Professor Derek Brewer: Scholar of medieval literature who led the field of Chaucer studies after the Second World War

Derek Brewer, Emeritus Professor of English at Cambridge, was the founding figure in the post-war study of Chaucer and, through the publishing firm that he invented and guided, he contributed more than any other individual to furthering modern research into the early literatures and cultures of these islands. He worked tirelessly to promote the study of English language and literature in Britain and abroad. As a long-serving Master, Brewer also proved to be the pivotal figure in the post-war history of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was an irrepressibly positive and genial personality; his humanity and kindness as a teacher, scholar and publisher changed many lives.

Born the son of a clerk with General Electric, Brewer was educated at the Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester, and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1941 to read English. His degree was interrupted by service in the Second World War from 1942 as an infantry officer. He saw action in Italy, 1944-45, and this was the beginning of a life-long affection for its land, culture and people.

Returning to Magdalen he was tutored by C.S. Lewis, whom he always recalled with fond admiration. From 1949 until 1964 Brewer was Lecturer in English at Birmingham, and here he met and married Elisabeth Hoole in 1951. Already with a growing family, they spent the years 1956-58 at the International Christian University in Tokyo. To pioneer English Literature courses so soon after the war in a still largely unmodernised Japan showed a characteristically venturesome and generously open spirit.

During the happy years in Birmingham came the books that first made Brewer's name, as well as friendships that were to last a lifetime. However, in 1964 he accepted an invitation to take up an unadvertised lectureship at Cambridge; he loved to recall how he later sat at a meeting next to F.R. Leavis who, unaware of Brewer's identity, railed at this latest instance of the English Faculty's wickedness. From then until retirement, the Brewers' careers were in Cambridge, with Derek promoted to a readership in 1976 and personal chair in 1983, and Elisabeth a lecturer at Homerton College.

It was never in Brewer's character to decline a request for help or an invitation: he delivered countless visiting lectures, returning periodically to Japan; he was twice chairman of the English Faculty and chaired or contributed to innumerable committees in college, department and university. Libraries he cherished and for 13 years he chaired the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library, where he facilitated acquisitions of several important collections. Always, he displayed the courtesy of making time for everyone, and often seemed most generous with his time when busiest.

Brewer's unique worldwide reputation as a medievalist stemmed from an unusual publication pattern that reflected his ambition as a scholar-critic and literary historian to reach out to his readership in an exchange of ideas. From 1953 onwards, continuously in print, there was the latest revised version of his critical book on Chaucer (appearing variously as Chaucer, An Introduction to Chaucer and A New Introduction to Chaucer) just as there was always in print the latest version, equally important to him, of one or other book that considered the poet in the context of the 14th century (Chaucer in His Time, first published in 1963, was followed by Chaucer and his World, 1978).

Alongside these volumes came a stream of essays and notes (nearly 170 items, 70 since "retirement"), many of which became classics and pioneered new lines of enquiry on a variety of medieval and later literary topics. He was an early champion of Tolkien.

This double focus, of producing relatively accessible books in conjuction with more academic articles, meant that Brewer's true originality and scholarship often went under-recognised, even though his learned edition of Chaucer's Parlement of Foulys (1960) and his landmark editing of Chaucer: the critical heritage (1978) are unlikely to be surpassed, and his influence on modern study of Malory is pervasive.

His collected essays had already appeared in two volumes by 1982-84, and his English Gothic Literature (1983) offered an ambitious overview. He put together or co-edited the most influential essay collections of their time in the field – Chaucer and Chaucerians (1966), Geoffrey Chaucer in the series "Writers and Their Background" (1974), Aspects of Malory (1981) – and, as befitted a Chaucerian, his intellectual interest in comedy went along with a lively sense of life's comedies.

His Symbolic Stories (1980), which ranged from medieval texts to Jane Austen and Dickens, was the fruit of the broad intellectual engagements with social anthropology, psychology and folklore, together with the curiosity about orality, literacy and traditional tales which distinguished his work. This book was published by D.S. Brewer, the publishing firm that he had founded in 1972, maintaining the view that the ancient university presses, despite the advantages of their charitable status, were retreating from their duty to publish scholarly books in specialist subjects.

A canny early combination of small overheads and low print-runs, together with Brewer's unrivalled network of academic contacts, made relatively small sales figures work, and the firm prospered and grew. Joined with Richard Barber's Boydell Press from 1978 and renamed Boydell and Brewer, the firm now publishes some 150 academic books a year on a variety of subjects. It plays a crucial role as one of the most important publishers in medieval studies, especially in enabling so many younger academics to publish their research.

In 1977 Brewer was elected Master of Emmanuel. His most visible achievement remains the purchase from Jesus College of Park Terrace, a street of Regency townhouses that dramatically extended Emmanuel's historic site and its capacity to attract and accommodate students. Less tangibly, Brewer helped modernise the college, welcoming the admission of women in 1979, developing the teaching Fellowship and, by his instinctively bridge-building personality, encouraging a culture where cliques and factions were self-condemning.

When his successor as master succumbed to cancer after a few months in office, it was Brewer to whom the Fellows turned to chair the election of another master: a remarkable tribute to someone who had only just stepped down after 13 years in the job. A college was the ideal focus for Brewer's belief in academic life as a community and a conversation, and Emmanuel benefited profoundly from the commitment of someone with his vitality and capacity for rapport with very different people. In 1989, he founded the Emmanuel Society, one of the first alumni organisations in Oxbridge, where the potential for alumni to help their old college was part, but only part, of fostering relations between the college and its members through the fellowship of family-friendly social events.

People often commented that it was the moral concerns of English medieval literature – courtesy, honour, loyalty and integrity – that they observed to be lived out in Brewer's life. The most generous-spirited of men, he had a genius for friendship and a knack of leaving others feeling more hopeful. Instinctively, he gave encouragement, and in so doing he furthered the early careers of many women colleagues, especially when such careers might be a struggle. That he would never speak ill of anyone in public did not prevent him smiling in private at individual foibles and hypocrisies, but he remained an object lesson in how a resistance to cynicism and a slowness to impute bad faith to others could liberate and energise a personality.

He was a staunch advocate of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. The faith that underlay his values was shared with Elisabeth, who joined in all his intellectual endeavours and interests. "I married a learned wife", he would proudly say, and none who knew their blessedly happy marriage will be surprised that Brewer survived her by barely five weeks.

Barry Windeatt

Barry Windeatt’s superb obituary talked of Derek Brewer’s belief in academic life as “a community and a conversation”, writes Colin MacCabe. I can testify to this because I had the great good fortune to be a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College in the mid-Seventies when Derek was the senior English don. He was a patient listener, even to youthful diatribes against the old, and he had the art of making the gentlest of arguments in a very self-deprecating way.

This meant that it was impossible to ignore what he said. He was the most persuasive advocate of the truths of conservatism that I have met.

Windeatt is right to say that he had the virtues of courtesy, honour, loyalty and integrity. These virtues were all the more evident in a Cambridge English Faculty notorious for its rancour and resentments. As a young lecturer in the Faculty I attracted my fair share of both. If I continue to believe in the ideal of a community of scholars dedicated to impartial judgment across a range of views, it is in large part because Derek was the embodiment of that ideal. In both words and actions he was the very model of fairness.

Derek’s commitment to medieval literature was also a commitment to the wholeness of life. For him the fall into neo-classicism – I never got the exact date but I guess Derek thought we’d been going downhill since the accession of Henry VII – had led to a stratification of culture which had been largely deleterious. His 1980 book Symbolic Stories is where this belief drives his writing into more modern literature. His ability to find patterns of the oldest folk tales in the most sophisticated of narratives still compels and rewards.

Derek Stanley Brewer, English scholar: born Cardiff 13 July 1923; Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, in English, Birmingham University 1949-56, Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer 1958-64; Professor of English, International Christian University, Tokyo 1956-58; Lecturer in English, Cambridge University 1965-76, Reader in Medieval English 1976-83, Professor of English 1983-90 (Emeritus); Fellow, Emmanuel College, Cambridge 1965-77 (Life Fellow 1990), Master 1977-90; founder, D.S. Brewer, publishers (now Boydell and Brewer) 1972, director 1979-96; married 1951 Elisabeth Hoole (died 2008; three sons, two daughters); died Cambridge 23 October 2008.