FOREWORD

Marie Kelleher was in the middle of reviewing the final copyedited manuscript of The Hungry City when, on May 6, 2024, she succumbed to a cancer that had quickly overtaken her. Marie, who was only fifty-three, had not had a long time to plan for this, as her diagnosis had come just weeks earlier, and she was working on the manuscript up until the day she died. The news was shocking to everyone who knew her, including everyone who was even tangentially involved in the project.

With the support of Marie's family, who naturally wished to see the book come to fruition, a group of her closest academic friends, members of a writing group she had been involved in for years, volunteered to take on the responsibility of finishing the review of the copyediting and completing the remaining work needed to bring the book to print. This group of longtime friends and colleagues includes Sarah Davis-Secord, Valerie Garver, Meg Leja, Susan McDonough, and Miriam Shadis. The changes made to her manuscript in the time since her death have been minimal and were primarily stylistic. A number of Iberianists—among them Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Thomas W. Barton, Paul Freedman, and Michael A. Ryan—also volunteered to address questions that emerged with archival- or language-specific issues in the final manuscript.

Marie had been at work on The Hungry City for over a decade. She spent long stints of time in Barcelona working in the archives, learning the city, and developing connections with the place she knew so well and brings so vividly to life in this book. The manuscript that Marie completed had entered production a few months earlier and was already in superb shape. As will be clear to all readers, she developed here a lively and engaged writing style that asks us to think about the dynamics of life in a city like that of fourteenth-century Barcelona in a new way, to see its landscape, trace its networks, and consider the experience of its inhabitants anew. Although we were unable to recover some of the final changes that Marie had made to the copyedited text in her last weeks, the most advanced version of the manuscript in our possession was entrusted to the writing group described above. They know Marie's voice, the cadence of her writing, and her precise and analytical mind, and they worked on the final version of the text with the aim of arriving at a book that is as close to Marie's intentions as possible. Her friends and colleagues have helped to bring Marie's voice and her vision for this project to completion. In the spring of 2024, Marie had also worked with Pamela A. Patton of the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University to choose what she saw as an ideal image for the book's cover, which the designers have honored.

We, the series editors, along with Mahinder Kingra, editor in chief at Cornell University Press, are deeply grateful to everyone involved in the commitment to seeing through the publication of this important part of Marie's scholarly legacy. We are grieved by the loss of such a wonderful and innovative historian, and proud to have been entrusted with what should not have been her final book. As many have noted to us, Marie's lively mind, inquisitive spirit, academic rigor, and infectious laugh will live on in memories of her and in her published work. It is our most sincere hope that Marie would have been pleased with the book's final production, and that she were able to read and hear her academic community's reaction to it so she would know the impact she has made. Resquiet in pacem.

M. Cecilia Gaposchkin

Anne E. Lester