Rita Lejeune (1906–2009) was a Belgian philologist who became a leading expert in the study of medieval French literature.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (April 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 6,164 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Rita Lejeune]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Rita Lejeune}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Lejeune was born in Herstal on 22 November 1906.^[2] Her father, Jean Lejeune, was a local government clerk and also a poet under the pen name Jean Lamoureux. He died in the 1918 influenza pandemic shortly before her twelfth birthday.^[3] After secondary school she became a student and then a researcher at the University of Liège, obtaining her doctorate in 1928 with a thesis on Jean Renart.^[1] She married Fernand Dehousse in 1929 and together they had two children. In the meantime she also studied at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. In 1937 she began teaching at Liège University, and in 1954 she was appointed full professor in the department of Romance philology there.^[1] Her primary research interests were chansons de geste and chivalric romances, but she also developed an interest in Walloon literature.^[1] She died in Liège on 18 March 2009,^[3] and was buried in the churchyard of Notre-Dame de la Licourt in Herstal.

Lejeune became a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium on 5 December 1977 and a full member on 2 May 1988.^[4]