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News > The House > RON TRUMAN

RON TRUMAN

We are sad to inform the Christ Church community that Ron Truman died in hospital on Tuesday 24 March following complications from a fall, following a period of increasing frailty.
26 Mar 2026
The House

Ron was elected to a Studentship at Christ Church, a Lecturership at Brasenose, and a University Lecturership in 1963, the year in which he completed his DPhil on the idea of the Prince in the Latin and vernacular writings of 16th-century theorists. He had read French and Spanish at St Edmund Hall (1954-1957) and had held a Lectureship at Birkbeck from 1959. An extremely committed tutor and supervisor, focusing on the Golden Age, he also took his share of administrative duties, including as Junior, then Senior Censor in Christ Church (1967-1972) and Chair of the Modern Languages Faculty Board (1979-1981). He retired in 2001, but continued his research, joining a distinguished group of neo-Latinists at the University of Leuven and the editorial board of Humanistica Lovaniensia. Alongside ground-breaking articles on Calderón and Lazarillo de Tormes, a regular flow of articles in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, Ron’s 1979 edition of Felipe de la Torre's Institución de un rey christiano and his 1999 magnum opus, Spanish Treatises on Government, Society and Religion in the Time of Philip II: The 'de regimine principum' and Associated Traditions assure his place as a major intellectual historian of Western Europe. 

​Ron enjoyed a long-standing association with Pusey House, where he wished his funeral to be held. We will share details about that, and a later memorial service in the Cathedral, in due course.

SIMILAR STORIES

MS 715, f. 4r & f. 5. © The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.

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