Conor McCarthy - Love Sex & Marriage in the Middle Ages

Having spent quite a few years now studying this topic, I have accumulated a good many debts along the way, and this seems an appropriate place to acknowledge some of them. I owe most to Gerald Morgan, who supervised my postgraduate work on medieval marriage at Trinity College, Dublin, with great generosity and enthusiasm. It is a pleasure to thank him again. The examiners of that thesis, John Scattergood and Alcuin Blamires, made suggestions that have found their way into this book, for which I thank them. I am grateful also to former colleagues and students at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the University of Durham, several of whom were interested in the subjects discussed here, or related topics, and were generous with their time and knowledge.

Personal thanks are due to my family (all of them) for their enduring support and interest: in particular my parents, Michael and Nuala McCarthy, and my brothers, Michael and David. Thanks likewise to friends for the same, particularly Niamh Walsh and Lisa Carey. My thanks also to Dario and Juliette Brollo, Darren Brollo and Emily Brollo, for hospitality, the frequent use of a computer, and what must have been hundreds of cups of tea. My biggest personal debt is to Deidre Brollo, who lived with the writing of this book over a couple of years, encouraging throughout. It would be difficult to thank her enough.

This book was written in Durham in 2001 and rewritten in Sydney in 2002, and I want to thank the Universities of Durham and Sydney for the use of their libraries and the helpfulness of their library staff. Particular debts are owed for some of the translations: I am grateful to Kathleen Coleman for her revisions of my translations of the Latin statutes in extract 15, and I am similarly grateful to Robert Carver for his revisions of the translations in extracts 10, 11 and 12. At Routledge, thanks to Vicky Peters for seeing the book past all hurdles, to Snje Redies, editorial assistant at Routledge, and to Gillian Oliver for suggesting something like this project in the first place. Further thanks to Miranda Chaytor for copyediting, Alex Ballantine for last-minute editorial assistance and Ruth Bourne for production editing. My thanks also to several anonymous readers for any number of suggested improvements. To all of the above, named or not, many thanks.

It remains to acknowledge the debt of this book to other books, and my own fallibility. It's self evident that nobody could possibly be an expert in all of the areas discussed by a book like this, covering so broad a span of time. Chaucer describes himself in A Treatise on the Astrolabe as a lewd compilator, an unlearned compiler of the works of others. In assembling this anthology, I too may claim to be a lewd compilator, and, probably unlike Chaucer, to mean it. As a consequence, although I am also repeating the knowledge of others, and in some cases have it translatid in myn Englissh, I am sure to have introduced errors somewhere in the materials assembled here. I apologize to the reader for any that might come to notice.

Conor McCarthy

Sydney

September 2002