Eleanor Duckett

Eleanor Shipley Duckett (7 November 1880, Bridgwater, Somerset, England – 23 November 1976) was an English-born philologist and medieval historian who spent most of her career in the United States. For thirty years, she taught at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). Duckett published a number of books with University of Michigan Press, mainly on European history, religious history, and saints, and was a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review. Initially, Duckett was known for writing accessible historical books on the Middle Ages; later, she acquired a reputation as an authority on early medieval saints. A devout Episcopalian, Duckett was the lifelong companion of novelist Mary Ellen Chase.

Biography Encouraged by her father to study the classical texts, Duckett worked through her preparatory education in order to attend university. She received her BA (1903) and MA (1904), as well as a degree in pedagogy (1905), from the University of London. She used these degrees to teach the classics at Sutton High School in Surrey until 1907, but then left to resume her own education with a scholarship to Girton College, the first women's college at Cambridge University.

In 1914, Duckett attained a position at Western College for Women in Ohio, and in 1916 began teaching Latin at Smith College, after 1928 as a full professor, where she would remain the rest of her career. In 1926, she met novelist Mary Ellen Chase, who was from Blue Hill, Maine. They lived together until Chase's death in 1973, and were honored by having adjoining halls named for them on the Smith College campus. In 1928 she was named the John M. Greene Professor of Classical Languages and Literature. She retired in 1949 and was named professor emeritus. In 1952, she finally received her doctorate from Girton College on the basis of her four published books on early medieval history. The Wandering Saints (UK: Collins, 1959; US: W. W. Norton, 1959) Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century (University of Michigan Press, 1962) Women and Their Letters in the Early Middle Ages (Smith College, 1965) "Engel Lecture" Death and Life in the Tenth Century (University of Michigan Press, 1967) Medieval Portraits from East and West (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972; US: University of Michigan Press, 1972)