Kathryn Rudy:
Touching Narratives in Prayerbooks:
a Taxonomy

Medieval manuscripts rarely survive without some damage. Some is caused by water leakage, pests, or fire. Some is deliberate. Deliberate damage has often been labeled “iconoclasm,” or, more frequently, when such examples are reproduced in scholarly books, the damage is simply ignored. However, deliberately damaged images have become more visible as institutions have increasingly digited entire manuscripts and not just highlights and “treasures.” The sheer number of deliberately touched devotional manuscripts demands an explanation. Many images have been visibly damaged through what I call “action-touching,” where—I argue—the user enacts the narrative with a finger. This is distinct from venerative touching, where the user touches down on the surface of the image with finger or lips. With action-touching, the user drags the finger across the surface in order to trace a depicted event. The users’ gestures thereby amplified small images. In this illustrated talk, I will pursue this hypothesis with examples from books of hours, propose ways of distinguishing the emotions behind deliberate image-touching, and consider channels through which such behaviors were transmitted.

Kathryn Rudy (Kate) is Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the School of Art History, University of St Andrews. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in Art History, and also holds a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the University of Toronto. Before moving to St. Andrews, she held research, teaching, and curatorial positions in the US, the UK, Canada, The Netherlands, and Belgium. Her research concentrates on the reception and original function of manuscripts, especially those manufactured in the Low Countries, and she has pioneered the use of the densitometer to measure the grime that original readers deposited in their books. She is currently developing ways to track and measure user response of late medieval manuscripts. Professor Rudy is the author of six books, including Image, Knife, and Gluepot: Early Assemblage in Manuscript and Print (Open Book Publishers, 2019); Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Piety in Pieces: How medieval readers customized their manuscripts (Open Book Publishers, 2016); and Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015).