J.A.W. Bennett Memorial Lectures

Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (28 February 1911 – 29 January 1981) a New Zealand-born literary scholar, studied first at Auckland University. He became best known as a scholar of Middle English literature. He was editor of the journal Medium Aevum from 1956 to 1980, having earlier assisted his predecessor, C. T. Onions, and was a colleague of C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1964 he succeeded Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, Cambridge University. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. His most substantial work was the volume on Middle English Literature for the ‘Oxford History of English Literature’, which was completed after his death by Douglas Gray and published in 1986. He was a member of the informal literary group, The Inklings; The Inklings included two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, the authors of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings respectively.