Terence O'Reilly MRIA (1947–2023) was a professor of Spanish at University College Cork (UCC) and a noted scholar of the literature, history, and art of the Spanish Golden Age.
Career
O'Reilly received his B.A. Honours degree in Spanish and French in 1969 from the University of Nottingham, followed by a PhD in 1972 for a thesis on the literature of meditation in early sixteenth-century Castile and Aragon. He was granted a research fellowship at the University of St Andrews in 1973, where he worked in the Spanish department. In 1975, he moved to University College Cork to take up a college lectureship in Spanish.
His principal fields of research included the literature, history, and art of Spain during the Golden Age (c. 1470–1700), 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 Diego Velázquez.
Personal life
O'Reilly was born in London to Irish parents and lived for a period in India. In 1968, he married the historian Jennifer O'Reilly (née Williams). He died in 2023, having been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017.
Honours
- Lansdowne Lecturer, University of Victoria, British Columbia (2002)
- Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellow (2004–2005)
- Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2007)
- Veale Chair of Spirituality, Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, Dublin (2009)
Selected publications
- From Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Routledge, 1995)
- The Bible in the Literary Imagination of the Spanish Golden Age: Images and Texts from Columbus to Velázquez (Saint Joseph's University Press, 2010)
- The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception (Brill, 2020)
- Humanism and Religion in Early Modern Spain: John of the Cross, Francisco de Aldana, Luis de León, ed. Stephen Boyd (Routledge, 2022)
