Background
Neil Ripley Ker was born on May 28, 1908, in Brompton, London. He was the son of Robert MacNeil and Lucy (Winifred) Ker.
Oxford OX1 4AU, United Kingdom
Ker studied at Magdalen College in Oxford, United Kingdom.
educator lecturer author scholars
Neil Ripley Ker was born on May 28, 1908, in Brompton, London. He was the son of Robert MacNeil and Lucy (Winifred) Ker.
Ker exhibited intellectual promise early in life. His mother doted on him and instructed him at home, introducing Ker to Latin, aesthetics, and other advanced scholastic subjects.
When he was twelve years old, he moved to Eton where he was peripherally affected by the provost, M. R. James. James was a scholar who also had respect and passion for studying manuscripts, and he encouraged apt students by allowing them to access to the Fellows’ College Library. In this library, there was a vast and precious collection of medieval books and documents, which James actually attempted to catalog, an effort that was published in 1895. Interestingly, it was this amateur effort that Ker improved and expanded upon nearly eighty years later, when he published Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries (1969-1992), in 1977.
When Ker entered Magdalen College in Oxford in 1927, he initially followed a course of study that would direct him to a career in the Foreign Office. However, heeding the advice of literary great C. S. Lewis, Ker redirected his focus by the end of his first term and began concentrating on the history of the English language. He completed his 1933 Bachelor of Letters thesis on the manuscripts and paleographical aspects of Ælfric's homilies.
After receiving his degree, Ker stayed on in Oxford and began giving courses in paleography in 1936. Still, in his twenties, he had already established himself as an important publishing scholar, notably in a series of eight contributions to the Oxford-based journal Medium Ævum. One of these pieces was a penetrating review of the facsimile of The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry (1933), edited by the formidable team of R. W. Chambers, Max Förster, and Robin Flower. Ker boldly pointed out some shortcomings in the editors' transcriptions with the help of an unpublished ultraviolet photograph Chambers himself had given to Ker.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Ker was granted an exemption as a conscientious objector. He showed what must have been unpopular convictions at the time by advising other conscientious objectors how to present their cases before a tribunal. For his wartime service he was assigned to work as a porter at the Radcliffe Infirmary, within easy reach of all the Oxford college libraries and only a few hundred yards from the Bodleian Library.
During the war years he published many important articles and reviews on paleographical subjects. His article "The Hague Manuscript of the Epistola Cuthberti de Obitu Bedae with Bede's Song" (1939) brought to light a crucial, assimilating stage of transmission. He also continued to display his photographic memory for scripts, decoration, and even for such things as rulings and patterns of wormholes, by using them to identify the provenance of membra disiecta, or dispersed manuscript leaves, in a second series of notes for British Museum Quarterly (1940). During this period he also published his seminal article "The Migration of Manuscripts from the English Medieval Libraries."
Ker's standing as a scholar was recognized as the war ended with his election to a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1945. The next year, he was appointed reader in paleography at Oxford University, filling the post with another great paleographer, E.A. Lowe. In 1949, Ker became a curator of the Bodleian Library, an honor befitting his unrivaled mastery of its medieval manuscripts.
His growing reputation as an authority in manuscript studies was also acknowledged in 1952 and 1953 by his selection to inaugurate the Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at Oxford. He chose as his topic English Latin manuscripts in the century after the Norman Conquest. Ker published his second book, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings, in 1954. This remarkable undertaking in some ways epitomizes Ker's gifts as a scholar.
In 1968, in order to spend more time on his research and writing, Ker retired early at the age of sixty from the readership in paleography at Oxford, at the same time resigning his fellowship and his duties as librarian at Magdalen College.
The primary reason for his early retirement was to give himself uninterrupted time to work on Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. The Standing Conference of National and University Libraries had asked Ker "to describe medieval manuscripts in collections hitherto uncatalogued or barely catalogued in print", excluding therefore the British Library, the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Library, and Cambridge University Library. Given these enormous exceptions, Ker responded with rather more than either he or the Standing Committee anticipated. In 1969, he wrote in the preface to Volume 1, devoted to London libraries alone, that his plan was to work his way alphabetically from Aberdeen to York. In 1977 Volume 2 was published.
While still at Oxford, Ker made a quick break by accepting a visiting professorship at the University of Illinois, where he taught a graduate seminar in English and Latin paleography for the fall term. Ker accepted a visiting appointment at Yale University for the spring semester 1971.
Neil Ripley Ker was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1957 and of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1977. He was also a corresponding fellow in the Medieval Academy of America.
The feat overcome in Ker’s identification of handwriting may not be immediately recognized. It is important to note that the material with which Ker earned his expertise was all written before the advent of the printing press. Thus, the technical difficulties involved with his methods and process may be hard to comprehend. Not only were the language and content unfamiliar and challenging, but the layout and legibility were also constant struggles.
Writers with dissimilar styles, slants, and habits set the words upon uneven handwritten lines, and often within crooked margins and columns. Ker’s ability to remain faithful to his ultimate goal, which Van Kampen says was "to account for every medieval book in England and proceed alphabetically by location from Aberdeen to York," while struggling constantly with the tactual obstacles involved in the analysis of the documents is both admirable and awesome. Fortunately, Ker was not only steadfast with his purpose, but was gifted with the aptitude for structure and organization. Through his life, Ker was not considered a social recluse or misfit, but was always described as a modest, thoughtful, approachable and sensitive man. He was surrounded by many great friends, and was well-liked and respected by colleagues and contemporaries.
Although Ker and his wife welcomed friends and visitors from nearby and abroad to their homes near Oxford and in Scotland, Ker was a private person with simple tastes, who tended to seclude himself with his family when not secluded in a library. Scholars from all over the world might easily intrude, however, by writing to him, for he kept up a voluminous correspondence, sometimes answering as many as twenty letters on a Sunday from his study. While his research and writing were always his most absorbing hobby, Ker also enjoyed walks with family and friends in the hills around his home.
Quotes from others about the person
"Ker’s thirty-two years of instruction created a methodology and level of scholarship that have permanently enriched the study of medieval English history and literature." - Kimberly L. Van Kampen in the Dictionary of Literary Biography
"The essence of Ker’s reputation depends on his work as a cataloger of manuscripts." - Julian Brown
"There is nobody left in our field who could set himself such great tasks and realize them with such tenacious consistency. I admire his greatness the most when set beside his unpretentious simplicity." - Bernard Bischoff
In 1938, Ker married his second cousin, Jean Frances Findlay. The couple had four children, a son named Robert, after Neil's father, and three daughters, Christina, Helen, and Janet.