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I am very late with both these pieces of news, but firstly I am not really writing here at all at the moment and secondly, they’re the kind of news one doesn’t want to have. Much as when my partner asks me if I’ve heard of a particular musician I hear a metaphorical bell toll, there is one obvious context for a subject header which is just two names, and I’m afraid that is the situation. Professor Björn Weiler, of Aberystwyth University, died on 15th November last year, and Jinty, or as she’d rather not have been known Professor Dame Janet Laughland Nelson, on 14th October, and I should have said something for them at the time. And whatever is happening to this blog, I still should, so I’m afraid I emerge from hiatus temporarily only to write a double obituary.¹

Aberystwyth University publicity photograph of Björn Weiler

I will start with Björn because I knew him less well. I ran into him almost only at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, and since I haven’t gone to that for a while, having no new research to present, I hadn’t seen him for some time. I was warned by a friend more socially connected that he was ill, and it was by the same route that the news reached me, not all that long after, that illness had indeed claimed him. This was pretty terrible news. It’s not just that Björn was both gentleman and scholar in an age when that is hard to maintain. His numerous books and articles are scholarship in the best aspect of his academic tradition, which is to say that they are thorough, painstaking and cautious but also illuminated with brilliant insight and still humble enough to expect others to continue to move the subject on.² We might all wish to be able to say as much of our own stuff, but I know I can’t! But it’s not just that, it is also the loss of his kindness and interest. I hardly knew Professor Weiler, but whenever we met I did not have to remind him who I was, and if he asked what I was working on he listened to and had thoughts about the reply. Anything you had to tell him was useful and interesting enough to be nice about. A collection of posts from social media collated by Medievalists.net as an obituary for him overflows with stories of his warmth and kindness. That was a trait which brought people together and built bridges between them. I have been in more than one conversation at the IMC with a certain medievalist who won’t always talk to me which was made possible just because one or other of us was already talking to Björn, and the certain medievalist didn’t like to kick off in front of him. He was in this literal respect a model to be followed, and in several others as well, and he was only 55, and it’s very sad.

This picture of Jinty is from the Guardian’s obituary, which was written by Paul Fouracre (on whom see below). (As Wikimedia Commons observes, there is no license-free photo of Jinty available.) I assume this is Paul’s photo and take the liberty of assuming he wouldn’t mind me reusing it for this purpose. The obituary, which is naturally a rather affecting one, is linked through.

However, I still didn’t know Professor Weiler very well, whereas while I didn’t expect a funeral invitation or anything, I was rather closer to Jinty. In fact, she was one of my most important academic patrons when I first needed one, and for as long after as I asked her, and I owe her a great deal, a great deal that includes my first invitation to speak at the Institute of Historical Research, my first lecturing gig and a substantial and invaluable part of my academic library. But though I clearly owe her one, a pæan to Jinty is a daunting thing to contemplate. Where does one even start? And once started, how does one stop? She was a legend in her field, and beyond. She was the professor who told a government minister he was a fool in the press and got more coverage than he did. She was, as its first female president, part of what she jokingly called a joint queenship that briefly ran the Royal Historical Society. She was in the legendary Bucknell Group. She supervised goodness knows how many doctoral students; I was at her retirement party when one of the first of them, Paul Fouracre, now well retired himself, gave a far better speech than I could ever manage in her honour.³ She more or less held together the activity of the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for many years. She wrote only two books, both royal biographies, but also had three volumes of collected papers which gathered only a fraction of her voluminous output.⁴ Every piece she wrote is a jewel, too, written with increasingly conversational style through her career but never losing seriousness, and some of them are lapidary explanations of the basic operations of parts of early medieval society that you can set to students in safety but still make experts nod in agreement years after they first came out.⁵ She could find the obvious which needed stating and put it before you – I remember well one unusually story-time-like seminar at the IHR which had been displaced into the tea room by building work, during the early stages of Jinty’s work on her biography of Charlemagne, in which she was trying to get his marriage dates sorted out, and which included her pausing to muse briefly and then saying, "You have to understand, these weren’t nice people." From anyone else it would have seemed trivial; from Jinty it was deep truth which explained more than we would usually manage about the problems we create for ourselves by heroising the people on whom we spend so much of our mental time. She did not do so, because she was a better historian than most.

But again the other thing which stands out is her kindness. Jinty was shrewd and far from apolitical, and she was far from agreeing with everyone; but I remember that when I was in the entry stages of my dispute with Cullen Chandler, I explained things to Jinty and she said, "well, keep things comradely, that’s what matters," and I probably should have paid more attention than I did. I was not a pupil of hers, and I’m not completely sure why she decided I was worth backing, except that I think she decided a lot of people were worth backing and then did that. But that backing got me three months of teaching in her stead; a half-made book pitch for Manchester Medieval Sources laid in front of their editor for me which, alas, I never finished the other half of though I still might some day because it was a good idea; 47 more books on my shelves to this day, retrieved during increasingly final sweeps of her office ("I’m not sure I’ll ever read these, Jinty."—"That doesn’t matter, Jon, I just want them to have a good home.")⁶; and I don’t want to think how many references and letters of recommendation. She didn’t have to do any of that; but I showed up at seminars, asked questions where I could, hung about and was sociable and seemed, I suppose, to know my stuff, and that was enough. Obviously I was never going to be able to repay all that; neither would she have expected me to. But even during my M.Phil. in Cambridge, a time of some difficulty where I racked up a lot of favours owing, I’d realised that except for very rare occasions one couldn’t pay back academic patronage; one could only pay it forward, to the next wave of people who showed up and seemed to know their stuff. And I have tried to until very lately, and still do where I can, and I comfort myself that Jinty would probably have thought that all she would have asked of me. I used to say that the academy ran not on its paid labour but on its goodwill work; Jinty was one of the best models of that I ever saw.

The last few times I did see Jinty, it was clear that she was finding it slowly more difficult to remember things and keep track of conversations. Despite that, her final book did come out. I don’t think it’s the book I wanted her to write – which would, I suppose, have been something like what Pauline Stafford has done for the reigns of English kings and queens of the tenth and eleventh centuries in her books, but for Charlemagne – but it is the book Jinty wanted to write and so it was a massive relief to me that she finished it.⁷ I still very much wish she was still around to talk to, and I’m sure there are many who feel the same from much closer to her; but even if the clouds did close in on her, hers was a life whose good works, printed and personal, shone on and shine on anyway, and I hope that was a continuing comfort to her until she no longer needed it. I shall be one of very many who will miss Jinty Nelson for a long time.

1. Even this one post has been in draft since January, as well, so there is as yet no clear path to a resumption of blogging I’m afraid. Details of an unclear one are emerging, however…

2. Because Björn worked later than I tend to, I don’t have the personal knowledge of his work necessary to list his greatest hits, but I can mention as things I’ve found useful despite the time between us these: Björn K. U. Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture: England and Germany, c.1215-c.1250, Medieval Culture and Society (Basingstoke 2007); idem, “The King as Judge: Henry II and Frederick Barbarossa as seen by their contemporaries” in Patricia Skinner (ed.), Challenging the Boundaries of Medieval History: the legacy of Timothy Reuter (Turnhout 2009), pp. 115–140; Weiler, “Describing Rituals of Succession and the Legitimation of Kingship in the West, ca. 1000–ca. 1150″ in Alexander Daniel Beihammer, Stavroula Constantinou and Maria G. Parani (edd.), Court Ceremonies and Rituals of Power in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean: comparative perspectives, The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1500 98 (Leiden 2013), pp. 113–140.

3. It began something like, "You all know Jinty well, or so you think, but I’m going to tell you some things about Jinty you don’t know. First of all, she is lousy at winking…" He had the hall in stitches before he was done.

4. The biographies Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald, The Medieval World (London 1992) and eadem, King and Emperor: a new life of Charlemagne (London 2019); the essay volumes eadem, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe, History 42 (London 1986); eadem, The Frankish World 750-900 (London 1996); and eadem, Courts, Elites and Gendered Power in the Early Middle Ages, Variorum Collected Studies 878 (Aldershot 2007); and to them one should probably add, as well as innumerable volumes she edited, eadem (transl.), The Annals of St-Bertin, Ninth-Century Histories 1 (Manchester 1991).

5. This is a bit of a greatest-hits list, but, I would pick especially
Janet L. Nelson, “Kingship and Empire” in J. .H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (Cambridge 1988), pp. 211–251; Nelson, “Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages” in Jean-Philippe Genet (ed.), L’historiographie en Europe (Paris 1991), pp. 149–163; Nelson, “Family, Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages” in Michael Bentley (ed.), A Companion to Historiography (London 1997), pp. 153–176; and Nelson, “Medieval Monasticism” in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (edd.), The Medieval World, 1st edn, Routledge Worlds (London 2001), pp. 576–604. They all opened my eyes onto topics where I might already have thought myself informed.

6 This, of course, obliges me never to get rid of them unless I can be sure they will still have a good home; but thankfully, most of them have been really useful, including constituting my basic teaching library for some years.

7. It being, of course, Nelson, King and Emperor.