Beverly Mary Boyd was born to Elspeth Mossop Boyd and James Gray Boyd in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from New Dorp High School on Staten Island and received her B.A from Brooklyn College and her M.A. and PhD. degrees from Columbia University.

Boyd taught at the University of Texas at Austin and Radford College before beginning her long tenure at the University of Kansas in 1962. A scholar of medieval literature, Boyd specialized in the life and work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Her books include The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin, Chaucer and the Liturgy, Chaucer According to William Caxton, and Chaucer and the Medieval Book, written with the support of a 1969 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Boyd advocated for equal treatment of women in academia. In 1975, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then teaching at Columbia University, recommended an ACLU lawyer that filed a successful suit for equal pay on Boyd’s behalf. Boyd was inducted into the University of Kansas Commission on the Status of Women Hall of Fame in 1977.

In the 1980s Boyd began working towards the canonization of Rose Philippine Duchesne, a French nun who served with a missionary order in St. Charles, Missouri in the early 1800s. In 1841, in old age, Duchesne went to work with the Potawatomi Nation near Mound City, Kansas. Boyd’s 1991 book, The Song of Mound City, is autobiographical, telling of her personal experience with Catholicism, Duchesne, and the trip to Rome for the canonization.

Boyd’s ongoing study of Chaucer took her to England. In Ipswich, England she worked to have a building that had been a tavern owned by Chaucer’s family recognized as a historical site. She attended the commemoration ceremony in 1995. Her book Chaucer and the Taverners of Ipswich was published in 2014.

Beverly Boyd received the Millenium Medal of Honor from the American Biographical Institute (2000) and the Mabel S. Fry Award for Teaching Excellence (2005). She retired in 2007, though her scholarship continued and she remained active in the Haskell Catholic Center community. Dr. Beverly Boyd passed away at the age of 93 in 2019.

[Information gathered from collection materials and Boyd’s obituary.]