Nicholas Howe


Nicholas Howe was an American scholar of Old English literature and culture, whose Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England was an important contribution to the study of Old English literature and historiography.

Biography

Howe was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 17, 1953, a child of academic parents: his father, Irving Howe, was a celebrated literary critic, historian of Jewish immigrants to America and a prominent American socialist; his mother, Thalia Phillies, was a classicist and academic. Howe received a B.A. in English from York University and a PhD in English from Yale University. His dissertation, The Latin Encyclopedia Tradition and Old English Poetry, was the basis for The Old English Catalogue Poems: A Study in Poetic Form. He taught at Rutgers University, then at the University of Oklahoma, and then at Ohio State University where he led the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2002 he moved to California, to the University of California, Berkeley. He died of leukemia on September 27, 2006.

Scholarship and influence

Howe's Migration and Mythmaking, first published in 1989 and reprinted in 2001, was a study of Anglo-Saxon culture and literature. Howe argued that the Anglo-Saxons, descendants of peoples who had traveled from continental Europe to settle Britain and then returned to Europe to convert their pagan forebears, were very conscious of their return to Europe and saw themselves as an integral part of and parallel to "the Israelite and Hebrew migration in biblical history". The book "influenced a generation of scholars".
In addition to his scholarship of Old English, Howe had an interest in geography and in American landscape and culture, and published a number of articles in that field. His Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin is a memoir of recollections and travel writing.

Selected works

Howe held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2005.