![]() As readers read the text and looked at the images, this normal but intensive handling left fingerprints on the page, and these marks, although made inadvertently, are nevertheless instructive. Under magnification, the vellum looks like a rug that has trapped dirt and grime in its fibers ( fig. 1 This means that repeated handling resulted in a cumulative build-up of fingerprints over the same area of the vellum. The fact that readers regularly picked up a book and read it, as occurred with devotional books, implies that the book was regularly held in the same way. Īs far as I know, discoloration due to wear in manuscripts has never before been considered as a topic of inquiry, besides casual comments about a certain book being “worn” or “heavily handled.” Studying the dirt, smudges, and signs of wear in a manuscript constitutes a form of forensic analysis that can reconstruct readers’ habits. (Photo: The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek artwork in the public domain). 90r, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Ms. The discoloration of vellum caused by water damage is not relevant to the current study.įig. Water damage always carries a high-water mark on its leading edge and can easily be identified. Water damage appears, for example, in a manuscript made in Delft and preserved in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague (Ms. It is very easy to distinguish the discoloration of wear from the discoloration caused by water damage, which likewise causes darkening. 14r) shows that, in this case at least, most of this user-deposited dirt appears in the lower outer corner of each folio ( fig. A recto leaf from a prayer book made in the eastern Netherlands (Luik, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Ms. Quantifying Fingerprintsĭiscoloration due to wear is identifiable as such. These are discussed as a series of case studies below. The results reveal how a given reader handled his book, which sections of a book he handled, and which he ignored. The densitometer has allowed me to objectively measure the wear, which is positively correlated to the darkening of the vellum (or paper) manuscript support. My contribution to this discussion of reader response is to quantify this wear using a densitometer, an apparatus that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface. The more intensely a reader used a given section of the book, the more intensely discolored those folios are. Users employed thread and glue to affix devotional objects to their books, and fingerprints and dirt darkened the page as the user ground it into the fibers of the vellum. I then consider how material was often inadvertently added to manuscripts through handling. I first consider how images were abraded through devotional kissing and rubbing that was directed at a particular image, or even a particular area of an image, or occasionally directed at a text. These examples reveal how medieval people interacted with their books and reveal something of their habits and expectations, and ultimately, an aspect of medieval readers’ emotional lives. Taking as my premise the idea that missals reveal habits of wear and use, in this article I bring together other manuscripts-especially prayer books-that have been rubbed and handled. The priest in Haarlem who used this missal kissed the osculation plaque some of the time, but his lips also crept upward, onto the frame of the miniature, onto the ground below the cross, up the shaft of the cross, occasionally kissing the feet of Christ. This plaque is designed to bear the wear and tear of the priest’s repeated kisses, for illuminators realized that priests would damage their paintings if they could not deflect the lips elsewhere ( fig. In the Missal of the Haarlem Linen Weavers’ Guild, made in Utrecht in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the illuminators provided an osculation plaque at the bottom of the full-page miniature depicting the Crucifixion. A priest would repeatedly kiss the canon page of his missal, depositing secretions from his lips, nose, and forehead onto the page. One of the most obvious ways in which a category of manuscripts-missals-carries signs of use is the damage often found in the opening of the canon of the mass. Īlthough it is often difficult to study the habits, private rituals, and emotional states of people who lived in the medieval past, medieval manuscripts carry signs of use and wear on their very surfaces that provide records of some of these elusive phenomena. 184 C 2 (Photo: Byvanck archive artwork in the public domain). 1400-10, tempera and gold on vellum, 349 x 270 (265 x 179) mm, 2 columns, 32 lines, littera textualis, Latin. Missal of the Haarlem Linen Weavers Guild, North Holland (Haarlem?), ca. 149v), showing damage where the priest repeatedly kissed it.
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