Abstract
The death of Terence (Terry) O’Reilly on 16 November 2023, after a long illness, signifies a great loss for his family and friends, and for his colleagues in University College Cork and beyond. His area of specialism was the literature and art of Golden-Age Spain and his contribution in this field was unparalleled in terms of its scope and significance.
The death of Terence (Terry) O’Reilly on 16 November 2023, after a long illness, signifies a great loss for his family and friends, and for his colleagues in University College Cork and beyond. His area of specialism was the literature and art of Golden-Age Spain and his contribution in this field was unparalleled in terms of its scope and significance. Indeed, although he made a particularly distinguished contribution to the study of the religious literature of this period in Spain (especially the works of St Ignatius Loyola and St John of the Cross) and, above all, to knowledge and appreciation of the interdependence of its religious and secular discourses, the range and depth of his work ensured its relevance to all those engaged in seeking to understand the complex intellectual currents at play in early modern Europe.
After completing an undergraduate degree in Spanish and French at the University of Nottingham, Terry remained there to pursue doctoral work under the supervision of Brian Tate. His dissertation, completed in 1972, ‘The Literature of Spiritual Exercises in Spain, 1500–1559’, followed in the footsteps of Marcel Bataillon’s Erasmo y España (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950 [1st French ed. 1937]), and set the direction for much of his later work. In 1975, after two years spent as St Leonard’s Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, he took up a Lectureship at University College Cork. Cork was not altogether unfamiliar territory for him, since he had spent many childhood summers visiting his father’s relatives in the county. He was appointed Statutory Lecturer in 1978 and Associate Professor in 1989. In these years, he produced many articles and essays on the spiritual and mystical (and also the secular) literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, especially on the sources, interpretation and impact of St Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and on the poems and commentaries of St John of the Cross. A selection of these was collected in his book, From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). In 1999 and 2006 respectively, he edited two books by his close friend, Elizabeth Stopp: Hidden in God. Essays and Talks on St Jane Frances de Chantal (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s U. P.) and Adrien Gambart’s Emblem Book: The Life of St Francis de Sales in Symbols (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s U. P.). In 2000, he produced an edition of Jorge de Montemayor’s, Omelías sobre Miserere mei Deus. In the contextualizing Introduction, he carefully explained how this sequence of poems ‘gives expression to a number of themes that are central to Castilian spirituality in the early sixteenth century’,Footnote1 and considered the polemical question—to which he was often to return—of the degree and nature of the influences of Savonarola, Erasmus and Luther on the various reform movements circulating within Spain in that period.
Following his retirement in 2007, Terry entered into the most productive period of his life. In 2010, he published a groundbreaking monograph, The Bible in the Literary Imagination of the Spanish Golden Age: Images and Texts from Columbus to Velázquez (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s U. P.). While it includes chapters in which he continued to engage with the Ignatian Exercises, the poetry of Fray Luis de León and of St John of the Cross, the first is devoted to the literary impact of the New World discoveries as manifested in Columbus’ journals, in Amadís de Gaula, in Góngora’s Soledad primera and in Gracián’s Criticón. In another essay, twenty rather than the hitherto supposed only eleven biblical allusions in Lazarillo de Tormes are identified and discussed. The book concludes with a revelatory study of the iconography of Velázquez’s two biblical bodegones, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and The Supper at Emmaus. In 2016, following the death of his beloved wife, Jennifer O’Reilly, a distinguished early medieval and art historian, Terry was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Despite this, he continued to be productive, seeing through to publication the three volumes of Jennifer’s collected essays, and completing two major studies. In 2021, he published The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception. This represents the summation and expansion of all his previous work on the Exercises. In the Preface, we are reminded that the image of Ignatius as an implacable defender of orthodoxy and ‘the traditional interpretations of the Exercises [were] shaped by writings composed in the late sixteenth century: the biography […] by Pedro de Ribadeneyra […] and the official Directory to the Exercises (1599)’ which ‘reflect, inevitably, the preoccupations of the Counter-Reformation world in which they were composed’.Footnote2 At the heart of Terry’s study is an attempt to re-place Ignatius and understand him in the contexts of late-medieval piety and of the reform movements present in the Spain of the 1520s and 1530s, movements which included, but were by no means confined to, Erasmianism. Terry’s last monograph, published in 2022, was Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain: John of the Cross, Francisco de Aldana, Luis de León (Abingdon: Routledge). In it, he brought together some revised and amplified versions of previously published work and much new material. The volume exemplifies the fruitfulness of his characteristic approach to texts: shedding new light on them by identifying their often previously unrecognized biblical, patristic and classical sources. In addition, his discussions of the way in which the structure of poetic texts shapes their patterns of meaning are particularly illuminating, as, for example, in the chapter entitled ‘Chiasmus and the Art of Memory in the Cántico espiritual’, or in the study of how the subject matter (the Trinity) of St John’s Que bien sé yo la fonte is reflected in the absolutely coherent but completely unobtrusive way in which the numbers three and one pervade every element of its fabric. In another essay, on Luis de León’s Ode to Juan Grial, and based on its chiastic structure and the interplay of its complementary classical and biblical allusions, two readings of the text are offered: one, ‘linear’, based on the sequential unfolding of its ideas, and the other, ‘reflective’ (and less pessimistic), that results from the awareness of the patterns of correspondence and contrast that run back and forth between the stanzas flanking the two central ones. In Terry’s last publications, both translations, he returned to his beloved St John of the Cross: Saint John of the Cross: Selected Poems (Cambridge: Iona, 2021) and Saint John of the Cross: Wisdom Sayings (Cambridge: Iona, 2021).
A characteristic feature of all his writing—and, indeed, of his seminar and conference presentations—cannot go unmentioned: this is the luminous clarity of structure and style. Ideas are presented in beautifully articulated sequence, as if obeying an inevitable, innate order. Remarks made to me in conversation led me to understand that he paid close attention to the cadencing of his sentences, and that, in a manner reminiscent of Luis de León, he weighed and measured them so that they fell naturally on the inner ear of the reader.
The value of Terry’s scholarship was recognized in various ways. In 1985, he was chosen by Alexander Parker to edit his final book, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature (1480–1680) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P.); he held visiting appointments at Cambridge, at Queen Mary & Westfield College and Heythrop College (University of London), and, as Landsdowne Lecturer, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He was a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellow in 2004–2005 and represented University College Cork on the Modern Language Committee of the Royal Irish Academy; in 2009–2010 he was appointed to the Veale Chair of Spirituality at the Jesuit Milltown Institute, in Dublin, and he was regularly invited to address members of the Jesuit and Carmelite communities. In 2009, he was honoured with the publication of a Festschrift issue of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, in which he is described as ‘a new model of humanitas (in its widest sense) for future generations’.Footnote3 In 2013 he was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
In 1999, Terry was co-founder of the biannual Golden Age Research Symposium at UCC. This forum, which welcomed (and continues to welcome) postgraduate students, early career academics and more established scholars, helped to establish Cork as a university of reference in Golden Age Studies internationally and effectively contributed to generating a more sustained interest in this area of study at a time when it was under threat. For two periods of three years, he served on the Committee of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, and between 1998 and 2011 he acted as the convenor of the Golden-Age Panel in the Association’s annual conference. Within UCC, he was one of the founders in the 1980s of the School of Languages and Literature, and was subsequently its secretary and chairman.
It would not be just to omit mention here of Terry’s outstanding personal qualities of kindness, gentleness, humility and open-mindedness. He took a keen interest in the welfare and in the work of others and was particularly helpful to younger colleagues. He was an avid reader, not just of Golden-Age related literature, but also of modern and contemporary writing. He was, in equal measure, intrigued and irritated by Unamuno and, in particular, admired the work of María Zambrano and José Ángel Valente. In many ways, nothing became Terry’s life so much as the leaving of it. He accepted his Motor Neurone Disease and each progressive stage of it with extraordinary serenity. Even when he could no longer speak and had to communicate by text, he continued to receive visitors and was invariably in good humour. One always left his company with a sense of having been enriched by it.
Terry leaves behind him a valuable legacy both as a scholar and as a person. May he rest in peace.Footnote*
Notes
1 Jorge de Montemayor, Omelías sobre Miserere mei Deus, ed., with an intro. & notes, by Terence O’Reilly (Durham: Univ. of Durham, 2000), 2.
2 Terence O’Reilly, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), xxiv.
3 Barry Taylor & Isabel Torres, ‘Professor Terence O’Reilly: An Appreciation’, BHS, LXXXVI:6 (2009), 725–26 (p. 725).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.