Background
Cecil Grayson was born on February 5, 1920, in Batley, Yorkshire, England to the family of John Micklethwaite Grayson and Dora Hartley.
Cecil Grayson was educated at Batley Grammar School.
Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Cecil Grayson obtained first-class honours in modern languages in 1947.
Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
(A scholarly edition of works by Francesco Guicciardini. T...)
A scholarly edition of works by Francesco Guicciardini. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
https://www.amazon.com/Francesco-Guicciardini-Selected-Writings-Classics/dp/0199607672/?tag=2022091-20
1965
(Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Al...)
Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye; and stipulates the moral and artistic pre-requisites of the successful painter. On Painting had an immediate and profound influence on Italian Renaissance artists including Ghiberti, Fra Angelico and Veneziano and on later figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, and remains a compelling theory of art.
https://www.amazon.com/Painting-Classics-Leon-Alberti-ebook/dp/B002TJLF9U/?tag=2022091-20
1972
Cecil Grayson was born on February 5, 1920, in Batley, Yorkshire, England to the family of John Micklethwaite Grayson and Dora Hartley.
Educated at Batley Grammar School, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Cecil Grayson obtained first-class honors in modern languages in 1947. At Oxford his teachers included Humphrey Whitfield and Carlo Dionisotti, certainly the two most outstanding Italianists of the time in Britain; there he won a Heath Harrison Scholarship to Italy in 1947, where he learned a remarkably authentic spoken Italian; indeed, to many who heard him, his splendid Italian accent gave the impression that his voice had been taken over by an Italian radio announcer.
Grayson's academic work having been interrupted by war service in the Royal Army Pay Corps in India (1940-1946). In 1948 he began his teaching career at Oxford when he took up the lecturership of Dionisotti, who had departed for the Chair of Italian at Bedford College. Those were palmy days for tutorial fellows at Oxbridge colleges, but fifty years ago lecturers in such outlandish disciplines as Renaissance literature or Romance philology, were not admitted to the privileged ranks of the tutorial fellows. The future professor was given a non-stipendiary lecturership at his old college (1948-1957), and he later had a brief spell as a non-stipendiary lecturer at New College (1954–1957). With no university or college accommodation available to him, he continued to do his teaching at home, declining the costlier alternative of paying to rent a room in the town center as many of his contemporaries, living at greater distances, were forced to do.
Ten years after beginning his lecturing career, Cecil Grayson was elected in 1958 to Oxford’s Serena Chair of Italian, which carried with it a non-stipendiary fellowship and a room at Magdalen College; there he replaced another friend and colleague of his, Professor Alessandro Passerin D’Entrèves, who had resigned the Chair to return to his native Turin. It took Cecil several years to become accustomed to having a room in college, and in fact for some five or six years he continued to work in libraries and at home, but he also entered as fully as he could into both the social and administrative life of the college, serving on those committees where the presence of a professor was required, and officiating as Dean of Degrees for several years. He was for a quarter of a century after his election to the chair, an executive committee member of the British Society for Italian Studies, and editor of their journal Italian Studies.
In 1949 he produced, with the late Professor Dionisotti, who became his life-long friend and collaborator, an edition with commentary of Early Italian Texts; the particular merit of this volume was to make it more easily possible to include in an Honours syllabus a study of Italian vernacular texts dating back in some cases to the tenth century. In the less rigorous academic climate which now operates, Early Italian Texts are no longer in such demand, but already by 1965, this useful book had run into a second edition. After the De commodis, it was Alberti’s unpublished writings, the Opuscoli inediti di Leon Battista Alberti (1954), which firmly established his scholarly reputation, providing him with his first major edition and a break-through into the Italian academic hierarchy, where he successfully promoted British Italian scholarship inside the Peninsula, notably by his active participation in many aspects of Italian academic life. He was a natural choice as one of Britain’s vice-presidents of the International Association of Italianists (AISLLI) which first met in Cambridge in 1953 but subsequently (and with obvious logic) largely based itself thereafter in Italy. Despite certain doubts about the Association’s hierarchical set-up in its latter days, he became the most active British participant in AISLLI’s activities for over forty years, and his calm presence and persuasive influence at these international gatherings helped promote their success and at the same time seemed to focus world attention on Italian studies in these islands.
He had a long love affair with America, and for nearly thirty years between 1965 and 1994 enjoyed fellowships or visiting professorships at various centres of learning: he was Fellow in Residence at Chicago’s Newberry Library in 1965, a member, for two decades, of Harvard’s governing body for the Centre for Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti, and visiting professor at Yale (1966), Berkeley (1969 and 1973), University of California at Los Angeles (1980, 1984, 1987, and 1994) and New York University, where he taught for the whole of the academic year 1995–1996 when he was already 76 years of age. Twice he undertook long stints as a visiting professor at Cape Town (1980 and 1983) and Perth (1973 and 1980) and was a frequent visitor to South Africa and the Antipodes. He became emeritus in 1987.
Cecil Grayson died on April 28, 1998, in Oxford.
(Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Al...)
1972(A scholarly edition of works by Francesco Guicciardini. T...)
1965
As chairman of the small sub-faculty of Italian, Grayson was a perfect head of department - never imposing himself or interfering with the initiatives of his colleagues, but always ready to respond positively to their requests for help or advice. He hated bureaucracy and time-wasting and often expressed relief that his retirement had come before the sterile and tedious excesses of these past fifteen years descended. He would have been very restless had he had to continue after 1987. He believed in quality rather than quantity; during his twenty-nine years as chairman of Italian, he increased the lecturing strength by only one appointment. But he was gratified by the influence and reputation which Oxford’s small Italian section had. At his farewell dinner in Pembroke College, attended by some 100 colleagues, many of them former pupils, he spoke with pleasure of Italianists’ achievements and noted, with a mixture of pride and amusement, that two of his current colleagues occupied respectively the positions of Chairman of the Modern Languages Faculty Board and Chairman of Faculty. ‘Italian’, he said, ‘has the Faculty in a stranglehold’.
Cecil Grayson married Margaret Parry Jordan on March 17, 1947. They had three daughters - Celia, Catherine, Julia, and a son - Robin.