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She was, when I met her two years before her death, much as others had described her decades before. I remember, when I knocked at her back door, the bright eye that peered at me over an easy chair, and the clear voice that bid me come inside. That voice was often a little breathless, as if she was having a hard time making her words catch up with her thoughts; but then, she had much to say. She was able to get around with a walker, and she insisted on coming into her little kitchen to supervise my brewing of the ritual tea. She admitted that I made a very good job of it, and not just by American standards. I remember it as one of the first times that an Oxford academic had offered me tea rather than coffee. But then, she was then 96 years old, and represented a very different generation.

Marjorie Reeves was born in the north of Wiltshire, and grew up amongst the barrows, tumuli, and other traces of a mysterious Neolithic civilization. Her family was Baptist, and had been since the 17th century (she would later join the Church of England). They had always been concerned, as she would later proudly write, for the education of their young women. In her generation this would have earned a woman the dismissive title of "bluestocking." She went up to Oxford, where she studied at St. Hugh's, one of the first colleges for women in the university. From there, she went on to the University of London for doctoral studies; Oxford was at the time not fond of doctorates, let alone women who presumed to earn them. Finishing her doctoral work, she taught school and taught teachers. She had been active in the Student Christian Movement, and in the '30s she was involved with Christian students in Germany who opposed the Nazi regime. During the war she became, as she put it to me in conversation, "a very junior member"

of the Moot, a group of intellectuals brought together from time to time in Oxford to plan the shape of a "new Christendom" that would rise from the wreckage of Europe. Her senior colleagues were some of the most luminous intellects in England at the time: T.S. Eliot, John Baillie, Walter Moberly, Alec Vidler, Karl Mannheim, and occasionally Christopher Dawson and Michael Polanyi.

In 1948 she returned to Oxford as a Fellow of St. Anne's College, another of the university's colleges for women. There she remained for many years, at one point holding the post of Vice-Principal of the college, right up to the moment of co-education. She bought a large house in North Oxford in which she hosted, as long as she lived, a steady procession of students, intellectuals, and diverse lodgers.

All of that would have been impressive enough. But she additionally maintained a rigorous and diverse publication schedule. She wrote monographs on medieval thought; on the appropriation of medieval thought by 19th-century authors and philosophers; pamphlets for Sunday school teachers and Christian educators, one of which boasts an introduction by Dorothy Sayers; a number of little history books for children, part of a series she proposed and then edited; one of the best of the many books written on the crisis of modern higher education, done from within a Christian philosophy of learning; and, along with assorted other publications too numerous to mention, a history of her church in Oxford, St. Mary the Virgin, that was published two weeks before her death.

But it was in London that she had some of her most formative intellectual and spiritual experiences. There she began her lifelong study of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian Cistercian abbot of the 12th century. Joachim interpreted Scripture to suggest a "third age" of the world, the "Age of the Holy Spirit," which would usher in the millennial reign of Christ. At a time when the Neo-Thomists were energizing Roman Catholic scholarship, Marjorie began to study a man whom they might well have regarded as representing the antithesis of Thomism, attractive to heterodox thinkers (including the poet William Butler Yeats), given to cryptic interpretations of the future rather than to the building of clear and interlocking systems of belief. But Marjorie was concerned first and foremost with what Joachim's contemporaries thought of him. "What you said," I told her on one of my visits, "or really, what you made it possible to say, was that Joachim was much more important to medieval people than was Thomas Aquinas." Her eyes got a little wide, and she stared at me with some disbelief. "Oh, of course he was," she said, surprised that anyone should still question that simple fact.

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