The Founder

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Born in Hanwell, London, on 5 March 1927, Leslie J. Workman attended the Russell School in London and received his bachelor's degree from Kings College of the University of London. From 1945-1948 he served with the British Army in Egypt, Palestine, and the Sudan. In 1954 he emigrated to the United States to pursue graduate study in history at Columbia University and Ohio State University. He taught at Queens College of the City University of New York; Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania; and the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. He resided in Holland, Michigan, since his marriage to Kathleen Verduin in 1983, and he maintained an office on the campus of Hope College.

Leslie Workman is widely recognized as the founder of the academic subject known as medievalism: the study of the Middle Ages as an imaginative construct in western society since whenever the Middle Ages may be said to have ended. He himself defined the subject as "the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages." In 1971 he initialed the formal scholarly investigation of medievalism through sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University. In 1976 he founded the scholarly journal Studies in Medievalism, serving as its editor until 1999. In 1986 he established the International Conference on Medievalism, an annual meeting of scholars which has convened throughout the United States and in England and Austria. He was also the organizer of the four-week Summer Institute on Medievalism at the University of York in 1996 and 1998. In 1998 his achievement received formal recognition by the publication of Medievalism in the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman.

Leslie Workman died in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on 1 April 2001. His scholarship is known and respected on five continents.

Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. Lord Acton