Looking Back — and Forward

After nearly forty years at the University of Virginia, Professor Hoyt “Dug” Duggan is retiring. Well-known by his students and colleagues as a medievalist and textual scholar, he plans to use his retirement to continue with his scholarly interests. In addition to having more opportunity to play with his granddaughters and to travel, the primary impetus for his retirement, he says, is to have the extra time to devote to the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, an immense project that he has been working on since the late 1980s. With the collaboration of his wife, M. Gail Duggan, and other medieval scholars, Professor Duggan will continue to produce his electronic editions on CD-ROM, including color facsimiles of all the manuscripts that witness to the text of Piers Plowman, the fourteenth century long alliterative poem written in Middle English by William Langland. So far, he has published five volumes since the first was released in 2000, with two more volumes nearing completion. Yet about fifty more manuscripts remain to be published, and so retirement certainly promises to keep Professor Duggan occupied. “As you can see, we’re not in any danger of running out of things to do,” he says with a laugh.

Professor Duggan received his B.A. at Centenary College in Louisiana, and subsequently pursued his Master’s degree at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. While studying at Oxford, he had good incentive to cultivate his interests in Middle English alliterative verse: “I spent all my money on books at Blackwell’s,” he says, “So I couldn’t afford heat. To stay warm during the winter, I would go to the library from the time it opened until the time it closed, and I would use that time to read every bit of alliterative verse I could find.” After completing his M.A. in 1963, he attended Princeton, where he received his Ph.D. in 1969. His dissertation at Princeton, an edition of The Wars of Alexander, another lengthy work of Middle English alliterative verse, reflected his career-long interest in textual editing.

Professor Duggan was hired by U.Va’s English department during the late 1960s, when it was under the chairmanship of Fredson Bowers, whom he says “greatly changed the department, making it one of the best in the nation.” Although Professor Duggan also received offers from Yale, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan, he chose to come to U.Va. after visiting the campus and being “very impressed” by both the beautiful surroundings and the quality of the work that was being done here. During his first twenty years at U.Va, Professor Duggan was heavily involved in the academic administration of the department. “There was a time in the 80s,” he says, “when I was on almost every committee.” As a regular component of the department’s administration, he had the opportunity to influence numerous decisions that he believes have benefited the department’s graduate students and the department as a whole.

Although his administrative work along with his own research occupied much of his time at U. Va., many of his students will remember him from the classroom, as one of his courses, Prolegomena to Literary Research, became a requirement for any Ph. D. student in the English department who wished to focus on medieval literature. His teaching has included classes in the intellectual backgrounds to medieval English literature, the history of the English language, metrical form, and research methods. With his scholarly specializations in textual criticism and the metrical form of medieval poetry, he also taught Old English, Beowulf, and Chaucer, in both undergraduate and graduate courses. Reflecting on the rigors of Professor Duggan’s classes, one of his graduate students comments, “Though his graduate classes could at times have a whiff of Parris Island about them, this was not unusual for the department as a whole, and the grounding we got became a valuable resource in our own maturing approaches to the field.”

The kind of demanding textual scholarship that Professor Duggan engages in has been greatly aided by the emergence of electronic media since the 1980s. Before using computers to track the masses of data that he collects, he employed the more time-consuming method of recording everything onto 5x8 note cards. As a part of his research on metrical form, he compiled a file of note cards containing 13,382 lines of Middle English alliterative verse in order to locate the possible metrical patterns — a study which ultimately culminated in a landmark article on the meter of Middle English alliterative verse. Eventually, Professor Duggan turned to the processing capabilities of computers, co-establishing the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET) to encourage electronic editions of early medieval texts. Such proclivity for vast, meticulous projects paved the way to his most ambitious project yet: the multivolume Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. 

Professor Duggan’s work on Piers Plowman, having begun tentatively in 1987, transformed into a full time occupation in 1993, when he became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Since then, he has incrementally published the first five volumes, with the aid of other medieval scholars and with a lot of help from his wife Gail. Professor Duggan is clearly grateful for the assistance he has received and proud of his wife’s contribution: “She does most of our transcriptions, though she’s never had any formal paleographic training. Since she’s a lot smarter than I am, it helps,” he says. 
 
The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive culminates a career that has continually expanded the boundaries of medieval textual criticism. A longtime associate of Professor Duggan, Professor Thorlac Turville-Petre of the University of Nottingham, says “What has characterized all Dug’s scholarly work is its innovatory approach. Both his metrical studies and his application of electronic technology to the editing of medieval texts are fundamental to current medieval textual scholarship.” Dedication to rigorous scholarship, remarkable knowledge, and substantial experience have likewise been consistent elements of Professor Duggan’s scholarship to date, qualities which he will surely bring to his scholarly pursuits during retirement.