photographKathryn Rudy (St. Andrews): Dirty Books

MEMS Public Lecture

Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 6th March 2012, 17:00 - 18:00

Now online: ReCap recording 

Early users of medieval books of hours and prayer books left signs of their reading in the form of fingerprints in the margins. The darkness of their fingerprints correlates to the intensity of their use and handling. A densitometer - a machine that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface - can reveal which texts a reader favored. This papers introduces a new technique, densitometry, to measure a reader's response to various texts in a prayer book.

Kathryn M. Rudy is lecturer in art history at the University of St Andrews. She has written extensively about Northern European manuscripts and their functions. Her books and articles treat real and virtual pilgrimages, the word as image, proverbs in medieval marginalia, and the ways in which medieval users handled their manuscripts. By measuring the dirt deposited on each folio of medieval prayerbooks, she has invented a technique of quantifying the relative frequency with which medieval users read various texts. Her most recent book is Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011), and her two forthcoming books are provisionally titled “Touching Skin: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Kissed, Inscribed, Dunked, Begrimed, and Prickedtheir Manuscripts”; and “The Postcard, the Pallium, the Amulet, and the Altar: Manifestations of the Autonomous Image on Vellum in the Late Middle Ages.” She is coeditor of Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Cultural Approaches to Textiles and their Religious Functions in the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2007). She has two long-term projects. One investigates the relationships between images, rubrics, and indulgences. The other is a history of edible images.  She was elected to the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde in 2009, and to the Centre Européen d’Études Bourguignonne (XIVe-XVIe siècle) in 2011.

Published: 17th October 2011