From Katherine Park

I never met Shona, but I greatly admire her work. I read her book on plague in Bologna with great profit, and I assigned her article, "Boccaccio and the Doctors," in a graduate proseminar on the history of medieval health and medicine that I taught this fall. It was received with great enthusiasm as engaging and original, and I plan to include it in the syllabus of my undergraduate survey the next time I teach it. As one of the members of the Villa I Tatti selection committee, I also had the pleasure of reading the proposal for her new project, on faculty wives and families in 14th-century Bologna. Writing women and families back into the history of the medieval and Renaissance university and of medieval scholarship is extremely very challenging, and only a handful of historians have attempted it, among them Alix Cooper and Gadi Algazi. Shona's work in this area would have been pathbreaking. Intellectually as well as personally, this is a great loss to the field.