Even now, Spence remembers Winchester as an intellectual hothouse, a kind of “high-octane preparation for Oxford and Cambridge.” Though only a fees-paying “commoner,” while his father and older brother were stipended “scholars” (to use the college’s own medieval distinction), Jonathan survived at Winchester, winning the History Prize. Summer holidays were typically spent in France with an exchange family, living in a rural chateau where he spent long afternoons at tennis and watched the bats swoop for insects in the dusk.īack at school he pursued his studies passionately.
Raised in the “soft” Anglicanism of the college, he attended compulsory chapel eight times a week, amusing himself by reading the services in French and German psalters that he slipped into the oratory. Toynbee, had been an Old Wykehamist as well. Somehow Jonathan’s world-spanning historical consciousness seemed all the more appropriate when I remembered that another global historian, Arnold J. 1368–98) was suppressing the Hu Weiyong uprising and abolishing the post of chief councilor of the Ming dynasty. As Jonathan once pointed out to me, in 1382, the very year Winchester College was established in Hampshire, on the other side of the world in Jiangnan, the Hongwu Emperor (r.
When he was thirteen, Professor Spence matriculated at Winchester College, one of the oldest public schools in England, founded by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and High Chancellor of England. His sister, a filmmaker, is also a professional translator of French, German, and Italian. One of Jonathan Spence’s two older brothers was a classicist and the other a chemical engineer.
He also worked at a publishing house and art gallery, and was editor of one of Joseph Conrad’s works. Dermot Spence had attended Oxford and Heidelberg universities in the late 1920s and spoke excellent German. Professor Spence’s maternal grandfather taught at Clifton College in Bristol during the Great War, and his mother, who attended secondary school in London, was a passionate student of French language and literature. Spence, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, was born in England on August 11, 1936, the son of Dermot and Muriel Crailsham Spence.
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