George Leonard Huxley 1932-2022
George Huxley, who died on 30 November 2022, was an influential figure in British Byzantine Studies. But twice in his career he held US positions and was significantly influential in both. A member of the Huxley family of intellectuals, he was born in Leicester and studied classics at Magdalen College Oxford; at that time he was mostly interested in Linear B and used to dash off to London to talk to Michael Ventris. After a prize fellowship at All Souls in 1956 he was appointed Assistant Director of the British School at Athens, where he worked on early Greek history. But after that in 1958-59 and 1961-62 he was visiting lecturer at Harvard, where he became interested in the history of science and in Anthemios of Tralles. He also taught Alice-Mary Talbot at Radcliffe; he was her tutor in her junior year.
In 1962 he became professor of Greek at Queen’s University Belfast, where he stayed until 1983. He taught mainstream classical set books but worked always on the edge, moving from his preclassical interests to develop postclassical concerns, with Digenes Akrites and Iconoclasm. He brought Irish Hellenists together twice a year in Dundalk, as the Hibernian Hellenists, soon to have Byzantinist speakers. By 1974 he had decided that what Queen’s needed was Byzantine Studies and set up a course to teach it, which eventually grew into a full range of degrees, graduate students, research projects, colloquia, a text series and the Institute of Byzantine Studies. George began all this. And he inspired generations of Belfast Byzantinists.
After he retired from Queen’s, in1986 he became director of the Gennadius Library at the American School in Athens, building up the library, restoring to it lost books, and participating in successful fund-raising for its endowment. Using the library’s rich collections he gave Byzantine lectures and seminars on Greek lyric poetry and organised exhibitions on Morosini’s bombardment of the Acropolis and on Ireland and the Hellenic Tradition.
George loved Ireland, learning Irish and participating fully in the Civil Rights movement, almost as much as he loved Greece, where he continued to excavate with Nicholas Coldstream at the Minoan site at Kastri on the island of Kythera after he had moved to Belfast. After retirement from Belfast he settled in Oxfordshire with Davina, whom he had met at Knossos and married in 1957, but he taught at Maynooth and held an Honorary Professorship at Trinity. He was very active in the Royal Irish Academy and endowed student prizes in various Irish universities. In 2018, at age 86, “intensely upset about Brexit”, George was the oldest of 3000 people who were granted Irish citizenship. He was also an honorary citizen of Kythera. But his contribution to Byzantine Studies is perhaps more important than either his philhellenism or his devotion to Ireland.
Davina died in 2020; George is survived by their three daughters Harriet, Sophie and Corinna. A funeral mass will be held on December 14th at 11am at St. Kenelm’s, Church Enstone, Oxfordshire.
