Professor Emeritus Keith Van Sinclair, A.O., D.del’U., D.Phil., D.Lit., Litt.D.

Keith Sinclair, later known to colleagues as KVS, was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 8 November 1926 and attended Wellington Boys’ College. The only child of divorced parents, he was brought up in straitened circumstances by his mother and, after matriculating aged sixteen at Victoria University College (now Victoria University of Wellington) he worked at odd jobs to pay his way through university until he could study full-time in 1945. In 1948 Sinclair headed the honours list in medieval French and was awarded the first post-war French government postgraduate scholarship in the Humanities. With no travelling allowance, he worked his passage to Europe aboard a freighter, reaching England four months later. Once in Paris he was away: he studied archives under Michel de Bouard, Hon.FSA, at the Ecole des Chartes, and history at the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes gaining both a bachelor’s degree (Licence és Lettres, in which he was marked 11/20 for oral proficiency in English) and a Doctorat de l’Université from the Institut de Phonétique. A further year in Paris ensued, thanks to a research scholarship from the Institut Britannique de Paris, followed by two more years teaching English at the Lycée Montaigne. Sinclair then arrived in Oxford. He thrived in his new surroundings at St Catherine’s College, presiding over the Oxford Union French Club for a term, acting as Foundation Secretary of St Catherine’s Research Society and, not least, rowing in the College eight. His tutor introduced him to the Anglo-Norman dialect and Sinclair’s editions of the Riwle (Rule) governing the spiritual conduct of the Knights Hospitaller (1989) and Corset by Rober le Chapelain, a rhymed commentary on the seven sacraments (1995), are the fruits of this research. In 1955 he accepted a lectureship in the French department at Canberra University College (now the Australian National University) where, with his expertise in palaeography, codicology and iconography he was a somewhat bizarre addition to the staff. Astonished to discover that a number of Australian institutions owned important medieval texts unknown to overseas scholars, Sinclair started work on a descriptive catalogue. He had completed the first draft in 1960 and was en route to Europe to check comparative details when his luggage was stolen at Singapore airport. It was never recovered and he had to begin all over again, publishing The Descriptive Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Western Manuscripts in Australia, in 1969. In the National Gallery of Victoria at Melbourne he had discovered a magnificently illuminated manuscript of Besuire’s Middle French translation of Livy and published in 1961, to wide acclaim from French art historians, The Melbourne Livy, the first study of the early fifteenth-century miniaturists who had decorated the manuscript. In 1963 Sinclair moved to Sydney University’s Centre for Medieval Studies to work on the literary and philological aspects of the unedited fourteenth-century romantic epic, Tristan de Nanteuil. His edition of the 23,361 lines of text was published in 1971, followed by a monograph, Tristan de Nanteuil: thematic infrastructure and literary creation in 1983. Sinclair was wholly committed to the promotion of medieval studies nationally, co-founding the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 1967. He published profusely in European and American learned journals and in 1972 was appointed Professor of French at the University of Connecticut, where his attention was drawn to prayers in Old French and where his monograph, Prières en ancien francais (1978), containing important corrections and supplements to the classic text by Sone, was written. But return to Australia was inevitable and in 1980 Sinclair accepted the Professorship of French at the James Cook University of North Queensland, a post he held until retirement as Emeritus in 1991. Sinclair, in his prefaces and introductions raised questions of interpretation which will occupy scholars for years to come. The breadth of his erudition is demonstrated in the Festschrift which marked his life’s work, Medieval Codicology, Iconography, Literature and Translation: Studies for Keith Val Sinclair (1994). For light relief in his late sixties Sinclair embarked on a translation of the journals of the nineteenth-century French navigator, Laplace. The first volume, Laplace in New Zeland, 1831, was published in 1998 but his translation of the Australian leg of the journey was never finished. He died in Canberra on 25 January 1999. Representatives of the French, Italian and Belgian embassies, all of which countries had honoured him in his lifetime, attended his funeral.