The Ark

Kathryn Rudy is the Keeper of Illuminated Manuscripts at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. Within the pages of these beautiful texts can be found tales of medieval nuns going on a kind of 'virtual pilgrimage'.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: Meeting with Kathryn Rudy, the Keeper of Illuminated Manuscripts at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague was a revelation.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National.

I never thought that the study of mediaeval manuscripts could reveal a culture that has so many similarities to our own. See how many you can spot in Kathryn's description. But her infectious love of the mediaeval world has had some good grounding: she worked for years in the Cloister, that glorious collection of 5,000 pieces of mediaeval art in North Manhattan, in a building made of five mediaeval French cloisters. Now, in her job at The Hague, she presides over another wonderful collection, which she told me about on her recent trip to Australia.

Kathryn Rudy: It's a fantastic job and it's one of the great libraries of Western Europe. And we have several hundred manuscripts, a number of them illuminated, and our strength is really in Dutch and Flemish manuscripts. The bulk of them were written in the 15th century because it's really when the production of manuscripts, where they took off, just in the era before the printing press, we get this giant surge in the production of texts, and a great surge in literacy as well.

Rachael Kohn: What are some of the great pieces in it?

Kathryn Rudy: One of my favourite manuscripts is actually a French manuscript, and it was written by Christine de Pizan, the great woman courtier-writer. She wrote a manuscript called L'Épistre de Othéa a Hector. It's the epistles of the goddess Othea, written to Hector when he was a 15-year-old and about to go to war. And so she wrote this book that describes how to properly conduct yourself. So it's a manual of conduct, but it's also highly illuminated, it's partly written in verse, and partly in prose, and our particular copy of it only 98 folders long, has a big illumination on nearly every page, and I'm a huge fan of that.

And then I love many of our illuminative Dutch manuscripts. I'm a particular collector of rubrics, that is the red texts in manuscripts, and I've studied those for three years.

Rachael Kohn: What's the significance of red text?

Kathryn Rudy: The rubric, or red text often provides instruction for how prayer should take place, and so rubricated texts provide instructions, for example, a rubric might say 'Read the following devotion while in the presence of an image of the trinity, or while in the presence of an image of Our Lady in Soleg, a Virgin of the Sun. And if you do that with proper devotion in your heart, you'll win 12,000 years indulgence or as many years indulgence as there are blades of grass at Easter time'. And so they become very metaphorical and beautiful.

Rachael Kohn: Well Kathryn, this suggests that images and indulgences were closely linked with prayer.

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, that's exactly right. And this hasn't been studied very much in the past, partly because many of the manuscripts in which we find these instructions for prayer to take place in front of images, are themselves written in unillustrated manuscripts. So I've been looking at those and finding that they shed enormous light on how people prayed and how they used images in prayer.

Rachael Kohn: Now of course this indicates that these prayers, or the people who wrote these books, were Catholics and not Protestants.

Kathryn Rudy: Correct, yes. I'm particularly interested in the period just before 1520, before Luther and before the waves of iconoclasm in the 1560s destroyed much religious art work. So the period from about 1420 to about 1520 revealed a great interest in not only the collection of indulgences which Martin Luther would later rail against, but also in the mass production of images in all kinds of new media.

For example, in prints, which often have an indulgence and an image bound together on a single leaf, often with a rubric that says 'Read this prayer while looking at this printed image in order to gain the indulgence that's attached to it.'

Rachael Kohn: Kathryn, are there any illuminated texts from the Protestant fold after the Protestant Reformation in your collection?

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, although we have a different curator for all the Protestant things. And the Reformation period and the period after say 1520, was when the printing press had so dominated the production of books that there aren't really that many manuscripts made after that period. The main manuscripts we have from the 16th and 17th centuries are called Alba Amacora, and these are albums written for friends, and they might have 400 folios, each folio written by a different person, and then they're collected together. They're a little like the way that we write notes to friends in year books, so that they become a memento of a particular time in one's life.

Rachael Kohn: How about the printing press and the proliferation of prayer books? I imagine that now it was possible for people to have a prayer book that they could take around with them. You've done some studies on prayer books as talismans; can you tell me about that?

Kathryn Rudy: One of the things that happens in this period, is that owning a prayer book becomes an accoutrement for the upper middle class, which is growing in cities such as Bruges, which is a great trading city, and we find many rich people who aren't actually nobles, but have risen the ranks of riches through trade. There's a Medici Bank, for example, in the city of Bruges, a major trading port for silks and spices and so forth traded there. And what people buy is lavish prayer books that can be connected to your arm by a little chain, so they look like little purses, and people take their prayer books to church and read them during mass, partly because mass is still in Latin which is a language that average people don't understand, and of course there's no amplification, people don't really hear what's going on. And it becomes a social scene for people to meet their friends and to show off their lavish prayer books.

But families generally own only one prayer book, and those are often chock-full of things other than just prayers. We find recipes, lists of birth dates and death dates and marriage dates, added to the calendars. And the thing that I have really been interested in looking for and I always find them when I'm looking for them of course, is talismans in illuminated prayer books, and these talismans are often written in religious language or couched in the language of the mass. But rubrics in them tell us what the original owners expected to gain from having such talismans in their books.

Rachael Kohn: Can you just explain talisman?

Kathryn Rudy: Sure. A talisman is a text or an image that works some kind of an effect on the body, just by proximity to the body. For example, the INRI titulus that was said to have been nailed to the top of the Cross, that is written in a prayer book with the rubric that says, 'Hold this close to your body and you won't die a sudden death on the day that you have this on your body.' Another para-religious text, a religious text that's used in the same way, are the first 14 lines of the Book of John. 'In the beginning was the word' and so forth, and that, either written in Latin or the vernacular, could be held close to the body and would prevent disease or sudden death. And then other kinds of talismans included suffrages to saints, such as St Sebastian, who was particularly efficacious against the bubonic plague.

Rachael Kohn: And amazing domestication of the prayer book, obviously. And an introduction into also the world of healing.

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, that's true. And we find recipes as well, where part of the recipe might involve putting some of the ingredients underneath an altar cloth so that when the priest blesses the eucharist that the ingredients are also inadvertently blessed at the same time. And we know about some of these practices because preachers railed against them in sermons. And so they told people what not to do, and through that, we can know what people were doing.

Rachael Kohn: Well another kind of publication around this time was the pilgrimage guide, people who went on pilgrimage to presumably Jerusalem or Rome, would write up their journey. But back home they were used as sort of virtual pilgrimages. Can you tell me about that?

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, that's exactly right. There was this big movement to go on pilgrimage, and it had to do with an extension of the Crusades really, but the pilgrimage movement was especially strong in Bruges, where a group called the Kontorini family based in Venice, had agents in Bruges who were like travel agents, who would sign up people to go on package tours of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. They were immensely popular, they could fill entire ships full of pilgrims to take them abroad, and the Franciscans in Jerusalem ran the pilgrim hotels and the guided tours of the church of the Holy Sepulchre and the other main sights in the Holy Land. And these same Franciscans also issued manuscripts that people could copy that listed all of the indulgences that you could win by visiting the various sites, and you did win seven years indulgence for visiting a not-so-important shrine, or plenary indulgence of all sin and all pain from going to the church of the Holy Sepulchre for example.

Rachael Kohn: And of course indulgence was meant to offset one's sins.

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, exactly. But a large number of women back in Western Europe, either couldn't afford to go on pilgrimage, which was unbelievably expensive, or else if they were nuns or semi-religious, semi-monastic women, they couldn't get permission to leave enclosure to go and so what they did is they began collecting pilgrims diaries of actual pilgrims who had been there as eye witnesses, and they used those as the basis for a new kind of spiritual literature in which they would change the pronouns around a bit.

Instead of saying 'We went to the church of the Holy Sepulchre', the nun in her version of the book would write 'I visited the church of the Holy Sepulchre' and this kind of devotional literature often adjusted the order of the sights visited, because they had no first-hand knowledge of where the church of the Holy Sepulchre was and where Bethlehem was and so forth, and rather than list them in topographical order, that is the order that you would visit them if you were on the ground with one of these Franciscan guides, they'd change it around so that they were in chronological order of the order of Christ's infancy and then subsequent passion. So they made more sense to the nuns who had never actually been there in the flesh.

Rachael Kohn: So this was a method of developing spiritual exercises I guess?

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, exactly. To use this kind of pilgrim's literature and turn it into a new form of spirituality, and of course the 15th century in northern Europe is one marked by a movement towards greater empathy, trying to feel Christ's pain and achieve a closeness with Jesus as he's walking towards Calvary.

Rachael Kohn: The Imitation of Christ.

Kathryn Rudy: Yes, that's it in a nutshell.

Rachael Kohn: Kathryn this is a fascinating broad sweep that you cover in your studies. How did someone who started out as a engineer I think, become a keeper of illuminated manuscripts? In the Hague.

Kathryn Rudy: Well I had a fantastic professor in graduate school who turned me on to the world of Dutch manuscripts, and then I applied for a post doctoral study at the University of Utrecht, and I spent nearly every day for three years in the Royal Library, working on a project about rubrics and indulgences and images, and pretty soon just become a piece of furniture there, and they sooner or later gave me a job and a salary.

Rachael Kohn: Katherine Rudy is the Keeper of Illuminated Manuscripts at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.

I do hope you join me next week at the same time.

THEME

Guests

Kathryn M. Rudy
is the Keeper of Illuminated Manuscripts at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) in The Hague. She works primarily on devotional art in Northern Europe of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, in particular, on Middle Dutch manuscripts. Her current project is called "The Prayerbook as Talisman" and addresses the ways in which the late medieval book could ward off evil, cure disease, and serve as a shield against sudden death. She spent 2002-2005 in The Netherlands writing a book called The Spiritual Economy of Images: The Performance of Prayer on the Eve of the Reformation in the Low Countries. That book is about how Christians in the fifteenth century used manuscript prayerbooks in the presence of devotional images. Certain images were deeply connected with the inflation and popularity of indulgences. Additionally, she has written several articles and a book (forthcoming) about virtual pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages.

Further Information

Kathryn Rudy - Art Historian
Kathryn Rudy's homepage.

National Library of the Netherlands - Illuminated Manuscripts
The National Library of the Netherlands has a searchable website with jpgs of all of its medieval miniatures.

Presenter

Rachael Kohn

Producer

Geoff Wood and Rachael Kohn