Acknowledgments
Things have changed since I started this book. As initially conceived in 2017, this was to have been a short treatment of the language of late medieval episcopal governance. Gender was present in my thinking but was not the focus of substantial research questions. This began to change in response to conversations happening in the Crime and Punishment in Medieval England class for Oxford undergraduates, which I taught over the years with Lucia Akard, Ellie Birch, Alice Raw, Hannah Skoda, and Lidia Zanetti Domingues. Students wanted to discuss what it meant for medieval—and modern—disciplinary systems to be so male dominated, and they were becoming more and more interested in transgender history. Their questions and interests pushed me in new directions, and I’m immensely grateful to them all.
In 2018, I was tasked with organizing the Oxford History Faculty’s first report for the UK’s Athena SWAN initiative on gender equality in universities. This was a formative experience. I would particularly like to thank Isabelle Pitt for her inspiring example and Lyndal Roper for her vital encouragement. I moved to the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow in 2023 just as that institution’s second Athena SWAN report was being prepared. Glasgow is home to the UK’s leading Centre for Gender History and to the journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia. Over these five years, discussions about gender equality in the humanities have begun to establish a new normal discourse, but the project has no end.
I have incurred many practical, emotional, and intellectual debts in writing this book. I am grateful to the provost and fellows of Oriel College for not canceling research leave during the pandemic. As I worked on this project during lockdown, I was reliant on the assistance of archivists in providing images of documents I had not already photographed and could not access. I am grateful to Max Parkin of Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, Sue Martin of Cambridgeshire Archives, and Siân Collins of Cambridge University Library and Archives. Shannon McSheffrey generously provided me with copies of her photographs from the London Metropolitan Archives. My thanks also to Brill Academic Publishers for allowing me to publish here, in chapter 1, a much longer version of a piece that appears in a festschrift for Miri Rubin, one of my doctoral supervisors: see Matthew S. Champion, Kati Ihnat, Eyal Poleg, and Milan Žonca, eds. Medieval Matters: Europe’s Premodern Religious Cultures (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2025).
Colleagues, friends, and former students furnished advice or references on a number of points: James Davis and Joanne Sear on the criminal associations of Newmarket Heath, Rachel Delman on female patrons of churches, Leah DeVun on dispensations, Chris Fletcher on the history of masculinity, Sarah Foot on the historiography of women’s ordination, Tom Johnson on a case of violence against a summoner, Annette Kehnel on the Lanercost chronicle, and Andrew Morrison on ancient letter writing; I was grateful to be able to read Alice Raw’s doctoral research on sexuality in late medieval songs. Sara Rees Jones allowed me to see in draft her important chapter on the registers of the archbishops of York. I am hugely grateful to Sara McDougall, Maureen Miller, Amanda Power, and Miri Rubin for particularly encouraging conversations at crucial moments in the book’s gestation. Simon Yarrow set a hare running in 2008 at a “Social Church” workshop with his statement that historical study of Christianity should be concerned with how the church had sustained patriarchy.
For the opportunity to try out ideas and hear invaluable feedback I am grateful to the Oxford Medieval Church and Culture seminar, the Edinburgh Medieval History seminar, a joint seminar of the Glasgow Medieval History and Gender History groups, Emily Corran and Christophe Grellard for their invitation to address the Institut d’études avancées de Paris, and participants in Kirsty Day’s “Hegemony of Men” online workshop, especially Fiona Knight, Katherine Lewis, Clare Monagle, Maroula Perisanidi, and Savannah Pine.
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Anne E. Lester have been wonderful as series editors, reading the manuscript generously and critically. The two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press gave me exactly what I needed: they got the point of the book, saw its flaws with clarity and learned insight, and gave me the invaluable advice that every author craves. My thanks also go to Mahinder Kingra and Pete Feely for guiding the editorial process, and to Mary Kate Murphy for her work on the text. Working with Cornell has been a fantastic experience.
Two friends deserve special mention. My deepening understanding of visitation records, on which large sections of the book depend, has formed in dialogue over many years with the peerless Chris Whittick, who also provided advice on several paleographic details. My debt to Sethina Watson, dear friend, is deep; merely to count her readings of particular Latin passages and her critique of chapter 5, or to recall our hours of conversation about medieval history does not do justice to the support she has given me over the years.
Finally, sharing life with Helen Brockett gives it all meaning. She helps living people find their voice, and this reminds me that there is more to life than medieval history.