a former vice-president of the Modern Language Association, and carried on important administrative duties at Princeton. He died in Asheville, North Carolina, on 10 April 1953. Altogether he had a very active and fruitful life, and his academic work, both as a writer and a teacher, was in accord with the highest tradition of the humanities in American scholarship. GEORGE R. COFFMAN E. BALDWIN SMITH WILLIAM W. LAWRENCE, Chairman