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

TOUCHING PARCHMENT

Touching Parchment
How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts
Vol. 1: Officials and Their Books
Kathryn M. Rudy





© 2023 Kathryn M. Rudy
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Kathryn M. Rudy, Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts. Vol. 1: Officials and Their Books . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0337
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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-959-0
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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0337
Cover Charles V swearing an oath on an open book being held by a bishop, Paris, 1365. London, British Library, Cotton Ms. Tiberius B VIII/2, fol. 46v. image reproduced with kind permission from The British Library.
Cover design by Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations xv
PART I: Introduction xvii
1. Feeling One’s Way Through the Book 1
I. Structure of the Book 4
II. Damage 5
III. A Haptic Approach 10
2. Ways of Touching Manuscripts 29
I. Inadvertent Wear 29
II. Targeted Wear 32
Part II: Books and Authority 45
3. Swearing on Relics and Gospels 51
I. Swearing on Gospels 54
II. Proffering the Book 69
4. Kissing: From Relics to Manuscripts 81
I. Kissing Missals 85
II. A Brief History of the Missal 86
III. Transformations of the Book 108
IV. Printed Canon Pages 118
5. Swearing: From Gospels to Legal Manuscripts 123
I. Last Judgment Imagery for Reinforcing Obligation 125
II. Local Government: Customary Law Books 137
III. The University: Old Proctors’ Book 154
IV.The Inquisition: Inquisitor’s Manual 160
6. Performances Within the Church 167
I. Choral Manuscripts 167
II. Books and Holy Water 176
III. Grand Obituary of Notre-Dame in Paris 186
Conclusion: The Gloves Are Off 213
Coda 223
Index 225
Bibliography 227
Illustrations 239

Acknowledgments
I am touched by the generosity of individuals and institutions that made this study possible. A Major Research Grant from the Leverhulme allowed me to read, write, travel, play idea-generating games, and most importantly, to take some risks. Several institutions have granted me fellowships that have afforded me opportunities to develop ideas about touching manuscripts in conversation with their members. Back in 2000 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC, Barry Flood and Zoë Strother first coaxed these ideas from their kernel. The ideas then developed during residencies at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert created a stimulating and edgy atmosphere. They encouraged me to think about objects as a series of operations. In Weimar I had particularly fruitful conversations with Moritz Hiller and Katharina Rein. Meanwhile, my former research assistant, Leif Weitzel, not only scraped hundreds of images of missals for me (from the internet, not with a blade), but also helped build an enormous loom in my office in the Palais Dürckheim.
I am grateful to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam, which not only provided access to scholars and libraries, but also hosted my fiftieth birthday party. At the Institut für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit in Krems an der Donau (Austria), Isabella Nicka, Thomas Kühtreiber, and Heike Schlie provided emulable models of collegiality and taught me the art of the coffee break. Serving as the Wanley Fellow at the Bodleian Library in Oxford gave me access to some of the greatest minds and filthiest books in the world. I am grateful for joyous exchanges with David Rundle, Emma Smith, Elizabeth Leach, Karl Kügle, Henrike Lähnemann, Jaś Elsner, and Martin Kauffmann. I will remember Nigel Palmer, who sadly died during the preparation of this volume, as enthusiastically supportive. During my sojourn at the Getty Research Institute, Rheagan Martin and Beth Morrison in the Getty manuscripts department identified several relevant items that would have otherwise passed me by. Numerous conversations with Nancy Turner, the famed manuscript conservator at the Getty, have proved invaluable. I am grateful to Maria Fredericks, Drue Heinz Book Conservator at the Thaw Conservation Center at The Morgan Library & Museum, for friendly chats about curtains in manuscripts. During stays in New York, conversations with Kathryn Smith, Ittai Weinryb, and Ivan Gaskell provoked thoughts. At Yale I had particularly fruitful talks with Ray Clemens, Jackie Jung, Christiane Gruber (during a seminar we led together at Yale), and Mitch Merback, who was hanging around at the time. Academia would thrive if everyone who worked on materiality and craft could attend Tactics & Praxis events at the University of Cambridge, steered by Louise Haywood, Georgina Evans, and Isabelle McNeill. On the continent, I enjoyed spending time at Radboud in Nijmegen, where Maaike van Berkel, László Munteán, Shari Boodts, Hanneke van Asperen, Willy Piron, and Johan Oosterman always made me feel welcome. One of my favorite intellectual gatherings took place in Stockholm, where Jonatan Pettersson brought together fascinating scholars at the Sjöfartshuset, including Vincent Debiais, Benjamin Pohl, Leah Tether, Mary Franklin Brown, Stefka Georgieva Eriksen, and Keith Busby. My research partner, Eileen Tisdall (brilliant pollen analyist) and I emjoyed the joyous and lively exchange. I am grateful to Karin Gludovatz for the splendid invitation to come to the Freie Universität in Berlin, where this book received its final sentences. As such, this book has been partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective (EXC 2020–Project ID 390608380).
Some of the ideas in this volume culminated in Sensational Books , an exhibition at the Bodleian. Delayed by two years because of covid, the show finally opened in May 2022. Presenting manuscripts to the public so that they could imagine handling, licking, and sniffing them was immensely rewarding, and I am grateful to the people who made that happen, including Sallyanne Gilchrist, Maddy Slaven, Jo Maddocks, and Richard Ovenden, and my marvelous co-curator Emma Smith.
Conversations with many other people have enriched this study, including Klaas van der Hoek, Irene van Renswoude, Marlene Hennessey, Maria Theisen, Monica Seidler-Hux, Rysiek Kukczycki, Kate Gerry, Ron Akehurst, Miri Rubin, Matthew Champion, Erik Kwakkel, Megan Holmes, Ed van der Vlist, Sonja Drimmer, Hanno Wijsman, Dominique van Wijnsberghe, Julian Luxford, Gia Toussaint, Rosalind Brown-Grant, David Ganz, Verena Schulz, Agnès Bos, Jack Hartnell, Sherry Lindquist, Hanna Vorholt, Andrea Pearson, Rory Loughnane, Ryan Perry, Doug Mortlock, Peter Kidd, Emily Rose, Suzanne Paul, James Freeman, Sandra Hindman, Laura Light, Anders Winroth, and Patricia Simons. From time to time Emily Guerry appears as if by magic in the UK or France, and then says fascinating things.
I am grateful to Paul Binski and Stella Nair for introducing me to the work of Paul Connerton; to Berthold Kress for help interpreting information pertaining to the collegiate church of St Severin in Cologne; to Reima Välimäki for telling me about the inquisitor’s manual in Linz; to Joshua O’Driscoll at the Morgan Library for showing me the Arenberg Gospels under UV light; to Jos Biemans, for leading me to the Gospels of St Amand in Cologne; to Kasper van Ommen and Harm Beukers from the University of Leiden for telling me about the surgical manuscripts splashed in blood. They don’t appear in this book, because studying them involved developing completely different methods of analysis, and they will form their own separate study. My special thanks go to Lisa Regan, Katharine Ridler, and Julia Faiers, who read and commented on the text at various stages of development. James Marrow helped me to arrange the ideas. I am grateful to him for his close reading and for encouraging me to work harder and write more clearly, as he has done since we met in 1992.
Of the manuscripts discussed and reproduced in this book, I have consulted nearly all