"Eating the Face of Christ, and Other Ways of Interacting with Medieval Manuscripts"

As literacy grew during the three centuries before the printing press, people learned not only how to read, but also how to handle their manuscripts. Certain physical gestures that readers enacted with illuminated manuscripts—including kissing or laying hands on certain images, and rubbing out the faces of others—imparted a ritual significance to books. Just as our twenty-first-century culture of ever-smaller screens has created a set of gestures and habits that had not previously existed (typing with two thumbs, scrolling, clicking, tapping), reading manuscripts, which were increasingly available in the late Middle Ages, also gave people a new set of physical gestures. In this talk I consider the settings and circumstances by which readers learned to handle—and deface!—their manuscripts. I argue that people in authority, including priests, teachers, parents, and legal officials, touched books publicly to carry out rituals. In so doing, they inadvertently taught audiences how to handle books in highly physical ways. Cumulative wear in books testifies to how they were used and handled.

Kathryn Rudy is a renowned specialist in western medieval manuscripts who came to St Andrews in 2011 from the Royal Library in The Hague, where she had been Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts for several years. Much of her current research focuses on the social lives of late medieval books, including their customization for specific sets of owners and their physical use (for instance through ritual touching and kissing) by different groups of viewers. To determine how users interacted with their books she uses modern forensic tools and methods, such as densometers and UV light, which yield important information as to how often specific books were interacted with and which kinds of images or texts were singled out for particular tactile or oscular attention. Rudy has published five books, including Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015), and Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2017).