John Matthews Manly (September 2, 1865 – April 2, 1940) was an American professor of English literature and philology at the University of Chicago. Manly specialized in the study of the works of William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. His eight-volume work, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940), written in collaboration with his former student Edith Rickert, has been cited as a definitive study of Chaucer's works.
Early life and education
Manley was born in Virginia, the son of Charles Manly, a Baptist minister and university president. He attended Staunton Military Academy and Greenville Military Institute. At the age of 18, Manly earned a master's degree in Mathematics from Furman University. In 1890, he received a PhD from Harvard University in Philology, a non-departmental field for which he created his own curriculum.
Career
In 1884, at the age of 19, Manly accepted a position at William Jewell College teaching Mathematics, which he held for five years. After taking his doctorate in 1890 and teaching Anglo-Saxon at Radcliffe for a year, Manly accepted a call to Brown University and became one of the chief members of the English staff there, until 1898. He then accepted the department chair in English at the University of Chicago, which he maintained until retirement.
Manly was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1912. During World War I, he served as cryptanalyst in the Military Intelligence Division.
He gave the 1926 Warton Lecture on English Poetry. In 1931, he published a paper in the journal Speculum disproving William Romaine Newbold's deciphering of the Voynich Manuscript.
Selected publications
- as editor: English Poetry (1170–1892). Ginn & Co. 1907.
- with Edith Rickert: The Writing of English (1st ed.). Henry Holt & Co. 1919.; Manly, John Matthews; Rickert, Edith (1920). 1920 2nd edition.
References
- "John M. Manly & Edith Rickert". The University of Chicago Faculty: A Centennial View. University of Chicago. Retrieved March 21, 2013.
- ^ "Guide to the John Matthews Manly Papers 1892-1940". University of Chicago Library. University of Chicago. 2006. Retrieved March 21, 2013.
- Hulbert, J.R. (August 1940). "John Matthews Manly, 1865 - 1940". Modern Philology. 38 (1): 1–8. doi:10.1086/388458. JSTOR 433980. S2CID 162190802.
- "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved November 21, 2023.
- Koretsky, Allen C. (Spring 1970). "Chaucer's Use of the Apostrophe in "Troilus and Criseyde"". The Chaucer Review. 4 (4): 242–266. JSTOR 25093132. (Manly was the first American to give a Warton Lecture.)
- D'Imperio, M. E. (1978). The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma (PDF). Fort George G. Meade, MD: National Security Agency/Central Security Service. pp. 33–35. OCLC 50929259. Archived from the original on April 9, 2013.
- Manly, John Matthews (1931). "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS". Speculum. 6 (3): 345–391. doi:10.2307/2848508. ISSN 0038-7134. JSTOR 2848508. S2CID 163421798.
External links
- List of John Matthews Manly publications
- Full Text of "Contemporary British Literature: Bibliographies and Study Outlines," by John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert.
- Works by John Matthews Manly at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about John Matthews Manly at the Internet Archive
- Guide to the John Matthews Manly Papers 1885-1940 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
  | This biography of a United States linguist is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it. |
- 1865 births
- 1940 deaths
- American philologists
- Brown University faculty
- Chaucer scholars
- Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America
- Furman University alumni
- Harvard University alumni
- Linguists from the United States
- Presidents of the Modern Language Association
- Shakespearean scholars
- University of Chicago faculty
- American linguist stubs
- Members of the American Philosophical Society