Rose Graham

--- CONTENT ---
Rose Graham (*16). August 1875 in the London district of Marylebone; † 29 July 1963 in London was a British church historian.

She was the eldest of four children of tape cutter and cabinet maker William Edgar Graham and his wife Jane b. Newton. Rose attended the girls’ school Notting Hill High School, founded two years earlier. In 1894 she entered the Oxford College for Women Somerville College, also recently founded, where she studied Modern History (in Oxford the history after AD 300). When women were able to earn academic degrees in Oxford from 1920, she became Bachelor of Arts, Master or Arts and 1929 Doctor of Letters, corresponding to the German Dr. phil. Her last Oxford teacher was the historian Reginald Lane Poole (1857–1939).

The mother encouraged her to continue research instead of becoming a teacher. Her field of work became the church history of the Middle Ages. In 1901, she published her first book on Saint Gilbert of Sempringham and the Order of the Gilbertines. She traveled a lot, often with her mother, especially in Burgundy and Alsace. One fruit of these journeys was an excellently illustrated book about the abbot of the Benedictine monastery in Vézelay – she considered him the greatest – Pons (Pontius) de Montboissier, abbot from 1138 to 1161. She researched the Cluniacensian Reform as well as the Grammontenses and both British monasteries. For the Canterbury and York Society she published the files (registra) of the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Winchelsey (about 1245–1313). One of the first established women scientists in the UK, she studied women’s rights in past centuries: ‘Historical arguments are often used by supporters and opponents of extending women’s rights; But sometimes errors are taken from obsolete sources.

One fruit of her travels in Alsace was her special interest in the Order of Antony. In 1927 she wrote extensively about his house on London’s Threadneedle Street. In the essay she added pictures of St. Anthony the Great from the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar. So she was predestined, for the Roxburghe Club after a long forgetting at the beginning of the 20th century. The manuscript “Life of St. Anthony the Great” from the year 1426, discovered in the National Library of Malta in Valletta. It is illustrated with two hundred miniatures in the format 19 × 20 cm, the largest illustrated saintly life. She first published an essay with a selection of a few pictures and four years later a monumental book with black and white photographs and analyses of all miniatures. She succeeded in identifying all the sources highlighted in red by the medieval scribe in the text among the miniatures, such as the Dominican Alphonsus Bonihominis (* before 12 August 1353). He had in Famagusta in Cyprus, for example, the legend of the Versu