Mary Paton Ramsay (25 October 1885 – 5 July 1946) was a Scottish academic. In 1919, she was the winner of theRose Mary Crawshay Prize for her bookLes Doctrines Medievales Chez Donne, which argued for the influence ofmedieval mysticism on the poetry ofJohn Donne.^[1]

Mary Ramsay was born inHeadington, Oxfordshire, on 25 October 1885, the daughter ofSir William Ramsay.^[2]

She was one of the first female graduates from theUniversity of Aberdeen where she read English (MA, 1908).^[2][3] She was elected to aCarnegie fellowship in 1913 and studied the origins of Englishmetaphysical poetry under professorH. J. C. Grierson. She completed her doctorate onJohn Donne under professorFrançois Picavet of theUniversity of Paris, an authority onscholasticism in Europe who had also written about Donne.^[4]

During the First World War, she did clerical work, spent two years working with munitions (TNT) in Edinburgh 1915–1917, and worked as an administrator in France for theQueen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps, 1917–1919.^[5][2]

In 1919, Ramsay was a lecturer in history and sociology at theAmerican College for Women atConstantinople^[5] when she won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her bookLes Doctrines Medievales Chez Donne (French),^[6] which was based on her doctoral thesis.^[1] She argued in the book for the influence of medieval mysticism on Donne's work, although not of an extreme kind; Michael Martin sees this view as part of a trend in early twentieth-century literary criticism that derives fromEvelyn Underhill's bookMysticism (1911).^[7] Ramsay's thesis was not universally accepted and several contemporary and later scholars have attempted to rebut it, includingMario Praz,T.S. Eliot,^[8] andGeorge Williamson (1898–1968).^[9]

Ramsay's later works were on Scottish topics, including a discussion ofJohn Calvin's attitude to art as it relates to Scotland and works on Scottish patriotism and song.^[10]

• Les Doctrines Medievales Chez Donne, le poète métaphysicien de l'Angleterre (1573–1631). Humphrey Milford, London, 1917. (2nd,Oxford University Press, 1924)
• Calvin and Art, Considered in Relation to Scotland. Moray Press, Edinburgh & London, 1938.
• The Freedom of the Scots from Early Times Till its Eclipse in 1707: Displayed in Statements of our Forefathers Who Loved and Served Scotland. Edinburgh, 1945.
• Popular Variants of Auld Scots Sangs. Kilmarnock, 1946. (Editor)

• 1885 births
• 1967 deaths
• Alumni of the University of Aberdeen
• University of Paris alumni
• Scottish women academics
• Scottish academics of English literature
• People from Headington
• British women in World War I
• Writers from Edinburgh

• CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list
• Use dmy dates from April 2022
• Articles with hCards