Medievalist curator of manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Miner was born to Roy Waldo Miner (1875-1955) and Anna Elizabeth Carroll (d. 1924). Her father was a marine biologist and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. She attended Barnard College, graduating in 1926 and continued in medieval literature as the first Barnard International Fellow at Bedford College, University of London. She returned to New York in 1928 to study art history at Columbia University as a Carnegie Fellow.