In Memoriam

We were sorry to learn of the death of Barbara K. Lewalski on Friday 2 March. Barbara became a member of our advisory board in the summer of 1976, after first contributing to SEL by writing the Winter 1974 omnibus review essay "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance." In her review, she noted especially the arrival of five groundbreaking books, including Raymond Williams's The Country and the City and Ricardo Quinones's The Renaissance Discovery of Time. Russell Fraser's The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold, however, elicited some of her plain-speaking criticism: "The countering of inadequate stereotypes … by the creation of new ones is surely a futile exercise, unworthy of a scholar of Fraser's distinction." Besides offering us candid advice about SEL's place in the scholarly world and incisively evaluating many submissions, she contributed to our pages herself twice more: once, in 1992, weighing in on the controversy that arose about Milton's ostensible authorship of the treatise De doctrina christiana, and again, in 2003, with the essay "Milton and Idolatry." Her own essays and her reader reports all shared a characteristic directness and good sense. She was as generous in her praise of good essays as she was emphatic in her criticism of those essays she deemed unpublishable. Of one author, she declared, "His authority is unquestioned on this topic, his scholarship is unquestioned, and he writes well." In summer 2013, she became an emeritus board member, and later that year served as the presiding judge for the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial award, administered by SEL, and given that year to Andrew Hadfield's Edmund Spenser: A Life. We extend our deepest sympathy to her family and colleagues, and are deeply grateful for her generous labor on behalf of SEL.