Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts. By Kathryn M. RudyPiety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized their Manuscripts. By Kathryn M. RudyPostcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. By Kathryn M. Rudy

Abstract

In the last three years, Kathryn M. Rudy has transformed the understanding of late medieval Netherlandish manuscript culture in an unofficial, rapid-fire series of three monographs. Across 1067 pages, and what must be at least 350,000 words, she has identified a previously unrecognized category of medieval artistic production and information exchange (the titular ‘Postcards on Parchment’); overturned assump tions about artistic, textual, and codicological responsibility for medieval manu scripts by uncovering patterns of how users (who were not necessarily readers) inter fered with content and format (Piety in Pieces); and established the co-dependency of indulgences and the images used to market them (Rubrics, Images and Indulgences). Each book weaves together detailed (in some cases, actually micro scopic) observations of physical traces of the production and use of individual objects produced in fifteenth-century Netherlandish manuscript cultures. Taken together, they offer wholly new corpora of texts and images in late medieval Europe, new methodologies necessary for assessing them, and new paradigms for understanding the significance of those analyses.