![]() ![]() The most engaging section of Rudy’s book is her discussion of prayers directed to Christ: whether the body of Christ, or the Arma Christi, or the combination of both in images of the Mass of St. As Rudy notes, this evidence implies that the act of reading indulgenced prayers “was fundamentally social, and whose purpose might be to mould social behavior in churches” (10). A communal approach to indulgenced prayers occurred in other contexts, as evidenced by prayerbooks that originated in convents, or indulgenced prayers that are linked to objects on public display. Other rubrics acknowledge that the votary cannot him/herself read, suggesting guidance and collaboration, even though praying for indulgences is particularly self-centered. Most are written in the second-person singular and others come in the all-knowing voice of God, but some rubrics speak the voice of the votary who reads them, so that the reader, in essence, instructs her/himself how to pray. ![]() The relationship established by the rubrics between the votary and the illustrated book is what most fascinates the author what fascinated this reviewer is the range of authorial voices taken by those rubrics. Some of the rubrics verify the source of the prayer and confirm the truth of the rewarded indulgences, while others choreograph the actions of the reader. Gregory, ‘Maria in Sole’ and objects seen against the sun, and Purgatory and the Harrowing of Hell. ![]() Rudy then concludes with a reflection on how indulgenced prayers led to an increased production of certain images, in particular the Mass of St. She begins with the sorts of instruction that rubrics provided to their readers, and proceeds to discuss prayers to images of Christ and to the Virgin Mary. Rudy has organized her study into four parts, followed by an appendix of original texts. Rudy calls this an “anthropology of the image” (ix), and since many of these rubrics refer to images outside the text, her study has far wider applications. These rubrics provide historians with valuable information on how viewers physically engaged with pictures in the late Middle Ages and what expectations they brought to that experience. As her title suggests, Rudy is not just interested in the images that accompany indulgenced prayers, but also in the red-lettered instructions on how to pray and how to engage with the image. She records having logged over 500 trips to 163 different book collections from California to Krakow, and her book contains color illustrations from 43 different collections, plus an appendix that transcribes rubrics and prayers from 78 manuscripts found in 22 different libraries. Kathryn Rudy has added a new and beautifully illustrated study to her already extensive bibliography on readers’ interactions with early Netherlandish manuscripts. ![]()
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