Barbara Lewalski, a renowned Renaissance scholar and expert on the poet John Milton who became the first woman to be granted tenured and endowed professorships in the English departments of Brown and Harvard Universities, died on March 2 in Providence, R.I. She was 87.

Her son, David Lewalski, her only immediate survivor, said she had a heart attack at her home in Providence and died in a hospital. She had recently learned that she had congestive heart failure, he said.

Professor Lewalski was an accomplished author, teacher, mentor to doctoral students and an enterprising researcher who was named an honored scholar by the Milton Society of America when she was 46. In 2016 she received a lifetime achievement award from the Renaissance Society of America.

“Professor Lewalski was without a doubt the foremost scholar of English Renaissance Studies in America and England, setting the standard for several generations of scholars,” Diana Trevino Benet, a past president of both the John Milton Society of American and the John Donne Society of America, wrote in an email.

In addition to breaching the brotherhood of English professors at Brown and Harvard, Professor Lewalski crashed another barrier: She refused to be consigned to the back door of the Brown faculty club, which was the portal reserved for professors’ wives and other women. ...