Toni Healey: A Tribute

Summary

Toni Healey would frequently, with some pride, tell her colleagues at the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) that the young Antonette diPaolo grew up in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania (Mushroom Capital of the World), though she had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, and so, arguably, is a Southern belle. Perhaps these auspicious beginnings presaged a career of great distinction. Toni graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1967 from the College of New Rochelle, New York, and continued her studies at the University of Toronto, where she completed a Master of Arts in 1969 and then a PhD in 1973 under the supervision of Angus Cameron. After a year as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto she took up a position for four years as an assistant professor in the Department of English, Yale University. Fortunately for the future of Old English lexicography, Professor Cameron, the inspiration behind the Dictionary of Old English and its founding editor, was able to persuade her to come back to Toronto to join the editorial team he was in the process of assembling, and she returned in 1978, along with her husband Robin and their then infant daughters, Elspeth and Emma. She was successively an assistant editor, an associate editor, a co-editor (with Ashley Crandell Amos), and then Chief Editor from 1989 until her retirement in 2014.

This tribute to Toni will of necessity be a mere sketch of her achievements and contributions to scholarship in her almost forty years at the DOE and the University of Toronto. Her overview of the DOE was unparalleled; she was a participant in the very early days of planning and the building of the research collection, publishing, in advance of the release of the first letter, D, in 1986, works on the plan for the DOE, on the microfiche concordance, on the electronic corpus, and on the design of the computer system. She constantly anticipated the next direction needed for every aspect of the project – editorial, technological, and financial. She scheduled the writing and revising of entries and put her superb analytical skills to use in those she wrote herself. She guarded the electronic corpus zealously, ensuring that it was (as it still is) regularly updated and corrected so that the published Dictionary would be increasingly comprehensive and accurate.