Karl Young was an American medievalist and professor of English.
Background
Young was born on November 2, 1879 in Clinton, Iowa, the third son and last of four children of George Billings Young and Frances Eliza (Hinman) Young. His parents were of New England descent. His paternal grandfather, George Drummond Young, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, had served as a Presbyterian minister in Maryland, Ohio, and Iowa. His father, a graduate of Oberlin College, became a lawyer and later a county and then a circuit court judge. After the father's death in 1893, Young was taken by his mother to her former home, Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Education
Young attended the local high school in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and received excellent training in the classics. He entered the University of Michigan in 1897. His mother's death, in his freshman year, left him without family obligations, and after receiving the A. B. in 1901 he began graduate work in English at Harvard. After receiving the A. M. in 1902, he spent two years as instructor in English at the United States Naval Academy. Young received honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin (1934) and the University of Michigan (1937).
Career
Himself a Presbyterian, while in Annapolis Young continued his research by studying the liturgy and the Roman Rite under the guidance of a Catholic priest of the Redemptorist Order, Father James Barron. Each summer he went abroad to consult medieval material in the European libraries, and he spent some time in liturgical studies with French Benedictine monks on the Isle of Wight. Returning to Harvard for work with George Lyman Kittredge, Young received his Ph. D. in 1907 with a thesis on the literary origins of Chaucer's Troilus, published in England (1908) by the Chaucer Society as The Origin and Development of the Story of Troilus and Criseyde. He spent the year 1907-1908 on a traveling fellowship in such manuscript centers as Paris, Rome, and Montecassino, and then returned to become assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. Young left Wisconsin in 1923 to become professor of English, and later (1938) Sterling Professor, at Yale University. His long work on medieval drama was now nearing fruition: he had searched out liturgical manuscripts in most of the countries of Western Europe, and had written some twenty monographs on the subject, presenting many new texts. In 1927-1928 he went on leave to London with all his materials and there proceeded to assemble a definitive corpus of the texts, with accompanying exposition, interpretation, and evaluation. Young had intended to pay the printing costs from his own pocket, but through the intervention of John M. Manly the Clarendon Press undertook to publish the resulting two-volume work, The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933), which for the first time made possible broad, intelligent study in this field. Young next returned to his early interest in Chaucer, particularly a study of his literary sources as a measure of the extent of Chaucer's learning. During visits to England, Young examined and took notes on hundreds of manuscripts to which Chaucer had or might have had access: dictionaries, schoolbooks, classical and medieval texts. Many of these he had photocopied. Finding that common fourteenth-century schoolbooks, such as the Liber Catonianus, contained selections from the works of many Latin authors, Young concluded that Chaucer probably used such compilations and was not himself a scholar. A number of articles by Young and dissertations by his students were based on these materials he collected, and their use has continued. As director of graduate studies in English at Yale he was tireless in urging and helping students to excel, always stressing the importance of their knowing other languages, particularly Latin and Greek. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, of a heart attack, a few days after his sixty-fourth birthday, and was buried in the family plot in Springdale Cemetery, Clinton, Iowa.
Achievements
Young was a clergyman, better known for his research of English literature.
Membership
Young served as president of the Modern Language Association of America (1940-1941), was a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy of America, and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Where teaching and scholarly administration were concerned, as his fellow medievalist John S. P. Tatlock has written, Young always "stood out for the essentials. He set his face like a flint against watering down, and held others to the same exactingness. " Yet "his candor, his brilliance, his spontaneous wit, his valuing of the distinguished, so combined with his social gifts and ability to handle things lightly that they did not clash with his tolerance, his enduring loyalties, and his generous appreciations. "
Interests
Young's chief recreation was music, and his friends knew him as a skilled pianist.
Connections
On August 10, 1911, Young married Frances Campbell Berkeley of Morgantown, West Virginia, an instructor in the same department. Their two sons were George Berkeley and Karl.
