Janet Thormann (aka Janet Thormann Mackintosh) was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and passed away in San Francisco in 2014. She studied Old English poetry with Alain Renoir at UC Berkeley in the 1960s, where she received her MA and PhD degrees, studying both medieval literature and modern poetry. She was the author of numerous articles in Old English literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the representation of Jews in medieval and modern art, and the relations between violence and the law, while she was also engaged in a long career teaching at the College of Marin in California. She lived in San Francisco with her husband Graham Mackintosh, one of the most well-known and important printmakers and publishers in Berkeley’s and San Francisco’s experimental poetry scene in the 1960s onward at both White Rabbit and Black Sparrow presses, a milieu that Janet participated in and cherished. Janet was also a long-time editorial board member and contributor to the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her last project, completed just before her death, was Chaucer’s Comic Providence.
Chaucer’s Comic Providence