TETEL, Marcel 1932-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 11, 1932, in Paris, France; died May 27, 2004, in Durham, NC. Tetel was widely regarded as one of the world's leading scholars of the French and Italian Renaissance period. Born to Jewish parents in Paris, he lost both his father and mother to the Auschwitz concentration camp, but with the help of the French Resistance he was able to survive with a family in La Rochelle. With aid from Jewish relief funds, he made his way to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1949, enrolling at the University of Chattanooga and graduating in 1954. Next, he earned a master's degree from Emory University in 1956, studied at the University of Florence for a year, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. Tetel joined the Duke University faculty in 1960 as an instructor, became a full professor of Romance languages in 1968, and eventually retired as professor emeritus. As a scholar, Tetel was most admired for his research and writing on Rabelais, Montaigne, and Marguerite de Navarre, as well as for his comparative studies on historical France and Italy. He wrote, edited, and compiled numerous books during his career, including Rabelais (1967), Montaigne (1974; updated edition, 1990), Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence (1989), which he coedited, and Rabelais Revisited (1993), which he wrote with Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Tetel was also a longtime editor of the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2004, p. 43.

ONLINE

Duke Dialogue Online,http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/ (June 18, 2004).