Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

Pfaff et al present an obituary for eminent philologist and scholar of Middle English literature George Kane, who died on December 14, 2008, at the age of ninety-two in Eastbourne, Sussex. Kane had been elected as a Corresponding Fellow in 1975 and then, following his move in 1976 to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he taught as William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of English, became a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Kane's outstanding contributions to Piers Plowman scholarship and to the discussion of the principles of textual criticism were immediately recognized. The A Version won him the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize of the British Academy (1963); for the B Version Kane and Donaldson were jointly awarded the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America (1978); and the C Version brought him the Gollancz Prize a second time (1999).