Jocelyn Toynbee


Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world."

Biography

Jocelyn Toynbee was the daughter of Harry Valpy Toynbee, secretary of the Charity Organization Society, and his wife Sarah Edith Marshall. Her brother Arnold J. Toynbee was the noted universal historian.
Toynbee was educated at Winchester High School for Girls and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved a First in the Classical Tripos. Toynbee completed her doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the subject of Hadrianic sculpture.
She was tutor in classics at St Hugh's College, Oxford, lecturer in classics at Reading University, and from 1927 Fellow, Lecturer and director of studies in classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, where her students included Lilian Hamilton Jeffery. In 1931 she was appointed lecturer in classics at Cambridge before becoming the fourth Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology. Toynbee maintained strong links with the British School at Rome during her career, and served as the Chairman of the Faculty from 1954-59.
In 1962, Toynbee organised a major exhibition at the Guildhall Museum on the subject of Roman Art in Britain, resulting in a key publication. She was married. A complete list of her works was published in the Papers of the British School at Rome.

Honours

Toynbee was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1943. She was awarded the medal of the Royal Numismatic Society in 1948. In 1952, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1956 she was awarded the Huntington Medal of the American Numismatic Society. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. In 1977, an edited volume of 20 papers was published in honour of Toynbee, in which Martin Robertson states that “No one has done more than she – no one perhaps so much – to establish and make clear the profound unity of the Greco-Roman artistic tradition”. A further collected volume of papers in memory of Toynbee was published in 1988.

Works