Bertha Haven Putnam (1872–1960)

Bertha Haven Putnam was born in New York City and grew up in Philadelphia. She was the daughter of George Haven Putnam, author and head of the publishing firm of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and his first wife Rebecca Shepard Putnam. Emily James Putnam was her step-mother. Bertha attended private schools and graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a bachelor's degree in 1893. She taught classes at the Brearley School in New York before earning a doctorate in history from Columbia University in 1908 with a dissertation on The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers During the First Decade After the Black Death, 1349–1359. This work led her to specialize in medieval English law and criminology. She joined the faculty of Mount Holyoke College as an instructor in 1908, and rose to become a full professor in 1924. That same year, she published After the Black Death, 1349–1359; and in 1933 she published Kent Keepers of the Peace, 1316–17. In 1938, she edited Proceedings Before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, for which she won the first Haskins Medal, awarded by the Medieval Academy of America, in 1940. She retired from Mt. Holyoke in 1937 and spent 1938 lecturing at Bryn Mawr College. During that year, she became the first woman and the first non-lawyer to become a research fellow at Harvard Law School. In 1939, she published Yorkshire Sessions of the Peace, 1361–1364. In the late 1940s, she had a bad case of shingles that left her partially blind, ending her scholarly career, which had achieved international recognition and acclaim. Her last book, The Place in Legal History of Sir William Sharehull, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, was published in England in 1950.