Claire Marie Donovan FSA RA FRHistS (née Baker; 12 February 1948 – 5 June 2019^[1]) was a British historian and academic.

Career

Donovan was educated in Oxford before studying an undergraduate degree in English and History of Art at the University of London. She gained a Postgraduate diploma from Somerville College, Oxford and a PhD from the University of East Anglia.^[2] Her PhD thesis, "The Early Development of the Illustrated Book of Hours in England, c. 1240–1350," was filed in 1981.^[3]

She was vice principal of Dartington College of Arts, an Honorary Research Fellow in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, a Council member of the Devon History Society, a Trustee of Poltimore House Trust^[4] and Chair of the South West Association of Preservation Trusts.^[2]

Doctoral thesis and select publications

• Baker, C. M. 1981. "The Early Development of the Illustrated book of Hours in England, c. 1240–1350" (unpublished Ph.D. thesis).
• Donovan, C. 1991. The de Brailes Hours: shaping the book of hours in 13th-century Oxford. London, British Library.
• Donovan, C. and Bushnell, J. 1996. John Everett Millais, 1829–1896: a centenary exhibition. Southampton, Media Arts Faculty Institute.
• Donovan, C. 2000. The Winchester Bible. Winchester, Winchester Cathedral.
• Donovan, C. 2005. Review of Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (London: The British Library/Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2003), in English Historical Review CXX, no. 486, pp. 203-05.
• Donovan, C. and Hemmings, J. 2014. "Evidence for Eighteenth-Century Rebuilding at Poltimore House: Interpreting Edmund Prideaux’s Drawings, 1716 and 1727", The Devon Historian 83.