De Theoria: Early Modern Studies in Memory of Eugene Vance

Preface

Eugene Vance affected the lives and careers of all the contributors to this volume. For some, the family ties, close friendships, and intellectual collaboration began decades ago. Others knew Gene less immediately, though he touched their lives, too, usually by his enthusiastic advocacy of their work and with generous career advice.

In proportion as Gene’s life profoundly moved the contributors to this volume, so it was with his death. Each of us can remember its shock. On May 15, 2011, my flight from Brussels had just landed at Dulles airport when my iPhone began to vibrate with incoming texts and emails all with the same shocking news: Gene Vance had died in the crash of a plane he was piloting. In the ensuing weeks, as friends assimilated the fact of Gene’s dramatic death, messages took on focus: what can we do? Geraldine Heng was the first to suggest a volume in his memory.

At a memorial service in the University of Washington’s Allen Library on May 27, Denyse Delcourt volunteered to request a subsidy from the Dean of Arts and Sciences to underwrite publication of these essays. Cognizant of Gene’s passionate commitment to the humanities at UW--and wryly acknowledging his equally zealous opposition to any effort by the administration, faced with budgetary exigencies, “to dilute the intellectual rigor of humanities courses”--Dean Robert C. Stacey (himself a distinguished medieval historian) generously granted the publication subsidy.

De Theoria and the studies it contains answer, at least in part, the question “What can we do?” And for that reason the essays engage intimately with what Augustine would call Gene’s anima . . . a term whose nuances--as he taught us–border the ineffable. These studies exhibit something else advocated by Gene: meditation on higher goals in the manner of Plotinus’s exercices spirituels of which Pierre Hadot–another of Gene’s heroes–wrote so beautifully. In this case, meditation takes two forms: each author’s private dialogue with Gene, which morphs into a public channeling of his scholarly range and rigor.

If Gene’s death is the reason for these studies, his intellectual curiosity, passion for culture of all kinds, and audacity provide their logic and coherence. A true comparatist, Gene ranged widely in vernacular and ancient cultures. While our essays don’t begin to encompass his protean capacity, they do pay homage to it. More difficult is finding a way to convey a sense of his magnetism. Howard Bloch came about as close to the magic as anyone in remarks prepared for Gene’s memorial:

Gene’s intellectual–and personal–restlessness was a challenge for those around him; his impish joy in making old things new, a source of inspiration and pleasure; his prodding persistence, the purest generosity from which we all took sustenance. Gene was an incredibly loyal friend, a sentimental soul, a complicated creature in whom one sensed pools of trouble. He was incredibly open about intimate things, yet I never felt I knew him to the root, core. To the manner born, Gene could have headed off to medical school to which he was destined. Yet, he took a riskier path, took on the intellectual challenges that propelled him from the field of English, to French, to Religion and History of Art. Gene was big, he was physical, he was active. He was the stuff of legend in our timid little world.