Derek Pearsall died on October 14, 2021 at the age of ninety. He had been ill with cancer for much of the last year of his life but continued to live alone at home, and to work until a couple of weeks before his death. His final book, A Descriptive Catalogue of the English Manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (with Linne Mooney), begun more than thirty years before, had appeared in August in time for his ninetieth birthday. His spirit never dimmed. When Julia Boffey and Tony Edwards visited him in his house in York a month before he died, Derek talked with anticipation about his projected move into an apartment in sheltered housing and was planning which books and what other possessions he would take.
This is not the place to give an account of Derek’s life, which was long and rich in scholarly achievement. A summary of...
