Volume 32, Number 1

Professor Janet P. Bews (1938-2000)

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Professor Janet Bews 1938-2000

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Janet Bews, an alumnus of the Ancient History & Classics Department at Trent University, passed away peacefully at her home on 27 August 2000. Her funeral was held at All Saints Church, Peterborough on August 29th.

Janet did her doctoral work at Royal Holloway College in the 1960s, studying with Norma Miller, who was a great friend also to us at Trent. Janet did her undergraduate work at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), and after a brief time at Cambridge, moved to Royal Holloway College where she completed her doctoral work on Tacitus and Vergil.

In 1966 she became one of the founding members of the Classics Department at Trent, and taught here with great enthusiasm and respect from her students and colleagues for a third of a century until her retirement in 1999. She published articles on Tacitus and Vergil, and edited the collection of essays (Celebratio) that marked the Department's 30th anniversary in 1997/98.

Latin was her initial passion, but her special interest lay in the interaction between the ancient world and other cultures, especially the mediaeval world in which she developed a particular interest in her last years (Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, and, of course, Dante).

She was fascinated by the transformation of myths and stories from one culture and one age to another, and pioneered a unique course on myth which began with Gilgamesh and ended with C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams (two more of her special favourites), studying how stories and themes "resonate" in time and place.


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