For Trevor J. Dadson, the renowned philologist and historian, “ser hispanista” was the driving and defining force of his existence. When prompted to reflect on his career in an interview carried out in Madrid in 2018, he communicated the passion that had shaped his engagement with Spanish culture, and marked out the trajectory of his life:These words, never intended to serve as an epitaph, seem now to have acquired a special weight in Trevor’s story. Less than two years later, in the early hours of 28 January 2020, Trevor passed away unexpectedly, at the age of seventy-two. He was, as is generally acknowledged, one of the greatest British Hispanists of our time, and has gifted us an extensive body of published work embracing cultural, literary, and social history; textual editing; literacy; book ownership; and textual criticism.Trevor was a remarkable scholar. I would come to know him also as a warm and caring friend, and first encountered him as a tutor in Queen’s University, Belfast in 1983. I recall his respect for, and empathy towards, all his students. But he had, I believe, a particular soft spot for those of us, like him, who were the first in our families to go to university—recognising the shaping weight of that, the opportunities, as well as the challenges—and he drew us into dialogues that we might otherwise have remained outside. He was the archetypal “inspirational teacher,” and recognised that he had learned from the best—always crediting in the unfolding of his own story, the interventions of others: his first Spanish teacher Mr. Davies at Borden Grammar School, his university tutors at Leeds, especially those who opened his heart and mind to early Modern Spain, among them Colin Smith, and Gareth Davies, and, of course, his doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, Edward Wilson. Trevor spent 12 years at Queen’s Belfast, then 14 at the University of Birmingham, before moving to Queen Mary, University of London, from where he retired in 2017. But, of course, he never really stopped working, and adding to an already immense body of published work.Trevor’s impressive contribution includes: biographical studies (notably on the poet Gabriel Bocángel y Unzueta, but also on the Conde de Salinas and the Princess of Éboli); a series of edited texts (the letters and documents of the Princess of Éboli, which he edited with Helen Reed; as well as the letters and memorials of the Count of Salinas); scholarship on textual editing and book ownership (including a book on private libraries and readers in the Golden Age, and on the printing history of the Rimas of Lupercio and Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola); and, of course, his research on poetry (both literary history and criticism).Anyone who ever had the pleasure of listening to Trevor relive the discovery of material in libraries or archives, will have experienced the excitement, the “buzz” (as he called it), that drove his scholarship. This passion that was stimulated under Wilson’s supervision at Cambridge (1970–73), while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Gabriel Bocángel y Unzueta, continued to constitute the substance of his success. I recall the enthusiasm with which he delivered a paper on the complex story behind the printing of the Argensola brothers’ Rimas. The subsequent publication (Zaragoza, 2010) was admired by Jaime Galbarro as: “todo un modelo para el estudio de aquellos textos que sufrieron intensos procesos de corrección y enmienda durante su impresión [. . .] muy pocas veces se cuenta con un estudio tan exhaustivo y riguroso” (Calíope, 17.1 [2011], pp. 224–229 [p. 224]). More recently, while carrying out research on the Princess of Éboli, mother of the poet-politician the Conde de Salinas, Trevor chanced upon discovery of unknown poems by Salinas, an archival “find” of autograph originals and copies that increases the established corpus from 98 poems to 259. The Introduction to the published edition (2016) encapsulates the pure joy he experienced as a researcher: “Como en este momento me encontraba solo en la Sala de Investigadores, salté de la silla de pura alegría, y alcé los brazos al cielo. Acababa de entrar de verdad en la Cueva de Alí Babá” (ix). Muriel Elvira comments on the “entusiasmo contagioso” of these introductory pages, but also on the intellectual stamina that delivered the prize: “Las primeras páginas [. . .] demuestran [. . .] los frutos que proporciona la lenta y paciente investigación de archivos, coronada, cuando el investigador tiene la intuición y la experiencia de Dadson, por premios como este” (Criticón, 128 [2016], pp. 153–161 [p. 154]).In 2007, decades of research in Spanish national and provincial archives produced a colossal study (over 1,300 pages) that turned a well-worn historiography on its head: Los moriscos de Villarrubia de los Ojos (siglos XV–XVIII). Historia de una minoría asimilada, expulsada y reintegrada. By giving voice to the thousands of mudéjares (later moriscos) who inhabited the Campo de Calatrava in the Castilian region of La Mancha during the period prior to the expulsion order of 1609, Trevor challenged over four hundred years of accepted history, going against the grain of studies that were usually based on inquisitorial material and generally favoured, therefore, a perspective of intolerance and persecution. He also effectively told three tales in one, bringing to life for the reader the small town of Villarrubia (its evolution from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century) and the interventions of two of its seigniorial lords, the counts of Salinas, Diego de Silva y Mendoza and his son Rodrigo de Silva y Sarmiento. If Trevor’s work put Villarrubia on the map, you might say that the town responded in kind—in July 2008 the town council voted unanimously to name a new street after him; a decision ratified in March 2009, after which Calle Trevor J. Dadson came into being. A further monograph on the topic, facilitated by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2011–13), and dedicated by Trevor to Villarrubia, was published in 2014 to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of the end of the expulsion: Tolerance and Coexistence in Early Modern Spain: Old Christians and Moriscos in the Campo de Calatrava. The title articulates Trevor’s revisionist agenda more explicitly, exposing a historical complexity at the core of the process of acculturation and assimilation, while also providing a timely reminder that “it was possible to create a pluralist society in even the most hostile environment, a society where all could live together in relative peace and harmony” (ix). The contemporary resonance has never been more urgent: “alongside the standard image of a monolithic, anti-liberal, and intolerant state [. . .] there was another willing and able to assume pluralism, to assimilate its ethnic minorities [. . .] and to search for a coexistence based on mutual respect and equality” (241). As several reviewers have pointed out, these arguments are compellingly made because they are based on an impressive array of micro historical details and because Trevor takes such delight in sharing ‘his journey of discovery with the reader’ at every turn (Martínez-Dávila, The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 41.2 [2015], p. 249). This combination of meticulously rigorous research and empathetic dialogue between the subjects of the past and readers in the present is not an exclusive characteristic of Trevor’s historical research, but an underlying principle that has greatly contributed to the scholarly impact of his work.There is within that broader corpus, another one, comprising Trevor’s contributions to our understanding of poetic production. This portfolio includes what is now acknowledged to be the definitive edition of the complete work of Bocángel (2002), the poet to whom Trevor dedicated a great part of his professional life. As Trevor’s great friend and fellow scholar, Antonio Carreira noted “ojalá hubiera muchos clásicos investigados con el tesón que Dadson ha dedicado a Bocángel” (NRFH, 50 [2002], pp. 270–280 [p. 280]). Trevor had begun editing Bocangel’s poetry in the early 1980s and published a Cátedra edition of the Lira de las musas in 1985. The magnificent two-volume anthology of 2000 was a labour of love over several years and is rivalled only in recuperative power and personal investment, by Trevor’s own 2016 edition of the unedited poetry of the Conde de Salinas. The starting point for this ambitious project, based on the autograph originals, was also a much earlier edition of Salinas’ extant poems, entitled Antología Poética 1564–1630, which, like the edition of Bocángel’s Lira, was also published in 1985 (Visor). The value of the more recent discovery speaks for itself in terms of underlining the extensive use made of poetry in the period, as Elvira notes: “como elemento de una cultura aristocática integrada en todos los momentos de la vida familiar, amorosa, amistosa y mundana de un noble titulado, como era el Conde de Salinas” (p. 155).The 2016 Salinas volume was published by the Real Academia Española. This same institution, in 2016, elected Trevor a Corresponding Fellow, coinciding with his election, in the same year, as Corresponding Fellow to the Real Academia de la Historia. To be rewarded both for his pioneering work on Spanish history and on literature reflects the depth, reach and significance of Trevor’s research. This rare achievement followed the award of Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Católica (2015) in recognition of his long-standing service to Spanish culture. Closer to home, Trevor’s enthusiastic promotion of Hispanism, and strong links with the Spanish Embassy, found the perfect outlet during his tenure as President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (2011–15). Working in close partnership with the other executive officers, he transformed the AHGBI into an association with real clout nationally, while retaining and releasing the characteristics that had always underpinned its success—the significance of the intergenerational dynamic and the potential for those generations to support one another in meaningful ways. During his time as president, he set up the annual publication prize for the best Hispanic or Lusophone doctoral thesis, in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy and the publishing houses Tamesis and Legenda. Trevor established the Legenda book series, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures (2013) to facilitate this initiative and continued as Chair of the Editorial Board until his death. He was also, until his retirement, editor in chief of the Hispanic Research Journal.Trevor eventually took full retirement in 2017. High on the agenda was spending time with his family: his wife, Ángeles; his two sons; and grandchildren, to whom he was utterly devoted. His research flourished too, and he rarely took a day off. There were several books in the making, most notably a biography of Salinas that he had been working on for some years. In one of the final messages that I received from him, not long before he went to the United States where he had accepted a position as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, he described his own work ethic graphically: “I am still working like an idiot and must learn to say no. But I have so many ideas, projects I want to see through to conclusion that I can’t see this happening any time soon. Maybe that’s for the best.”The research that Trevor Dadson produced, enabled, and inspired will speak for him for a long time to come; it might even answer him back. Trevor would have enjoyed inspiring a cacophony of provocative, challenging, interventions. I am reminded of the final verse of Salinas’ sonnet that Trevor chose for the epigraph to his 1985 edition: “¡alábeos el callar que no enmudece!”