Visiting Scholar on Art History to Lecture on Medieval Users of Manuscripts

Image courtesy of Royal Library Brussels

The Department of Art is pleased to present visiting scholar Kathryn M. Rudy at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, in J.B. Hunt Center for Academic Excellence, Room 216.

Kathryn M. Rudy is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews. She has written extensively about late medieval manuscripts and is best known for her work on 'Dirty Books', that is, measuring signs of wear in manuscript margins in order to quantify reader reception. Before joining the ranks of academia, Rudy was curator of illuminated manuscripts at the National Library of The Netherlands. She holds degrees from Cornell University, Columbia University, and the University of Toronto. Rudy has held fellowships, inter alia, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Warburg, the Bodleian Library, the Getty Musuem, the Bauhaus University in Weimar, and Trinity College in Dublin.

Her most recent book is Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015) and she currently has two books in press. One explores the relationship between images and indulgences in the decades before the Protestant Reformation, and the other about the modular structure of manuscripts in the fifteenth century and its implications.

All visiting scholar lectures are free and open to the public. The Department of Art, as well as the Joy Pratt Markham Endowment Fund, provide support for the Joy Pratt Markham Visiting Artist/Scholar Series.