A towering scholar among medievalists, George Kane was for half a century and more the acknowledged authority on Piers Plowman. He spent most of his career in the University of London, where he was an influential and greatly respected figure. After retiring from King’s College, he accepted a chair in the University of North Carolina, retiring in 1987.

His first London appointment was as an assistant lecturer at University College in 1946, where he became a lecturer with tenure in 1948 and a reader in 1953. During these years he established his reputation as the coming leader in Middle English studies, with the publication of an important paper, Piers Plowman: Problems and Methods of Editing the B-Text (1948), and of a monograph, Middle English Literature (1951), daringly a work of literary criticism at a time when historical and language-based approaches were general. This work engaged directly with romances, lyrics and Piers Plowman, and was described by a reviewer as “one of the best books so far written on any aspect of Middle English literature”.

In 1955 he became Professor of English Language and Literature and head of department at Royal Holloway College, and in 1965 returned to Central London as Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at King’s College.

Throughout his three decades at London University Kane was active in the dealings of the intercollegiate Board of Studies and on its examination boards. In addition to his departmental roles and committee responsibilities, he was the university’s Public Orator (1962-66), chairman of the board of studies in English (1970-72), Dean of the Faculty of Arts at King’s (1972-74). He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968, serving on its council from 1974-76, a Fellow of University College in 1971 and a Fellow of King’s College in 1976.

Keenly aware of the changing profiles of university entrants, at King’s he wholeheartedly supported first-year work in the classical background for English literature and taught the first batch of students without a classical language at O level. He juggled undergraduate teaching and graduate supervision, a distinguished scholarly output and a heavy administrative burden with a kindly patience and quiet humour that made it all seem effortless. The holidays spent fishing rivers and tumbling about in small boats on cold loughs were, apart from reading, his main relaxation.

Internationally too he had become known, lecturing in many European and North American institutions, serving on appointment panels, on the editorial boards and councils of learned societies, delivering keynote lectures. In 1970 and again in 1982 he directed summer seminars at Harvard for the Medieval Academy of America in palaeography and textual criticism and in 1978 at Duke for the Southwestern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Elected a corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1975, in 1978 he became a Fellow; and in 1977 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His retirement as William Rand Kenan Jr Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was marked by a festschrift, Medieval English Studies presented to George Kane.

George Kane was born in 1916 in Humboldt, Saskatchewan. His mother was widowed before his birth, and he spent most of his childhood with his grandparents near Muenster. There he grew up bilingual in English and German, attended the parish school and the Abbey school of St Peter’s College. In 1934 he moved to Vancouver with his mother and stepfather. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1936 with a first in English and Latin.

After fellowships at University College Toronto and Northwestern University he was awarded a two-year studentship to the UK. He arrived at University College London in September 1938, ready to work on a Milton project. Assigned to R. W.Chambers for research direction, he was deflected into preparing a critical edition of the three final passus of the B-text of Piers Plowman.

War intervened, and Kane enlisted in the Honourable Artillery Company. Chambers insisted that Kane’s collations and working papers should go to Aberystwyth to be stored with the college’s rare books and muniments: a lucky decision, for his other property was in a house bombed in 1942.

From 1939 to 1946 Kane served in the British Army. He took part in the stand at Calais, where he was badly wounded and captured. He was a PoW in Oflag VIIC, near Laufen, Bavaria, Oflag VIB in Westphalia, Oflag VIIB in southern Bavaria and Oflag IXAH in Spangenberg in Hesse-Cassell, and he was involved in much tunnelling. One escape attempt, from Eichstätt, took him nearly as far as the Swiss frontier. He got back to London in April 1945.

With the return of his thesis from Aberystwyth Kane set about completing his PhD, an archetypal B-text for Passus XVIII-XX of Piers Plowman. His 1948 paper Piers Plowman: Problems and Methods of Editing the B-Text formulated the gargantuan problem to which he had decided to tackle: the lack of an “established text” for any of the three versions of Piers Plowman.

Pointing out that “the question of authorship has been allowed to take precedence for a long time over the problem of the text, when in actual fact no point regarding this poem, and certainly not that of its authorship, can be settled upon internal evidence until the text itself has been fixed”, he demonstrated the need for a full examination of the B and C texts and for the reconstruction of the “best possible texts . . . from the evidence to be found there”.