Draft:Cora Scofield

Cora Louise Scofield (February 6, 1870-March 10, 1962) was an American historian of late medieval England. The second of two daughters of a Union Army veteran, General Hiram Scofield, and his wife Amelia, Cora Scofield was born in Washington, Iowa in 1870. She attended Vassar College, graduating in 1890, which she followed with a period of study at the University of Oxford in 1891-92. She went on to pursue her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, where she completed a thesis on the Court of Star Chamber. When she received her PhD in 1898, she was the first woman to receive a PhD in history from the University of Chicago. Dr. Scofield would go on to teach at Wellesley College in 1897, resigning from this position in 1902. Four years later, her father died and Dr. Scofield became her widowed mother's companion until Amelia Scofield's death in 1929. Dr. Scofield and her mother moved to Boston in 1912, where each of them would spend the remainder of their lives.

Freed from her teaching responsibilities, Dr. Scofield was able to pursue her research more singlemindedly. She had published her doctoral thesis, A Study of the Court of Star Chamber, in 1900. Following that, Dr. Scofield focused her studies on the reign of Edward IV of England. She spent the first two decades of the twentieth century researching and writing on the king and his reign, publishing a multitude of articles on various aspects. In 1923, she published her two volume The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth. This was the first scholarly biography of that king ever produced and was the result of extensive research carried out by Dr. Scofield in the archives of England and the continent. Her book became not merely the defining history of the king and his reign for half a century, but was a landmark work for historians of later medieval England in general for its engagement with unprinted primary sources. Even after Charles Ross published his Edward IV in 1974, Dr. Scofield's work has continued to remain a vital resource for scholars up to this day and was reissued in 2016.

While Dr. Scofield's output all but ceased after the completion of her magnum opus, she remainder a respected scholar of the period, continuing to travel to Britain through the 1930s. Dr. Scofield died in Boston on March 10, 1962.