Roger D. Ray

Roger D. Ray, Who Recast the Father of English History, Dies at 87

He argued that the Venerable Bede was a sophisticated rhetorician rather than a pious compiler. In Toledo, he founded The Humanities Institute and promoted the city's jazz legacy.

Roger D. Ray, a medieval historian whose work overturned a long-settled view of the Venerable Bede, the eighth-century English monk widely regarded as the father of English history, and who founded the humanities institute at the University of Toledo that now bears his name, died on July 12 at his home in Toledo, Ohio. He was 87.

His wife, Dr. Katerina Ruedi Ray, confirmed the death. The cause was cerebral atherosclerosis.

When Dr. Ray began his career, scholars generally treated Bede as an admirable but derivative figure, a monk who had faithfully assembled the words of others. In a series of articles beginning in the late 1970s, Dr. Ray argued that Bede had in fact been a trained and self-conscious rhetorician who understood exactly what he was doing when he wrote history.

His 1980 article "Bede's Vera Lex Historiae," published in Speculum, the leading journal of medieval studies, contended that Bede's promise to write according to the "true law of history" was not a plain pledge of accuracy but an Augustinian conception of truth drawn from classical and Christian rhetorical tradition. Seven years later, in "Bede and Cicero," published in Anglo-Saxon England, he argued that Bede had worked directly from Cicero's De inventione. This claim credited the monk with a command of rhetoric that few scholars had been willing to grant him.

In 1997, Dr. Ray delivered the prestigious Jarrow Lecture, an annual address given at the church of St. Paul in Jarrow, England, where Bede spent his life. He argued that Bede had deliberately set out to create a Christian Latin culture for the Anglo-Saxons. The lecture was published as "Bede, Rhetoric, and the Creation of Christian Latin Culture."

He also published in Viator, Studia Monastica and the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, and contributed to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages.

Roger Dale Ray was born on July 24, 1938, in Kilgore, Tex., an oil town in the eastern part of the state, and moved to Corsicana, southeast of Dallas, as a boy. He was the son of Marion Vernon Ray and Leslie Geneva Ray.

He earned a bachelor's degree at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and a doctorate in theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He then turned from theology to history, earning a Ph.D. from Duke University with a dissertation on Orderic Vitalis, a 12th-century monastic historian whose struggle to reconcile faith and evidence anticipated the questions Dr. Ray would pursue over the next four decades.

In 1986, he founded the university's Humanities Institute, and he directed it for more than 20 years. He raised more than $1 million for it, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ohio Humanities Council, and used the money to underwrite a faculty research seminar, undergraduate scholarships, and public programming, as well as statewide public humanities programming collaborations between Ohio universities and K-12 school partners. The institute became a template for similar centers at other Ohio universities. The university renamed it the Roger Ray Institute for the Humanities in 2017.

For more than two decades, the institute maintained partnerships with the Toledo Museum of Art, the Toledo Symphony, WGTE PBS and NPR, and other key regional cultural organizations. He served as a member of and chair of the board of the Ohio Humanities Council, receiving its Richard Bjornson Award for distinguished service to the public humanities in Ohio.

His public teaching could be unorthodox but was much beloved. For years, he visited Toledo public schools dressed as Charlemagne, in robes and a crown, and answered students' questions in character.

He also pressed the university and the city to celebrate its jazz history. He argued for greater recognition of Art Tatum, the Toledo-born pianist, blind in one eye and with limited sight in the other, whom many musicians consider the most technically accomplished in the instrument's history.

In 2000, working through the institute, Dr. Ray helped bring the singer Jon Hendricks, another Toledo native and a pioneer of vocalese, to the university as a distinguished professor of jazz studies, a post Mr. Hendricks held until 2016. Mr. Hendricks, who had studied informally with Tatum as a young man, taught a course on jazz and American society that drew large enrollments.

Roger Ray's other great love was cooking. He was an outstanding home chef, having lived next door to Julia Child and her husband Paul while a visiting scholar in Boston. His dinner parties, many based on Julia's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, are still remembered by his friends.

In addition to his wife, Dr. Ray is survived by his daughter, Leah Ann Ray, from his first marriage to Alice Chumbley Lora; his sister, Jan Ray Turbeville; and his grandson, Dexter Ray Grzyb. His son, John Jeffrey Ray, a jazz guitarist, died in an accident in 2014.

A memorial service will take place later this year. The family invites gifts in his memory to the Roger Ray Institute for the Humanities at the University of Toledo.