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Kathryn Rudy’s busy research leave and publications

Dr Kathryn M. Rudy is on research leave in 2015-16. In the fall, she was a senior fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angels, and in the spring she was the Wanley visiting scholar at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. She led the Hilary Term meeting of the Workshop for Manuscript and Text Cultures at Queen’s College, Oxford, with a presentation titled ‘Touching Skin: Why Medieval Users Rubbed, Kissed, Inscribed, Splattered, Begrimed, and Pricked their Manuscripts’.  In January she gave a plenary paper titled ‘Prints (formerly) pasted in Netherlandish manuscripts’ at the conference ‘Unter Druck – Illuminierte Handschriften und Inkunabeln im Zeitalter Gutenbergs’ in Vienna, sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Science. On 6 March 2016 she gave the keynote address at the 36th Annual Conference of The Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University; her talk was titled ‘Dirty Books: Approaches to Measuring Reader Response in the Middle Ages’. Students voted it ‘best event at the conference’. In April she gave a talk about eating images of the Face of Christ at a conference about the Roman Veronica, held at Madgalene College, Cambridge.

Dr. Rudy's 2015 Publication
        Dr. Rudy’s 2015 Publication

Kathryn published this article: ‘Sewing the Body of Christ: Eucharist Wafer Souvenirs Stitched into Fifteenth-century Manuscripts, Primarily in the Netherlands’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 8, 1 (Winter 2016), Article 1 (48 pages). Her newest book, The Circular Economy of Manuscripts: Resisting Obsolescence in the Parchment Era, will be published by Open Book Publishers in June 2016. It will be available as a free pdf.  This book was made possible by a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation and a publication grant from St Andrews.

She will give a keynote lecture titled ‘Assembled from Disparate Parts: Medieval Manuscripts, Upcycled and Recycled’ at the upcoming Re//Generate Postgraduate Conference at St Andrews, 6-7 May. Later in 2016 she will give keynote lectures at conferences in Amsterdam (on early printing) and Nijmegen (on the personalisation of manuscript prayerbooks). She also has lectures scheduled in Prague, Vienna, Orleans, Texas and Arkansas. In January 2017 she will be a Fellow at the Institute of Material Culture in Krems (Austria). She is also a fibre artist and has a show of her work opening in January 2017 at the Cambridge University Library foyer titled ‘Woven Manuscripts’. Each soft sculpture will relate to a medieval book or its reception.