Betha Colaim Chille: Life of Columcille. Compiled by Manus O'Donnell in 1532. Edited and translated from manuscript Rawlinson B. 514 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, University of Illinois Bulletin 15.48, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois, 1918.

Gertrude Schoepperle (Loomis), Professor of English

Betha Colaim Chille: Life of Columcille. Compiled by Manus O'Donnell in 1532. Edited and translated from manuscript Rawlinson B. 514 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, University of Illinois Bulletin 15.48, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois, 1918.

Gertrude Schoepperle graduated from Wellesley in 1903, and in 1909 took the Ph.D. degree at Radcliffe. Her undergraduate life had brought a sharp awakening of mental powers, which ripened steadily as she swept on from university to university, from Cambridge to Munich, to Berlin and Paris, where she found ultimately her intellectual home. In those ardent, questing, student years she lived with intensity, as eager for fellowship and human experience as for knowledge. Her letters of that time humorously intermingled student balls and Saxon seminars, great names of scholars and young unknown scolares vagrantes like herself. Of the work done by her this seems less the place to speak than in the philological journals where so much of it appeared. In preparation for it she accomplished feats of learning that remind one of the feats of prowess of the old Irish heroes. She acquired languages as other women acquire garments; she set standards for herself in literary research which demanded the exactitude and the patience of the laboratory. Her book, Tristan and Isold, a Study of the Sources of the Rojnance, published in 1913 after seven years of research is definitive. Its cool logic, lucidity, and imperturbable erudition, bear witness to her own profound admiration for those qualities in French scholarship.

--Laura A. Hibbard, “In Appreciation of Gertrude Schoepperle,” Vassar Miscellany News, vol. VI, no. 42, 8 April 1922

1911-1919