Cecil Grayson, CBE, FBA (5 February 1920 – 29 April 1998) was an English Italian studies scholar.
Born on 5 February 1920, Grayson came from a working-class family; his father, a boilermaker, died following an accident when Grayson was six years old, and his mother used her income as a seamstress to pay for his and his brother Denis's education.
[1] He attended Batley Grammar School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford; he served in the Army in the Second World War, rising to the rank of Major.
Alongside other articles and reviews, Grayson produced an edition of Vincenzo Calmeta's Prose e Lettere (1959), compiled Cinque Saggi su Dante (1972), and edited The World of Dante (1981) and The Renaissance: Essays in Interpretation (1982, co-edited with André Chastel, Denys Hay and others).
[5] He received the International Galileo Prize in 1974,[6] was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1979, and was appointed a CBE in 1992;[4] he was the subject of two Festschrifts: The Languages of Literature in Renaissance Italy (1987) and Dante and Governance (1997).