The former Prefect of the Vatican Library, Father Leonard Boyle OP (Dominicans) who died in Rome on October 25th, was recognised as the foremost scholar in his chosen field of Latin palaeography and diplomatics. Shortly before his death he was presented with two volumes of essays written in his honour by mediaeval scholars from all over the world. Born in Burtonport, Co Donegal on November 13th, 1923, he lost both parents at a young age and grew up in Tralee, Co Kerry with his brother's family. An all-rounder of exceptional ability in Mount Melleray Cistercian College, he took a life-long interest in sport. On leaving school he entered the Dominican noviciate of the Irish Province and in 1947 he and Austin Flannery OP commenced theological studies in Blackfriars, Oxford, a gesture of solidarity with the depleted post war Dominican House of Studies.
Ordained a priest in 1949, Father Boyle was awarded the Alexander Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1954. Two years later he earned the DPhil in Mediaeval Studies, winning critical acclaim from the Oxford mediaeval scholars, Bill Pantin, Beryl Smalley, Daniel Callus and Gervase Mathew who remained his friends until their deaths.
He was immediately appointed professor of Latin palaeography and history of mediaeval theology at the Angelicum, now the Pontifical University of St Thomas in Rome, which began his lifelong association with the Vatican Archives and Library.
He lived with the Irish Dominican community in San Clemente, where his discovery of St Cyril's burial place and his archaeological excavations on the site of the San Clemente Basilica attracted a delighted Pope John XXIII to inspect the finds. In 1966 the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto succeeded in persuading Prof Boyle to take up a full-time appointment there while allowing him to retain his ties with Rome.
Held in high esteem, one of his former doctoral students described him as "having a kind of elegant light-heartedness, yet possessing enormous erudition and rigorously high standards - he never insulted or humiliated a student".
This happy period of his life during which he took out Canadian citizenship and served on the Board of the Mediaeval Academy of America came to an end with his appointment as Prefect of the Vatican Library in 1984. He will be remembered as one of the great librarians of the Vatican Collections, brilliantly innovative and a confident moderniser in the teeth of opposition. He transformed an old-fashioned, inadequate service into a library equipped with the electronic technology needed for the next century. His progressive style of administration was not acceptable to certain senior elements of the Vatican bureaucracy who forced his early retirement from the library.
He was general editor of the Calendars of Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, and President of the Leonine Commission for the critical edition of the works of St Thomas Aquinas. Among his numerous publications, his Survey of the Vatican Archives and its Mediaeval Holdings (1972), became a standard work. The Master of the Dominican Order, Father Timothy Radcliffe, presided at his Requiem Mass in the Basilica of San Clemente where he was buried with special permission of the Ministry of Culture in Rome.
Father Boyle was a towering friar-scholar in the great tradition of Irish learning abroad.
Leonard Boyle: born 1923; died October, 1999