In this richly illustrated study, Kathryn Rudy seeks to “identify a new category of late medieval object: the parchment painting” (5). These devotional paintings, she argues, need to be distinguished from single-leaf illuminations that were specifically designed to be inserted into books. Their iconographies and execution—the former often unusual and the latter frequently crude by illumination standards—indicate that they were originally produced as single sheets by amateur artists and that they circulated in various ways before ending up between the covers of a book. Rudy explores the multiple lives and meanings that these “postcards” could have had, and how they fulfilled a need for devotional images, especially within religious communities.

Part 1 describes the historical backdrop to parchment paintings, situating them between panel painting and manuscript illumination. Four case studies are the subject of the chapters in part 2, “The Parchment Painting as Gift.” In chapter 3, beginning with a group of Saint Barbara images from Brabant, Rudy shows that although both men and women made gifts of parchment paintings, it was women in religious houses in particular who used them “to form and maintain bonds with other nuns and lay people” (76). The subsequent case studies consider the production and reception of Marian parchment paintings, a group of postcards made in South Holland that served to personalize books, and the imagery of the “clockface,” a way of writing text around a circular design that Rudy argues would have appealed because of its flexibility, ease of copying, and also for its reference to the new invention of the mechanical clock.

In part 3, “The Many Functions of the Parchment Painting,” Rudy analyzes multiple examples according to categories such as iconography, function, and form. Paintings of individual saints inserted into prayer books are the subject of chapter 7, and albums of parchment paintings are analyzed in chapter 8. The latter focuses in on the Grandes Heures of Philip the Bold, to which first the duke and then his grandson Philip the Good added prayers and pilgrimage souvenirs, making it a “precious scrapbook” (176). Rudy rejects the “recent fashion for ‘pilgrims’ images’ among scholars [as] a way of explaining some of the apparent mobility of images” (198), preferring instead to emphasize the images’ multivalency, a feature that allowed them to be adapted to a variety of contexts, although her suggestion that “votaries … sometimes had to forge text-image relations in unorthodox ways or forgo them altogether” in adding images to books seems to contradict the argument somewhat (198). The painted word—such as the holy name of Christ (IHS)—is the subject of chapter 9, and Rudy suggests that it was scribes rather than painters who made such designs since they did not require “extensive artistic training” (208). This chapter also considers metric relics—measured or to-scale representations of Christ’s body and his wounds that met people’s needs to understand and share in his suffering. Further desire for proximity to Christ is discussed in chapter 10, “The Parchment Painting as Ersatz Eucharist,” which considers “Eucharistic proxies” such as “altar furnishings made of parchment … and small paintings with sacrificial themes” (225). Chapter 11 discusses how parchment paintings “serve[d] as proxies of large public or semi-public altarpieces that are constructed with a recognisable aesthetic” (246) that would have allowed owners of a parchment painting to connect the image to a particular place. The final two chapters continue to discuss how parchment paintings served people’s spiritual needs, first as texts and images offering indulgences and, second, as objects on which oaths could be sworn. In conclusion, part 4 looks at the limitations of parchment paintings, especially in the later fifteenth century as printing became “the most cost-effective way” to produce “autonomous images” (308).

This is an impressive study that revisits some famous manuscripts and brings to light a plethora of less well-known codices. It also offers a new way of thinking about the materiality of medieval books and how they acquired their present forms. If the prose is sometimes a little repetitive in emphasizing the contexts and functions of parchment paintings, it is nevertheless a fascinating analysis of the intersecting lives of books, texts, images, paintings, readers, and communities.