 |
 |
Members of the REED community-- It is with a heavy heart that I have to report that Jane Cowling, co-editor of the Hampshire collection for REED, died recently in Brecon, Wales, after a brief illness. After a career in the Navy and raising two children, Jane decided to return to university as a mature student, gaining a BA and then a PhD at the University of Southampton, where she worked with John McGavin. Her doctoral thesis was an edition of the dramatic records of Winchester and Winchester College from 1558-1642, following REED protocols. When Jane and I decided to work together to edit the records of all of Hampshire for REED, she extended her work on Winchester back to the fourteenth century, and also edited records from Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. The majority of her edited records are now available on the REED Pre-Publication Collections website (www.reedprepub.org), with the rest to appear in the next few months. Jane also published interpretive articles on this research in Medieval English Theatre, Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. I shall greatly miss collaborating with Jane, not least getting to play good cop in our good cop/bad cop act when confronted with archive staff reluctant to let us see a document because it was too damaged, or too late in the day, etc. Jane’s bad cop, seemingly equal parts naval officer and imperious lady of the manor, simply refused to believe that a reasonable person wouldn’t accede to our request--and soon we would have the document in our hands. My knowledge of Hampshire comes as much from traveling the county with Jane as from research in the archives; she was a generous colleague and a wonderful friend. She will be missed by the REED community. Yours, Peter Greenfield