By As Cal State Long Beach associate history professor Marie Kelleher’s book was nearing the final stages of publication, her publisher approached her with a question: “Are there any book prizes that you would like us to submit your book for?”
Kelleher wrote up a list of potential prizes and handed it over to her publisher. For Kelleher, that was that.
“[Submitting for prizes] is just part of the publishing process,” Kelleher said. “You give them a list, and then you kind of forget about it because there are so many good books out there that you can’t just get hung up on it. You just have to be happy that you wrote a good book.”
Almost three years after the publication of her book, just as Kelleher was moving on to different projects, she received an email from the American Historical Association. Her book, “The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon,” had won.
“It was really cool … I opened up the email and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so great! I have to call mom. Wait, I have to call my publisher first.'” Kelleher said.
Last month, Kelleher traveled to New Orleans to accept the 2012 Premio Del Rey book prize, a biennial prize awarded by the AHA to distinguish books in the field of medieval Spanish history.
Kelleher said receiving an award for a project that took almost 10 years to complete was extremely gratifying for her.
“[The book was] a process of several years, a lot of labor, and it’s nice to know that it’s going somewhere – that somebody besides your mom is going to read it, and that somebody besides your mom thinks it’s worth reading,” Kelleher said.
In her book, which is an expansion of her graduate dissertation, Kelleher examines the ways in which medieval women participated in the legal culture of the time.
She also looks at medieval legal ideas and history regarding women, which often claimed women were emotionally fragile and less intellectually capable than men.
Kelleher said she found that medieval women actually served to further perpetuate these ideas by conforming to them – making themselves appear fragile and incapable – in order to appear sympathetic to the male judges in court and win their cases.
Over the course of writing the book, Kelleher took several research trips to Spain, where she spent days flipping through archives of old court cases.
“It’s kind of fun actually,” she said. “You get to leaf through 600- to 700-year-old documents and read about the sex lives of people who died 650 years ago. But it’s also a tough slug because … you read 300 pages for every one that you can use.”
Kelleher also spent a year in Madison, Wis. as a Solmsen research fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, where she focused on finishing her book. She said the task wasn’t an easy one.
“The writing was frustrating sometimes, and then it was really rewarding sometimes,” Kelleher said. “Sometimes you would just write something and think, ‘That’s a beautiful thing,’ but there were times that I was in tears on my couch because it just wasn’t working.”
Amy Mulligan, assistant professor in the department of Irish language and literature at the University of Notre Dame, met Kelleher while attending the same fellowship.
Mulligan, who at the time was working on a project of her own, said she was impressed by Kelleher’s persistence.
“Writing is always difficult … Marie [Kelleher] would just keep slugging through it, and be at her desk every day . . . even when I am sure that she would rather walk away from a messy draft,” Mulligan said via email.
Mulligan said that even though Kelleher sometimes got stuck somewhere in the writing process, she wouldn’t give up.
“I think she called it ‘procrastivity,’ which means productive procrastination,” Mulligan said. “Even if she needed to take a break from the writing, to procrastinate a little, she would move onto something still related, so that she could have a little break but still be moving forward with the project and keeping her thoughts developing.”
