He retired from the University in 1998 as Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, beloved by many students.Īmong his many publications is his re-evaluation of one of the major paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts: Jan van Eyck's, Saint Jerome in His Study. After two years in Rome, Ed was awarded his PhD in 1955 and the same year joined the History Faculty at Wayne State University. Although he entered medical school in fall, he withdrew after two days and decided he would study medieval history instead.Įd studied under the eminent canon and Roman law scholar Gaines Post and subsequently went off on a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the Vatican Library and Archives, completing his dissertation on the ancient procedure for arbitration in Roman law in the 12th and 13th centuries.

After his junior year, however, he went to Europe for two months, an experience that changed his life profoundly. Thus Ed entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a pre-med student. His great-grandfather had studied anatomy with Oliver Wendell Holmes, and his great-great grandfather studied medicine at Yale. Initially he planned to follow the family tradition of medicine. The son of Sidney and Mildred Hall, Ed was born on August 2, 1928, in Wauwatosa,Ī suburb of Milwaukee, the descendent of a hardy stock of Norwegian, German, and British immigrants who first settled the Boston Bay Colony and what later became Boston. Long-time Grosse Pointe City resident and medievalist, Edwin Hall, 92, died peacefully on 20 August at Beaumont Hospital, following a long and courageous battle with bone marrow disease.

Edwin paul grosse pointe