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A Scholarly Work

Tom O'Reilly

Terence O’Reilly (1947–2023)

Terence (Terry) O’Reilly (1947–2023) studied modern languages at the University of Nottingham, where he graduated in 1969 with a BA Honours degree in Spanish and French. In 1972 he was awarded the PhD for a thesis on the literature of meditation in early sixteenth-century Castile and Aragon, and in 1973 he was granted a Research Fellowship in the University of St Andrews. In 1975 he moved to University College Cork to take up a Lectureship in Spanish. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1978, Associate Professor in 1989 and Professor Emeritus in 2007, when he retired.

He held visiting appointments at Cambridge, Queen Mary and Westfield, University of London, and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and he was a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellow in 2004–2005. A member of the Royal Irish Academy and of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, his principal field of research was the literature, history and art of Spain during the Golden Age (c.1470–1700), especially the prose of the period (chivalric, pastoral and picaresque fiction), religious writings (Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross) and the paintings of El Greco and Velázquez.

His key publications include:

His contribution to the field of Golden Age studies is acknowledged in a Festschrift issue of The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies:

Reviewers of Terry's work have been unanimous in their praise, finding his prose 'graceful'; his arguments 'judicious'; his approach 'sensitive' and 'balanced'; his conclusions 'illuminating' but 'unpretentious'; and his analyses all the more eloquent when 'untangling the threads of controversy'. But these attributes are not restricted to his writing. Generations of doctoral candidates, seminar speakers and conference audiences will recognize in this profile the subtle, challenging and always generous interlocutor whose manner of speaking surpasses other normal utterances in terms of quiet authority, efficacy and total credibility. If Golden Age studies are experiencing a revival in these shores this is due in no small part to Terry's tireless efforts behind the scenes.[3]

Terry shared his academic life and intellectual interests with Jennifer, whom he married in 1968. An esteemed scholar in early medieval history and art, Dr Jennifer O’Reilly lectured at University College Cork from 1975 until her retirement in 2008. An obituary published in The Irish Times in 2016 describes her as ‘a gifted university teacher and a renowned authority on The Book of Kells and similar treasures of antiquity’.

In her long and distinguished career, she made substantial and ground-breaking contributions in the fields of history, theology, art history and manuscript studies. In a moving eulogy, her great friend Colmán Ó Clabaigh O.S.B., of Glenstal Abbey, compared her untimely and unexpected death to ‘watching a library burn’.[4]

An introduction to the devout life

In his final year (1968–69) as an undergraduate in Nottingham, Terry decided that if his degree was good enough he would apply to do research. His teachers were encouraging, but when they asked him to suggest a topic he had to think hard. Then he remembered a French author, St Francis de Sales, whose writings had helped him in the dark days after his father’s death. And eventually he came up with a plan: to investigate the influence of Spanish meditation manuals on his Introduction à la vie dévote.

Later this plan had to be modified, because Terry found in the Spanish manuals sufficient material for his doctorate, but he did not forget St Francis whose writings he continued to read, particularly the Traité de l’amour deDieu on which he wrote an essay in 2015.

The professor of French at Nottingham, Lewis Thorpe, put Terry in touch with Elisabeth Stopp, an authority on the writings of St Francis, and early in 1969 he travelled to Cambridge to meet her.[5] They stayed in contact, and over time they became close friends. On her death in 1996 Terry inherited her Salesian library and papers, and in the years that followed he edited her unpublished talks and essays in two books: a collection of her talks and essays on St Jane de Chantal and an edition of an emblem book inspired by St Francis’ writings.

 

The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola

In the autumn of 1972 Terry and Jennifer finished their doctoral theses, and a year later they moved to St Andrews, where Terry had been offered a fellowship in the Spanish department under Professor L.J. Woodward. During their time there, three of the chapters in his thesis, The Literature of Spiritual Exercises in Spain, 1500–1559, appeared as articles in Barcelona and Rome. Two of them were about the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the most enigmatic of the manuals he had studied. Terry had become aware, when writing these articles, of unanswered questions concerning the origins and early interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises, and he resolved to investigate them further. The result was a research project that kept him busy for years. It led him to libraries, seminars and conferences in Ireland, England, Spain and Italy, and brought him into contact with other scholars in the field.

Teaching the literature of the Spanish Golden Age

In 1975 Terry was appointed to a lectureship at University College Cork. There he devised courses in Golden Age Spanish literature, a subject he had studied for his first degree.

Terry's style in teaching and giving seminar papers was, like his writing, remarkable for its limpid clarity: ideas were presented in beautifully articulated sequence, as if obeying an innate, inevitable order.[6]

In his student days the Golden Age had a privileged position in most university departments. That changed at the end of the last century when new programmes brought to the fore other areas of Hispanic Studies. In the hope of sustaining morale and fostering research, Terry convened for two decades or so the Golden Age panel in the annual meeting of hispanists (AHGBI).

The Golden Age panel which he convenes at the annual conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain andIreland (AHGBI) has become the unofficial flagship of our discipline. Here, where language's potential to build isparamount, scholars young and old are informed and formed.[7]

In 2002 he wrote for undergraduates a short introduction to Golden Age Studies. And in 2006 he and Stephen Boyd founded a Golden Age Research Symposium that met every two years and brought together researchers from throughout these islands (it meets still under the direction of Dr Sylvia Arroyo).

This event, which welcomed postgraduate students, early career academics and more established scholars, turned UCC into a university of reference in Golden Age Studies internationally and effectively contributed to generating a more sustained interest in this area of study.[8]

These initiatives helped, Terry felt, to transmit to a new generation the tradition in which he had been formed, and the preparation of these courses, which he taught for three decades, prompted him to write essays on the prose of the period (Columbus, Valdés, Granada, Santa Teresa), the drama (Tirso, Calderón), the poetry (Garcilaso, Montemayor, San Juan, Fray Luis, Góngora), the fiction (Lazarillo, Cervantes, Gracián) and the art (El Greco, Velázquez). In many of them he tried to shed light on the writer or artist concerned by drawing on his knowledge of the religious literature of the time.

Three of the courses meant a lot to him.

Luis de León

The course on the poetry of Luis de León involved examining closely a poem of his each week. This led Terry to start writing commentaries on his odes: their imagery, hidden structures and themes. When it turned out that a friend of his in Oxford, Colin Thompson, was working on similar lines, they agreed to collaborate on a book. Terry had completed and published seven commentaries when illness meant he could not complete his share of the task.

Saint John of the Cross

Another course Terry loved was on the poetry of San Juan whose use of human love to evoke divine love fascinated him, and a desire to understand it took his research and writing in two directions. On the one hand hebecame interested in the Song of Songs and its reception in the Spain of his time. The quest for commentaries onit by his contemporaries led him to collections of rare books in Dublin, Cambridge, London, Madrid, Burgos and Rome. This sparked a more general interest in his knowledge and use of the Bible, in which Terry was guided by the wise advice of George Every.[9]

On the other hand he studied how he used the traditions of Spanish love poetry that he knew. In this enquiry Terry was influenced by the approach of Alexander Parker who came to Cork in the late 1970s to lecture on courtly love and mysticism.[10] When he told Terry that he was going blind and could not finish the book in which the lecture was a part, Terry offered to help him prepare it for publication, and the book came out in 1985.[11] This experience of working with a great scholar taught him much.

Luis de Góngora

The third course was one he taught with Stephen Boyd on Góngora. It focused on his masterpieces, the Soledades and the Polifemo. The essays on the Polifemo that it prompted him to write were all concerned with his agudeza or metaphysical wit and the enigmas to which it gave rise. One of them appeared in a special issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies that Terry edited with Jeremy Robbins in 2013 to mark the fourth centenary of the poem’s completion. In these essays Terry was helped by Elisabeth Stopp’s work on the ‘emblematic thinking’ of St Francis, and by Alexander Parker’s commentary on the Polifemo which he studied and wrote about.

Retirement

After his retirement in 2007 the Milltown Institute in Dublin offered Terry the Veale Chair of Spirituality, a one-year appointment with a remit to lecture on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The talks he gave then were included with his other papers on the text in a book published in 2020, in time to mark the fifth centenary of the year (1521) when the first version of the Exercises was composed.[12]

In a review published in Studies in 2022, Timothy O’Brien S.J. writes of Terry’s contribution to Jesuit studies:

Throughout his career, O'Reilly has been a pioneer. Decades before a more general surge in academic interest in the Society of Jesus, especially among researchers who were not themselves members of the order, he was engaged in serious and rigorous study of Jesuit history and sources. As a scholar of early modern Spanish literature, O'Reilly has always brought to the Society's history a deep knowledge of the Iberian cultures that shaped the order's founder, Ignatius Loyola, and his literary output. His command of the relevant literature allows him to shed light on the patristic and medieval antecedents that shaped Ignatius's spiritual culture.

At the same time, he acknowledges the limits of his endeavor, cautioning other scholars against concluding that they can precisely identify the origins of Ignatius's thought on the basis of current literary research.[13]

A work of grace

Upon receiving his terminal diagnosis in early 2017, Terry devised an ambitious plan of work that would occupy him until he could no longer continue.

Jennifer, when she died in 2016, left behind three unfinished articles that had been promised for publication. Terry’s plan began with the completion of this work, a substantial task that would demand considerable care and thought:

  • ‘St Paul and the sign of Jonah. Theology and Scripture in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica’ (Jarrow Lecture, 2014, published 2017).

  • ‘Bede and Monothelitism’ in Cities, Saints and Communities in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020).

  • ‘Bede and the Dating of Easter’ (revised and extended from conference papers given in Oxford, 2007, and Durham, 2015).

While working on these texts, and keen to secure Jennifer’sscholarlylegacy,Terrybroughttogetherand led a committee that would administrate ‘The Jennifer O’Reilly Memorial Lecture’, which was established in 2017 by the School of History, UCC, and runs to this day. Designed to ensure longevity of the series, each year a distinguished scholar is invited to speak on either the writings of Bede or medieval iconography, two subjects that Jennifer explored in her research and teaching.[14]

Following the inaugural Memorial Lecture in 2017, Terry appointed an editorial team to work with him on a large project through which Jennifer’s legacy could be assured: the collection of her previously published essays in three areas of medieval studies (the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnán of Iona; the early lives of Thomas Becket; and the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England).

In these three areas Jennifer had explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis, and, seen together, these essays (comprising more than 500,000 words and 200 colour images) would highlight her distinctive approach to historical sources and her substantial contribution to our understanding of England and Ireland in the Middle Ages:[15]

With this work for Jennifer complete, and finding it increasingly difficult to type, Terry turned to his own publication projects, the first being a volume of essays exploring the historical, theological and literary contexts of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola:

This was followed by a collection of six new and nineteen previously published essays on Renaissance Humanism and Religion in the spiritual writing of sixteenth-century Spain:

Thankful that he had been given the time to produce these two books, the last of the publications in his initial plan, Terry decided to start a ‘new’ project: a translation of the wisdom sayings of Saint John of the Cross. Fr Senan Furlong O.S.B., in his Homily at Terry’s Requiem Mass, describes this undertaking as follows:

This task, begun as an undergraduate, was one he soon realised would take a lifetime to complete and involve not just research but also profound spiritual engagement. Despite his other commitments, these wisdom sayings remained in the background gradually maturing and ripening. Revisiting the task in the workshop of suffering, he serenely crafted theseshort texts so that they reflect as much of himself as they do of St John of the Cross.

Referring to pencilled notes taken as a young man when visiting collections of rare books in Dublin, Cambridge, London, Madrid, Burgos and Rome, Terry set out to produce and publish two translations simultaneously (Cambridge: Iona, 2021):

With his and Jennifer’s scholarly work done, and having organised his personal papers, Terry began to prepare three small yet complex texts that would be privately produced in book form:

  • My Parents: A memoir

  • Some Poems: A selection

  • Mansiones: A journal

His illness now progressing at an accelerated rate, and having announced his work to be complete, Terry composed a short essay about a drawing by Saint John of the Cross that had intrigued him throughout his life:

  • ‘The drawing of the Cross by Saint John of the Cross. A Short Reflection.’ Mount Carmel 72.1, 2024 (pp.104– 105).

His final writings, a reflection on his scholarly interests and teachings entitled ‘My Work’, were completed two months before he died. The content was written, sentences at a time, through emails and, latterly, text messages. In it, he considers the motivation behind a lifetime of scholarly work:

The genre I cultivated in my writing was the academic essay, an art form I saw as neglected but capable of beauty. I wrote impersonally and for others, but at a deeper level I was writing for myself; and I was the main beneficiary of what I learned.Beneath my research, I now see, lay a personal quest whose features I can trace back to childhood: an interest in meditation (I was brought up in a praying community); a longing for wholeness and wisdom; a delight in love and friendship; and a desire to write that I felt long before I had anything to write about.

He finished this document in a final text message, sent in the moments before he was taken by ambulance from his home, Dunowen, to Marymount Hospice:

When I think of people who helped my work, I remember Ferdy Woodward, professor of Spanish in St Andrews; BernardHamilton and Elisabeth Stopp, lifelong friends; and of course Jennifer… without whom nothing.