Nora Elisabeth Mary Boyce (2 August 1920 – 4 April 2006) was a British scholar of Iranian languages and an authority on Zoroastrianism.
There she met her future mentor, Walter Bruno Henning, under whose tutelage she began to study Middle Iranian languages.
In 1948, Boyce was appointed lecturer of Iranian Studies at SOAS, specialising in Manichaean, Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Parthian texts.
The results of her research there were formative to her understanding of Zoroastrianism and she discovered that much of the previously established scholarship on the ancient faith was terribly misguided.
In the same year she published the first volume of her magnum opus, The History of Zoroastrianism, which appeared in the monograph series Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden:Brill).