Christina Edgeworth Butler was born in 1919 in Oxford, into a family of academic pedigree.
She attended St Paul's Girls School and University College, London.
She married Howard Colvin, an architectural historian, in 1943, and moved to Oxford when he took up a faculty position at St John's College.
She contributed to the topics of poor relief and religious nonconformity in volume 14, on the Bampton Hundred.
The papers, on loan from Dublin, were at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and she worked with her sister-in-law Marilyn Butler in preparing them for publication.