Guy René Mermier [1931-2011]:Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Founder, Advisor and Friend of the Société Guilhem IX Robert A. Taylor Guy René Mermier was born in Grenoble, France October 20, 1931, and died March 23, 2011 at the age of 79, from complications after surgery; his life was filled with love for his family and for France, his devotion to teaching and advising several generations of students, and his broadly-based interests in the world of culture and scholarship. His adolescent years were spent through the Second World War in occupied France; in 1951 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for a year of study at Amherst College; making the year even more meaningful was the fact that he met his future wife, Martha Brinton, on the boat taking him back to France after his Fulbright year. In France Guy earned his Licence in 1953 and a Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures in 1954 from the University of Grenoble; in the same year he married Martha, who has become well known in her own right in the field of social work, author of a highly regarded book outlining support systems to aid families in coping with mental illness. Returning to America, Guy completed a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, with a thesis on Pierre de Beauvais' Bestiary, subsequently published in 1977 and again with an English translation and colourful illustrations in 1992; from graduate school he immediately accepted a position as Instructor, then Assistant Professor, at the University of Michigan, and apart from one year at the University of Massachusetts in 1964, he spent the rest of his career at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, where he became Associate Professor in 1966, Professor in 1980, and Emeritus Professor upon retirement in 1998. His professorial occupations consisted, as is normal, of teaching, administration, and academic research, and he made his mark in all three. [End Page 214] Teaching Guy was acclaimed as a learned, warm and dynamic teacher in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, a tireless promoter of French and Medieval studies, and as a caring academic advisor and mentor; in 1994 he received an L.S.A. Excellence in Education award from his College of Literature, Science and the Arts, and in 1995 he was chosen for the Ruth Sinclair Award for concentration advising, in recognition of his many years of dedicated and effective work as an academic advisor to undergraduates. To assist in classroom teaching, he published books on the typically French disciplines of explication de texte and analyse de texte, and several popular editions and translations of medieval French texts. On the graduate level, he taught a wide variety of courses as well as chairing or co-chairing fourteen doctoral dissertation committees and serving on many others. Administration During his thirty-five years of dedication to the University, he served on many departmental committees, as well as participating actively on the Rackham Graduate School Executive Board, the academic judiciary, and the Senate Assembly. He directed the Michigan-Wisconsin academic year in Aix-en-Provence three times. For seventeen years, until his retirement, he directed the interdisciplinary undergraduate program Medieval and Renaissance Collegium (MARC), the forerunner of today's Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS). Guy was Co-Editor with Edelgard E. duBruck of the journal Fifteenth-Century Studies from its inception in 1978 until 1985, then served on its Advisory Board until 2010. Academic research Guy was a specialist in Medieval French and Occitan literature, though he contributed extensively to the overall study of France and of the whole of French literature and culture. His publications included a dozen major scholarly books, editions, and translations of major Old French texts, as well as more than 40 articles. His research on French and Occitan literature covered [End Page 215] the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, and sometimes led him past the Renaissance and into the twenty-first century. His interests were extraordinarily broad, ranging from troubadour poetry to hagiography, epic and drama, from romance narratives to reformist religion. One of his widely...