THANK YOU TO the staff of the British Library who, with unfailing efficiency and good humor, delivered truckloads of books to Humanities Reading Room One, a place where, should one be able to find a seat, a writer comes close to heaven on earth in London.
Vivian Nutton, Professor of the History of Medicine, University College, was kind enough to help me with the medicine and science of the time; Professor Kate Lowe at Queen Mary’s College, University of London, was boundlessly generous and knowledgeable about the world of Italian Renaissance nuns; and Professor Craig Monson at Washington University, St. Louis, and Laurie Stras and Deborah Roberts of the innovative musical consort Musica Secreta all opened my ears and my heart to the wonders and complexities of convent music. Sacred Hearts owes a great deal to all of them. Its mistakes, however, are entirely my own.
In Ferrara, Italy, visits to Corpus Domini and Sant’Antonio in Polesine provided emotional as well as physical geography, while the city itself is so welcoming and visually evocative of its past that I fail to understand why it isn’t overwhelmed by tourists (though that is also one of its great pleasures).
I am grateful to Professor Elissa B. Weaver and to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to quote some lines of translation from her 2001 book on convent theater (details in the bibliography).
As always, deepest thanks go to Clare Alexander and Sally Riley my agents; my American editor, Susanna Porter; and in London, Elise Dillsworth and the one and only Lennie Goodings, head of Virago Press.
Writers are not the most even-keeled of human beings when working on a book. I’d like to apologize to my daughters, Zoe and Georgia, for the excessive number of conversations about nuns in our house, and, for their critical support, to thank Eileen Horne, Christopher Bollas, Gillian Slovo, Maria Maragonis, Don Guttenplan, Ian Grojnowski, Scarlet MccGwire, Joseph Calderone, Sue Woodman, Christina Shewall, and Isabella Planner. But final thanks must go to Tez Bentley who, as well as giving my words the polish of his rigorous subeditor’s pen, suffered (and I do not use the word lightly) alongside me when the going got really rough. It is fitting, perhaps, that for a novel with no men within it there should have been one on the outside whose sanity and generosity kept me from madness.
— London
May 2009
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