Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, FSA, FBA (3 March 1897 – 31 December 1985[1]) was an English archaeologist and art historian.

Her father had a breakdown when she was around 10 and was institutionalised for the rest of his life meaning that her mother, Edith, was the most dominant figure in the children's lives.

[3] Toynbee was awarded a scholarship to and educated at Winchester High School for Girls and (like her mother) at Newnham College, Cambridge (1916–20),[4] where she achieved a First in the Classical Tripos.

[1] After retirement from Cambridge, she continued to publish a wide range of academic papers and lived in Oxford with her sister Margaret until her death in 1985.

From 1927 she was Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, appointed Lecturer in 1931, where her students included Lilian Hamilton Jeffery and Joan Liversidge.

[4] Her earlier visits to the British School at Rome brought her into contact with Eugénie Sellers Strong who was an influence on Roman art.

A review of the Roman Society for its centenary suggests that Margerie Venables Taylor hoped to have Toynbee appointed President in 1962 but that a trial session of Council made it clear that she was too deaf to function effectively in the post.

[16] In 1977, an edited volume of 20 papers was published in honour of her eightieth birthday, in which Martin Robertson states that “No one has done more than she – no one perhaps so much – to establish and make clear the profound unity of the Greco-Roman artistic tradition”.