Introduction

Summary

… al claro resplandor de vuestra llama …

Garcilaso de la Vega

Hay espadas que empuña el entusiasmo y jinetes de luz en la hora oscura.

Julio Martínez Mesanza

The landscape of the festschrift is densely populated and continues to flourish. The demise of the genre, predicted by John Richetti in 2012, now appears premature. In fact, a cynical observer might identify a potential crisis of overproduction – a reality sharply satirised by the novelist Philip Roth. In The Human Stain, Roth's narrator remarks somewhat wryly of his professor protagonist Coleman Silk: ‘It's almost a certainty that had he retired, without incident, in his own good time, there would have been the festschrift.’ There is little trace of Richetti's nostalgia for the passing of ‘a more collegial academic age’ in Roth, rather the sense of the festschrift as an inevitable, albeit generous, gesture of recognition (the homage volume as the academic equivalent of chocolate or flowers, or industry's gold watch). And what is most conspicuously absent from Richetti's reflections, and not quite on Roth's radar, is the unique interweaving of the private and the public that drives the whole festschrift enterprise: the intimate connections of former students, colleagues and friends blending in the shared celebration of a professional career, and engagement with the honoree's most crucial contributions to knowledge. It is this very distinctively dialogic coalescing that not only deconstructs the private/public dichotomy but, in fact, depends upon it for the survival of the genre. In these fraught economic times, in which some presses have been reluctant to commit to the publishing of festschriften, its resilience is surely due in large part to an underpinning creative connectivity that is the hallmark of academic scholarship. The ideal festschrift, to paraphrase Cặtặlin Mamali, accomplishes a ‘generative interaction’ between the ‘creative core’ that constitutes the original research of the honoree, and ‘a developing ecology of interactive creative minds’. In other words, to do justice both to the honoree and to the genre itself, the assembled contributions should enhance understanding of the wide spectrum and innovation of the original research, while also recognising its catalytic role by opening up to other dialogues beyond it, and daring to break new ground.