Francis P. Magoun research materials on the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni

Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (1895-1979), American philologist born in New York City, was a professor of Comparative Literature and English at Harvard University from 1937 to 1961. He graduated Harvard with an AB in 1916 and completed his PhD in philology in 1923; his dissertation, The gest of Alexander: Two middle English alliterative fragments, Alexander A and Alexander B, translated from an interpolated version of the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni, was published by Harvard University Press in 1929. Magoun began his teaching career at Harvard as an instructor in 1919, and in 1937 was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature; the post was renamed Professor of English in 1951. He also served as managing editor of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies (1926-1930) and editor of Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature (1934-1935). In the 1930s, he collaborated with German philology professor Alfons Hilka to publish an edition of three interpolated versions of the Historia de preliis, although the project ended with Hilka’s death in 1939.

In the early 1930s, Alfons Hilka (1877-1939), Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Gottingen, Germany, and Francis P. Magoun collaborated on a project to publish an edition of three interpolated (I) versions (recensions) of the Medieval-Latin Historia de preliis Alexander Magni, also known as the Romance of Alexander, based on all known manuscripts containing the texts. Hilka assumed responsibility for editing Recensions I1 and I2, and Magoun was to edit Recension I3. In connection with the project, Harvard Corporation voted in January 1931 to grant Magoun $500 from the Fund for the Support of the Humanities, appropriated by the General Education Board for Studies in the Humanities, to procure Photostats of manuscripts containing the text of Recension I3. In 1934, Hilka and Magoun published a list of the Photostats they had collected, primarily from European libraries, in the journal Speculum. On Hilka’s death in 1939 the project was indefinitely postponed. As a result, Magoun decided to deposit his Photostats of the I3 manuscripts in the Harvard College Library in 1947. In an article in the Harvard Library bulletin coinciding with the deposit, Magoun summarized the project’s history and listed the Photostat holdings in his possession, noting that one was lost in 1937 during a residential move. He also gave the Library several typed copies of I3 manuscripts and his handwritten "trial apparatus for the characteristic Prologue and Chapters 1 and 2."