Medieval Books Research Articles

Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts by Kathryn M. Rudy

Reviewed by: Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts by Kathryn M. Rudy A. R. Bennett Manuscript studies, Medieval Kathryn M. Rudy. Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016. 416 pp. £34.95. ISBN: 978-1-78374-234-9. In this comprehensive study, Kathryn Rudy makes an important intervention into studies of late medieval manuscript culture. "Manuscript culture" as a large phenomenon is a difficult object of inquiry, not least because manuscripts themselves are not easily treated within the frame of a single discipline, be it literary or textual history, art history, or media history. More difficult still is an attempt to characterize a large corpus of these objects as a single phenomenon pointing to larger trends within the economy, ecology, and society of the late Middle Ages in northern Europe. What Rudy is attempting in this book is nothing short of a large-scale qualitative study of the largest arm of late medieval manuscript production: the dramatic rise in the creation and consumption of books of hours. Her study focuses on the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, but as a major production center for these objects whose style was very much in vogue across Northern Europe, the impact of Rudy's study extends as far as the Dutch and Flemish books themselves did. The difficulty of Rudy's intervention is that she is attempting to enact a complete shift in the current conversations and conclusions about books of hours in the fifteenth century with an exhaustive, nigh on catalogic exploration of a large quantity of manuscripts. This is not a case study. This is not an attempt to make an argument out of a localized context that, by its very localization, generates a handy sample of objects that can be used for [End Page 487] evidence. It is instead attempting to redefine a totality—a large, sprawling, century-(or-more-)long whole by examining quite literally hundreds of manuscripts that feature in her study in 286 images. Rudy is executing a comprehensive redefinition of late medieval Netherlandish book culture—and by extension those of other countries, like England, whose book cultures interacted or traded with it. Rudy simultaneously upends the disciplinary logic of literary studies—that books are about authors and readers—and art history—that books are about artists and patrons—in order to center the conversation around books as usable technologies, with users and interface adaptations and upgrades—we might even say "hacks." This is based upon her introduction of what she calls the "modular method," in which various pieces of books could be made and purchased in discrete units in a build-a-book fashion. The mere fact that manuscripts could be made in this way, and that they sometimes were, is not in itself a new discovery. Rather, Rudy pushes readers to absorb the magnitude of this element of devotional book production as more common than not, which understanding, if it does not entirely redefine how scholars are thinking about late medieval book culture, at the very least must open up another vein within that culture that shows distinct characteristics of production and use—which are often the same thing, we discover in Rudy's analysis. First, the modular method essentially notes that as literacy rates and demand for books of hours rose after 1390—a date that Rudy identifies as a marked turning point—book labor became increasingly divided and specialized even as it was de-skilled by the proto-assembly-line practices. Book pieces were sold in what Rudy calls "design units"—or modules of images, texts, or sets of either. These units could then be purchased piecemeal to include a vaguely standard set of texts (The Little Office of the Virgin, The Office of the Dead, the Seven Penitential Psalms, and a calendar) as well as a number of other options that provided opportunities for tailoring by adding particular prayers, indulgences, saints, or images. What is more, however, is that Rudy argues that this kind of tailoring was not simply enacted at first production, but that manuscripts remained vital and accretive, accumulating texts, images, and objects, sometimes for centuries. In Rudy's...

The Medieval Book in Early Modern Transylvania Preliminary Assessments

The Medieval Book in Early Modern Transylvania Preliminary Assessments

Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics. Jason Crawford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. vii+227.

The next chapter on “Genealogies of Allegory” offers an illuminating discussion of the earliest example of literary allegory, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, along with its links to “early Christian exegesis” (46), but meaning still trumps narrative. Since interpreters of scripture tend to dismiss “narrative contingency in favor of static meaning,” Prudentius finds himself willy-nilly “committed to a poetic strategy in which narrative must fail” (48). Crawford astutely links this tension to the contradiction at the heart of Christianity: Christ’s incarnation and the Word made flesh (50). Christianity presumes from its inception “that history is pregnant with eternity, that God is pervasively immanent in the material cosmos” (11). Nevertheless, from St. Paul onward, Christians have generally argued for the need to subordinate flesh to spirit. In his discussion of St. Paul, Crawford emphasizes the apostle’s “dialectic movement, out from the human to the divine and likewise back, with the divine, into the core of the human” (67), but in allegories like Psychomachia, that dialectic becomes a one-way street; “Prudentius figures the human person as an eschatological being,” freed “from the burdens of temporal being” (81). Crawford’s equivocal vacillation between dialectical and hierarchical notions of allegorical narratives pays lip service to their complexities and tensions while reducing them to what Angus Fletcher calls “the dull systems that they are reputed to be” (Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964], 23). He duly cites Fletcher but ignores his advice about combining the exegetical and literal (Fletcher, Allegory, 7). His argument would also benefit from Rosemond Tuve’s notion that the “meaning is one, and the story is saying it, but an author must be permitted to tell stories, and not draw up schemes” (Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity [1966; Princeton University Press, 1977], 413).

Translatioand Objecthood: The Cultural Agendas of Two Greek Manuscripts at Saint-Denis

AbstractIn tracing the histories of two Greek copies of the complete works attributed to Dionysios the Areopagite, known as the Corpus Dionysiacum, this article considers the kind of agency exerted by medieval books as distinct from other art objects mobilized in the cross-cultural diplomatic arena. An examination of the entangled social lives of these two Byzantine books sent from Constantinople to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris as imperial gifts in the ninth and fifteenth centuries reveals their transformation over time as objects of translatio akin to sacred relics in the negotiation of political, hagiographic, and humanistic agendas, and, further, in the cultivation of medieval patrimony in the service of medieval kingship and modern statehood.

Manuscripts as Evidence for the use of Classics in Education, c. 800–1200: Estimating the Randomness of Survival

Are the surviving copies of schooltexts representative of what was popularly used in schools in the medieval period? In other words, was the survival of these manuscripts a random or selective process? To approach this question, this article presents a series of comparisons between the numbers of manuscripts of different schooltexts. It demonstrates that the most popular schooltexts all survive in very similar numbers from each century, and that the typical number of copies varies from one century to another. The easiest explanation for such a survival pattern is to assume that the texts were produced in equal numbers and passed through a relatively random filter of losses. The article seeks to test this intuitive explanation by using a simple probability mathematical experiment. In addition, the article analyses how the numbers of surviving manuscripts relate to entries in medieval book lists and medieval library catalogues. This examination supports the interpretation that the survival of schooltexts was a relatively random process. In addition, comparison between medieval book lists and extant manuscripts advocates caution in using the book lists as evidence for the popularity of texts in the medieval centuries. Even though the catalogues provide snapshots of specific historical situations, this paper concludes that the mass of extant books is more likely to give us a realistic picture of the contemporary popularity of texts.

Nature and Daily Life Represented in the Medieval and Renaissance Prayer Books

Nature and Daily Life Represented in the Medieval and Renaissance Prayer Books

Medieval Muslim thinkers on foreign language pedagogy: The case of Ibn Khaldun

Throughout history, language teaching in the West has depended on traditional methods that relied primarily on the teacher as the source of information for language and culture. These methods were mainly confined to the teaching/learning of grammar and structure, and/or imitating native speakers of the language being learned/taught. It was not until the 19th century, from a Western point of view, that linguists and pedagogues started to form the concept of a foreign language teaching method/approach. However, this article takes a different stand: it claims that seeds of modern methods of teaching foreign languages and language acquisition theories have their origins in the writings of medieval Muslim thinkers about teaching Arabic as a foreign language across the Muslim Empire. To support this argument, a qualitative content analysis was used to draw evidence from the medieval Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun's history book, Al Muqqadimah [The Muqqadimah/The Introduction]. Findings of this study indicate that a number of teaching methods, similar to contemporary ones, were developed by medieval Muslim thinkers. Implications for the teaching of languages to non-native speakers are also provided.

Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books

Book Review| April 01 2017 Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books Rudy, Kathryn M., Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 362 pp. Jeffrey F. Hamburger Jeffrey F. Hamburger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2017) 23 (2): 354–355. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3815978 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeffrey F. Hamburger; Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. Common Knowledge 1 April 2017; 23 (2): 354–355. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-3815978 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: LITTLE REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Constructive parchment destruction in medieval manuscripts

Abstract This article argues that in the fifteenth century, many manuscripts were physically recycled, and that this recycling is symptomatic of interest in sustaining books. In the case studies explored here, unwanted or old texts became valued for the physical qualities of the parchment on which they were written. Case studies of recycled manuscripts, including flyleaves, pastedowns, limp covers and palimpsests, are presented to argue that many books were made (and re-made) in sustainable ways. Although recycled books, and bits of books, have been mentioned fleetingly by many scholars, and studied as treasures or for the scraps of text they preserve, this article focuses particularly on the practices and processes of medieval book recycling. Research into recycled books thus adds to the history of material culture, to the history of the book, and to debates about the sustainability and durability of media today: we can learn from the practices and processes of the past.

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. Michael Johnston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+301.

<i>Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England</i>. Michael Johnston. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+301.

The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen

Reviewed by: The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston, Michael van Dussen Carrie Griffin (bio) Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, editors. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 94. Cambridge UP, 2015. 302pp. £67.00. In their prefatory remarks, the editors of this timely volume, Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen, highlight the tendency among many medieval book historians to produce “tightly focused analyses of individual manuscripts or small groups of codices” (1), citing James Simpson’s critique that palaeographers and codicologists fail to translate their findings into “literary criticism and cultural history.” The collection they mastermind—The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches—successfully marks a move away from such tightly focused studies toward a reappraisal of manuscripts as “objects within the cultural world, where people interact with them in meaningful, readable ways” (2). The essays ask broad questions about book culture in later medieval Europe but significantly they are underpinned by those aspects of traditional manuscript studies, and this is the strength of the collection: there are no single case studies, and instead scholars use their intimate knowledge of manuscript production and use to make “broader interpretive claims about manuscript culture” (12). It is this philosophy (not a new idea, as acknowledged by the editors, but applied to medieval studies in pockets only) that drives the collection, informing the thirteen contributions and challenging, “gauntlet-like” the “entire field of medieval literary studies” (Kerby-Fulton 243). The essays gathered here are consistently strong, privileging theoretical assessments of questions around matters such as authorship, the manuscript-print nexus, circulation, archival practices, and miscellaneity, while (necessarily) retaining a strong foundation in close readings of the book; as such they are both provocative and informative. Some of the contributions suggest ways in which we might refocus our treatment of and relationship with the medieval book. Seth Lerer’s essay opens by looking at the complex relationship between manuscript and printed books, asserting that manuscripts were designed to be unique but that early printed books, for all their indebtedness to the manuscript, were never meant to pass as manuscripts. “Bibliographical theory and the textuality of the codex: towards a history of the premodern book” (17–33) argues that early printed books and manuscripts did not exist simply to transmit authorial content but instead were [End Page 556] “shaped by the commercial, scribal, and social institutions of the time” (18). Lerer’s piece looks at how the medieval impulse to compile “shades into” compilation practices evident in early printed books, specifically in Sammelbände (19), examining also the various ways in which early printed books could be and indeed were transformed into unique objects. In “What is manuscript culture? Technologies of the manuscript matrix” (34–59), Stephen G. Nichols suggests that we are too dependent, despite our technological sophistication, on “analog protocols developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (34) with respect to our attitudes to medieval manuscripts. He suggests that we can profitably consider them a “technology,” produced in “urban micro-cultures” requiring high levels of skill and interpretative acts that are visible on each page, rather than as irregular, artisanal, and idiosyncratic objects that require to be replaced by critical editions. “Manuscripts,” Nichols argues, “situate their texts in contemporary history” (36). Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “Organising manuscript and print: from compilatio compilation” (77–95) also studies a Sammelband, here in order to think through “the complex entanglement of print and manuscript . . . in the reading and writing cultures of late pre-modern England” (77). Several of the essays offer thought-provoking reassessments of commonly debated issues and cruxes in the field medieval book history. Erik Kwakkel, in “Decoding the material book: cultural residue in medieval manuscripts” (60–76), is concerned with the kind of information that can be gleaned from the codex itself apart from in the words: the “data embedded in the physicality of the object itself” (60). His essay examines what looking beyond the textual content might teach us about the scribe, the relationship between that scribe and the reader, and the anticipated use for the volume, concluding that “book design may relate manuscripts to their milieu of production, readers, and manner of use...

"Allmygti god this lettyr sent": English Heavenly Letter Charms in Late Medieval Books and Rolls

This study focuses on the material context of medieval charms by investigating how books differ from rolls as carriers of charms. The essential difference between medieval books and rolls as carriers of charms appears to lie in the kind of unity they constitute. A roll featuring charms like the one described in the present work was probably used integrally as a physical protective device, making it the epitome of a functional unity: the whole of its contents combined with the physical writing surface of the roll itself is what defines the use of the roll. A book can certainly also make up a thematic unity, but the functional combination of contents and materiality is not as strongly present. Instead, books containing charms were more likely to have functioned as storehouses of information in a less physical sense. The texts, including the charms, could be consulted separately, and were also more likely to be perceived as such. This would explain why added and deleted texts are more commonly found in books than on rolls. The intensity of the usage of rolls, especially amulet rolls that were worn on the body, could be one of the reasons why relatively few medieval rolls survive. Ultimately, it was not the carrier that selected the charm, nor was it the charm that selected the carrier. It was an individual's purpose that determined whether and how a charm was to become part of the contents of a particular material carrier.

Rudy, Kathryn M. Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books

Rudy, Kathryn M. <i>Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books</i>

Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. Kathryn M. Rudy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. x + 360 pp. $85.

Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. Kathryn M. Rudy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. x + 360 pp. $85.

Veneno, secreto y virtud en textos novohispanos de Yucatán

The following article explores the transfer of ancient and medieval narratives of herbolaria, hermetica and hagiography to Yucatecan texts of the 17th and 18th centuries. The identification of books printed in the 16th century that circulated in Mayan geography — derived from the old world — allows to check in the texts written in the southeast of New Spain the continuity and bifurcation of medical narratives of poison and remedy; narratives of revelation of feminine and astrological secrets; narratives of virtuous lives, apparitions and miracles.The study exposes in four Yucatecan texts of the novohispano period narratives coming from the Mediterranean space. These are complex narratives that for expository purposes are reduced to simple nouns: poison, secret and virtue. The European books in the convents of Yucatan and in the small secular libraries did not disappear with the change of the centuries nor with the climatic inclemencies of the Caribbean. Part of the content of these ancient and medieval books moved to foundational texts of regional culture, to the origin of the Hispanic tradition of the Yucatan.

Automatic Layout Analysis and Storage of Digitized Medieval Books

With almost twenty years of expertise in the field of computer methods in the humanities, the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Trier has recently been partner in two projects in the field of medieval manuscript studies: Virtuelles Skriptorium St. Matthias reconstructed the stock of medieval texts in the abbey of St Matthias in Trier by digitizing and publishing more than 450 manuscripts. eCodicology aimed to develop, test, and optimize new algorithms that automatically detect the macro- and microstructural layout elements on manuscript pages. This article discusses the workflows and technologies of both projects with a focus on the potential and limits of machine-reading technologies.

Two French or Flemish Manuscripts and their Scandinavian Fate

The Nordic countries suffered great losses in their holdings of medieval manuscripts after the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Some were reused for other purposes; thousands of manuscripts were dissembled and reused in the bindings of the account books of the royal administrations of Denmark and Sweden, which has resulted in large fragment collections reflecting the medieval book holdings of the different countries. Two manuscripts, probably with a French or Flemish origin, are among those reused as binding material by Danish officials. Fragments from these two manuscripts have been found in archives both in Norway and Denmark, in a process of reconstruction which has been ongoing for a century. These two fragmentary manuscripts are important witnesses to the relationship between Norwegian and Danish fragment material, as well as to the international contacts of Denmark in the Middle Ages.

Pioneering in the Preservation and Restoration of Medieval Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in the Netherlands

From 1963 to 1996 Sister Lucie M. Gimbrere restored 446 books in the Onze Lieve Vrouwe abbey in Oosterhout, for various clients. Most of these books were very valuable manuscripts, incunabula and post-incunabula. Indeed, some of the absolute gems among the books in Dutch collections passed through her hands. Sister Lucie always adhered to the same principles: following the French binding tradition and working in the footsteps of the medieval bookbinder. She was guided by the book itself, academic literature and her commissioners, and not significantly by the code of ethics for restorers. Furthermore, she kept well away from chemical experiments and modern techniques. Precisely this approach made her business a success. Because of her concern for history, the attention she gave to the smallest archaeological leads and her practice of careful documentation, Sister Lucie emerged as an important pioneer in the history of medieval book restoration in the Netherlands.

Special object extraction from medieval books using superpixels and bag-of-features

We propose a method to extract special objects in images of medieval books, which generally represent, for example, figures and capital letters. Instead of working on the single-pixel level, we consider superpixels as the basic classification units for improved time efficiency. More specifically, we classify superpixels into different categories/objects by using a bag-of-features approach, where a superpixel category classifier is trained with the local features of the superpixels of the training images. With the trained classifier, we are able to assign the category labels to the superpixels of a historical document image under test. Finally, special objects can easily be identified and extracted after analyzing the categorization results. Experimental results demonstrate that, as compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our method provides comparable performance for some historical books but greatly outperforms them in terms of generality and computational time.

Ergänzungen zu „Deutsche Rechtsbücher des Mittelalters und ihre Handschriften“

Abstract Addenda to „German medieval Law Books and their manuscripts“. This article presents newly discovered manuscripts and single leaves of German-language customary law books. It describes variations to the manuscripts and single leaves listed in U.-D. Oppitz, „Deutsche Rechtsbücher des Mittelalters“, vol. II, Cologne 1990. A passage from the Erfurt Chronicle (1447) points at the importance of the Saxon mirror at court.