John Fleming, the Louis W. Fairchild ’24 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, legendary lecturer and renowned medieval scholar who published extensively in the fields of medieval English and European literature, medieval art history, and the history of Christian thought and spirituality, died on May 30. He was 90.
Fleming, a 1963 Princeton graduate alumnus in medieval studies, joined the faculty in 1965 and transferred to emeritus status in 2006.
During his 40 years at Princeton, he was a widely admired member of the University community, receiving the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary degree from the University.
He was deeply engaged in University life, twice serving as head of Wilson College and delivering the Class of 2007 Baccalaureate address. He also served for two decades as chief marshal to lead the academic procession at major University events.
Fleming was the author of books on subjects including the works of Boccaccio, Dante, and Chaucer; the great 13th-century poem “The Romance of the Rose”; and the medieval Franciscan devotional tradition. He published important studies of Chaucer, Bellini, Ovid, and Portuguese poet Luís de Camões, and of Christopher Columbus as a subject in Franciscan literature.
In the early 1990s, Fleming worked alongside colleagues Theodore Rabb, Robert Hollander and others to launch HUM 216-219, “Interdisciplinary Studies in Western Culture,” the landmark, four-course Humanities Sequence at Princeton.
“He was an immense presence in his own discipline and one of the principal architects of Princeton’s interdisciplinary Program in Medieval Studies,” said William Chester Jordan, the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, and a colleague and friend of Fleming’s for more than 50 years. He recalled his friend’s famous sense of humor and his own “good fortune” to live in a house that abutted Fleming’s, where he and his family could enjoy “one of Princeton’s most beautiful flower gardens,” cultivated by Fleming himself.
Jordan remembers once watching his 3-year-old daughter in their yard, her eyes glued to Fleming working in the garden. Jordan had recently taught her a line of “Hamlet”: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“She didn’t know what it meant but she liked saying it,” Jordan said. “That morning, she shouted the line to John. He was flabbergasted and responded by quoting passage after passage from Shakespeare, which baffled her and almost made me die laughing.”
Fleming was a past president of the Medieval Academy of America, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. He served on the executive committee of the Alumni Council and the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni, and in 2004 received the Alumni Council Award for Service to Princeton.
A memorial and celebration of Fleming’s life, open to the public, will be held at the Princeton University Chapel at 1:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 25.
Read the full obituary on the University homepage.
Adapted from a story by Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications, on the University homepage
