Obituary: Alan David Deyermond, 1932-2009

Qué amigo de amigos

Jorge Manrique, Coplas a la muerte de su padre

Generosity of spirit is the characteristic for which Alan Deyermond will be remembered by his many friends and disciples, and not just for his impressive list of honours and publications. For Alan, as everyone called him, inspired three generations of Hispano-medievalists in the UK, Spain, the USA and as far afield as Argentina. The numbers of postgraduates who were directed by him or were temporary visiting students is truly impressive, and the outpourings of shock and grief on the website dedicated to him after his unexpected death include many from former students who attest to his influence on their careers.

For a large portion of his career, Alan operated quietly from his base in Hampstead, North London, at Westfield College, and his famed Hispanic Research Seminar became a magnet for visitors from all over the world. This continued after his semi-retirement in 1992 and the translation of the college from its leafy surroundings to the East End of London and Queen Mary College. Although he had worked at Princeton as a Visiting Professor and had after retirement also visited the Irvine campus of the University of California (and had even held a tertulia for Complutense postgraduates in Madrid where he also regularly gave cursillos in recent years), Alan was quintessentially British and never was able to uproot himself and his beloved wife Ann and daughter Ruth (and various poodles, the last the redoubtable Tom) from their English base.

Ann has died a scarce three months after Alan; she had herself been gravely ill for the previous year, and in our last telephone conversation admitted that she was finding it difficult to summon up the strength to go on without Alan.

It would be impossible and foolhardy for me to try to list all of the Hispanists who consider Alan to have been a paramount influence in their careers, but at least I can cite a few who were undergraduates at Westfield and who have enjoyed subsequent academic success in Medieval Spanish Studies in the UK: in alphabetical order, Andrew Beresford, Louise Haywood, Fiona Maguire and Julian Weiss (and I could add Parvati Nair to this list, although her field of expertise lies outside the medieval). The University of Valencia and its postgraduates had a particularly close bond with Alan, and Valencia was one of the places to have awarded him an honorary doctorate. But to mention or favour one group over another is a risky business, as there were so many. Alan's enthusiasm for his subject, and for life itself, was infectious, and his love extended to the animal kingdom; no slug on the path at Westfield need feel at risk as long as Alan was around to rescue it. Alan was a true Christian, whose love for everyone was manifest in his actions.

To rehearse some of the more factual data about Alan, he was born in Egypt to a peripatetic military family, and grew up in Liverpool during the war and in Jersey after the war. His academic success at Oxford (where his tutor was the polymath Robert Pring Mill) was rewarded with an early job at Westfield, although his landmark thesis The Petrarchan Sources of 'La Celestina' was only submitted for a BLitt and he had to wait until later life when his prodigious literary output was rewarded with an Oxford DLitt. Although a large amount of Alan's literary work was dedicated to providing basic tools for students of Medieval Spanish (for example, his medieval volume of the Ernest Benn History of Spanish Literature of 1971, later translated into Spanish), his true originality was his nose for the latest international movements in medieval literary criticism, which he translated into a number of cutting-edge articles that moved the frequently parochial Hispanic medieval studies into the mainstream of criticism. Far from feeling threatened by new movements, he embraced and espoused, for example, feminist criticism and new historicism (although he was admittedly always somewhat sceptical about the French movements of the 1970s, an attitude which seems to have been vindicated...