5 From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of A merica, 23.2 (2003): 5-8. Copyright © 2003, The Cervantes Society of America. R. Merritt Cox (1939–1987), Pioneer of John Bowle Studies There had been little scholarly attention given to John Bowle’s landmark 1781 edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote when R. Merritt Cox entered graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he worked with Mack Singleton. His dissertation, “The Rev. John Bowle, First Editor of Don Quixote,” on the figure called by Julio Casares the “verdadero fundador de la crítica erudita del Quijote ,” was published as The Rev. John Bowle. The Genesis of Cervantean Criti- cism (1971). This first book-length appreciation of Bowle’s grand accomplishment was expanded during Cox’s early faculty appoint- ments, first at Wisconsin and then at Duke, and grew during his ten- ure at the College of William & Mary (1972-1987) into a companion volume dedicated to Vicar of Idmiston’s life and publishing career, An English Ilustrado : The Reverend John Bowle (1977). The lasting con- tributions of these two monographs are well documented by the fresh research presented in this issue of Cervantes. Merritt’s roots in Richmond, Virginia—the second colonial- period capital of this Commonwealth after Williamsburg—were deep. A native son, he did his undergraduate work at the Univer- sity of Richmond, and even after he decided on Spanish literature as his area of professional specialization he chose to focus on the same era as that of Virginia’s pre-eminence in eighteenth-century Amer-ica. That century is still the most neglected in Spanish liter- ary studies, but Merritt laid out the intellectual territory for his