Mary Martin McLaughlin, an internationally renowned scholar of the Middle Ages who spent the last four decades working almost entirely outside the academic world, has died in Millbrook, N.Y. She was 87.
Ms. McLaughlin’s small but distinguished body of work was highly regarded by academic medievalists around the world. Her research focused on the role of women, children and families in the Middle Ages, largely overlooked subjects when she began her career in the 1940s.
Ms. McLaughlin also was known to generations of college students for two anthologies, “The Portable Medieval Reader” (1949) and “The Portable Renaissance Reader” (1953), both of which she edited with James Bruce Ross.
For the last 40 years, Ms. McLaughlin labored over two books, to be published posthumously, that colleagues describe as her masterworks. One is the first full biography of Heloise, the lover and later wife of the 12th Century French philosopher Peter Abelard. The other is the first English translation of the complete correspondence of Heloise and Abelard.
Born in Grand Island, Neb., Ms. McLaughlin in the 1940s and ’50s taught at Wellesley, Vassar and the University of Nebraska; she rejoined the Vassar faculty in 1959.
She left in 1967 to pursue the life of an independent scholar.
She is survived by a sister and several nieces and nephews.
