They died recently within weeks of each other, Elborg (on November 13, 2025), five years after the death of Robert Forster, and Pat (on January 25, 2026) after seventy years of marriage to Orest who survives her.

After Bob and Orest joined JHU, in 1966 and 1970 respectively, they began to collaborate with each other and with their spouses, launching a highly influential project to bring Annales history to Anglophone academics. French historians and historians of all thematic fields in the United States and elsewhere first encountered Pat and Elborg through their translations into English of classic articles initially published in the journal Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. If Bob and Orest were credited as the editors, Pat and Elborg brought their superb language skills, their translators’ fluency with language, their familiarity as de facto historians with the subject matter, and their ability to push a lot of laborious work to the epic task of translating 61 articles into English, providing the content for seven edited volumes. [1] The publication of these volumes in English mainstreamed the Annales method, topics, and interpretative frameworks for much wider audiences.

Elborg Hamacher was born June 17, 1931 in Breslau. Her family fled Breslau in early 1945 as World War II was ending. She went to university in Cologne and then to Toulouse for dissertation research, where she met a young American also conducting dissertation research, Robert Forster, in the fall of 1953.  They married in 1955. Elborg earned her PhD [Die französische Elegie im 16. Jahrhundert (The French Elegy in the 16th Century)] from the University of Cologne in 1958. They became the parents of two sons, Thomas and Marc.

In the wake of the Annales volumes, Elborg became a sought-after translator and noted scholar in her own right. She brought François Furet’s paradigm-shifting book, Interpreting the French Revolution (1981), to an English-speaking audience among other important works. Elborg took the art of translation seriously. In February 2001, she wrote an essay for the Johns Hopkins Magazine, The Art and Craft of Translation, in which she reflected on the creative choices that go into the work of translation. She compared it to musical or theatrical performance in which “different authors will translate the same text in sometimes amazingly different, yet equally accurate, ways.”

Elborg’s keen and critical understanding of language was important to her husband’s career as well; according to their son Marc R. Forster, a historian at Connecticut College, she “read and commented on everything Dad wrote. As time went on, I think their cooperation got closer.” She would also play an instrumental role in Marc’s career, providing the same feedback on his work in French and German, including his 2023 book, Keeping the Peace in the Village: Conflict and Peacemaking in Germany, 1650-1750. He remembers: “the year after Dad died. I taught Mom how to use Google Docs and she read and edited every chapter I wrote. Then we met on Zoom to discuss each chapter and of course we went over all my translations carefully. Then, a week or so later I would get a phone call. ‘So Marc, where is the next chapter?’”

Elborg’s role as Bob’s intellectual collaborator was obvious to all who knew them and acknowledged in their joint publications where she was co-editor as well as translator, beginning with European Society in the Eighteenth century (1969) and culminating in Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: the Letters and Diary of Pierre Dessalles, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856  (1996), an early important intervention in English in the history of the French Atlantic.

Elborg’s favorite scholarly project, one that brought her enormous pleasure and satisfaction, was her edition of the translated letters of the wife of Louis XIV’s brother, titled A Women’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von des Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans, 1652–1722 (1984). Louis Auchincloss’s review in the New York Times  reported that “The letters, translated from German by Elborg Forster, are accompanied by an excellent introduction and a ‘Cast of Characters’ as informative as any scholar could want.”

Patricia McGroder was born in St Paul, Minnesota on November 8, 1932. She graduated from Macalester College where she also met and married her fellow student, Orest.  She held a Fulbright Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1954-55 as she earned a certificat dans la literature francaise from the University of Besançon. Their children, Kristen and Marcus, are both alumni of Johns Hopkins.

Pat was Orest’s collaborator from the start. He recalls that she “typed after editing every paper, book, article and book review I wrote and published since 1957” as well as his PhD thesis. They worked together on editing and translating multiple texts beyond the Annales series. When he published his final book in 2020, his acknowledgements ended with “My expression of gratitude toward Patricia McGroder Ranum is found in the Dedication. It has no bounds.” The dedication captured  her many roles: “For Patricia McGroder Ranum. Muse, Inspired Critic, Typist, Friend, Wife.”

In addition to the Annales collections, Pat translated the work of some of the giants of French history after World War II including Phillipe Ariès (The Western Way of Death) and Fernand Braudel (Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism). These translations helped bring those historians to an Anglophone audience and to make their publications influential  among English-speaking  historians, even those who were not specialists in French history. 

Many visitors to the Ranums’ house enjoyed the pleasure of listening to Pat play their harpsichord before eating a wonderful dinner she prepared, and from the 1980s, Pat increasingly applied her superb musicianship, experience in the archives, knowledge of French history, and publication to establish her own research trajectory as a historian of French Baroque music.  She published prolifically in a wide variety of outlets and, like Orest, had a broad curiosity about many aspects of her historical subjects’ lives. Her books and articles were published in English and French and her interests stretched from the composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier  to recorder playing and pronunciation, In a review in 2008, Davitt Merony identified Pat as one of two scholars (the other is French) “who have dominated the field” in the previous twenty-five years. [2]  Orest wrote proudly after her death that “she was number one in her class in college, number one in the history of French Baroque music in the United States and dare I say in France too.”

Graduate students who worked with Bob and Orest - including the two of us - benefited from the intellectual and broader support of these two amazing women as well as their generous hospitality and trenchant life advice. Like other talented “faculty wives” of their era, neither had a university appointment and they contributed so much to their spouses’ careers. Their talent, intelligence, and tenacity made Elborg and Pat widely recognized as important scholars in their own right.  Like their partners, they helped shape the trajectory of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French history as a field in the United States.

Christine Adams and Julie Hardwick

[1] The volumes were all published by Johns Hopkins University Press: Biology of Man in History, 1975; Family and Society, 1976; Rural Society in France, 1977; Deviants and the Abandoned, 1978; Food and Drink in History, 1979; Medicine and Society in France, 1980; and Ritual, Religion, and the Sacred, 1982. JHU Press subsequently published all seven as a paperback set. 

[2]  Davitt Merony, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 61, no. 3, 2008, p. 655. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2008.61.3.654. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026. The other was Catherine Cessac.