The book offers a detailed exploration of a Netherlandish book of hours from 1500, examining its creation amidst the rise of mechanically-produced images in the fifteenth century. Kathryn Rudy highlights the manuscript's significance in the evolution of multimedia objects and traces its dismemberment in the nineteenth century, revealing the history of its prints and drawings. Additionally, she shares her contemporary research journey, navigating archives and addressing the challenges of academic inquiry in the twenty-first century.
Kathryn Rudy's research in Touching Parchment explores the significance of medieval books, both religious and secular, as treasured objects. The study focuses on the physical interaction with these texts during various rituals, including oath-taking, highlighting how such practices shaped the cultural and spiritual value of books in the medieval period. Through examining the traces left by handling, Rudy reveals the deep connections between people and their written works.
Medieval manuscripts were crafted by skilled artisans using labor-intensive techniques and rare materials, making them both valuable and durable. These books often outlasted their owners, prompting readers to update or repurpose them instead of discarding them when newer versions emerged. This practice highlights the creative ways in which historical book owners engaged with their texts, preserving their value and relevance over time.
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.
