Charity Cannon Willard

Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.

After a brief illness, Charity Cannon Willard died peacefully on June 5, 2005.

Charity Cannon Willard was born on August 9, 1914 in Eureka, Illinois. She studied at Eureka College and Hiram College, where both her parents taught, and then completed an M.A. at Smith College in 1936. Four years later she received a Ph.D. in Romance philology from Radcliffe College. Her dissertation, an edition of Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Paix, was published in 1958.

While studying at Harvard, she met Sumner Willard, whom she married in 1944. When her husband became a professor of foreign languages at the United States Military Academy (West Point, NY), she discovered that officers' wives were permitted to work outside the home only on a temporary basis. During the early years of their marriage, she therefore filled in for professors on leave of absence and spent summers in Europe, searching out the existing manuscripts of the works of France's first woman of letters, Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1429). From 1961 until 1979, she taught French and Spanish at Ladycliff College (Highland Falls, NY). With this full-time appointment, she became the first West Point colonel's wife to pursue a professional career. She was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in 1983. She was honored also by Hiram College in 1988 with its Distinguished Alumni Award and by Smith College several years later as a Distinguished Alumna.

After retiring from teaching in 1979, Charity Cannon Willard concentrated on publishing the scholarly monographs that she had been preparing for decades: Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (1984); the critical edition of Christine's Livre des Trois Vertus (with Eric Hicks, 1989), which she also translated into English under the title A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor; The Treasury of the City of Ladies (1989); and an anthology in English of Christine's works, The Writings of Christine de Pizan (1994). Following Sumner Willard's death in 1995, she edited Christine's The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry (1999), which her late husband had translated into English; until shortly before her death, she was working on completing the French edition of that work. She is widely regarded as the world's preeminent scholar of the life and works of Christine de Pizan. She was also a pioneer among American medievalists in the study of original manuscripts. She will be remembered for her integrity, her intellectual rigor, and her spirit of collegiality.

Interment will take place in Post Cemetery, West Point, New York.

Funeral arrangements were made by William F. Hogan Funeral Home, Highland Falls, New York.