CV

Kathryn Rudy (Kate) earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in Art History, and also holds a Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the University of Toronto. She has held research, teaching, and curatorial positions in the US, UK, Canada, The Netherlands and Belgium. Kate specializes in late medieval manuscripts of the Low Countries. She has written articles about the manuscript precedents of Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs; the earliest visual interpretation of the Ghent Altarpiece; illustrated manuscripts for instructing children; words as devotional objects; as well as several articles about medieval pilgrimage both real and imagined, culminating in a book (forthcoming) titled Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages. Other recent work includes a long essay titled “How Nuns Invented the Postcard,” and an investigation of the manuscripts produced at the Franciscan Convent of St. Ursula in Delft. Her three long-term projects concentrate on the reception and original function of manuscripts: she has built a database to reconstruct fifteenth-century manuscripts whose prints have been cut out of them. She has compiled several thousand Middle Dutch rubrics that provide instructions for votaries in front of images for a book provisionally titled The Spiritual Economy of Images: The Performance of Prayer on the Eve of the Reformation in the Low Countries. Thirdly, she is completing a book called The Prayerbook as Talisman in Late Medieval Flanders.

During the 2009-10 academic year, as Caroline Villers Associate Fellow at the Courtauld Institute in London, she quantified grime and patterns of use in medieval manuscripts with the aid of a densitometer in a project called ‘Dirty Books’. She first developed this technique during her tenure as Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. The project considered books of hours and prayer books, the largest surviving category of late medieval books, and asked how their original users handled them. Medieval readers often held their prayer books open by resting their thumbs at the lower corners of the opening but inadvertently deposited grime during handling. Quantifying the intensity of this grime can reveal users’ sentiments about the various texts and images in their books.