In 1919, she was the winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book Les Doctrines Medievales Chez Donne, which argued for the influence of medieval mysticism on the poetry of John Donne.
[2][3] She was elected to a Carnegie fellowship in 1913 and studied the origins of English metaphysical poetry under professor H. J. C. Grierson.
[5][2] In 1919, Ramsay was a lecturer in history and sociology at the American College for Women at Constantinople[5] when she won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book Les Doctrines Medievales Chez Donne (French),[6] which was based on her doctoral thesis.
[1] She argued in the book for the influence of medieval mysticism on Donne's work, although not of an extreme kind; Michael Martin sees this view as part of a trend in early twentieth-century literary criticism that derives from Evelyn Underhill's book Mysticism (1911).
[7] Ramsay's thesis was not universally accepted and several contemporary and later scholars have attempted to rebut it, including Mario Praz, T.S.