Kathleen Verduin, born the same year as Casablanca, grew up in a small Dutch
Reformed enclave south of Chicago, taking the first eight years of her
education at a school named for John Calvin. Much might be made of this. Her
father was and still is a farmer: he fed the nation, she reflects, a genuine
contribution to the common good, while she, whimsically and erratically and
sometimes without knowing quite what she was talking about, has spent her
adult life purveying notions about literature to a generation, almost, of
innocent and unsuspecting college students--whom she has nevertheless loved,
in her fashion, worked hard for, and wished well. In her high school years
she nursed a fascination for persons and places outside her previous
insulation: this left her, so they say, with some traces of sophistication.
She earned her A.B. (1965) from Hope College, where she met more than her
share of the great and good. She wanted to save the world by (how else?)
teaching at an urban high school but, discouraged after two years of nearly
unmitigated exhaustion, decided to follow what seemed then the easier path of
college teaching. Her M.A. (1969) was from the George Washington University,
where she wrote a thesis on John Updike; she taught for four years at Grove
City College, then entered the Ph.D. program at Indiana University. Time
passed. She lived in Bloomington, Indiana; Orange City, Iowa; Boston,
Massachusetts. In 1978 she was welcomed magnanimously back to her alma mater,
Hope College (all having been forgiven), received her Ph.D. in 1980 (her
dissertation was titled "Religious and Sexual Love in American Protestant
Literature"), and has taught at Hope ever since.
She is by training an Americanist, specializing in American literature
and culture from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries; she has also
taught modern fiction and a range of courses on other topics, from the Divina
Commedia of Dante to the novels of Stephen King. In 1983 she married Leslie
J. Workman, a cultivated Englishman of wit and erudition who had just
committed a new journal, Studies in Medievalism. Now published by Boydell &
Brewer, this is still the only serial publication devoted to study of post-
medieval constructions of the Middle Ages in Western culture from 1500 to the
present. This is the field she and Workman have labored to promote, claiming as their
province incidences as diverse as the seventeenth-century antiquarians, the
nineteenth-century Arthurian revival, and indeed the discipline of medieval
studies itself. Since 1986 they have also sponsored the International
Conference on Medievalism (held annually at different venues, including sites
in Europe), and in the summer of 1996 they organized the first four-week
summer Institute on Medievalism, held during the month of July at the
University of York. Studies in Medievalism sponsors an annual multi-session
program at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan
University and at the conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies.
Verduin is interested in the cultural contexts of literature and in the
History of the Book. She has published fairly regularly and hopes in the
future to complete a book on American readings of Dante from Emerson to Edith
Wharton. She would like to start drawing again. She likes Bach and
Rembrandt. She would like to visit Norway and Montreal. Were she to be
marooned on a desert island (why couldn't it happen?) she would want with her,
yes, the King James Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress, Moby-Dick, and Lady
Chatterley's Lover (if there is a pattern here let others find it); perhaps
also the stories of Raymond Carver and the poetry of Ezra Pound.
Who said, "What thou lovest well remains: the rest is dross." Which is
expressed by Stephen King as "Keep your love alive" and by Robert Frost as
"What I would not part with I have kept." And by John Updike's comforting
line from The Centaur: "All joy belongs to the Lord."
