Tribute: Russell Peck

PAST & PRESENT: Understanding the past helps “;enable people to live more vitally in the present,” wrote Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and Poetry, who joined the English Department in 1961. (Photograph: J. Adam Fenster)

Each of us should be lucky to earn a single crowning achievement in our time, but the life of Dr. Russell Peck was so unquestionably well-lived—both personally and professionally—that he earned dozens of them.

Russell’s keen scholarly output continues to shape our understanding of medieval literature, particularly when it comes to the remarkable poet John Gower. Russell’s founding of the Middle English Texts Series fundamentally changed not just what we know about centuries of our history, but also how we teach it. Influential programs of study at home and abroad owe their existence to him. So does one of the greatest libraries for medieval studies in the world, Rochester’s own Rossell Hope Robbins Library in Rush Rhees.

And all this pales in comparison to his human impact. This is a man, after all, whose tireless energy and boundless enthusiasm inspired generations of students and colleagues during more than five decades as a pillar of the English department. We sadly lost Russell in February at the age of 89, but it is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of us, all around the world, who count ourselves blessed to have known him, to have been shaped by his gentle guidance and his sparkling wit.

Russell’s Wyoming upbringing never left him, so I hope he’ll smile when I say that I’d have better luck trying to lasso the moon than I would in trying to encapsulate his impact on this world. Even here I feel the pull of the man. For, rather than despair at the impossibility of giving testament to him, I find myself turning to his words and his lessons.

In his introduction to the second volume of his monumental edition of Gower’s masterpiece, Confessio Amantis, Russell wrote that “without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history.” This complex idea was one Russell recognized early in the poet’s work, and it never ceased to fascinate him. “But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past,” he went on to say, “or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.”

That open-eyed engagement with the world—cognizant of the past but passionately focused on the present—is how he lived his life, and how he asked us all to live our lives in turn.

If in doing so we achieve only a measure of what he did, we should count ourselves very lucky indeed.

—Michael Livingston ’06 (PhD)

Livingston, whose research focuses on the military history of medieval Europe, was named The Citadel’s first-ever Citadel Distinguished Professor in March. A student of Peck’s, Livingston has posted a personal tribute, “Russell Peck, My Friend and Mentor”.

More about Peck’s life as a scholar and teacher.