From Joëlle Rollo Koster

I met Shona at the American Academy in 2003. Since then we met a few times, the last time in Venice at the RAA. We shared emails on our work and I wrote a piece for her. All of us know the thoroughness of her scholarship and how we will all sorely miss her contribution. But I want to add something about her personality. I have always found academia tiresome and full of ego and pomp. Shona was fun to be around. I had kids when I wrote my dissertation and always felt like an alien. Shona was so refreshing, her children were with her in Rome and that's the way it was! One night she cooked a dish for her family...and me....of pasta with smoked salmon and cream. That dish became my spaghetti à la Shona....I have done it many times since 2003 always thinking about her. It now takes a totally different connotation. To Shona. Tu etais one bonne collégue, tu nous manqueras beaucoup.

Joëlle

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

From Julian Deahl

Shona published one of her books with me: we had a working relation for several years (the book took a long time to get written). We had both begun as grad students in medieval philosophy, so we had that in common. Shona was smart, funny, charming, understated, very likeable. Last time we talked she seemed to be in the middle of life and enjoying it too. At the end of March her friend Roisin Cossar was telling me of her doings in Rome. This news is incredibly sad and very hard to take in: my deep condolences go to her family and friends.

Julian Deahl

Leiden, the Netherlands