From Christina Neilson

Dear Maggi,

We had the conference in Shona's memory at the end of last week at the University of Manitoba and it went very well. We had 8 papers from people working in many different fields of Renaissance studies (history of literature, science, and politics, social history, and art and architectural history) and many of us had known Shona from our time with her at I Tatti. Shona came up a lot during the conference. At the beginning of the conference Roisin explained how the event had come about and how Shona had been one of the original organisers, and she went on to talk about Shona's work and how it engaged with many of the issues we would be talking about at the conference. Many people mentioned Shona during their talks and how their interactions with her had affected their thinking (for instance, Filippo de Vivo, one of the other organisers, explained how he had been moved to include a discussion of gender in his consideration of the experience of walking in the Renaissance city because of conversations he had had with Shona). On the final evening we had dinner at Roisin's house and we made a point of remembering Shona together. Roisin began by telling those people who were there and did not know Shona something about her. After that many of us talked about Shona and how she had influenced us or a funny story about an interaction we had had with her. Her droll sense of humour was mentioned more than once.

Something we were all happy about was the quality of the conference papers, which we plan on submitting to I Tatti Studies as a special issue, dedicated to Shona's memory. The high quality of the articles will be a fitting tribute to Shona's own remarkable talents as a scholar.  

I think of Shona often and I, like many, was very sad at the conference that she could not be there. She was very much missed, as she is in my life in general.