A tribute to Jean R. Brink (1942-2025)
By Robert Bjork — May 19, 2025
Editor’s note: Professor Emeritus of English Jean R. Brink passed away May 15 after an illness. Her sons Robert and Peter Brink shared the following:
We plan to hold a hybrid gathering, online and in person, for anyone who knew her. Our mother Dr. Brink was feisty, brilliant, hilarious, and uncompromising. If you loved, admired, or argued with her, you’re invited. The event will take place in the early fall, after we’ve had time to spread the word. True to form, Mom did not want a memorial — she wanted a series of advanced lectures in medieval and Renaissance studies. We’ll find a way to honor her wish while also coming together.
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Jean R. Brink, her “Minde on honour fixed” as well as on early Spenser, friendship, Michael Drayton, and gender in early modern Europe among other scholarly subjects, was an impressive scholar. She was an even more impressive person.
I first met her in Cleveland in October 1978 when, as a graduate student finishing up my PhD, I nervously delivered my first scholarly paper. The auspicious event occurred at the Fifth Ohio Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Jean was at that conference, too, along with her colleagues from history at ASU, Retha Warnicke and Roger Adelson. They all heard my paper bearing the riveting title of “The Thematic Role of Direct Discourse in the Old English ‘Juliana’”; they all seemed thoroughly engaged in its “funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts,” to quote Lucky Jim; and we all had drinks and a convivial dinner afterwards. I was flattered and touched that these three well known scholars would spend time with a mere graduate student. If I were fortunate enough to land a job one day, I thought, I hoped that it would be at a university like ASU that had such supportive people on its faculty. Four years later, ASU advertised for a specialist in Old English language and literature and ended up hiring me. Jean was on the search committee.
Jean and I, along with her husband, Dan, became close friends, and I benefited from their generosity of spirit and constant wit. I particularly admired Jean’s audacity and vision. She and Fredi Chiappelli of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA saw that Arizona needed a center such as his, and they persuaded all three universities and the Arizona Board of Regents to fulfill that need. The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies was founded under her direction in 1982 and continues to flourish.
Jean ran ACMRS until 1993 with the same audacity and vision with which she first envisioned it. Long before the notion of the global Middle Ages and Renaissance became popular, for example, she recognized its importance and gathered affiliates from Arizona’s three universities who studied non-European cultures of the period. And long before AI became a household acronym, she published a book on the subject: “Computers and the Brain: Perspectives on Human and Artificial Intelligence” (1989).
Jean was a woman for all seasons; she gave great gifts to medieval and Renaissance studies; and in her publications and the center she established, “mon mæg giet gesion hire swæð” (one can still see her track), to paraphrase King Alfred the Great. That track is even broader and more variously adorned in the hearts of friends and family whom she leaves behind.