Larry D. Benson

Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

George Peddy Cuttino, distinguished scholar of diplomatic and diplomacy, died in Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 October 1991 in his seventy-eighth year. He was born in Newman, Georgia, on 9 March 1914. When Cuttino entered Swarthmore College in 1931, he assumed that he was heading towards a career as a diplomat, but Mary Albertsons seminar soon turned his thoughts to medieval history. After graduating with highest honors in 1935, he received an M.A. from the University of Iowa the following year. He then proceeded on to Oxford, the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and for the next two years he studied at Oriel College. Maurice Powicke, already the Regius Professor, was his official tutor, but increasingly he sought guidance and inspiration from Vivian Galbraith, then a Reader in Diplomatic and the scholar whom Cuttino regarded as having had the greatest formative influence on his own development. He received his D.Phil. in 1938, after which he spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Londons Institute of Historical Research.