This engaging, informative, and wonderfully-illustrated volume is a companion to the 2023, Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts; Volume 1: Officials and their Books, by a scholar who is probably best known for her groundbreaking “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2:1-2 (2010). One interesting methodological difference from that earlier study is that Rudy here eschews the scientific calibration of a densitometer and instead relies on her own human perception in looking at signs of use in the text and illustrations of medieval manuscripts. And what a perception it is! The result is a treasure trove of observation, making the case for a new way of engaging old books, with a focus in this volume on manuscripts that exerted a force of social cohesion on their users. The pay-off is considerable: “By studying these traces, one can hypothesize how the user touched the book, and consequently build a scenario that helps to recreate the feelings, habits, and emotions of people from the past” (9). Rudy recurringly does just that.
In volume 1, Rudy established a taxonomy of touching that is partly reproduced here. Both signs of inadvertent and targeted wear are of interest, with particular emphasis on the latter, which includes wet-touching, namely the result of touching with a finger that has been moistened with saliva, as well as dramatic touching with a finger and aggressive poking. Rudy notes that in the books explored here, the act of kissing the book is rarer than in the contexts explored in the first volume, which centered on figures in authority: “Instead, another operation reigns: moistening the finger with a kiss before touching the book...Book users treated images, initials, and decoration with this action. The gesture creates a moment of intimate physical contact between the reader and the word, as symbolized by an initial. In doing so, it forges a physical link between the breath of the author and that of the reader” (7-8). The chapters put flesh on these observations through a broad range of case studies, with particularly rich analysis of late medieval Northern European manuscripts.
Chapter One, “Professing Obedience,” centers on evolving practices in recording and performing professions and oaths. Rudy first looks at the rich archive of professing obedience to the archbishops of Canterbury from the eighth to the fifteenth century and then ranges across Europe, noticing a movement from individually named professions of obedience to generic oaths sworn on a book. Her study is particularly concerned with physical interactions with the parchment. These range from writing a cross or one’s name or a complete profession to compensatory touching or kissing of a book. That book itself often has attestatory power. This is clear when a collection of oaths is added to a much older gospel book, but also seen in cases where the scribe copies incipits or short gospel extracts to give a collection the totemic power of a gospel book. Rudy examines and unpacks a wide range of specific examples, placing them in evolving practices of literacy and the performance of bureaucracy. To expand on some of her case studies, oaths that were added to the Gospels of St. Loup (Troyes, Médiathèque Jacques-Chirac, MS 2275, a twelfth-century gospelbook with fifteenth-century additions) and the Chapter of Utrecht Gospels (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 1590, a thirteenth-century gospelbook with additions from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) are transcribed and translated in the appendices.
The second chapter turns to lay society and looks closely at three fifteenth-century manuscripts of confraternities, with texts transcribed and translated in the appendices, to build the case for their rich use in rituals of validation and community building. While the insertion of names provides conventional palaeographical evidence for their use, Rudy goes much further, pointing to the patterns of soiling from many confrères touching a page during the oath of entry or, more imaginatively, uncovering the ceremonial physicality in the reading of a book. As she observes of the Linkebeek Guldenboek (Southern Netherlands, beginning in 1467, with additions made until the seventeenth century): “users have targeted the face of Charles the Bold [the founder of this confraternity], his entire body, his book, his coat of arms, the faces of the retinue, the body of St Sebastian, the altar below the saint, and the two blue altar cloths, which may have brandished coats of arms” (113). She suggests that touching the faces of the duke’s retinue was the act of confrères seeing themselves in the representations: “If this hypothesis is correct, then the damage resulted from multiple acts of tactile self-identification. In this scenario, just as some members sought to have their names close to the duke’s, others expressed this wish by touching the duke’s representation, leading to its significant damage,” along with the near rubbing off of the duke’s name (113-14). Through such interpretation of the handling of these books, Rudy brings to life the layering of ritual with emotion.
Other scholars have unpacked the production of manuscripts, Rudy acknowledges in chapter three, “whereas I aim to steer the conversation to its reception. How did medieval people learn to handle their books and emulate others’ behaviors? This shift in focus underlines the importance of understanding the lived experiences of medieval readers” (125). In this case, she does so by working over teaching books, drawing inferences from signs of wear. The extent and detail of the recreations are impressively bold. In Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS French 5, for example, an aid for teaching children containing Old Testament illustrations (France or Francophone England, first half of the thirteenth century), she reconstructs both the actor and the intent in the defacing of certain images: “In the scene where Moses kills the Egyptians and spares the Israelites, the teacher has heavily touched various elements in the picture. The Egyptian is pulling the Israelite’s hair, and the teacher/reader has noted this gesture by touching the hair-pulling hand and smearing the black ink. With even more gusto, the reader/teacher has participated in plunging the lance through the Egyptian’s gut by fingering the bleeding wound at the center of the image. As if to negate this figure after the murder, the reader/teacher has rubbed out the Egyptian’s face, indicating his death. Finally, one can imagine that the teacher--explaining that Moses was also disobedient for committing murder--rubbed the face of Moses too, as if to punish him” (139). All of this is surely possible, perhaps even likely, although it is hard to be entirely certain. Maybe the student child was doing the touching, or maybe the touching of Moses’s face was admiration rather than rejection? In further case studies, Rudy explores The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 76 F 21, a Book of Hours made in the first decade of the fifteenth century with a Marian emphasis ideal for teaching a young girl to read, which reveals significant touching with a wet finger, often suggestive of a desire to participate in the narrative. A didactic collection, Ci nous dist, compiled in France around 1320, preserved in Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, MS II 7831, written and illuminated shortly before 1400 in Ghent or Bruges, demonstrates the teaching of shame through the pattern of touching around the naughty bits of the naked bodies displayed in illustrating the Genesis story. Signs of engagement or disapprobation are also seen in the touching of didactic works aimed at adults, such as in the Book of Antichrist. Rudy brings the use of these books to life with accounts of their users’ tactile engagement.
Chapter Four, “Performing at Court,” centers on manuscripts containing literary works in verse vernaculars that were likely performed aloud to a noble audience. Rudy suggests that gestures from formal ceremonies spilled into entertainment contexts. She posits a performance context in which small groups, who could see the illustrations in a book held open, gathered around a prelector or teacher who would touch the book for emphasis. Such touching targeted figures, faces, and narrative-motivating objects. Extended treatment is given here of a manuscript of Miracles of Our Lady, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 71 A 24, ordered in 1327 by Charles IV of France from the Parisian stationer Thomas de Maubeuge, where Rudy presents the story-teller’s manifestation of outrage in a lively account of an imagined performance that is specific and detailed and broadly likely for the touching she detects. Other case studies in this chapter include the Estoria de Espanna in Madrid, El Escorial, MS Y.I.2, from 1272-74, where other commentators have seen an act of destruction but Rudy sees multiple touches of veneration; multiple examples of romances, where the figure of Lancelot often receives special attention; and the Vows and Restoration of the Peacock, chansons de geste, which in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce165 (from Paris around 1340) have illustrations in such poor condition that Rudy can construct a convincing story of digitally-engaged storytelling, with the resulting selective destruction. Chapter Five, “Touching Death,” provides analysis of mortuary rolls and necrologies, manuscripts incrementally written in a way that allows Rudy to unpack the process of their creation as well as use, including charting how a specialist messenger bearing news of death traveled gathering tituli into a memorial collection.
Rudy presents fascinating research throughout this study, but not just the research is groundbreaking here. It is also worth noting the publication format, through Open Book Publishers, who make the work available for purchase in paperback or hardback printed editions, or online for free in HTML or PDF format, or for download as a PDF (for free) or EPUB (for a modest fee), thus maximizing access to the scholarship. In another example of experimenting with newly evolving best practices, Rudy describes in the introduction to the appendices the use she made of AI in checking transcriptions and developing her translations. Rudy is also expanding what a reader might expect in the acknowledgements, where contextualizing information about her research joins details that make good on an allusion in the first volume to a possible alternative career as a race-car driver. It is also worth remarking on the impressive illustrations, many, Rudy observes, of items that have not been previously photographed or studied. These often feature a close up of a detail of interest alongside a complete page, reproduced in high-quality color, occasionally with back or raked lighting in an attempt to capture texture. Such illustrations facilitate following Rudy’s observations, even as it is hard to be certain of all the details about touching the page from even these good visual reproductions.
Indeed, the recreations of use and sometimes the implied chronological developments here may go further than a more cautious scholar might see the evidence leading, and yet the very wealth of examples tells a recurring story of tactile engagement with books that should alert all who work with medieval manuscripts to attend to such marks. Rudy’s enthusiasm for describing the contents of a manuscript and the story of its use contribute to the sense that these are convincing recreations of how books were used to cultivate social relations. In Rudy’s hands, uncovering such handling of text and image brings to life both book use and storytelling, where “the intertwining of the tangible (the manuscript) and the intangible (the deep human connectivity)” displays the lived reality and the emotional life of communities (95). Projected future volumes will attend to users touching the start of texts and to the ways people expressed devotion by touching their manuscripts and will surely, like these first two volumes, present lively and fascinating, well-researched and well-presented studies into the real-world handling of medieval manuscripts. These are studies that will appeal to anyone interested in manuscript text or image or in the lived reality of the Middle Ages.