Consuming Medieval Manuscripts - Professor Kathryn M. Rudy

Consuming Medieval Manuscripts - Professor Kathryn M. Rudy

Hosted by The University of Leicester and The British Academy.

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Even before Gutenberg’s printing press began squeezing out nearly identical copies of texts around 1450, artisans with less sophisticated machinery – just an engraved plank of wood or sheet of copper – were serially producing images. They made stacks of sheets with saints brandishing their attributes and sequences of narrative scenes from the Infancy and Passion of Christ. One subject they did not make in abundance was the Face of Christ. This is surprising, considering that illuminators nearby painted sheets manually with this image, repeated identically like a sheet of postage stamps. One uncut sheet of repeated Faces of Christ was found under the floorboards at the convent at Wienhausen. It dates from ca. 1500, deep in the printed age, but is hand-painted, not printed. Sheets like these were trimmed into squares for individual use. Nearly 50 Face-of-Christ-squares survive because they were pasted into books, while hundreds more were depicted pinned to hats. This number points to hundreds or probably thousands of similar Face-of-Christ-squares that perished. If this was such an in-demand subject, then why didn’t printers print them? 

In this talk, Professor Kathryn M. Rudy offers a roundabout explanation, one that involves printing in blood, consulting manuals of magical stones, and concocting medieval home remedies. 

Professor Kathryn M. Rudy is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews, a member of the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies, and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Medieval Manuscripts and Technology (CeMManT). She holds degrees in English literature (Cornell), art history (Columbia), and medieval studies (Toronto), and she completed a post-doc in Middle Dutch literature (Utrecht). Her research concentrates on the reception and original function of medieval manuscripts. She has pioneered the use of the densitometer to measure the grime that original readers deposited in their books as a way to indirectly measure use. She is currently developing ways to track and measure user response of late medieval manuscripts by employing pollen analysis (to understand where manuscripts were carried on voyages and pilgrimages), parchment thickness analysis (to track parchment quality in the early years of print), and DNA analysis of proteins in medieval medical manuscripts (to investigate disease and surgical interventions). These projects tap collaborations with bench scientists, palynologists, and book binding specialists.

Event Information:

Please note that the lecture will start promptly at 5.30pm, with doors open from 5.15pm.

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