Readers of TMR will be saddened to hear of the loss of our founding colleague Gene Vance. Gene was Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington at the time of his death this weekend in the crash of a very small plane he was flying at an airfield near Seattle. Here is a representative news story: http://www.kirotv.com/news/27916502/detail.html

His scholarly career and excellences as teacher and colleague are hinted at there and I'm sure there will be more memorials over the coming months. TMR owes Gene a special debt as the e-journal's founding inspiration. When in 1990, I co-founded Bryn Mawr Classical Review with Richard Hamilton of Bryn Mawr, we quickly heard from Gene that there was an evident need for a similar journal in the domain of medieval studies. What began shortly after, under his prodding and leadership, as Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, moved after a few years to Western Michigan University, where it was reborn as The Medieval Review, and it is now published from Indiana University under the leadership of Deborah Deliyannis (for a little more history, see http://www.indiana.edu/~tmrl/TMRhistory.html). It flourishes.

Gene continued to serve until his death on the Advisory Board of TMR, along with Maria Rosa Menocal, Paul Szarmach, and myself. The excellence of our editorial leadership has rendered our advice less urgently and less often necessary than it was in the founding years, but I have valued the friendship and wisdom of my colleagues. Gene and I shared interest in Augustine and a visit of his to one of my seminars in Philaelphia many years ago was riveting to myself and my students, at least two of whom were influenced in their own work by just that visit. I can see him also now for some reason in mind's eye over a lunch table in the atrium of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, as ever animated, engaged, excited, and exciting. He was 77 at the time of his death, and the manner of his passing brings back for me the last page of Joyce's "The Dead":

"One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

That, at least, our friend was granted. I'll miss him.

Jim O'Donnell

Georgetown University