Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts

Rudy’s extraordinary detective work – examining all manner of abrasions and smudges in scores of manuscripts – leads to a startlingly original understanding of books, reading, and learning in the European Middle Ages.

'This engaging, informative, and wonderfully-illustrated volume is a companion to the 2023, Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts; Volume 1: Officials and their Books, by a scholar who is probably best known for her groundbreaking “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2:1-2 (2010). One interesting methodological difference from that earlier study is that Rudy here eschews the scientific calibration of a densitometer and instead relies on her own human perception in looking at signs of use in the text and illustrations of medieval manuscripts. And what a perception it is! The result is a treasure trove of observation, making the case for a new way of engaging old books, with a focus in this volume on manuscripts that exerted a force of social cohesion on their users. The pay-off is considerable: “By studying these traces, one can hypothesize how the user touched the book, and consequently build a scenario that helps to recreate the feelings, habits, and emotions of people from the past” (9). Rudy recurringly does just that.'