This interview features Bill Sherman, who is Director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of Cultural History in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He was founding director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York, and he moved to the Warburg from the Victoria and Albert Museum where he served as Director of Research and Collections. He has published widely on the history of books and readers, the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the collection and display of modern art, and the role of codes and ciphers in Renaissance culture. 

Editor: What got you interested in marginalia?   

BS: As far as the history of marginalia goes, I was in the right place at the right time. I started my graduate studies in Cambridge in 1988, just as Lisa Jardine was returning from the fellowship in Princeton that produced her seminal study (with Anthony Grafton) on Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia. Their article on ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’ was published in Past & Present in 1990 and became the single most influential contribution to the field. I had been trained as an undergraduate in literary theory and textual bibliography, and both had given me an interest in both readers and margins. But Jardine and Grafton showed me what could be done with the evidence provided by marginalia, and once I passed a crash course in palaeography I was ready to find some marginalia of my own to work on. 

Lisa became my supervisor and I quickly decided to see if I could extend their work on Harvey to another case of a contemporary reader with an even bigger library—the polymath John Dee. I ended up writing my PhD dissertation on Dee, using his marginalia (and other manuscript writings) to challenge the received account of Dee as an isolated wizard. 

Image 1: Lisa Jardine’s inscription on Bill’s copy of Past and Present 129 (November 1990), in which the article “‘Studied for Action:’ How Gabriel Read His Livy” appeared.

Editor: What do you find most interesting or powerful about marginalia?  

BS: I like to say that marginal notes (and other marks left behind in books) rarely provide the answers we want, but they often force us to ask the questions we need. I also like to say that they have an uncanny ability to give us intimate glimpses of the readers who handled books before us—their thoughts, beliefs and even (to some extent) their bodies. 

Image 2: Cover of Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania P, 2008), featuring the manicule of Bernardo Bembo.

Editor: What marginalia are you working on now?   

BS: I have been following up my general study of English Renaissance marginalia, Used Books, with a wide-ranging study called The Reader’s Eye (under contract with Reaktion Books, who published one of the best early books on the subject, Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge). As the title implies, the book looks at examples of readers who responded visually to texts. It sets out to challenge the persistent assumption that marginalia are words next to other words and asks instead how we might understand reading as a visual act. 

As I look back on Used Books, and the body of evidence it set out to survey, there is one gap that now strikes me as painfully large, and that is what might be described as visual modes of response to the text—from isolated doodles to fully-fledged decorative and illustrative schemes. I did at least gesture toward this topic in my chapter on manicules, the pointing hands that litter the margins of so many books and manuscripts between the 13th and 18th centuries; but I subsumed them under the general heading of non-verbal marks without ever considering them as fully visual, and nowhere did I discuss in any detail the surprisingly complex ways in which readers used images as well as words to make their books meaningful, beautiful, or useful. In my desire to restore the humble hand to the field of reading, I suggested that Renaissance readers picked up their books with a more acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the fingers than at any other time before or since, and went so far as to claim that reading was above all a manual art. In doing so, I clearly emphasized the hand at the expense of the eye and lost sight (as it were) of sight itself. 

Image 3: A typical page from the Dante Vallicelliano; Photo from Z79A Biblioteca Vallicelliana.

Editor: What do you see as the future of marginalia studies?   

As with so many other areas of research, the impact of digital tools will no doubt stimulate all kinds of new work on marginalia. In the case of Harvey and Dee, we now have an extraordinary online resource called The Archaeology of Reading to turn to. It is not just giving us digital access to early modern books but is asking how digital culture might help us to understand the circulation and use of information in the pre-digital past. After all, marginalia is a kind of graphic user interface—and an exceptionally sophisticated one at that. I wonder, in fact, if early modern marginalia might have something to teach digital developers rather than vice versa…. 

Editor: Is there anything else you want to tell us? 

BS: In the very first footnote of the 1990 article on Gabriel Harvey, Jardine and Grafton announced that I would join them in producing a book on the subject. More than 30 years later, we will soon be publishing Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading—as a free e-book with UCL Press. I’m only sorry it took so long and that Lisa Jardine did not live long enough to see the project that she started come to fruition.