Mary Stallings-Taney
Scoring games in tennis is child’s play compared to keeping track of 115 copies of a 14th century Latin text. However, for scholar and life-long tennis buff Mary Stallings-Taney, playing tennis, with its demands for focus and concentration, helped her develop the discipline necessary to spend most of her academic career researching a complex “critical text.”

Stallings-Taney began her doctoral work at Catholic University in 1964, deciding to focus on Meditaciones vite Christi, an original Latin depiction of Jesus. She aligned different copies of the text and compared them, word by word, to ascertain the original text from what had been lost through scribal errors.

She filled 30 years with travel to England, France, Germany and Italy to view original documents as well as teaching history and Latin at Glassboro and raising a family. She did much of her research after retiring in 1991, while teaching as an adjunct at Rowan.

Her 400-page critical text was published in 1997 and is now held in 700 research libraries around the world. Stallings-Taney collaborated with her husband, Francis Taney ’71, on a translation of the Latin into English, published in 2001. She said the text was desperately needed for medieval research, but, proving the value of scholarship outside academe, Stallings-Taney suggests that “Mel Gibson could well have found insights for his new film from this vivid portrayal of Jesus.”

After decades of scholarship and teaching, Stallings-Taney remembers students most about her time at Glassboro. “I enjoyed them immensely,” she said. “I taught students who were eager to work.” She believed it was important to give students “the skeleton of history—you can add the muscles yourself.”

Her allusion to anatomy is not surprising for the athletic Stallings-Taney. She was inducted into the Haddonfield Athletic Hall of Fame for triple lettering in high school and for coaching and teaching athletics in Ohio and Minnesota. To stay in shape now, Stallings-Taney plays doubles with friends at local clubs and on the tennis court she and her husband built in the backyard of their Deptford home.

With academic rigor and competition a way of life, Stallings-Taney transmitted her combined passion for scholarship and athletics to her son, Frank, Jr., an academic all-American in economics and tennis at Drew University. She also coached a young neighbor, working with him until he was able to make the high school tennis team. “Nothing could be more gratifying to a teacher than to see her students succeed,” she said.

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Alumni can honor retired faculty by donating to a scholarship fund and other investment. Call Anne Hagan at 856-256-5402 or visit the Rowan University Foundation.