Professor Peter M. Brown (1926 –2022)

Abstract

Peter Melville Brown, who died in Aberdeen on 4 January 2022 at the age of 95, was a distinguished academic and scholar, known primarily for his work in what was the then relatively underexplored area of the cultural history of later Cinquecento Florence. Born on 7 July 1926 in Todmorden, a historic industrial town straddling the Yorkshire–Lancashire border, he was the son of an engineer employed at one of the local cotton mills. After completing his secondary education at the town’s grammar school, in 1944 Peter joined the Navy, which deployed the young sublieutenant to learn Japanese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. After the war, he proceeded to Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1952 with first class honours in Italian and French, and with the additional award of a Senior Demyship. This was followed by a two-year scholarship at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, an intellectual experience which was to prove seminal for his later career. His Oxford doctoral thesis, a study of the Florentine scholar Lionardo Salviati (1539–1589), was published by Oxford University Press in 1974. Peter’s first academic post was at the University of Aberdeen. Starting in 1955 as assistant lecturer in Italian, he went on to become Senior Lecturer and Head of Department. Colleagues in the later stages of his tenure there included Tom O’Neill, Brian Prescott, and Isa Minio-Paluello Cochrane. In 1972, he succeeded T. Gwynfor Griffith as professor of Italian at the University of Hull where his team, over time, comprised John Barnes, John Woodhouse, Peter Hainsworth, John Gatt Rutter, Frank Woodhouse, and Judith Bryce. In 1975 he returned to Scotland on his appointment as Stevenson Professor of Italian at the University of Glasgow where he headed a team comprising Eileen Anne Millar, Denis Mooney, and Richard Greenwood. He retired in 1987, and was honoured the following year by the publication of a Festschrift dedicated to him, entitled Renaissance and ITALIAN STUDIES 2022, VOL. 77, NO. 3, 364–366 https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2022.2096316