Christina Roaf, Italian scholar, was born on November 27, 1917. She died on June 19, 2014, aged 96
Christina Roaf was a punctilious textual scholar who taught widely throughout Oxford University. Specialising in Italian Renaissance writings, her critical editions of the letters of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, Sperone Speroni’s defence of his tragedy Canace and Francesco Sansovino’s letters on Boccaccio’s Decameron, were well reviewed by many demanding critics.
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Evelyn Christina Mervyn Drake was born in a house where the poet Christina Rossetti had lived: hence her second name, by which she was always known. With her excellent French and Italian, she read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in 1940 with a First. She returned there in 1949, embarking on a DPhil thesis on Cavalcanti. When a vacancy for a lecturer in Italian opened up, her former tutor encouraged her to apply. The post did not bring with it any college connection, but Somerville was quick to offer her a college lectureship. Through successive manifestations as fellow, tutor, honorary senior research fellow, emeritus fellow and foundation fellow, she played a key role in the life of the college.
In 1955 she married the Christ Church physicist Douglas Roaf, a widower with five young children. He predeceased her in 1996. Among her visitors at the care home where she spent her latter years was a former colleague who came regularly to read Dante to her. A few days before she died they reached the final canto of Paradiso, the vision of God. She did not take this as an omen, but looked forward, she said, to starting again at the beginning of Inferno on his next visit.