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.

From Maria Constantoudaki and Paschalis Kitromilides

We had known Shona for a rather short time, since we only arrived in Florence in late March. We remember her as a very kind presence in the I Tatti community, with discretion and intelligence. Sometimes we would see her riding her bicycle through the centre of Florence, and she would stop to talk to us if we had not happened to see her first. We would also occasionally wait with her outside the National Central Library of Florence, for the little bus (the “pulmino”), driven by Gennaro, to take us, along with other fellow-researchers, to the Villa I Tatti. Then we also had the opportunity to chat with her about her work, the Renaissance notaries and the archives, her current writing, but also about her daughter’s interest in art, especially modern art, and her son who was with his father back in the US. One of the last times we saw her I liked the combination of colours in her clothes; she was wearing a dark mauve skirt with a saffron-yellow jacket, and I thought this is a person with a special taste. We are sure she was so special for all her family and many friends. It is very sad that fate took her so soon from this life, but her contribution to scholarship and her other activities will keep her memory alive. Our warm thoughts are with her beloved ones.

Maria Constantoudaki and Paschalis Kitromilides (from Athens, Greece)

From Roisin Cossar

Shona in Florence

Shona was my great friend, my work partner, and a source of support and love to my family, too. We'd been spending the year in Florence, at the Villa I Tatti, working on projects that intersected in several ways. Over the years of our friendship, we talked about the possibility of coming here, but neither of us ever managed we'd actually manage it, let alone in the same year!

I'll have so many memories of her, and I'll have other chances to share those, here and elsewhere, but today I was thinking about how she and my ten-year-old daughter would walk together through the Uffizi, looking rather irreverently at renditions of the Madonna and Christ child. They'd stop in front of a Botticelli, or a Filippo Lippi, or (maybe worst) Lucas Cranach, and critique the artists' renderings of baby heads, baby legs, and baby eyes. I will NEVER be able to go to the Uffizi again without hearing them giggling about the "creepy babies."

Roisin Cossar