Beryl Smalley

She never married, and died in Oxford after a brief illness in 1984. After her surgeon told her she had only a few months to live, she finished as much of her work as possible and destroyed the rest.

In 1963, Smalley was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 1985, a Festschrift was published in her memory, titled Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley, edited by Katherine Walsh and Diana Wood.

Smalley was a member of the Marxist Historians Group until 1956, when most members of the group left. Later she delivered the Ford Lectures on Thomas Becket.

Between 1931 and 1935, Smalley taught at Royal Holloway College, when she left to become a research fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. Later, she was a temporary assistant in Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and, in 1944, became tutor in history at St Hilda's College. Smalley remained in that position until 1969, while from 1957 onwards she was also the college's Vice-Principal. One of her more notable pupils was the internationally respected historian on mid-Tudor England, Jennifer Loach, a tutorial fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. Smalley discovered the lost biblical lectures of John Wycliffe, though she had no sympathy for the man himself. According to R. W. Southern, she "could not tolerate his stridency and his putting the Bible above the Church."

"In 1929 she had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, and about ten or twelve years later had become a member of the Communist Party. The connection between these two loyalties remained a mystery to all but herself. But by the time of her death she had quietly dissociated herself from both of them. These were her only attempts to find a home in a universal community. When these failed her, she sought no others, and accepted her solitary fate with unflinching courage and steadfastness. She bequeathed her books to her old College, and directed that there should be 'of course, no memorial service'".

Beryl Smalley FBA (1905–1984) was an English historian best known for her work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1941, but revised many times, a book that laid the foundations of modern study of the medieval popular Bible.

Beryl Smalley was born on 3 June 1905 in Highfield House, Stockport Etchells, the eldest of six children born to Edgar Smalley, a Manchester businessman, and Constance Lilian Bowman. At 13, Beryl was sent to Cheltenham Ladies College. In 1923, she won a scholarship to St Hilda's College, Oxford. She studied there from 1924 to 1927 as Agnes Ley's pupil. After graduating, she was a research assistant to F. M. Powicke. In 1929, she went to Paris to study and converted to Catholicism. In 1930, she obtained her doctorate from the University of Manchester.