Honors Art History Student Selected to Participate in Digital Dirty Books Project

Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal

On this page, the book's owner kneels in reverence to the suffering Christ. The coat of arms indicate that the patron was a member of the Levis family. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Ms-439, folio 97r (detail).

Since January, honors art history major Kate Hodgson has been spending a lot of time poring over dirty books — to kickstart graduate-level study of illuminated manuscripts. She is one of two undergraduate students selected to participate in an international research project led by art historian Kathryn Rudy, author of the groundbreaking article "Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts" (Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 2:1-2, Summer 2010).

"Dr. Rudy traveled across Europe with her densitometer, a small device that measures the darkness of a reflecting surface; it's a very good tool for measuring dirt on manuscripts," Hodgson said. 

Since publication of Rudy's article, libraries have digitized thousands of manuscripts, both to preserve the parchment, gold leaf and natural inks of these precious artifacts and to share their contents with scholars around the world. 

"So now, we have Dirty Books 2.0," Hodgson said. She is one of about 20 scholars who are helping Rudy to expand the scope of her research and credits Lynn Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of art history in Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, for connecting her with Rudy. 

"I'm very grateful to Dr. Jacobs for getting me involved and helping me navigate this project," Hodgson said. "It's so exciting — it feels like I'm solving a mystery."

"Participation in this research team gives Kate entrance into a professionalized environment and into a whole network of support for her interests in manuscript illumination," Jacobs said. "The Dirty Books project applies digital technology to the study of medieval manuscripts, allowing us to discover how people really used these prayer books in their day-to-day lives. It's fantastic that Kate will be able to contribute to this cutting-edge and incredibly fascinating area of manuscript studies."

Rudy's team is focusing on Books of Hours, a prayer book for laity often characterized by small dimensions and sumptuous decoration. Hodgson begins each case study by outlining the parts of the manuscript. Then, to document soil on a digital manuscript, she uses a digital color meter that is built into every Macintosh computer. She measures the lightest part of the page to establish a baseline, then measures the darkest part of the page — often the bottom right corner, where the user turned the page. The resulting graph reveals the most heavily used pages, providing clues to the daily life and concerns of the book's original owner.

"The Suffrages to the Saints are most used; they might be reading prayers to specific saints for help with relationships and everyday problems or asking for the saint's intersession," Hodgson said. 

In the first manuscript that she studied, measurements indicate that the book's patron lingered on the page where he is depicted, kneeling in reverence to the suffering Christ — evidence of devotion and perhaps, a healthy self-regard. 

Hodgson plans to complete several case studies for Rudy and will be coauthor on the resulting publication. Within the first two weeks of work, she also stumbled upon her honors thesis topic: a painting of the Virgin Mary, tipped into a manuscript, that differs in style from the rest of the book's paintings.

"I think we may be able to make an attribution to a specific illuminator," she said, an endeavor that will require a trip to France to study the manuscript in person. "I'm so excited!"