About the Fund
The Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund was established by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature in 2025, and honours the contribution made to the Society by Nigel F. Palmer, executive editor of Medium Ævum 1990-2022. The Travel Fund will support graduate students whose research in medieval languages and literature necessitates travel.
The Fund will support:
- Travel to visit libraries and archives to consult manuscripts or other archival material
- Travel to visit archaeological sites and/or monuments of direct relevance to the student’s research
The Society welcomes donations of any size to support the Nigel F. Palmer Travel Fund.
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Nigel F. Palmer: His Scholarship and Legacy
Nigel F. Palmer (1946-2022) was executive editor of the Society’s journal Medium Ævum, and its responsible editor for German, Latin and all historical disciplines for well over thirty years, from 1990 until his death in 2022. He was appointed Professor of German Medieval and Linguistic Studies at the University of Oxford in 1992, when he moved from Oriel College, his academic home since 1976, to St Edmund Hall. His retirement from that post in 2012 allowed him, if anything, to intensify the already exceptional pace of his scholarly life, and to travel even more widely in its pursuit. His work as a German literary scholar and as a historian in equal measure – in short, as a medievalist – was grounded in the careful study of the manuscript and archival evidence, to borrow a phrase that he liked to use, in autopsy; and in that, he had the ability, in the words of one of his closest academic and personal friends at his memorial conference in 2023, ‘to turn dross into gold’. His inclination in his codicological endeavours to turn away from the familiar and the grand to explore the much more extensive, but entirely uncharted landscapes of the ignored and the apparently quotidian, led him not only to numerous stellar discoveries, but to academic studies of fundamental significance that remain seminal in their fields.
Nigel was a true proponent of inclusivity long before that term entered the institutional lexicon. He loved to encourage younger scholars and treated them with the respect that he knew their expertise in their own specialist areas should be accorded: in other words, as his equals. His proclivity to puncture inflated egos amongst his contemporaries and peers, a habit that he exercised with kindness and without mercy in equal measure, made him beloved amongst graduate students and junior academics in his field across the continent and beyond. Many became his lifelong friends. He welcomed them to his Oxford college and to his home, and was always on the road, visiting libraries and archives and speaking at conferences. He was much in demand, not just for his extraordinary papers, but also for his personal and intellectual commitment to the whole enterprise: he was always the centre of lively and engaged discussion.
Our aim is to endow a travel fund in Nigel Palmer’s spirit: to support graduate students in medieval studies to travel and pursue research on original materials.
