Edward Cooke Armstrong

Background

Edward Cooke Armstrong was born on August 21, 1871 in Winchester, Virginia, United States. He was the third son and youngest of five children of James Edward Armstrong, a Methodist minister, and Margaret (Hickman) Armstrong. He was of Scotch-Irish descent.

Although he grew up under the difficult economic conditions of Virginia after the Civil War, his parents enabled him to prepare for college.

Education

He entered Randolph-Macon men's college at Ashland, Virginia, in 1887 and graduated with the A. B. degree in 1890, when not quite nineteen.

In 1893, after two years as an instructor at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, he entered the Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student in Romance languages. His doctoral dissertation was a critical edition of an Old French poem, "Le Chevalier à l'épée, " and he received his Ph. D. in 1897.

Career

For twenty years, from 1897 to 1917, Armstrong taught at Johns Hopkins, rising gradually through the academic ranks until he succeeded A. Marshall Elliott as chairman of the department of Romance languages after the latter's death in 1910.

Armstrong's enduring respect for Elliott, under whom he had taken his doctorate, imbued him with the ambition to carry on and expand Elliott's pioneering work in the United States in training Romance scholars. As an assisting editor, contributor, and, from 1911 to 1915, co-editor of Modern Language Notes (which Elliott had founded), Armstrong wrote for this scholarly journal several articles and more than forty reviews and notices.

He also began (1914), and edited for some years, the Elliott Monographs as a medium of scholarly publication in tribute to his predecessor. As an editor of Modern Language Notes, he regularly checked every detail of the articles submitted to him and aided the authors with constructive suggestions. His students, too, learned from him an enduring lesson in accuracy of content, exactness and brevity of language, sound reasoning, and freedom from preconceived judgments. He made every effort to place his students and other scholars of his acquaintance in the exact type of position for which he believed them to be best fitted; a number had distinguished careers in fields they had not originally contemplated.

In 1917 Armstrong resigned from Johns Hopkins to accept a post as professor of French language at Princeton University. There he organized a group of scholars to undertake a study of the Alexander corpus--Old French poems of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries dealing with Alexander the Great. The project, "one of the few large Romance enterprises that have been fathered in America, " had resulted, by the time of his death, in fourteen volumes. Although his own field was Old French language and literature, Armstrong had "a sound respect for honest, precise labor" in any period. Under his editorship, for example, the first four numbers of the Elliott Monographs were devoted to the novelist Flaubert; others dealt with aspects of modern French literature.

Of his more distinguished students, H. Carrington Lancaster was noted for his work on seventeenth-century literature and E. Preston Dargan for his studies of the French eighteenth century and of Anatole France.

Armstrong took a leading part in the work of the Modern Language Association of America, of which he was president in 1918-1919. As such he helped found the American Council of Learned Societies in 1919 and was its secretary-treasurer, 1925-1929, and chairman, 1929-1935. In the judgment of the Council's executive officer, Waldo G. Leland, "His part in shaping its course and determining its policies cannot be overestimated. "

Armstrong retired from teaching at Princeton in 1939 as he approached the age of sixty-eight, but continued his own research ardently and, in spite of gradually failing health during the last year and a half of his life, uncomplainingly. During these final months, says Gilbert Chinard, Armstrong read and reread Montaigne's famous chapter "Of Experience, " with its appropriate line, "There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge. " He died of uremia at his home in Princeton and was buried in the Holbrook family plot in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Achievements

• For Armstrong's postwar services as dean of American students at the University of Bordeaux (1919) and his other achievements he was decorated with the Legion of Honor by the government of France. Among the honors that came to him were doctoral degrees from Oberlin College and the universities of Chicago, Paris, and Berlin.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Le Chevalier à l'Épée: An Old French Poem; Dissertation (French Edition)

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Syntax of the French verb

    (Syntax of the French verb. 188 Pages.)

  • The French Metrical Versions of Barlaam and Josaphat

Membership

Fellow member of the Mediaeval Academy of America, member of the American Philosophical Society.

Personality

Armstrong had an intuitive understanding of persons and situations, as well as a keen and practical sagacity. He was also friendly and warmhearted, although firm and uncompromising in the high standards he demanded of himself and inspired in others.

Connections

On June 8, 1905, Armstrong married Emerline Mason Holbrook of an established Boston family. They had one son.

Father:

James Edward Armstrong

Mother:

Margaret (Hickman) Armstrong

Spouse:

Emerline Mason (Holbrook) Armstrong

Son:

Percy Holbrook Armstrong