Kathryn Rudy
University of St Andrews, School of Art History, Faculty Member
The Medieval book, both religious and secular, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of its use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching... more
The Medieval book, both religious and secular, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of its use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment.
Rudy presents numerous and fascinating case studies that relate to the evidence of use and damage through touching and or kissing. She also puts each study within a category of different ways of handling books, mainly liturgical, legal or choral practice, and in turn connects each practice to the horizontal or vertical behavioural patterns of users within a public or private environment.
With her keen eye for observation in being able to identify various characteristics of inadvertent and targeted ware, the author adds a new dimension to the Medieval book. She gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on the social, anthropological and historical value of the use of the book by sharpening our senses to the way users handled books in different situations. Rudy has amassed an incredible amount of material for this research and the way in which she presents each manuscript conveys an approach that scholars on Medieval history and book materiality should keep in mind when carrying out their own research. What perhaps is most striking in her articulate text, is how she expresses that the touching of books was not without emotion, and the accumulated effects of these emotions are worthy of preservation, study and further reflection.
Rudy presents numerous and fascinating case studies that relate to the evidence of use and damage through touching and or kissing. She also puts each study within a category of different ways of handling books, mainly liturgical, legal or choral practice, and in turn connects each practice to the horizontal or vertical behavioural patterns of users within a public or private environment.
With her keen eye for observation in being able to identify various characteristics of inadvertent and targeted ware, the author adds a new dimension to the Medieval book. She gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on the social, anthropological and historical value of the use of the book by sharpening our senses to the way users handled books in different situations. Rudy has amassed an incredible amount of material for this research and the way in which she presents each manuscript conveys an approach that scholars on Medieval history and book materiality should keep in mind when carrying out their own research. What perhaps is most striking in her articulate text, is how she expresses that the touching of books was not without emotion, and the accumulated effects of these emotions are worthy of preservation, study and further reflection.
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Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and... more
Kathryn Rudy takes the reader on a journey to trace the birth, life and afterlife of a Netherlandish book of hours made in 1500. Image, Knife, and Gluepot painstakingly reconstructs the process by which this manuscript was created and discusses its significance as a text at the forefront of fifteenth-century book production, when the invention of mechanically-produced images led to the creation of new multimedia objects. Rudy then travels to the nineteenth century to examine the phenomenon of manuscript books being pillaged for their prints and drawings: she has diligently tracked down the dismembered parts of this book of hours for the first time. Image, Knife, and Gluepot also documents Rudy’s twenty-first-century research process, as she hunts through archives while grappling with the logistics and occasionally the limits of academic research.
The book is available for FREE at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/806
The book is available for FREE at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/806
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Catalogue for an exhibition held at Cambridge University Library, February-December 2017.
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In collaboration with Unglue.it we have set up a survey (only ten questions!) to learn more about how open access ebooks are discovered and used. We really value your participation, please take part! CLICK HERE
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Images from Rudy, Postcards on Parchment, part III
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Rudy, Postcards on Parchment, images, Part II
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These are the images from my 2015 book (in 3 parts, as the file is quite large). I'm giving them to you in case you want to use the book for teaching.
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Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims’ badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of... more
Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims’ badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of these last items have been classified as manuscript illumination, but Kathryn M. Rudy argues that these pictures should be called, instead, parchment paintings, similar to postcards. In a delightful study identifying this group of images for the first time, Rudy delineates how these objects functioned apart from the books in which they were kept. Whereas manuscript illuminations were designed to provide a visual narrative to accompany a book’s text, parchment paintings offered a kind of autonomous currency for exchange between individuals—people who longed for saturated color in a gray world of wood, stone, and earth. These small, colorful pictures offered a brilliant reprieve, and Rudy shows how these intriguing and previously unfamiliar images were traded and cherished, shedding light into the everyday life and relationships of those in the medieval Low Countries.
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‘Walking in Christ’s footsteps’ was a devotional ideal in the late Middle Ages. However, few nuns and religious women had the freedom or the funding to take the journey in the flesh. Instead they invented and adjusted devotional exercises... more
‘Walking in Christ’s footsteps’ was a devotional ideal in the late Middle Ages. However, few nuns and religious women had the freedom or the funding to take the journey in the flesh. Instead they invented and adjusted devotional exercises to visit the sites virtually. These exercises, largely based on real pilgrims’ accounts, made use of images and objects that helped the beholder to imagine walking alongside Christ during his torturous march to Calvary. Some provided scripts whereby votaries could animate paintings and sculptures. Others required the nun to imagine her convent as a miniature model of Jerusalem. This volume is grounded in more than a dozen texts from manuscripts written by medieval nuns and religious women, which appear here transcribed and translated for the first time, and a multiplicity of (occasionally three-dimensional) images. They attest to the ubiquity and variety of virtual pilgrimages among religious women and help to reveal the functions of certain late medieval devotional images.
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This article considers how early users of prayer books handled and interacted with their manuscripts. Deploying evidence from signs of wear within the manuscripts themselves, the author argues that medieval believers used manuscripts... more
This article considers how early users of prayer books handled and interacted with their manuscripts. Deploying evidence from signs of wear within the manuscripts themselves, the author argues that medieval believers used manuscripts ritually in such a way that they blurred the distinction between images and their referents. Votaries treated their manuscripts as interactive agents that they would kiss, rub, and handle with physical affection. Some of their actions imitated those of priests, who ritually handled objects such as the pax and ritually kissed manuscripts, especially the missal. The article interrogates two Harley manuscripts, one an English roll, and the other a Southern Netherlandish book of hours made for the English market, as an entry point into this discussion.
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Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. By Kathryn M. Rudy. [Disciplina monastica. Studies on Medieval Monastic Life, 8.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2011. Pp. 475. euro110,00 paperback. ISBN... more
Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. By Kathryn M. Rudy. [Disciplina monastica. Studies on Medieval Monastic Life, 8.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2011. Pp. 475. euro110,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-50354103-7.)This is a magnificent, revisionist study of an important topic. It examines the ways in which nuns, religious women, and even a few laywomen from the Low Countries interacted with texts, images, and objects to go on virtual pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem during the half-century or so before the Reformation. This much is well known; but much less so is the fact that although many were motivated by lack of resources and opportunity, not a few simply did not want to compromise their commitment to poverty and enclosure. At the book's core is Rudy's sensitive and nuanced discussion of seventeen manuscript texts, dating from the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, which were copied by nuns or devout women (mostly tertiaries). Several of these texts have been transcribed in their original language, Middle Dutch, with parallel English translation, in the extensive appendices on pages 263-448. As a corollary to the fact that these accounts, more often than not, drew on diaries or guidebooks written by those who had actually visited the sites in Rome and the Holy Land, their users-and this word is used advisedly, given the passive, modern-day connotations of "reader"-tended not to interpret pilgrimage metaphorically but sought to replicate the experience as physically and literally as possible: "not just with the imagination, but with the eyes, the hands, and the feet" (p. 21). A striking manifestation of the desire for "authenticity" was the importance of so-called "metric relics"-"the measured distances between holy places . . . which could then be remapped onto the local environment to construct personal Passion theaters" (p. 97). Rudy sets these phenomena firmly in the context of the influence in the Low Countries of the devotio moderna, which she considers responsible not only for spurring production of vernacular devotional literature in the century up to the Reformation but also for "the ubiquity of women's vernacular literacy" (p. 25) as testified by the survival of literally hundreds of manuscripts written in Middle Dutch with feminine pronouns and nouns. Although the lion's share of Rudy's attention is paid to the ways in which the Holy Land was evoked in text and image, as she notes, the earliest work that consciously sought to provide a substitute for physical pilgrimage was an early-fifteenth-century text, attributed spuriously to Jean Gerson, which explained how its readers could journey to Rome in their imagination. However, it was not only owing to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which made actual travel to the Holy Land much more difficult, that Jerusalem became the focus of attention. Key to this development was the direct association of visits to the specific locations where Christ walked, talked, suffered, and was crucified with spiritual reward in the form of indulgences. The master impresarios here were friars of the Franciscan order who had been given the role of custodians of the Holy Places by the pope in 1342. It was they who transplanted the spiritual boon of plenary indulgences-nine of which could be gained in Jerusalem alone (and four of those within the single site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre)-to Western Europe. …
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Black manuscripts, written and illuminated on parchment that has been stained, present a figure-ground reversal so that the images and texts seem to step out of darkness. Whereas medieval scribes and illuminators normally began with a... more
Black manuscripts, written and illuminated on parchment that has been stained, present a figure-ground reversal so that the images and texts seem to step out of darkness. Whereas medieval scribes and illuminators normally began with a luminescent creamy off-white parchment substrate and applied ink and pigments, thereby conceptualizing the image as dark-on-light, makers of these manuscripts began with a dark, opaque substrate and built up light and bright colors, thereby conceptualizing the image and script as light-on-dark. Black Books of Hours were produced from ca. 1458 to ca. 1485 for the Burgundian nobility, whose bibliophiles appreciated their exquisite craftsmanship and unusual technique. In three of the most celebrated surviving examples—two Books of Hours now in Vienna[1] and one in New York[2]—the reversed figure-ground painting is executed in a jolting palette, including a shade of lime green that seems to phosphoresce.[3] Black parchment must have appealed to those with a sense for elegance and for unusual objects, and perhaps those who knew about purple-dyed parchment used in the most luxurious manuscripts from an earlier era, such as the Codex Argenteus, a sixth-century manuscript written in silver and gold on prepared purple parchment (now in the Uppsala University Library, acc. no. DG 1). A purple-stained (or black-stained) manuscript would be notably unusual and special, even from a distance.
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Skeuomorphs are objects or features that imitate the design of similar artefacts made from another material. In the late middle ages, artists employed alternative materials under several conditions: when the challenge of representation... more
Skeuomorphs are objects or features that imitate the design of similar artefacts made from another material. In the late middle ages, artists employed alternative materials under several conditions: when the challenge of representation exceeded their skill levels, when the ideal material would be too expensive to use, when other physical constraints limited material choice. The resulting skeuomorphs often reveal ingenious solutions to dealing with those constraints. Skeuomorphe Objekte oder Objekteigenschaften imitieren die Gestaltungsweise ähnlicher, aus anderen Materialien gefertigter Artefakte. Im Spätmittelalter nutzten Künstler alternative Materialien unter bestimmten Umständen: Wenn die repräsentativen Erfordernisse ihre eigenen Fähigkeiten überschritten, wenn das für den jeweiligen Zweck ideale Material zu teuer gewesen wäre oder wenn andere äußere Umstände die Auswahl an Materialien einschränkten. Die dadurch entstandenen skeuomorphen Objekte zeigen daher häufig, wie Künstle...
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Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims’ badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of... more
Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims’ badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of these last items have been classified as manuscript illumination, but Kathryn M. Rudy argues that these pictures should be called, instead, parchment paintings, similar to postcards. In a delightful study identifying this group of images for the first time, Rudy delineates how these objects functioned apart from the books in which they were kept. Whereas manuscript illuminations were designed to provide a visual narrative to accompany a book’s text, parchment paintings offered a kind of autonomous currency for exchange between individuals—people who longed for saturated color in a gray world of wood, stone, and earth. These small, colorful pictures offered a brilliant reprieve, and Rudy shows how these intriguing and previously unfamiliar images were traded and cherished, shedding light into the everyday life and relationships of those in the medieval Low Countries.
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Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts considers how indulgences (the remission of time in Purgatory) were used to market certain images and how images helped to spread indulgences in the decades before... more
Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts considers how indulgences (the remission of time in Purgatory) were used to market certain images and how images helped to spread indulgences in the decades before the Protestant Reformation.
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Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called "uterine vellum," has been a long-standing controversy in codicology.... more
Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called "uterine vellum," has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves or sheep was used. Others have argued that it would not be possible to sustain herds if so many pocket Bibles were produced from fetal skins, arguing instead for unexpected alternatives, such as rabbit. Here, we report a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment. The noninvasive method is a variant on zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface by using an electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Using this method, we analyzed 72 pocket Bibles ori...
Research Interests: Archaeology, Medieval Literature, Art, Medieval History, Bioarchaeology, and 15 moreManuscripts and Early Printed Books, Archaeological Science, Mass Spectrometry, Manuscript Studies, Medieval Church History, Medieval Archaeology, Codicology, History of Universities, Medieval Europe, Medicine, Codicology of medieval manuscripts, Collagen, Animals, Latin Bible Manuscripts, and Extraction of Collagen and Gelatin
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Abstract When the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) at The Hague purchased a Book of Hours in 1994 (MS 77 L 58), it was thought to have come from Arnhem. This article disentangles some earlier misconceptions about the manuscript,... more
Abstract When the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) at The Hague purchased a Book of Hours in 1994 (MS 77 L 58), it was thought to have come from Arnhem. This article disentangles some earlier misconceptions about the manuscript, including its relationship ...
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Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called “uterine vellum,” has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of... more
Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called “uterine vellum,” has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves or sheep was used. Others have argued that it would not be possible to sustain herds if so many pocket Bibles were produced from fetal skins, arguing instead for unexpected alternatives, such as rabbit. Here, we report a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment. The noninvasive method is a variant on zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface by using an electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Using this method, we analyzed 72 pocket Bibles originating i...
Research Interests: Archaeology, Medieval Literature, Medieval History, Bioarchaeology, Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, and 15 moreMedieval Studies, Archaeological Science, Mass Spectrometry, Medieval Church History, Medieval Archaeology, Codicology, History of Universities, Medieval Europe, Codicology of medieval manuscripts, Multidisciplinary, Collagen, Paleogenetics, Animals, Medival History, and Extraction of Collagen and Gelatin
Illuminated manuscripts provide salient opportunities for the study of image-text relationships, since, with few exceptions, the images have a built-in textual context. This chapter considers some of those relationships in Netherlandish... more
Illuminated manuscripts provide salient opportunities for the study of image-text relationships, since, with few exceptions, the images have a built-in textual context. This chapter considers some of those relationships in Netherlandish prayer books of the fifteenth century. It addresses the authority of the word as medieval readers understood it and applied it to the devotional images they encountered both within their illuminated manuscripts as well as in other spheres of their private and public visual environment. The chapter describes two questions such as: first, how did rubrics take on an authorizing role within the late medieval prayer book? And secondly, how did rubrics shape reader's reception of images? It analyzes the linguistic structure of rubrics, in order to consider how they function and what kinds of authority they claim. The chapter contextualizes the fragments in the Emory collection, which are all Christological in theme. Keywords:fifteenth century; image-text relationships; linguistic structure; public visual environment; rubrics
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Dieser Essay betrachtet mittelalterliches Nähen im Licht von Austins Sprechakttheorie. Indem er Manuskripte, Reliquien, Ablässe und sogar die Mitra eines Bischofs analysiert, argumentiert der Artikel, dass Nähen eine Weise war, den... more
Dieser Essay betrachtet mittelalterliches Nähen im Licht von Austins Sprechakttheorie. Indem er Manuskripte, Reliquien, Ablässe und sogar die Mitra eines Bischofs analysiert, argumentiert der Artikel, dass Nähen eine Weise war, den rituellen Gebrauch der Objekte einzusetzen oder zu intensivieren – ob es sich nun um zeremonielle, devotionale, oder autoritative Zwecke handelte. Während ein Sprechakt durch seine Äußerung agiert, handeln Nähstiche, indem sie sichtbare und oft feierliche Verbindungen zwischen Materialien schaffen, um Autorität zu steigern, zu verschönern, zu behaupten und zu schichten – oder um einen Gegenstand in Textilien zu hüllen, als handelte es sich um eine Reliquie. </br></br>This essay considers medieval sewing in light of Austin's speechact theory. Analysing manuscripts, relics, indulgences, and even a bishop's mitre, the article argues that stitching was a way to enact, or intensify, the ritual purpose of objects, whether that was ceremonial...
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Page 1. Dana Bentley-Cranch. The Renaissance Portrait in France and England: A Comparative Study. La Renaissance Française 11. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2004. 271 pp. + 78 b/w pls. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. 29. ...
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journal_title Copyright © 2006 The Renaissance Society of America, Inc. All rights reserved. Renaissance Quarterly 59.1 (2006) 246-248. ...
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Kathryn M. Rudy considers the huge expenses of doing scholarly work in her field of art history
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Review by Antoine Brix. The reviewer does not mention that the book can be downloaded for free at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/806
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The review covers Piety in Pieces: How medieval readers customized their manuscripts (Open Book Publishers, 2016); and Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
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Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 7, 1 (2018), pp. 131-134
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Review of Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage, editors, Printing colour 1400–1700: history, technique, functions and reception.
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Review of an exhibition catalogue about early printing. The exhibition took place at the Louvre in 2014.
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Reviewed by Nicolette Zeeman in the Times Literary Supplement
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Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called "uterine vellum," has been a long-standing controversy in codicology.... more
Tissue-thin parchment made it possible to produce the first pocket Bibles: Thousands were made in the 13th century. The source of this parchment, often called "uterine vellum," has been a long-standing controversy in codicology. Use of the Latin term abortivum in many sources has led some scholars to suggest that the skin of fetal calves or sheep was used. Others have argued that it would not be possible to sustain herds if so many pocket Bibles were produced from fetal skins, arguing instead for unexpected alternatives, such as rabbit. Here, we report a simple and objective technique using standard conservation treatments to identify the animal origin of parchment. The noninvasive method is a variant on zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS) peptide mass fingerprinting but extracts protein from the parchment surface by using an electrostatic charge generated by gentle rubbing of a PVC eraser on the membrane surface. Using this method, we analyzed 72 pocket Bibles ori...