Constance Blackwell (1934-2018)

It is with great sadness that we have to report the death of Constance Blackwell on 29 March 2018. Constance’s enthusiasm for the study of early modern philosophy (especially the late scholastic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was undiminished right up to the moment of her final illness. Constance played a key role in fostering the study of intellectual history, setting up the Foundation for Intellectual History in 1994, and publishing a regular newsletter, Intellectual News, which featured contributions from many of the key figures in the field. Constance was an avid promotor of ambitious conferences which often resulted in associated publications:  Method and Order in the Renaissance Philosophy of Nature: The Aristotle Commentary Tradition(1997), Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Conversations with Aristotle (1999) and Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (2001), all bear witness to her efforts. The Foundation was later transformed into the International Society for Intellectual History, and the Intellectual News was replaced by Intellectual Historical Review in 2007. In 2016, Intellectual History Review published a Festschrift for Constance with essays by many of her colleagues on the theme of “Studies in Intellectual Historiography.” During the course of her career Constance published many articles on the scholastic authors that fascinated her, including Cajetano, Zimara, Pereira, Zabarella and Keckermann. She also worked intensively on Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742-1744). Constance will be sadly missed, not only by her family, but also by her many friends and colleagues across the world.