Florence Edler: The “Indispensable Collaborator” of Raymond De Roover

This chapter explores the life and career of Florence Edler de Roover, utilizing heretofore unexplored archival materials from the personal papers of Edler and her contemporaries and an interview with one of her few remaining students to examine her scholarship, the trajectory of her career, and her relationship, both professional and private, with her husband Raymond de Roover. Examining Edler and de Roover’s scholarship in tandem with those underutilized sources and their public statements, especially the introductions and dedications of de Roover’s books, reveals the extent to which the worked published under Raymond de Roover’s name and indeed the whole direction of his scholarly career was in fact largely Edler’s. The relationship between Edler and de Roover and the appropriation of her work is one example of a broader phenomenon of the co-optation of female scholarly labor (research, translation, etc.) and ideas in American and European academia in the twentieth century.