Professor Arthur Askins has given new meaning to the word retirement. Eschewing the usual sense of quitting the field after long years of dedication to his profession, he preferred the Luso-Hispanic connotations of jubilar. Reliable documents confirm that Professor Askins did indeed “retire” in 1994, but since that year – to our joy – he has devoted himself ever more to research, taking advantage of additional time to finish, update and initiate scholarly projects, address learned societies in the United States and abroad, search out manuscripts from secreted archives in Portugal, and publish his elegant, rigorously prepared texts in print and electronic venues. All the while, our friend and colleague has continued to enrich the life of the department he served faithfully for more than thirty years. For Professor Arthur Askins, the commonplace meaning of retirement must itself be retired, to be replaced by a word more faithful to the man and his scholarly pursuits: jubilation.

Though it is true, as Portia states in The Merchant of Venice, that “he is well paid that is well satisfied,” the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Portuguese Studies Program, at the University of California, Berkeley, wish to increase our colleague's satisfaction as best we know how: with a beautiful book. Mindful of how much we owe this passionate bibliophile, we think a book of learned essays prepared by his colleagues, students and friends, is a fitting tribute to an exemplary scholar and beloved teacher.

The two individuals most responsible for this volume have modestly declined to increase its pages, preferring instead to coordinate and edit the essays of other distinguished scholars of Portuguese and Spanish medieval and renaissance texts. Warm thanks are due to Professors Martha E. Schaffer and Antonio Cortijo Ocaña for their generous dedication to a project that joins science and sentiment, erudition and style, the very hallmarks of the man whose life and work have inspired so many of us.