D'AVRAY, David L.

PERSONAL: Born in Lusaka, Zambia; son of Hector Anthony (a colonial civil servant) and Audrey Sabina D'Avray; married Julia Caroline Walworth (an art historian), August 14, 1985. Education: St. John's College, Cambridge, B.A., 1973; Balliol College, Oxford, D.Phil., 1977. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES: Home—Flat 16, 1 Hornton St., London W8, England. Office—Department of History, University College, University of London, Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, England.

CAREER: Professor of history at University of London, London, England.

WRITINGS:

The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1985.

Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

(With Nicole Bériou) Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity, Centro Italiano di studi sull'Alto medioevo (Spoleto, Italy), 1994.

Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to journals.

SIDELIGHTS: English medieval historian David D'Avray is the author of several books that focus on aspects of life in the Middle Ages. His Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350 "provides readers with a sensitive and supple study" of the subject, according to Alan Fletcher of Medium Aevum. D'Avray begins by pointing out that, from the fourth century through the Middle Ages, there was a dearth of archived sermons related to the passing of royalty. By the mid-1300s, "no memorial sermon for a prince [had] survived, except for occasional mentionings," commented Journal of Religion writer John Baldwin. That changed at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when memorial texts tied to such influential rulers as Edward I of England began to surface.

D'Avray has taken these unedited manuscripts and, according to Baldwin, "transcribed nearly fifty pages of Latin text, and placed the genre on a solid scholarly basis." The author examines three aspects of memorializing, the reviewer added: first, the "portrayal of individual personality," followed by "representation of political ideology," and finally "attitudes toward death and afterlife." To Jean Dunbabin, writing in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the author "demonstrates that these sermons offer the historian insights into the ways in which political office and its holders were presented by preachers to the wider public." English Historical Review contributor R. N. Swanson maintained that individualism is the weaker point of Death and the Prince: "To argue that the sermons reveal people as individuals who can be recognized as such if they are sufficiently well known from other sources appears somewhat idiosyncratic," wrote Swanson. Dunbabin had fewer such reservations, stating that D'Avray has produced an "erudite and stimulating work," and adding that the author "has put later medieval historians in his debt by providing them both with material as grist for their mills and with sophisticated interpretative techniques as stimulus to reflection."

In 1997 D'Avray and coauthor Nicole Bériou published Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity, a collection of historical writings whose "utility and impact," noted R. N. Swanson in Journal of Ecclesiastical History, "will vary according to the needs of the reader." Several of the articles "are already in the mainstream; others have hitherto been relatively unknown or inaccessible, but will deservedly soon start to appear in footnotes and bibliographies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, October, 1996, Janet Nelson, review of Death and the Prince: Memorial Preaching before 1350, p. 1192.

Church History, March, 1997, Daniel Bornstein, review of Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity, p. 101.

English Historical Review, February, 1997, R. N. Swanson, review of Death and the Prince, p. 170.

History, July, 1996, Chistoph Maier, review of Death and the Prince, p. 434.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, April, 1996, Jean Dunbabin, review of Death and the Prince, p. 367; January, 1997, R. N. Swanson, review of Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons, p. 161.

Journal of Religion, July, 1997, John Baldwin, review of Death and the Prince, p. 465.

Medium Aevum, spring, 1996, Alan J. Fletcher, review of Death and the Prince, p. 122.

Speculum, April, 1997, Augustine Thompson, review of Death and the Prince, p. 461.

Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 1985.*