In memoriam: María Rosa Menocal: (Cuba 1953-USA 2012), Sterling Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University

It is with a heavy heart and a measure of disbelief that I write an obituary for my extraordinary Ph.D. mentor, who died from a rare form of cancer on October 15 at too early an age. For many of us it is quite hard to reconcile with the idea of her death—María Rosa is still incandescently alive, like the medieval times she was so exceptionally able to evoke and revive in her lectures and books. María Rosa was truly a life force, a bright spirit and a luminous human being. Her letters to friends and loved ones during her illness radiated with her love for life and her ability to live it to its very fullest, with passion and an open and giving heart. There is, as she put it in one of her many update letters since the beginning of her illness in 2009, a "real gift" in this "indispensable variety of human experience," one that María Rosa knew well from her 1992 brush with death: that "The moments of darkness—and there should be no doubt that they are very real and very dark—have a way of yielding to their counterparts, those moments of clarity about life that I, at least, can't possibly describe without falling back on the most annoying clichés" (December 13, 2009).

A passionate and greatly-imaginative academic and an inspiring teacher and mentor, María Rosa was an intellectually-generous spirit, and one of the rare Hispanists whose work so fully transcends her discipline. Books like The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994) and the co-written The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (2009) count among the many visionary works and lectures that will continue to influence fellow academics, students, and the public at large on medieval Islamicate societies and their continuing role in so-called Western civilizations. An evocative writer and masterful storyteller, a reader may count on being deeply moved by her writing, by the humanity and lived experience that she transmits, by the ways in which she makes the past vibrantly alive and meaningful for the world we inhabit today.

It might be one of those most annoying clichés, but she lives in the work we continue to do as former students and advisees. I, for one, know—now with unexpected clarity—how much María Rosa is a constant presence and my inner interlocutor. I will always remember her with immense affection, with gratitude for the intellectual freedom she gave us, for her unwavering support, and especially for her humanity and extraordinary warmth.