What do you think?
Rate this book
Montague Rhodes James
Book by Pfaff, Richard W.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
461 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 1980
14 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 21, 2022
Richard William Pfaff's biography of Montague Rhodes James is probably the best concerning the gentleman who was the only person to be Provost of King's College and Eton College.
Pfaff takes the reader through eleven well constructed chapters:
Chapter 1 deals with James' family history, the early days and his time at Temple Grove School.
Chapter 2 concentrates on his time as an Eton School boy.
Chapters 3-5 deal with James in his early years at Cambridge, and his times as a Don of the University of Cambridge.
Chapters 6 and 8-9 deal with James' involvement in the Catalogues of Manuscripts and the related Manuscript investigations.
Chapter 7 deals with his times at Provost at King's College, Cambridge.
Chapter 10 concerns the times James had as Provost at Eton College.
Chapter 11 deals with the last ten to fifteen years of James' life.
Although M. R. James is most widely known as the author of classic ghost stories, such as A Warning to the Curious, O Whistle and I'll come to you my lad and others, his main achievements were as an academic. He was for example, a biblical scholar, a leading antiquary (it was this that came up many times in the ghost stories), and was a pioneer in the fields of bibliography and palaeography. Dean at King's College from 1889-1900, then Provost there from 1905-18, and was also Vice-Chancellor during three very difficult years from 1913-15. From 1918 until his death in 1936, he was Provost at Eton College. Forty years of his life were taken up with the cataloguing of medieval manuscripts, indeed finding a fragment of one such manuscript at Bury St Edmunds, led to the eventual finding of the graves of five former Abbots, which were thought lost since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He was also a translator of many texts and did major work on wall paintings and stained-glass windows.
Pfaff takes the reader through eleven well constructed chapters:
Chapter 1 deals with James' family history, the early days and his time at Temple Grove School.
Chapter 2 concentrates on his time as an Eton School boy.
Chapters 3-5 deal with James in his early years at Cambridge, and his times as a Don of the University of Cambridge.
Chapters 6 and 8-9 deal with James' involvement in the Catalogues of Manuscripts and the related Manuscript investigations.
Chapter 7 deals with his times at Provost at King's College, Cambridge.
Chapter 10 concerns the times James had as Provost at Eton College.
Chapter 11 deals with the last ten to fifteen years of James' life.
Although M. R. James is most widely known as the author of classic ghost stories, such as A Warning to the Curious, O Whistle and I'll come to you my lad and others, his main achievements were as an academic. He was for example, a biblical scholar, a leading antiquary (it was this that came up many times in the ghost stories), and was a pioneer in the fields of bibliography and palaeography. Dean at King's College from 1889-1900, then Provost there from 1905-18, and was also Vice-Chancellor during three very difficult years from 1913-15. From 1918 until his death in 1936, he was Provost at Eton College. Forty years of his life were taken up with the cataloguing of medieval manuscripts, indeed finding a fragment of one such manuscript at Bury St Edmunds, led to the eventual finding of the graves of five former Abbots, which were thought lost since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He was also a translator of many texts and did major work on wall paintings and stained-glass windows.
August 30, 2023
An excellent biography of M R James, which focuses mainly on James’ historical and bibliographical works and academic career rather than the ghost stories for which he’s famous nowadays. Like James, Pfaff was a medieval historian so can (and does, at length) write authoritatively about his subject’s academic works. By comparison the famous ghost stories are much more briefly dealt with. Anyone not particularly interested in catalogues of college libraries or critical editions of early Christian texts (fortunately I am) could profitably skip over about a third of this book. The downside for me was that James himself remains something of an enigma as this biography never really seems to get beneath the public persona.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews