To her, as to many others, he was a rich source of promising lines of enquiry, ideas which blossomed into other ideas; he was also able to protect her from the slings and arrows of bureaucracy, leaving her free to do what she did best.The first earnest of what was to come was the little Bodleian exhibition catalogue Duke Humfrey and English Humanism, a present to Roger Mynors on his retirement from the chair of Latin and chairmanship of the Curators of the Bodleian in 1970. This revealed not only her knowledge but the sureness of her eye, the ability to see and recognise handwritings, and to realise the connections between them and what they meant.The Lyell catalogue followed next year, and in 1973 what remains her magnum opus, The Handwriting of Italian Humanists, a handsome folio of reproductions with long commentary, describing the lives and writing of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, Poggio, Niccoli and three others It was subtitled “Volume I Fascicle 1″, but alas, no more were finished. The preface reads, “The preparation of this book has been more hurried than I would have liked”, a euphemism for the pressure put on her by the publisher, the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (not least Anthony Hobson), to get it out at all. It remains a splendid vestige of what would have been a great monument to its author, and also to the once great Oxford University Press, which printed it.In 1975 Hunt retired, his seminal career at Bodley commemorated with an exhibition, “The Survival of Ancient Literature”, in which de la Mare had an important part, and she had an even larger one in the memorial exhibition, “Manuscripts at Oxford”, in 1980. Her grasp of the impact of humanism in England was also evinced in her joint paper with Lotte Hellinga, showing exactly why the first book printed at Oxford had been dated “1468″ instead of 1478, thus confusing early historians of the press no end.By now too, her reputation, already great in Italy, had become European, and she was invited to the United States, often staying with her friend Ellen Erdreich in Washington.

A host of elegant papers in journals and elsewhere enabled an increasing band of admirers to follow her path as she increased her grasp of the movements of scribes and booksellers in and beyond Italy, some of them even reaching England, and of their customers, English, such as Bishop William Gray and Andrew Holes, as well as Italian and other potentates. This work culminated in “New Research on Humanist Scribes in Florence”, a substantial book in its own right, but only part of Miniatura Fiorentina del Rinascimento (1985), which she shared with Annarosa Garzelli.The Bodleian in the 1980s was not the second home it had been earlier, so, when Julian Brown, Professor of Palaeography at King’s College, London, decreed on his deathbed that Tilly de la Mare and no one else should succeed him, she was quite glad of the summons, although she never left Oxford, whither her father moved in 1980 (she moved to look after him at Cumnor). But she took to a new career as a teacher with delight, retiring only in 1997.She organised and gave lectures with conscientious thoroughness. There was, quite literally, no stopping her: an hour-long seminar at the Warburg might begin at 11.30; at 1 the Director would look in to say that it was lunch-time, and again at 1.30 to remind her that the canteen would close in 10 minutes. But none of her pupils felt that it was too long; fact after fascinating fact would emerge, and yet another, well worth waiting for, was just round the corner. Her audience always left reluctantly, unwilling to wait till next week for another “thrilling instalment”.As idea followed idea, too quick to be pinned down, so chaos was apt to set in.

If she never quite achieved the legendary disorder of Canon Claude Jenkins, her work was a sea of paper that she alone could navigate. Her lectures might begin with a carousel of slides emptying itself on the floor, to be hastily put together in an entirely different order, which would nevertheless prove to be full of new and unsuspected insights. It was rather like the Queen of Hearts’ garden party: publishers and administrators might find it hard to keep up, but Tilly would be away, flamingo in hand, knocking a new hedgehog through a soldier that had only just become a hoop. Life with her was always exhilarating.And she got as much out of it as any of her admirers. She must have read a detective story a day all her life; Brother Cadfael, whose adventures she adored, owes some of his existence to her She knew P.G. Wodehouse backwards (Carry on, Jeeves was on the table beside her when I went to see her in hospital the day before she died, and she said, in evident bewilderment, “It’s taken me three days to read one story”).

The music constantly in the background was mainly 17th- and 18th-century, but increasingly earlier, as more and more Renaissance and medieval music became available. She travelled widely, making light of the occasional crosses that came with it. She had a strong sense of public duty, serving in the Civil Defence Corps to be the better prepared to help in the event of any disaster. She was a loyal member of the Comit?nternationale de Pal?raphie, a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1993 was appointed OBE.No one could call Tilly de la Mare beautiful, but there was something irresistibly attractive about her long face, the mouth that would keep turning up into a smile. Her funny voice, apt to go up unexpectedly at moments of surprise or excitement, was like no one else’s.