… as noted jurist M. Cyrus would have said…

Thoughts on a manuscript submission…

Well – big day: I’m about to press the button and send off my checked-over manuscript to the publisher. Women and the Medieval Common Law c. 1200-1500 is a real thing! No doubt there will be  messing around and checking – perhaps some battles about the (admittedly copious) length of the notes, but essentially this is it. I won’t be able to change anything major from this point onwards.

Naturally, I can’t just do it, I have to agonise about doing it … and reflect about it. Well, indulge me, it’s been a long time in the works, and I don’t think I’ll be doing anything like it again.

I have wanted to write about women and legal history for such a long time – probably since my days on a postgrad course in which women were very much an add-on, and only interesting from a property perspective. For a long time, I avoided it, though. It seemed too close to home, in a way – I did drink in all the objective standpoint stuff rather too enthusiastically in my academic youth – and I was well aware that it would not be popular with the powers that be in the world of Law School legal history. So there was a lengthy diversion into other things – economic offences (seems a lifetime ago) suicide, all sorts. (And even a brief stint of masquerading as a modern property lawyer … But eventually it got to the point that I felt robust enough to have a go, and so it has been there in the background for a few years now.

It has changed a lot over the course of researching and writing. Obviously I was massively over-ambitious in thinking I could look at every subject, every relevant document (that has, of course, been especially true in the last few months, with library and archive restrictions). I more than half expect to be clobbered with the old ‘Why have you not looked at [insert name of 50 obscure MSS which would take a year to locate and translate…] and done a comprehensive survey of levels of women’s participation over 3 centuries [at least another year, with a research team and a way with complex quantitative analysis], but there does come a time when you just have to stop and publish the thing. It is the right length for the publishers’ parameters, it has some things to say, and I hope it will make a contribution. So – a little sadness that it is not all that I meant it to be, and trepidation that it will end up being clobbered from several different directions, by those who wouldn’t have done it at all, or would have done it in a different way …but I am so ready to move on.

One of the later things to do in this sort of project is the preface, dedication and so on. I am dedicating it to my mother, who very much deserves it. I hope it will make her happy and proud. I decided, though, against anything else personal by way of preface. I have become rather disenchanted with academic book prefaces. The convention of thanking people at the start of books they will probably never read, nor know about,  is polite in a way, but also a little odd. In some cases, it does feel a bit master/servant, in others, there is the sneaking suspicion that there’s a bit of boasting going on (look – not only do I write books, but I have a great personal life, supportive spouse etc. …) I hope that I have thanked those people who deserve my thanks in person anyway, and treated people in libraries and at conferences with respect as we work together. So I used the preface in a more content-relevant way, to set up the material which would follow. I feel more comfortable with that. At the moment, if I did the thank you thing, it might turn out to be rather more of a sarky ‘and I’d like to say THANK YOU VERY MUCH to the Senior Managers at my University for their handling of the coronavirus emergency and the [innuendo: abysmal] level of respect and support for staff who already have a lot to do [such as writing legal history books] over the summer’. And the email system which decided to play up just when I needed to despatch my files. Which would make me look extremely grumpy to anyone who looked at the book, years from now. So best not. [Could of course start a new trend for ‘And no thanks to …’ sections, a.k.a. Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth if you know your Dafydd Iwan …]

Anyway. Time for action. Things to do. Buttons to press.

With crossed fingers.

And … done.