Tribute: Michael Gunn

by Vicky Gunn

Michael was known to many members of the AAA. He served on the AAA’s Board and took a leading role in two of the AAA’s most prestigious events: a Scanderbeg Symposium at Pembroke College, Cambridge in November 2016, and “Celebrating Scanderbeg” at the British Academy in November 2018.

Michael was born in Woking, Surrey on 3 January 1942 in an emergency wartime maternity hospital. As a child he attended Wandsworth Grammar School and from there he went to Camberwell School of Art, specialising in painting, particularly surrealism.

His early career was in book binding and from there his visual skills led him into the field of microphotography. He joined University Microfilms in 1961 where he specialised in the microfilming of medieval manuscripts and early modern books as well as more typical quality microfiche reproduction. He worked his way up from apprentice to master, overseeing the modernisation of their cameras to improve the reproduction quality of the microfilms. In 1967, he moved to World Microfilms where he expanded his specialism from research library activity to broader high quality documentary reproduction. 

In 1981 he established Academic Microforms with his wife Jane. The company focused entirely on specialist microphotography, drawing together Michael’s years of working with libraries as diverse as the British Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Royal College of Music Library and the Courtauld Libraries, and expanding out to monastic libraries and modern archival collections. That year he also finished his first book, Manual of Document Microphotography. This work became a standard text for microphotography until digitisation replaced it as the superhighway to accessing manuscripts and archival documents. 

Under the auspices of Academic Microforms, Michael worked on a wide range of microfilmed early rare book and medieval manuscript collections in the United Kingdom as well as more modern subjects, including the letters of Florence Nightingale, the Holocaust Papers of Friends House Library, ITN’s  Press Cuttings Project and the case files of Melanie Klein, held by the Wellcome Institute. 

In 2012, Michael founded a small independent publishing house, Highland Heritage Press, which specialised in academic historical works about the clans and castles of the Northern Highlands of Scotland. Michael himself wrote Caithness Castles, but his main interest was in the Clan Gunn. This was a lifelong obsession with his own family’s highland genealogy. He wrote two books about it: Heraldry and Tartans of the Clan Gunn and Sons of the Sword: History of the Chiefs of Clan Gunn, Hereditary Crowners of Caithness. In writing these books, Michael developed his scholarly thoroughness, pursuit of truth, and control of the minutiae necessary to unravel a thousand years of history.

These skills were ultimately brought to bear on his studies of the Albanian tribes, clans and families. Michael’s interest in the Balkans went back to the early 1970s, and it was his desire to learn from the Albanian clans to better understand the Highland ones that led to the publication in 2021 of his book, Historical Dictionary of the Albanian Tribes, Clans and Families.  

This work is an encyclopaedic synthesis of his years of Albanology and it reflects thirty years of research which engaged him with the people and texts of Albania. Michael’s knowledge was put to good use in the AAA’s Scanderbeg celebrations in 2016 and 2018, when he prepared a detailed timeline of Scanderbeg’s life, and information about the leaders of the League of Lezhë, convened in March 1444.

Michael was a regular contributor to the Anglo-Albanian Gazette. He wrote more than a dozen articles, all focusing on different aspects of mediaeval Albania: its tribes and clans, its politics and social structures, and of course Scanderbeg. In 2012 he was awarded a Certificate of Honour by the Albanian Institute of National Affairs, an award that got pride of place on the shelf above his desk.

Michael died from cancer on 22 October 2024, at Trinity Hospice in Clapham. He is survived by his wife, Jane Gunn, his children, Alex and Vicky Gunn, and his grandchild, Maya Gunn.