- Scribleriana
The Scriblerian thanks Dean Joseph Aistrup of the Auburn University College of Liberal Arts, along with Jeremy Downes and Donald R. Wehrs of the Department of English, for their generous support.
We also thank David Oakleaf (University of Calgary), who is stepping down; his many bibliographies and indexes were accurate, useful, and valuable. We thank Judith Burdan (Flagler College), who also is leaving us. We welcome Catherine Ingrassia and Rivka Swenson (both at Virginia Commonwealth University) and Christopher F. Loar (Western Washington University) as Contributing Editors. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, will now have a Contributing Editor devoted to her—Yvonne Noble (University of Kent, Canterbury).
Special thanks to Melvyn New (University of Florida) for his skill and energy, and his resourcefulness in melding these two 2016 issues into the generous double issue.
We are especially grateful to Shiladitya Sen (Montclair State University), Matthew Binney (Eastern Washington University), and Kellye Corcoran (Saint Mary-of-the-Woods). The fine work of Matthew Shoemaker (Auburn University at Montgomery) is also particularly appreciated.
GERARD REEDY, 1939–2016
Gerard Reedy SJ, died March 11, 2016. Jerry, as he was known to his colleagues in eighteenth-century studies, entered the Jesuit novitiate at Bellarmine College in 1957. After earning a BA from Loyola Seminary (1963) and an MA from Fordham (1965), he received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. He taught at Fordham for many years, serving as well as dean and vice president before being named president of the College of Holy Cross in 1994. He returned to Fordham in 1999 and finished his career teaching literature there.
Jerry’s work exploring Anglican theology has proved of enduring value to decades of scholars awakening to the fact that it is impossible to understand eighteenth-century literature without a substantial grasp of the Christian thought underwriting it. His first book, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (1985) has just been rereleased as a 25th-Anniversary E-book by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His second monograph, Robert South (1634–1716): [End Page 199] An Introduction to His Life and Sermons (Cambridge, 1992), dedicated to his mentor Paul Korshin, is a model for both biographers and theologians. Among his essays, two gems might be noted. First, “Interpreting Tillotson” (HTR, 1993), which offers a beautiful methodology for interpreting sermons in an age of sermon-writing; no literary critic should attempt to read this vast body of writing without first reading this essay. And second, his “Preface to Anglican Rationalism” in Eighteenth-Century Contexts, a festschrift for Philip Harth (2001), the final sentences of which provide a particularly valuable insight into Anglican latitudinarian sermons: “The absence of Scriptural argument need not signify that this is a deist text … [but is] simply a continuance of late seventeenth-century methodology, in that Anglican rationalism often dramatizes its selfconscious encounter with multivalent reason by such means. This dramatization, which has nothing to do with heterodoxy and everything to do with self-confident orthodoxy, seems to remain forceful in mainstream Anglican theology of the new century.”
Jerry’s final effort was coediting with me a collection of essays, titled, significantly enough, Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism (Delaware, 2012).
For clarity of insight reinforced with substantial and coherent argumentation, few scholars will excel Gerard Reedy.
Melvyn New University of Florida
RALPH COHEN, 1917–2016
Ralph Cohen, a specialist in eighteenth-century English literature who made the world his province, has died, at the age of 99, in Charlottesville, VA, where he taught as William R. Kenan Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia. After his 2010 retirement from that position, he continued teaching until his death, as Provost Distinguished Professor at James Madison University. The devotion to teaching and the phenomenal energy implicit in such persistence characterized much of Professor Cohen’s accomplishment. In his writing; his editorship of the distinguished journal he founded, New Literary History; his public speaking; and his classrooms, he insisted always on the vital relation between literary history and literary theory, on the relevance of European thought to British development, and on the importance of intellectual activity as a human pursuit...