Peter John Fergusson

Background

Peter John Fergusson was born in 1934. He is a son of Alfred Milnthorpe Fergusson, a British cleric for St. Peter's Church in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and Ursula Mabel Fergusson.

Education

Peter John Fergusson received a Bachelor of Arts from Michigan State University in 1960. He entered Harvard University for graduate work, achieving his Master of Arts in 1961. There the lectures of Eduard Sekler introduced him to Cistercian architecture which would become a life-long passion. At Harvard, he worked closely with James Ackerman and John Coolidge of the Fogg Museum, who, as he wrote, "tried to make an architectural historian" out of him. In 1967, he received a Doctor of Philosophy with a dissertation on twelfth-century Cistercian architecture written under John Kenneth Conant from Harvard University.

Career

Peter John Fergusson was hired as an assistant professor first by McGill University in 1965 and then Wellesley College in 1966. In 1987, he was named Teodora L. and Stanley H. Feldberg Professor of Art.

A longtime professor of art with a particular interest in the architecture of medieval Cistercian abbey, Peter Fergusson published Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England in 1984. In 2000, he teamed up with Stuart Harrison to produce a history of the most prestigious of these structures. Rievaulx Abbey: Community, Architecture, Memory tells the story of the founding, dissolution, and restoration of this remarkable monastery. As an emeritus professor, Fergusson wrote Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket, which appeared in 2011.

Achievements

• Peter John Fergusson for his works received such awards, as Reginald Taylor Prize and Medal, Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize. For his longtime professorship at Wellesley College, he earned Faculty Service Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Rievaulx Abbey: Community, Architecture, Memory

    (From its foundation in 1132, Rievaulx Abbey in North York...)

    2000
  • Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England 1984
  • Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket 2011

Membership

• 

  Society of Antiquaries of London , United Kingdom

  May 5, 1986

• 

  Peter John Fergusson chaired the Boston area Save Venice Foundation between 1980 and 1986. In 1986, he became a vice-chair.

  Save Venice , United States

  1980

Connections

Peter John Fergusson is married to Lilian Armstrong.

Father:

Alfred Milnthorpe Fergusson

Mother:

Ursula Mabel Fergusson

Wife:

Lilian Armstrong

Lilian Armstrong is Mildred Lane Kemper Professor Emerita of Art at Wellesley College. Retired from teaching, she continues to work on book history, focusing on Italian Renaissance manuscripts and early printed books. Her areas of teaching included Italian Renaissance Painting and Sculpture; Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Illumination; and seminars on Venetian Renaissance Art and on topics in Italian Renaissance Sculpture.

She has served on the editorial boards of the periodicals Word and Image; and Rivista di Storia della Miniatura. She has been a consultant for the catalog of 15th Century books in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, also for a digitized catalog of incunabula (books printed before the end of 1500) at Cambridge University Library, and for a "hard-copy" catalog of incunabula in Cambridge University Colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Presently she is a consultant to the 15cBOOKTRADE project and to Material Evidence in Incunabula, whose goal is to enter provenance information of the approximately 500,000 surviving books printed in Europe in the 15th century, into a web database.

teacher:

Eduard Franz Sekler

Eduard Franz Sekler was an architecture historian and first director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. He joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1954, where he co-founded the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. The author of many publications, and recipient of several awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sekler worked as an advocate for the preservation of Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. The lectures of Eduard Sekler introduced Peter John Fergusson to Cistercian architecture.

teacher:

James Sloss Ackerman

James Sloss Ackerman was one of the leading historians of art and architecture. He taught at Berkeley and then at Harvard University until 1990. During the Second World War, he served in the United States Army in Italy. This allowed him to improve his knowledge of the Italian Renaissance which would then become his major area of expertise. His books are considered classics in their field, both in terms of rigor and of method: a monograph on architecture, the biography of an artist, the study of a particular architectural style.

teacher:

John Phillips Coolidge

John Phillips Coolidge was a director of the Fogg Art Museum in 1948-1968. He taught at Harvard University in 1955-1984.

teacher:

Kenneth Conant

Peter John Fergusson wrote a dissertation under Kenneth John Conant.