Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books by Kathryn M. Rudy (review)

The title of this engaging book aptly compares a medieval with a modern phenomenon. Likening the devotional drawings and miniatures pasted or sewn in medieval prayer books to the modern postcard, it identifies (if not for the first time, then with unprecedented depth) an independent category of image, distinct from those that were originally intended to serve as illustrations, and explores its various functions, whether as ersatz eucharist, indulgence, pilgrimage souvenir, or meditational focal point. Within late medieval monastic culture, especially that of nuns, the role of such images, very often augmented with inscribed prayers and messages, as gifts and tokens of exchange, underscores their likeness to the postcard, though in many respects the medieval precursor was far more personal. The postcard itself, however, threatens to become no less a historical artifact than the fascinating assemblage of images presented here. In the age of the iPhone and Instagram, in which one can share one’s impressions instantaneously, to send a physical object by snail mail might seem hopelessly antiquated. But just as a handwritten note still carries the aura and trace of actual physical presence, so too the objects lovingly collected in this volume—not unlike a scrapbook in the way that it gathers and organizes a vast amount of material assembled over decades of sifting through innumerable libraries and archives—convey an immediacy and intimacy lacking in the virtual realm. That the often humble images Rudy studies with such insight, if sometimes with a tad too much fancy, acquire such eloquence, speaks not only to their importance to their makers and recipients but also to the author’s historical imagination. That Yale University Press lavished such care and so much color on the production of this beautiful book helps no less in bringing this largely forgotten genre of image to life. It is, therefore, to be lamented that recently announced changes at the press’s London office will probably make the publication of scholarly art-historical monographs such as Rudy’s much less likely. Sic transit gloria mundi.