Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without several important studies that preceded it. In addition to the great cataloguers of the nineteenth century, whose work I both loathe and cherish, my contemporaries have not only contributed to knowledge, but have also convinced me that this topic is worthy of pursuit. I am fortunate that many of those scholars have become friends: Hanno Wijsman, Ursula Weekes, James Marrow, Peter Schmidt, David Areford, Peter Parshall, Giulia Bartrum, Sheila O’Connell, Séverine Lepape, Huigen Leeflang, Erik Geleijns, Todor Petev, Eamon Duffy, Elizabeth Savage, and Ad Stijnman: thank you. I also thank Paul Taylor at the Warburg Institute for telling me where I could find the images whose photographs were neatly organised in the image library, Kathleen Doyle, Scot McKendrick, Julian Harrison, Clarck Drieshen, and Amy Jeffs at the British Library, Joris Van Grieken at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België — the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique. James Marrow, Emily Rose, and Stephanie Azzarello provided nourishing hospitality and more. Jamie Harper suggested the book’s title. And I thank Jeffrey Hamburger and Maria Theisen for inviting me to Vienna to discuss some of these ideas at a conference in 2015.
In 2011 and 2017 this project received grants from the Neil Ker Foundation, administered by the British Academy, for which I am truly grateful. In 2011 the Foundation granted me £1000 toward the cost of travelling to Paris to use the collections in the BnF; and in 2017 they granted me £1981.45 to partially offset the costs of images. The University of St Andrew’s Open Access fund kindly contributed towards the cost of the book’s publication by Open Book Publishers; the School of Art History also made a generous donation in exchange for my putting in 175 hours of work as chair of the Athena SWAN/Equality and Diversity Committee in 2017. Andrew Demetrius of the School of Art History at St Andrews kindly prepared the digital images for publication.
I am grateful to Katharine Ridler, who read the text and suggested useful improvements, and to Emily Savage, who made perspicacious editorial suggestions. Lisa Regan helped me to find the unconventional scholarly voice in these pages, and I am deeply indebted to her insights. I thank the anonymous peer reviewers who did not pull any punches in their reports. One of them found it unsavoury that I discuss such topics as academic salaries, the costs of images, funding models, and the personal financial hardships that the academic marketplace foists upon us. However, at the risk of irritating this person further, I have not only decided to leave these sections in the final draft, but to develop them, as I believe that a more open discussion about such matters is urgent.
Bibliographical Note
Some of the ideas in this book first appeared in my previous books and articles:
Kathryn M. Rudy, ‘How to Prepare the Bedroom for the Bridegroom’, in Frauen-kloster-kunst: Neue Forschungen zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed. by Carola Jaeggi, Hedwig Roeckelein and Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 369–75.
—, Virtual Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Isabelle Cochelin and Susan Boynton, Disciplina Monastica, vol. 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 175–92; and 399–410.
—, Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 86–91.
—, ‘Reconstructing the Delbecq-Schreiber Passion (as part of the St Godeleva manuscript)’, Unter Druck. Mitteleuropäische Buchmalerei im 15. Jahrhundert. Akten der Tagung, Wien, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 13.1.–17.1.2016, herausgegeben von Jeffrey F. Hamburger und Maria Theisen. Buchmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts in Mitteleuropa Herausgeben von Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Band 15 (Petersberg: Michael Imhoff Verlag, 2018), pp. 156–67.