Alan David Deyermond

The following obituary by Nicholas Round was first published in the Guardian on 14 October 2009.

Alan David Deyermond, Hispanist and medievalist, born 24 February 1932; died 19 September 2009

Alan Deyermond, who has died aged 77, was the English-speaking world's leading scholar of medieval Hispanic literature. The most international of Hispanists, he remained an ineradicably English figure, his entire career based in a single London college – Westfield, later Queen Mary and Westfield. Yet he recalled an early life so nomadic that he could scarcely answer the question, "where are you from?"

Born in Cairo, he reached England with his army family shortly before the second world war. He attended schools in Liverpool, and from 1946 in Jersey. In 1950 a scholarship brought him to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read modern languages. It was, he claimed, pure chance that his final-year medieval Spanish course convinced him that more could, and should, be known about these texts.

Friendship with Ann Bracken, who was reading history at St Hugh's, was perhaps more than chance. Both experiences proved decisive. In 1953 he began BLitt research; his first article came a year later; the degree in 1957; the resulting book in 1961. In 1955 he secured his first teaching post as assistant lecturer at Westfield. That, and marriage to Ann in 1957, would define his life for the next half-century. Alan advanced swiftly through each career grade to his personal chair in 1969, serving, much later (1986-89), as vice-principal of Westfield.

His published output was prodigious – 40 books, written or edited, and almost 200 articles ranging through four centuries of medieval Hispanic literature. He saw his field as lacking the basic research tools – dictionaries, bibliographies and historical syntheses – and his medieval volume for the Ernest Benn History of Spanish Literature (1969) supplied the last of these. Still richer bibliographically are his volumes in Historia y Crítica de la Literatura Española (History and Criticism of Spanish Literature, 1980) and its 1991 supplement. No less remarkable was Literatura Perdida de la Edad Media Castellana (Lost Literature of the Castilian Middle Ages, 1995), the fruit of a 20-year project and Alan's own favourite work. His last major book, A Century of British Medieval Studies, edited for the British Academy in 2007, placed his gifts of comprehensive reference and lucid distillation of sources at the service of another scholarly community.

Bibliographical completeness, textual accuracy and logical rigour did not make him a pedant. They were always a means to understanding, never an end. Nor was his a conservative scholarship, bringing familiar controversies to predictable order. Rather, it was dialogic: argument ensured continuing debate by redefining its terms. His concern with the elusive and discontinuous – orality, folklore, lost literature, mixed genres – brought to the foreground "the distinction between evidence and inherited assumptions".

So did his openness to new critical approaches. Something could always be learned – from linguistics, narratology, socio-economic criticism, the visual arts. Medieval studies, after all, were interdisciplinary. "One must be both a critic and a historian," he thought.

The new emphasis most evident in his work was his response to the claims of women. His studies of medieval female writers, and of women as portrayed and spoken for in medieval literature, drew on the work of feminist scholars in many countries. They, in turn, found in Alan that acceptance and support for which younger scholars could always look to him.

Honours were heaped upon him by scholarly societies worldwide, and his retirement in 1997 added two further festschrifts to one produced by north American colleagues in 1986. Visiting professorships multiplied Alan's contacts, as did hundreds of lectures and conference papers, delivered in more than a dozen countries. In all this, his natural gift for friendship was reinforced by lessons drawn from his early experience. Scholars must share their knowledge. What you have been given, you pass on to others.

Alan's writings, encyclopedic in their aspiration, reflected his belief in a community of scholarship, sharing a common work across space and time. In all this, as in his strongly held Anglican faith, he recalls the appropriately medieval (and English) model of Oxford's 13th- and 14th-century Franciscans.

His joyous, intimate family life – generously shared with guests from across the world – seemed of a piece with that. The Franciscan note is evoked, too, by Alan's vegetarianism and lifelong concern for the wellbeing of animals. The family included a succession of poodles, whose presence among the heaped papers of Alan's office could disconcert visitors as he located with implausible speed the offprint or typescript they needed to discuss. Relevantly again, his critical guide to Lazarillo de Tormes mentions a book in progress, The Social Gospel in Medieval Spanish Literature. Like too much else, its progress is now cut short.

His wife and their daughter Ruth survive him.

Julian Weiss, Louise Haywood and Andrew Beresford write: As a teacher, Alan Deyermond combined formidable knowledge with comic idiosyncrasy, and the combination, though at times unsettling, inspired our eventual university careers. It was not just the obviously quixotic moments of his lectures – battling with class furniture to illustrate scenes from the Poem of the Cid, engaging in dialogue with Tom, his poodle – that brought the subject to life. Nor was it just the clarity with which he expounded the complex and unfamiliar. It was also his ability to make students feel that they, too, could participate in academic debate.

It was never a good idea to cross swords with Alan in matters of bibliography or the finer points of copy-editing – he applied the same rigorous standards to drafts of our PhD theses as he did to the many articles or books of ours that he saw through to press. Though we sometimes submitted our work to him with trepidation, we knew that we could count on his encouragement and support.

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 20 October 2009

Alan Deyermond was the most prominent scholar of medieval Hispanic literature of recent decades, not only in Britain but throughout Europe, Spain included, and the Americas. His abundant written work was known and keenly read in all these places.

The enormous breadth and depth of Deyermond’s research and publications covered practically all literary aspects of medieval Spanish writing and culture. This range was already apparent in his 1971 A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages, used by generations of university students and scholars in its English original and in its Spanish translation (Historia de la literatura española, I: La Edad Media), now in its 19th edition.

His specialist areas within medieval Spanish studies were La Celestina (the subject of his Oxford postgraduate thesis, published as The Petrarchan Sources of “La Celestina” (1961 and, remarkably for such a dissertation, republished in a second edition in 1971), the epic (Epic Poetry and the Clergy: Studies on the “Mocedades de Rodrigo”, 1969; El “Cantar de Mio Cid” y la épica medieval española, 1987), the sentimental novel (Tradiciones y puntos de vista en la ficción sentimental, 1993), lost literature (La literatura perdida de la Edad Media castellana: catálogo y estudio, I: épica y romances, 1995), and women’s writing.

In addition, Deyermond’s three dozen sole-authored and edited books and almost 200 scholarly articles scrutinise all the major and many of the minor works that have survived from the Spanish Middle Ages.

Alan David Deyermond was born in 1932 in Cairo. He was educated at Quarry Bank High School, Liverpool, Victoria College, Jersey, and Pembroke College, Oxford (BA 1953, BLitt 1957), Deyermond spent his entire academic career in the same department. He was appointed assistant lecturer at the moment when the Department of Spanish at Westfield College, University of London, was founded in 1955, as one of two members of staff (the other was John Varey). He therefore had to teach half the university syllabus in Spanish, giving classes in the history of the Spanish language, medieval literature and Golden Age poetry, as well as practical classes in Spanish.

This teaching load clearly did not restrict his research output, and his growing string of publications led to a readership in 1966 and to a personal chair in 1969, at what was then the very early age of 37. For some years he commuted between Westfield and Princeton, teaching half the year at each, but he remained fiercely loyal to his home college, and transferred that loyalty to the new institution (now Queen Mary, University of London) that arose from the merger of Westfield College with Queen Mary College in 1989. That commitment did not diminish after retirement in 1997 and he was a familiar and active figure in the college right up to his death.

Deyermond was not just a prolific researcher and author; he was also an enormously generous facilitator of other scholars’ work, through his editorial and seminar-organising activities. He founded the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar (MHRS) at Westfield in 1968, which since has attracted scholars from all over the world. Discussion at the Friday-afternoon sessions was typically continued at a restaurant, because Deyermond, a staunch vegetarian, believed that food, wine and fellowship (not to mention mild gossip) were as much part of the academic life as the study and the library. From MHRS sprang, in 1995, the Publications of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, a series designed to cater for writing that was longer than a journal article but shorter than a conventional book. Most of the volumes, now numbering more than 60, were edited, and typeset, by Deyermond, an enormous labour of love for his subject and for the dissemination of work on the Spanish Middle Ages.

This was typical of the man: he never stinted in the academic help that he gave to colleagues, other scholars and students. One effect of this unselfishness was the constant flow of scholars and students who spent a period at Queen Mary, officially or unofficially, and worked under his guidance. Another aspect of his devotion to the dissemination of knowledge was the energy he brought to the journals published by his department, in particular the Hispanic Research Journal.

He was likewise instrumental in the founding of Tamesis Books (now part of Boydell & Brewer) and of the series Research Bibliographies & Checklists (Grant & Cutler).

Deyermond was fiercely independent-minded and never willing to adopt any position in which he did not fully believe. This uncompromising characteristic, which could lead to astringency, was unsettling for some, although it was never accompanied by public anger or rudeness. These traits, with an astonishing memory, made him much loved as a teacher and supervisor. For many years, he was accompanied to the department by his standard poodle, Tom. On more than one occasion when Deyermond was lecturing on the Poema de Mio Cid, the episode in which the hero calmly seizes the escaped lion and returns him to his cage (thereby enhancing his personal honour) was enacted by Deyermond with Tom as the lion.

Deyermond received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Valencia and Georgetown. He was a Fellow of the British Academy and this year became one of the small number of corresponding members of the Real Academia Española. In 1994 he was awarded the Nebrija Prize, given each year by the University of Salamanca to the non-Spanish scholar who has contributed most to the understanding of Spanish culture and the Spanish language.

A reflection of his standing in the world of Hispanism and medieval studies was his presidency of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (1992-95; honorary life president since 1995) and of the International Courtly Literature Society (1983). In 1985 he was made a socio de honor of the Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval and, since 1999, an honorary fellow of Queen Mary, University of London.

A Christian and a life-long Liberal, Deyermond is survived by his wife, Ann, and their daughter.