(b Dayton, OH, 1941; d 1995). American art historian. Deshman attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate before training with Kurt Weitzmann at Princeton University, where he received his PhD in 1970 for a dissertation on the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, a manuscript that occupied him for his entire career. This project was published as a book in 1995, just before Deshman’s death from oesophageal cancer, and was awarded the 1997 Charles Homer Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America for a distinguished book in medieval studies. Beyond his assiduous work on the Benedictional monograph, Deshman explicated the complex theological meanings embedded in Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination, contributing broadly to this field of study through numerous notable articles. Using methods advocated by Weitzmann, Deshman considered the choices made by artists in the manipulation of models, using the close observation of subtle compositional and iconographic nuances as his usual springboard, coupled with a wealth of comparative visual material. To recover the original meaning that art had for such grandees as Charles the Bald, Bishop Aethelwold of Winchester, and other monastic reformers of 10th-century England, Deshman typically plumbed the depths of contemporaneous religious, political, philosophical, and liturgical texts. The image, however, was always at the centre, as in a posthumously published ...