Consuming Medieval Manuscripts – May 2026.
On Wednesday 13 May 2026, 5:30PM – 7:30PM in Lecture Theatre 2, Sir Bob Burgess Building, University of Leicester, Prof. Kathryn M. Rudy presents a talk on the reception and original function of medieval manuscripts. This FREE event is hosted by The University of Leicester and The British Academy.
Even before Gutenberg’s printing press began squeezing out nearly identical copies of texts around 1450, artisans with less sophisticated machinery – just an engraved plank of wood or sheet of copper – were serially producing images. They made stacks of sheets with saints brandishing their attributes and sequences of narrative scenes from the Infancy and Passion of Christ. One subject they did not make in abundance was the Face of Christ. This is surprising, considering that illuminators nearby painted sheets manually with this image, repeated identically like a sheet of postage stamps. One uncut sheet of repeated Faces of Christ was found under the floorboards at the convent at Wienhausen. It dates from ca. 1500, deep in the printed age, but is hand-painted, not printed. Sheets like these were trimmed into squares for individual use. Nearly 50 Face-of-Christ-squares survive because they were pasted into books, while hundreds more were depicted pinned to hats. This number points to hundreds or probably thousands of similar Face-of-Christ-squares that perished. If this was such an in-demand subject, then why didn’t printers print them?
