Sir, – Further to Hugh Oram's An Irishman's Diary (June 17th), it is worth noting that today's academic bestseller is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century; in 1927 it was Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars. Then, as now, popular appeal can raise scholarly hackles. Waddell's fellow experts were baffled and not a little miffed by her success: a rival declared that "the very genius of her writing negates its appeal to a crowd of specialists" and accused her of "jazz[ing] the Middle Ages", while FM Powicke, who had known her as an undergraduate at Queen's University Belfast and was soon to be installed as regius professor of modern history at Oxford, prophesised "that she will have many readers, and that, though some of them may often want to shake her, all of them will wish to thank her".
Waddell's works may no longer be fashionable but they continue to attract readers – and serious attention, not so easily sidelined into "certain academic circles". Her unique fusion of scholarship and creativity stimulates questions as to what she does and how she does it; the answers which emerge draw attention to her profound, radical and extraordinarily fertile achievement. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics has been reissued with a searching introduction by John Scattergood (Four Courts Press); a new biography interweaves her scholarly fortunes and misfortunes with that of her best friend, Irish medieval historian Maude Clarke, and the first critical examination of Waddell's varied oeuvre, examining her extraordinary achievement, edited by myself, has just been published under the title Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014). – Yours, etc,
JENNIFER FitzGERALD,
Bruceala Court,
Cardiff, California.