Laureation address: Professor Terence Cave CBE FBA

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor Lorna Milne, Master of the United College and Deputy Principal

Monday 13 June 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the Degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa, Professor Terence Cave.

Professor Terence Cave CBE, FBA, Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite is a leading figure in French and literary studies who has been influencing our understanding of literature for almost 60 years in this country and around the world.

His professional story began here at St Andrews, as an Assistant Lecturer in French shortly after completing his studies at the University of Cambridge. He then moved to Warwick University before settling in 1972 at Oxford University as a Fellow and Tutor at St John’s College. He became University Professor of French there in 1989 and has been Professor and Fellow Emeritus since 2001. During his long teaching career, Professor Cave was to challenge, inspire and by all accounts – and in the nicest possible way – thoroughly intimidate hundreds of students who, like his colleagues, praise his dedication, humility and kindness as well as his tremendous intellect.

While he became known primarily for his contributions to French Renaissance studies with books entitled The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance in 1979 and Pré-histoires Volumes I and II, in 1999 and 2001, Professor Cave has also written on Aristotelian poetics (Recognitions, 1988) and on the relations between literature and music (Mignon’s Afterlives, 2011). His insights always transferred easily to the contemporary and other contexts, but this became even more apparent after he was awarded the prestigious Balzan Prize in 2009 and directed the ground-breaking project ‘Literature as an object of knowledge’, which positioned literary texts as unique works of human cognition and drew accordingly on methodologies from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and philosophy (amongst others), to explore new approaches to literary criticism. The books Thinking with Literature (2016), Reading Beyond the Code (2018), and Live Artefacts (2022) are among the outcomes of that project. 

This considerable corpus is consistently interested in, precisely, ‘problems of writing’. The purpose and uses of literature; the ways in which we read, and write, and re-read and re-write from one age, culture, mode of enquiry, thought or expression to another are some of the infinitely complex questions that Professor Cave tirelessly addresses. His expertise encompasses every genre, and ranges from Rabelais, Ronsard and Montaigne to Shakespeare, Goethe, Eliot, Conrad, and Angela Carter. His style is limpid and elegant, but also warm, amusing and, frankly, thrilling, in that his reader invariably finds herself impatient to know what happens next: how one idea will lead into another, and what the conclusion will be.

Professor Cave’s is a body of work of outstanding importance that has altered approaches to literature across languages and generations, and (perhaps uniquely) has made generations of readers smile as they studied it.

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to French and literary studies, I ask you to confer the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Terence Cave.