Rachel died peacefully at her home in Boston on January 24, age 86, and was laid to rest on Long Island alongside her parents, Richard and Natalie and her younger brother, Leonard. She was a prodigious scholar, who took a B.A. at Cornell and an M.A. at Harvard, both in English. Subsequently, she studied Dante with John Freccero at Yale and in 1977, received her Ph.D. in Italian. She subsequently edited and introduced Freccero’s Dante, The Poetics of Conversion, in 1986. Over her long career, she taught at the University of Virginia, Stanford and Cornell and for more than thirty years, served Wellesley College as Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. The high quality of her work was recognized with an unusual number of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (I Tatti), Bellagio Center (Villa Serbelloni), the Liguria Study Center (Bogliasco) and The American Academy of Rome. Her research and writing were often done in collaboration with other scholars, with whom she joint-authored or co-edited such volumes as “Lectura Dantis Inferno II” (1989), “The Poetry of Allusion” (1990) and “The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections” (2001). Her own essays, especially those on the Paradiso, are perhaps her finest contribution to Dante studies. The recipient of several teaching awards, Jacoff was renowned as a mentor, not only to generations of students, but also to younger colleagues, who valued her generous attention and encouragement. A remarkably social person, she had an extraordinary gift for friendship, which flourished in conversation, over meals and with laughter.
