Anne L. Middleton

Anne Louise Middleton died on November 23, 2016, one month after she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Born July 14, 1940 in Detroit, she was appointed assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, after receiving her doctorate in English from Harvard University in 1966. She was promoted to associate professor in 1972 and to professor in 1981, and retired in 2006.

Middleton’s influence on the study of later medieval literature was profound, but exercised by unusual means. Literary scholars conventionally seek to establish their reputations on narrow mastery early in their careers so that they may pronounce on larger topics and wield greater influence later on. She, by contrast, began almost as a generalist, publishing early essays on works of the tenth through the seventeenth centuries; as she matured, she focused ever greater learning and ideational power on an ever narrowing topic, establishing new standards of analytic intensity for the field of later medieval literary studies. For by 1978 it was clear that the fourteenth century would be her field and that she would change the terms of its study. In that year, she published “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” an essay still routinely cited, relied on, and contested 40 years after its publication. At a stroke it abolished the habit of characterizing that period of literary history as “the age of Chaucer.” She showed how uncharacteristic of its generation Chaucer's poetry was, and thus helped to explain his accomplishment as the result of artful strategy and design rather than the happy outpouring of the age’s spirit. More important, it offered critical means for exploring and explaining literary styles for which literary criticism had no analytical resources, styles that relied not on irony, characterological interiority, and cosmopolitan facility of allusion, but on didactic earnestness, direct address, and speculative rather than psychological richness. Chief among the works benefiting from this demolition of critical commonplaces was William Langland's formidably difficult Piers Plowman, which soon became the nearly exclusive focus of her research. A remarkable series of dense, innovative essays, from “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman” (1982) through “Acts of Vagrancy: The C-Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388” (1997), set new standards, and supplied new techniques, for examining the rationale of literary form and the historical dimensions of literary figuration. These essays helped make Piers the most exciting topic of medieval literary scholarship as the twentieth century drew to a close, and elevated the standards of critical sophistication expected in Middle English studies. In 1986, Middleton joined with four other scholars to design, propose, and execute what has become the five-volume Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman. In his preface, the author of Volume 4 calls her the “intellectual leader” of the commentary, centrally responsible for its innovative structure and procedures, which were designed to capture the logic both of the poem's internal development and of its historical development through three successive authorial versions. Her work on Volume 3 of the Penn Commentary led to a half-dozen intense and luminous essays, but remains incomplete and in fragmentary form.

Middleton’s influence was realized as much in colloquy and personal exchange as in print. In person as on the page, her intelligence was fierce, not gentle. She held firm views and expressed them without apology. Criticism and theory, she thought, were rational discourses directed to the rational understanding and assessment of the goods afforded by art, and she held all scholars to high standards of clarity, evidence, and logical argument; though a defender of continental theory during the theory wars of the 1980s, she ruthlessly battled incursions of the vatic and the obscure in her writing and that of others. But, though not gentle, she was generous, and threw herself into the intellectual lives of her students and colleagues. She won the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 1980 and the Excellence in Teaching Award from Northern California Phi Beta Kappa in 1999. A chair's memo on the occasion of the former award expressed admiration at her ability “to inspire unusual efforts from doctoral students pursuing their individual studies in medieval literature.” Her graduate mentorship came to be celebrated internationally, and her students — several now among the most important figures in the field — remembered eloquently, at memorials in Berkeley and at the International Medieval Congress, the immense time and energy she invested in their work, not only as they pursued their Ph.D.s but for many years after. More unusually, she gave similar attention to many younger scholars who were never her students. When young medievalists needed help, she would set her own work aside and give full attention to theirs. It was not unusual for her to return someone’s long and untidy first draft before the day was out, every page covered in handwritten comments—dense, witty, sometimes coarse—solving problems of analysis, exposition, and expression currente calamo. The Festschrift in her honor edited by two former students (Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, 2013) bears eloquent testimony to the love and admiration she earned throughout her field. The regard was reciprocal: walking away from dinner with a large group of her former students, who had assembled on the occasion of an honorary lecture she delivered, her first comment was, “My cup runneth over.”

Many major universities moved to recruit her over the years, but she remained at Berkeley from both love and conviction. A graduate in 1958 of Detroit, Michigan's Bedford High School and in 1962 of the University of Michigan with a B.A. in English, she was outside systems of public education for only the four years of her Harvard doctoral work. She spoke with cheerful contempt of the private schools and their ways; explaining to a new recruit how Berkeley worked to foster the research of assistant professors so that all of them might earn tenure, she derisively named the alternative “the east-coast system.” She believed in public universities as public goods, and held it a point of high principle that the best research university in the nation should remain true to its public calling. She was accordingly tireless in its service at every level. Her years as chair of the Department of English (1988-1992), are remembered as years of extraordinary challenges successfully faced. The first of these was the emergency closure of Wheeler Hall just days before classes began for 1988-89, which resulted in the department's removal, helter-skelter and in a matter of hours, to the Banway Building half a mile away. (With the address of her first memo following this catastrophe — “TO: English Department community in exile” — she signaled how she would rally colleagues to draw together with good cheer and support each other through the chaos.) But these years are remembered chiefly as years of achievement, with many successful faculty recruitments, a revision of English major requirements, and prescient reforms, invisible to most, that prepared the department's staff, procedures, and equipment for the more extensive documentation and reporting that was shortly required of it. Her service to the Academic Senate was rich, continuous, and visible: she served on the committees on Courses of Instruction (1971-72), Educational Policy (1972-73), and Assembly Representation (1972-74, 1995-97), and on Graduate Council (1986-88).  When, in 1990, the Academic Senate established seats for elected representatives on Divisional Council, she was in the first cohort elected. She was elected again for 1995-97. For such service, and for extensive work on administrative committees at Berkeley and systemwide, she was awarded the Berkeley Citation upon her retirement in 2006.

Middleton first emerged into faculty-wide visibility while still an assistant professor. Active in the political movements of the late 1960s, she met then-Assistant Professor Gene I. Rochlin of the Department of Physics (and later a professor in the Energy and Resources Group) when a group of leftist faculty appointed them to coauthor a public statement. They married in 1973 and remained virtually inseparable for the next 43 years. When they were at the height of their powers, late-afternoons in their house on Derby Street often saw spontaneous gatherings of their colleagues and graduate students for coffee and conversation. Middleton was survived by Rochlin — who died two years after she did, in November 2018 — and by her stepchildren, Stephen Rochlin and David Rochlin, and their families.

Steven Justice
2019