My father, Roger Boase, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of Spanish 15th- century cancionero poetry and history.
Roger’s magnum opus, published in 2017, was Secrets of Pinar’s Game, analysing across two volumes a single Iberian poem from 1496 and all the literary, historical, botanical and heraldic references therein.
Before his death he was close to completing a second long-term project, telling the story of Anselm Turmeda (later Abdallah at-Tarjuman, 1352-1432), a Franciscan friar who converted to Islam and documented his transition of faith in Catalan and Arabic. Roger himself became a Sufi, under Sheikh Nazim, in the 1970s.
Born in Glasgow, the son of Alan Boase, a French professor, and Grizelle (nee Forster), Roger was educated at Eton, spent a year at Trinity College Dublin and then switched to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to study French and Spanish. There he met Aisha Ahmad, who was on the same degree course. They married in 1969 and both completed PhDs in London.
While many academics spend their postdoctoral years writing their first book, Roger came to his PhD viva with two already under his belt: The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love (1977) and The Troubadour Revival (1978), the first of which is still used to teach undergraduates.
Both traced the rise of concepts in Spain such as chivalry and courtly love in the wake of the disintegration of medieval values and institutions. Moreover, he argued that these concepts were inspired by Islamic ideas, the links forgotten in the “othering” of the Muslim world and subsequent expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492 and 1609 respectively.
After six years teaching English at the University of Fez in Morocco, Roger returned to the UK in 1983 and was a research fellow at Westfield College, now Queen Mary University of London, for four decades. He was an honorary senior fellow there and never retired. A strong advocate for religious pluralism and peace-building, he edited Islam and Global Dialogue (2006), a volume of essays by Christians, Jews and Muslims, and Pashtun Tales (2008), folk stories that Aisha had collected at the Pakistan-Afghan frontier.
As well as being a meticulous academic, Roger was a true gentleman adored by all who knew him – and he was a great family man.
He is survived by Aisha, their two sons, Muin and me, two granddaughters and two of his three brothers.
