Kathryn M. Rudy describes her fascinating research into how dirt
on medieval manuscripts can give us clues about how they were read
and used, and reveals how a visit to the Museum of Natural History
in Boston inspired her work in this field:
Medieval manuscripts are written on parchment, which is very
tough, much tougher than paper. For the last ten years or so, I
have been writing about late medieval Books of Hours and prayer
books, and I have noticed - in the course of studying approximately
700 manuscripts in more than 40 libraries - that the parchment
carries signs of wear from the original users. Whereas paper would
have disintegrated after a decade or more of hard use, parchment
just grows darker and darker with increased handling. In many
manuscripts, one can see exactly where the owner’s thumb had rested
on the page while she held her book open. (Many medieval prayer
book owners were women.) These thumb marks over time created dark
areas, usually at the lower corner of the page.
Books of Hours contain multiple texts. People did not read their
Books of Hours from cover to cover; rather, they read selections.
My research is helping to reveal which selections they favoured.
All Books of Hours contain a calendar, the Hours of the Virgin, the
Penitential Psalms and litany of the saints, and the Vigil of the
Dead. However, they might also contain all kinds of extra texts. In
the century or so before the Protestant Reformation, book owners
demanded prayers for which the reader would earn indulgences, that
is, credits to be released from Purgatory years or even thousands
of years early. I compiled hundreds of these indulgenced texts as
part of a post-doctoral project I designed at the University of
Utrecht. I noticed that these texts were often more worn - that is,
darker with the users’ fingerprints - than other texts in the
manuscript. I set out to discover if I could measure these varying
degrees of use and handling to determine which parts of the
manuscript were read and handled and which parts were ignored.
My first attempt involved photographing each folio of a
manuscript, then lining up the photos from the folios with the
lightest, most pristine margins, to the folios with the darkest
margins, thereby ranking them according to use. This proved too
expensive and time-intensive. A photographer named Casper Cammerat
told me about the densitometer, an apparatus that measures the
darkness of a reflecting surface. I experimented with this on the
some of the heavily worn manuscripts at the Koninklijke
Bibliotheek, where I was Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts from
2006 to 2009.
To use the densitometer, I measured the “darkness” value for the
thumbed area of every folio in a given manuscript. These values I
entered in a spreadsheet, from which it was easy to generate a
graph that would clearly show which parts of the book had been
heavily handled and which parts had been relatively ignored.
I analysed twelve manuscripts with this method, and the results
showed some surprising trends. Many users read their Penitential
Psalms more intensely than any other text. Several other graphs
showed heavy usage at the Hours of the Virgin, but the graph often
drops off at the end of this text, suggesting that people did not
stay awake through compline to finish their devotions, but rather
fell asleep before the part of the text that was supposed to be
read late at night. The graphs often reveal spikes at the
indulgenced texts. In some cases, the votaries read these
indulgenced texts with such voracity that they rubbed the text
right off the page. I suppose that they had memorised the texts in
the course of inadvertently obliterating them.
I had learned about the idea of measuring wear as an index of
usage when I was child in the 1970s and my mother took me to the
Museum of Natural History in Boston. I vividly remember an
exhibition of chicks hatching from eggs in a glass box, with heat
lamps above to keep the emerging chicks warm. The box was about two
meters squared, filled with maybe 100 eggs, all at different stages
of hatching, and just the right height for children. One could not
help rooting for the chicks as they struggled out of their shells.
I stood there enraptured for an hour. Or was it three hours? I was
absorbed.
Eventually the guard came over and gently shooed me away because
the museum was about to close, and I was the last one remaining
watching the chicks. He pointed out that the square of linoleum on
which I had been standing was loose, and several other squares were
new and had been recently replaced. “That’s how we know how many
visitors look at each of the exhibits - by how often we have to
replace the floor tiles,” he explained to me. This was my
introduction to indirect evidence, which I have now applied to
medieval manuscript research. I’ve always believed that some of the
opportunities for creativity emerge when we apply the conceptual
structure of one field to the material of a seemingly unrelated
field.
I have also been fortunate to come from a family of inventors
and writers. When I told my aunt, who is a paper chemist, what I
was doing with the manuscripts, she found an old densitometer in
the back office, which her company agreed to donate to my study. I
am also grateful to my dedicated research assistant, Julia Brungs,
who crunches my numbers and generates my graphs, as well as to the
Caroline Villers Foundation, which supports my research at the
Courtauld Institute. I have now measured the dirt in the Books of
Hours in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, and have
received invitations to do so at the Royal Library in Brussels, the
Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the British Library, and now at
Guildhall Library and LMA in London.
The images used in this article are from Ms 1448, a 15th
century Flemish Book of Hours, made in Arnhem in the Netherlands
for the use of the Diocese of Utrecht, one of the books Kathryn
studied at Guildhall Library which is now available at LMA with
prior notice.