Garrett Mattingly
Garrett Mattingly (May 6, 1900 – December 18, 1962) was a professor of
Early life and education
Born in Washington, D.C., Mattingly attended elementary school in Washington and public high school in Michigan after his family moved to Kalamazoo in 1913. Following graduation, Mattingly served, 1918-1919, as a sergeant in the U. S. Army. He then earned an A. B. summa cum laude at Harvard University (1923) and, while still an undergraduate, studied in France at Strasbourg and Paris and in Florence, Italy. After two years spent working in a New York City publishing house he received his M.A. in history at Harvard (1926) and began his academic career at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, teaching history and literature. There he formed a close personal and professional friendship with writer Bernard DeVoto.[1]
Mattingly completed his PhD at Harvard in 1935, having developed a strong interest in the sixteenth century and coming under the influence of Roger B. Merriman, a specialist in the history of the Spanish Empire. Aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship—of which he was a four-time winner—he spent the academic year 1937-1938 doing intensive research in European archives. In order to read the primary sources, Mattingly taught himself several foreign languages as well as sixteenth-century script.[1]
Academic career
Mattingly's first book was the biography, Catherine of Aragon (1941), a book "extremely careful and accurate and enormously erudite" but with traces of the care, accuracy and erudition "carefully concealed or utterly obliterated."[2] The book was chosen as a selection of the Literary Guild.
During World War II Mattingly served in the
In 1955 Mattingly published Renaissance Diplomacy, a book that made his historical reputation. Exceptionally well researched and citing sources in six languages, Mattingly wrote it in a style both erudite and limpid. As J. H. Hexter later wrote, "If any amount of skill could have made Renaissance Diplomacy a popular book, its author had the skill; but the cards were stacked against him." Nevertheless, Mattingly was so determined not to publish the book with a university press that, at his publisher's recommendation, he cut the manuscript by a third and destroyed the original draft. "It is perhaps a measure of that achievement that the Renaissance Diplomacy which historians read with such admiration is not as good as Mattingly could have made it; it is, indeed, not as good as he had made it. Even so, it remains one of the finest historical works of the past half century."[6]
Mattingly's most successful book was
Critical assessment
Although a mild "
Marriage and later years
Mattingly married Gertrude L. McCollum, a teacher, in 1928; the couple had no children. Although his health had been poor for several previous years, Mattingly died unexpectedly of
Works
- LCCN 41-6540
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- Mattingly, Garrett (January 2010). 2010 ebook edition. Cosimo. ISBN 978-1-61640-267-9.
- Mattingly, Garrett (January 2010). 2010 ebook edition. Cosimo.
- LCCN 59-8861
- Renaissance Profiles (1978) ISBN 9780061311628
References
- ^ a b c d e James Friguglietti. "Mattingly, Garrett", American National Biography. DeVoto and Mattingly each dedicated a book to the other.
- ^ Hexter, 159.
- ^ a b Donald R. Kelley, "Mattingly, Garrett, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 7: 1961-1965 (1981).
- ^ Leo Gershoy, "Garrett Mattingly: A Personal Appreciation", in Charles H. Carter, From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), 9.
- ^ Hexter, 158, 169.
- ^ Hexter, 161.
- ^ "Special Awards and Citations". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-12-02.
- ^ "Garrett Mattingly". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-11-23.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-11-23.
- ^ Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 316.
- ^ American Historical Review, 68 (April 1963), 907.
Bibliography
- J. H. Hexter, "Garrett Mattingly, Historian", Doing History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 157-72.
External links
- Garrett Mattingly at Library of Congress, with 17 library catalog records
- Finding aid to Garrett Mattingly papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.