Mildred K. Pope

Mildred Katherine Pope (28 January 1872 – 16 September 1956) was an English scholar of Anglo-Norman England. She became the first woman to hold a readership at Oxford University, where she taught at Somerville College.

Biography Mildred Pope was educated at Edgbaston High School, Birmingham. She read French at Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1893 was placed in the first-class of the Oxford University women's examination. Interested in Old French philology, as an undergraduate "she had to rely mainly on tuition by correspondence from Paget Toynbee at Cambridge". She taught at Somerville College, Oxford, first as a librarian, and from 1894 as a lecturer. She spent the 1894 summer vacation studying with Fritz Neumann at Heidelberg.

In 1902-3 she spent a sabbatical year working in Paris under Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, She was appointed lecturer, then university reader (in 1928—the first woman at Oxford to achieve that position She left Oxford for Manchester in 1934 and was later honored with emeritate.

Legacy Pope taught a number of notable medievalists including Eugène Vinaver, Dominica Legge and Dorothy Sayers; the character Miss Lydgate in Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935) is based on Pope.

Works Life of the Black Prince, By Chandos Herald. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Editor, with Eleanor C. Lodge. From Latin to modern French, with especial consideration of Anglo-Norman; phonology and morphology, 1934 (ed. with T. Atkinson Jenkins, J. M. Manly and Jean G. Wright) La seinte resureccion from the Paris and Canterbury mss,Oxford, Pub. for the Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1943 The Anglo-Norman element in our vocabulary: its significance for our civilization, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1944 (ed.) The romance of Horn, 2 vols., Oxford: Pub. for the Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1955-64.