Consuming medieval manuscripts

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This event is part of the Aspects of Art (Henriette Hertz Fund) series.

About the event

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 surprisingly did not make in abundance was the face of Christ, which was often manually featured on painted sheets, repeated identically like a sheet of postage stamps. 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 Kate Rudy will offer a roundabout explanation, one that involves printing in blood, consulting manuals of magical stones, and concocting medieval home remedies. Along the way, she will show how wayfarers dressed in tatters and silk-swathed princes both consumed the Face-squares with gusto. And, by presenting evidence that such images were licked, scraped, and swallowed, she will argue that consumed is the operative word. She will simultaneously offer a vegetarian account of the Protestant Reformation and scratch a straight line between the late medieval Face-square and the modern instant lottery ticket.

Speaker

Professor Kathryn (Kate) Rudy FBA FRSE earned her PhD from Columbia University in Art History, and a Licentiate in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto. Now Professor of Art History at St Andrews, she has previously 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.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s National Academy. In 2019 she was awarded the Sir Walter Scott Medal, the senior prize in arts, humanities and social sciences in Scotland. In April 2021 she was elected Curator of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

Chair

Dr Ben Parsons, Associate Professor in Late Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Further information

Free, booking required.

This lecture will be available to attend in-person and will include a reception for attendees, details to follow.

If you have any questions about this event, please email [email protected].

Image credit: Parchment sheet with the Face of Christ repeated eight times, made ca. 1500, probably in Wienhausen. Kloster Wienhausen, Professor Kathryn Rudy.