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How to Find Marginalia in Printed Books (so that you can request photos through BookMark!)

On By Kathy AchesonIn 17th century, Method, OtherLeave a comment

…or rather How to Find the Possibility of Marginalia in Printed Books to Which You Do Not Have Access! If you don’t happen to live or work in the region of a rare books repository, you may be able to get leads about the existence and sometimes nature of marginalia from library catalogues. First, we need the catalogue to have a field for notes about the particular copy. Copy-specific notes can include information about provenance and history (such as re-binding, repair, etc.), and can also include a brief description or transcription of manuscript additions, such as ownership claims, prices, gift inscriptions, and marginalia. These catalogue notes will not be exhaustive, but a book with marginalia in it is likely to have something recorded in that field that might lead us to believe there is material there for us. Most library catalogues (including my own institution’s) do not have a field that includes such notes, but many rare books library catalogues do: this blog post focusses on the catalogues of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the libraries of Oxford University and mentions those of the Newberry and the Huntington.

Library catalogues that include copy-specific notes tend to be customized to the needs of the collections. The way that they record marginalia or other supplements to printed books that we might be interested in differs from library to library and even from cataloguer to cataloguer. You can always start by talking or writing to a librarian for advice: I learned the basics from Georgianna Ziegler at the Folger Shakespeare Library. (Dr. Ziegler is now retired but is still very active as a scholar: “Little Books, Big Gifts: The Artistry of Esther Inglis” is her latest project). 

I’m going to start with the Folger Shakespeare Library, as I’m most familiar with it. I’ve gone to the Folger Library’s site, then to “Research” on the top nav bar; from the drop-down menu you can go to “Search the Catalog.” Once there, I select “Advanced Search” from the bottom line of text. This option which will allow me to search multiple fields, connected by Boolean operators such as “and” or “not.” I’ve built a search that is shown in the image below which asks for items that fulfill the following criteria: one, they include the word “health” in the title; two, the title does NOT include the term “electronic resource” (for those of you who use Early English Books Online, you’ll know that the works in EEBO are included within the catalogues of institutions that subscribe to the resource); and three, under “Date type,” I’ve restricted my results to items that “published/created” in a “specific time period” between 1600 and 1620. You can do this search yourself to follow along.

Figure 1

We have some results here! 16 titles, some of which are represented in multiple copies in the Folger’s collection. This is a manageable number for me to sift through; in each entry, I’ll be looking at the “Folger-specific notes.” The first title on the list (The hauen of health : chiefly made for the comfort of students, and consequently for all those that haue a care of their health, amplified vpon fiue words of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, meat, drinke, sleepe, Venus: by Thomas Cogan, Master of Artes, and Bacheler of Physicke: and now of late corrected and augmented. Hereunto is added a preseruation from the pestilence: with a short censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.) is represented in three copies in the Folger’s collection. Each of these copies has a Folger-specific note in the catalogue record.  

Figure 2

The notes for the Folger copies of The hauen of health tell us that there are provenance notes in the first copy, which may or may not interest us (provenance refers to the history of ownership of the item). The key for marginalia hunters is the term “manuscript notes,” which can be abbreviated as “ms notes.” For copies two and three, we see that there are manuscript notes in the books. These might or might not be marginalia that interests you; we can’t tell from the catalogue. This is when you might place a request in BookMark: the call number, the title, and your confidence the book might have marginalia in it are all you need. Your correspondent – the person who fields the request through BookMark on the basis that they have access to the Folger’s collections – will request the book be made available to them in the reading room, look through it for marginalia, photograph the marginalia, and send the photos to you by email or file transfer service. That’s it. 

Most rare books library catalogues will have a searchable field for the copy-specific notes. Here’s another example. The Oxford Universities catalogue includes rare book holdings in college libraries and in the Bodleian Library. Excluding electronic copies is different than in the Folger catalogue. In SOLO, on the left nav bar, there is a set of filters including “resource type.” If you select “physical resources” and then apply the filter, you will exclude electronic versions. Our search is for “health” in the title, and a publication date between 1600-1620, inclusive. The search results list 13 items, some of which are available in multiple copies. 

SOLO aggregates the library catalogues of all the Oxford College and University libraries. If we open the record for this title, The treasurie of hidden secrets (1600), we see there are two copies in the system, both at St. John’s College. Both of these items have extensive notes, some in “Provenance Notes” and some in “MS additions.” Here’s a screenshot of the catalogue entry for the second copy at St. John’s, which includes an “MS addition” in the form of a “contents” list (probably a list of the contents of the book, but possibly an inventory of other kinds of materials or objects) <Figure 3>. In addition, the provenance note includes citation of some marginalia that expresses not just the ownership and transmission record normally belonging to provenance, but a set of interpersonal relationships of some emotional magnitude. As with the examples above, you could put in a request through BookMark for a fellow scholar who has access to St. John’s College and can take photographs for you. 

Figure 3

Library catalogues are all different, and many don’t have copy-specific notes. I’ve looked at the catalogs for the Newberry (in Chicago) and the Houghton (at Harvard), and they do have a notes field, but it seems to be used mainly for bibliographical observations about the contents and construction of that copy of the book. The Huntington Library catalogue has a category called “Huntington notes” which can include description of marginalia: for instance, for the collection’s 1605 copy of The hauen of health, for example, the Huntington note includes reference to three seventeenth-century ownership claims, two of which are women who share a surname, and for the library’s 1617 copy of Regimen sanitatis Salerni, the note says that the book bears the signature of owner William Newman, with the date 1621. It is possible that these books – and books that are catalogued but lack notes such as these – contain other early modern marginalia, and it might be worth checking out. 

At EMMRN, we’re happy to receive requests for photos of marginalia that just have the repository, title, date of publication, and call number. These will be passed on to whomsoever commits to fulfill the request; if you haven’t specified particular marginalia in the request, the fulfiller will look through the copy of the book and take photos of all the marginalia that are in the book, or the type (ownership, gift, notes on the text, miscellaneous additions, etc.) that you would like to retrieve. We’re also happy to answer questions (emmrn@uwaterloo.ca) about how to do this research – and Librarians at libraries will also be preternaturally helpful, in my experience, when we ask them to teach us things we can go on to do ourselves.

Good luck and happy hunting!  Drop us a line at emmrn@uwaterloo.ca if you find something interesting or would like to write a blog post about your marginalia adventures. 

An Interview with Dr. Anne M. Thell

On By blaze wellingIn OtherLeave a comment

Anne M. Thell is an Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. Her books include Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Literature (2017; 2020) and the Broadview edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020). Her interests include the history of aesthetics; the history of science and philosophy; early prose fiction; and early women writers. She is now at work on a new monograph on Cavendish and time, while also co-editing, with Lara Dodds, the 21st-Century Oxford Authors edition of Cavendish’s complete works.

Editor: What got you interested in marginalia?

AT: Hm, that’s a good question…  I remember being intrigued by this kind of thing when I took an early graduate course in research methods; the instructor was a rare books specialist and got us all pretty jazzed up about book history and all that we might glean from early texts beyond what’s printed on the page.

But I think the first time I realized marginalia’s real value and thrill occurred when I was doing some dissertation work on seventeenth-century voyage literature. This led me to Robert Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon (1681), printed by Richard Chiswell (printer to the Royal Society). Fascinatingly, Chiswell provided Knox with a special copy of this work that featured blank, interleaved pages where the author could make notes and additions for an intended second edition (which, despite Knox’s lifelong dedication to this project, never came to fruition). This copy also features copious annotations by Robert Hooke, who had been assisting Knox in expanding and organizing his text so as to suit scientific interests. It was lost for centuries, but is now held at the Anthropology Library at the British Museum (Item M10836). (Knox also owned a second interleaved copy where he inserted his autobiographical notes; see MS Rawl Qc. 15 at the Bodleian Library.)

When I learned all this, I headed straight to the Anthropology Library and found the annotated copy; it is bursting at the seams—quite literally—with not only Knox’s intended insertions, but also, overlaid onto these, Hooke’s extensive emendations (comments, questions, corrections), scrawled across every page. Even the conclusion—Knox’s final statement of authorship—is covered in Hooke’s black ink, with only Knox’s name left unchanged. I remember paging through this rarest of texts for days, enthralled by the vibrant, agonistic exchange that played out across its pages, and more broadly by the sudden access I had gained—to Knox, to Hooke, to history itself. The text became a living thing, and its engagement with readers vivid, visible, haptic…  I felt like I had hit a vein straight into the past. I was also beguiled by Hooke’s critical posture, his mode of reading (bold, energetic, confident, at times even intrusive). This was an intimacy that I hadn’t experienced before.

Image 1 & 2: Hooke’s edits of Knox’s interleaved notes. (British Library, Item M10836).

Now I’ve been lucky enough to have more of these encounters, although the joy of discovery doesn’t wear off. I’ll admit that I like angry or frustrated marginal comments best; you can feel the caustic energy as readers scribble across the text, correcting, belittling, undermining. It’s a wonderfully material exchange between two minds. A great example of this antagonistic reading relationship is one copy of George Anson’s Voyage (1748)—a synthetic, triumphalist account of a disastrous voyage—now held at the British Library (BL 10025.f.8), which is subsumed in James Naish’s bold, black ink. A highly knowledgeable seaman and former supercargo to the EIC, Naish explodes Anson’s (rather brittle) authority, his rationale and decision-making processes, and more broadly the polished, “official” account of this particular voyage. 

Editor: Do you remember your first marginalia? 

AT: Yes, I think it was Knox’s Historical Relation, as I mention above. But another early encounter was a hand-corrected copy of Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), now held in the British Library. This was years ago, as I was working on my first book. After spending so much time with Cavendish—countless hours reading and re-reading, trying to wrangle with her complicated prose, writing endlessly on her work—holding a 1666 text that she likely held, 350 years later… it was another one of those magical moments of feeling history.

Image 3: BL copy of Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656) (BL shelfmark G.11599).
Image 4: Cavendish’s Natures Pictures (1656) (BL shelfmark G.11599).

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

AT: I think most people would agree that marginalia is exciting because it provides access to unmediated responses from early readers, whether they are doodling in the margins (a moment of reverie), carefully signing and dating their books (moments of jealous possession), or inscribing comments between lines (moments of genuine engagement). Marginalia creates a sense of intimacy: Handwriting—ink on paper, where you can not only see but also feel the impressions of the words on the page—provides a haptic encounter with another person whose physical presence has otherwise vanished. It materially entangles two people across centuries in a way that is startlingly sensual (and also in the only way possible). I love this about archival work.

Editor: What marginalia are you working on now? 

AT: At the moment, most of my work with rare books is editorial. I’ve been working with Cavendish for some time; previously, with my Broadview edition of Grounds of Natural Philosophy (2020), I had been working with a British Library copy that was hand-corrected (although there were only minor changes). Now, Lara Dodds and I are expanding this work as we embark on a new compendium of her work for OUP; we’ll be comparing extant copies, incorporating errata pages and hand-written changes, etc. But this is probably not the most exciting answer!

Beyond Cavendish, I’ve just finished a piece on Anson’s Voyage that includes a short section on Naish’s obliteration of Anson’s textual authority. And this coming winter, I’ll be diving back into British archives, where all of my marginalia encounters tend to start, very accidentally. I will notice something, check if it’s been catalogued, try to figure out the derivation of the text, etc., and then I end up on a sleuthing mission that is nearly always productive… 

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

AT: Well, the future is probably in fantastic resources like this database, where we can more easily locate, compare, and organize marginalia, sharing resources and thus cutting down research time substantially. This will also allow us to create a broader, comparative rubric across larger data sets (so what kinds of texts tend to register what kinds of responses and when). This means more scholars can work on these materials, with or without funding or travel or extensive time in archives. So this is of course fantastic for opening up this type of research and broadening interest in the field. 

Broadly speaking, I also think the ‘new material’ turn in literary studies—with the renewed focus on material conditions, on texts as physical objects, and on human embeddedness in or commingling with the material world—lends itself pretty directly to the study of marginalia, as we continue to map out relationships between texts and people, past and present.

Although I should also say that I don’t think first-hand encounters—powerful, multi-sensory, temporally thrilling—will ever lose their hold on us. These encounters can be hard to predict and hugely productive, opening all kinds of avenues of inquiry one could never plan or expect. But the key difference is how easy these discoveries will be to share.

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

AT: I will take a cue from Swift and conclude with a something that undermines my own authority: I think the feeling of not knowing what a marginal note or scrawl means is in itself important. I have countless times found scribbles or symbols that must mean something to the writer, but am completely baffled when it comes to figuring out what that meaning is (I’m also not great with early handwriting!). But being suspended in a state of befuddlement isn’t a bad thing. In fact, reading, re-reading, and not understanding, remaining engaged but uncertain—not knowing—is itself is a critical posture that’s good for us all. It keeps us searching. 

The Newberry Library: An Introduction to Rare Books and Special Collections 

On By blaze wellingIn 17th century, OtherLeave a comment

Hello all, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Blaze Welling, and I am a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo in the English Language and Literature department. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dr. Acheson on the Early Modern Marginalia Research Network (EMMRN) project for almost a year now. 

In March, Dr. Acheson and I had the opportunity to go to the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) 2024 Conference in Chicago. To make the most of this trip, we jumped at the opportunity to visit the Newberry Library to see some early modern materials, specifically some versions of Richard Blome’s A Description of the Island of Jamaica; With the other Isles and Territories in AMERICA, to which the English are Related, viz, […] Taken from the Notes of Sr.Thomas Linch Knight, Governour of Jamaica and other Experienced Persons in the said Places. Illustrated with Maps […]. (Yes, the title is that long). 

As a new scholar in the field and someone who has not worked with early modern materials, this experience was eye-opening. The opportunity to look at texts predating 1800 was fascinating and the value that was placed on these materials at the Newberry was a humbling experience that I’m grateful for. 

I have included some photos of a 1672 version of the Blome text that we were able to look at. This 1672 imprint of A Description of the Island of Jamaica […] (Figure 1) made all the repository research I had conducted come to life. Being able to touch a text that was written so long ago (and without gloves!) was such a unique and wonderful opportunity. This visit gave me a newfound appreciation for the work Dr. Acheson set out on with the EMMRN and made me grateful that there are spaces that value books and their rich histories as much as they should be. 

(Fig.1,  [Newberry Rare Books and Special Collections Department] Cover Page. Blome, “A Description of the Island of Jamaica,” 1672, Case G81.106.) 

Finding a label of the text (See Figure 2) that we can only assume was the owner of this version made this history come to life for me. Someone held this text, valued it, and claimed it as their own in the form of marginalia such as this. It does make you wonder where this book travelled with Nickolls among many other likely unanswerable questions. Who had it before 1742? Were maps removed for personal use and never returned? These questions motivate me to continue my search in the archives and attempt to find some answers to what seems unanswerable now. I think this is the inclination of early modernists and reflects the heart, patience, and determination that is required to research such materials. 

(Fig.2, [Newberry Rare Books and Special Collections Department] Sticker with Name and Date. Blome, “A Description of the Island of Jamaica,” 1672, Case G81.106.) 

Thinking about the work done on the EMMRN and seeing these materials and the life that comes along with marginal notes came to life was exciting as a new scholar. I can see how pulling the signs of use of A Description of the Island of Jamaica […] together can give us a picture of how English-speaking people received information about their new imperial economy and the places in which it was developing.

I’m eager to see where this project goes and what other opportunities it will provide me and the many other scholars using the network for their research interests. 

Introducing BookMark (and A description of the island of Jamaica (1672-78))

On By Kathy AchesonIn 17th century, English, Other2 Comments

The principal objective of the Early Modern Marginalia Research Network, and especially the BookMark tool, is to reduce barriers to access to marginalia. At present, research in marginalia is limited to those with ready access to large, historic collections, or those with job security and research funds (or even better, both) that can allow for the kind of location-specific research that marginalia scholars undertake. These constraints mean that a) research topics may not accurately reflect the interests and trends of early modern studies in a broader sense because those who can do marginalia studies are a small and privileged subset of the field, and b) those who do research in marginalia work primarily on marginalia, rather than on a broader set of topics for which marginalia might produce meaningful evidence. These biases affect not just who does the work, but what kind of work gets done.  

To give an example of the opportunities that such a tool might make available, a scholar of British imperialism and the Caribbean might want to collect marginalia from all surviving copies of a work such as A description of the island of Jamaica; with the other isles and territories in America, to which the English are related, viz. Barbadoes, St. Christophers, Nievis, or Mevis, Antego, St. Vincent. Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla. Barbada, Bermudes, Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New-York, New-England, New-Found-Land. This book was issued four times between 1672 and 1678. According to the ESTC, there are more than 50 surviving copies in repositories in the UK, US, Europe, and Australia. I scanned the thumbnails of the four copies in EEBO, and there is marginalia in each one – nothing startling, signatures and ownership and gift claims, including this, in a copy now at the Bodleian: “Bibliothecae Ashmoleanae dedit Martinus Lister M. D.” This inscription means that that copy was part of a large collection of books that Martin Lister gave to the Ashmolean when it opened. But having a look at the copies outside of EEBO might yield further results. We’ve put requests for photos of any marginalia in all the surviving copies of this book in BookMark. You can search by location and see if there is a copy in a repository you might be able to visit.   

But there are other pathways to take with these tiny snips of book life from EEBO – there are other books with “Jamaica” in the title, and provenance, deaccession, and marginalia in them could create one of the many novel views available of the complex discursive and social worlds of early modern European empire, the early modern African slave trade, and the consequences of these we still live with. Heroic efforts have of course been made to collect marginalia in multiple copies of particular books. And we do collect this kind of marginalia, sometimes, some of us, but largely we depend on the goodwill of librarians to take and send photos, and therefore we are back to the value of institutional affiliation and status within the profession as part of the economy of goodwill. As Matthew Sangster, Karen Baston, and Brian Aitken write, “Digital technologies thus have the potential for allowing us to organize, reorganize, and potentially democratize knowledge by removing the constraints imposed by physical space and the manners of thinking it imposes” (Sangster, Baston, and Aitken 951). Along with Sangster, Baston, and Aitken, I assume that lowering barriers to access will support not only broader participation in marginalia research (that is, open the field beyond old white people like me), but the use of marginalia as evidence in support of diverse projects not centrally concerned with marginalia per se.  

It helps to remember what kind of scale we are talking about here. William Sherman estimated from his research that 20% of surviving early modern printed books have marginalia of some sort in them. Sherman’s sample – the 7500 volumes in the Huntington Library’s STC collection – is from a relatively modern collection, and it is certainly dependent on curatorial selection; both influence the likelihood of marginalia in the books in the collection. But it depends too what we think of as marginalia – if we broaden our attention to include anything that modifies or supplements the contents of a book – a rust stain from a pair of glasses, an interleaf, a bookplate, a hand-embellished capital, and so on – we will extend our purview considerably. One of the copies of the book about Jamaica at the Bodleian (W.I.C. 21) includes the following information in copy-specifc notes: there is a bookplate of “The Hamilton Palace Library Beckford Collection,” and an inscription to the effect that Bernard Quaritch bought the book at Sotheby’s in 1882; there is “a pencil note on Jamaica on the second free endleaf recto” which is on the map, I think, and other minor notes, possibly former shelfmarks or booksellers annotations. The book was previously owned by the West India Committee, and held at Rhodes House Library. There is a whole history embedded here in these copy-specific notes of a topic which is of great importance. There’s enough in this example to start a research project with, whether the focus is on the books or on any of the phenomena that their use and circulation are related to.  It is the aim of this project to support this kind of research and diversify who does research in marginalia and what we do with it.

Works cited

Sangster, Matthew, Karen Baston, and Brian Aitken. “Reconstructing student Reading Habits in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow: Enlightenment Systems and Digital Reconfigurations.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54(2021)4: 935-955.

Renske Hoff: Streepjescode 

On By Kathy AchesonIn OtherLeave a comment

Dr. Renske Hoff specializes in late-medieval religious book culture, with a particular focus on the use and transmission of Middle Dutch biblical texts. She is Assistant Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). Her recent research concerns the readers of early-sixteenth-century Dutch Bibles and their reading practices. She is currently developing a research project on the use and users of Middle Dutch psalters in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in which she combines perspectives from literary studies, religious studies, and book history. 

Editor: Do you remember your first marginalia?  

RH: One of the first marginalia I encountered was a note in a early-sixteenth-century Dutch Bible. A parent wrote down the birthdays of their two daughters in the margins of the liturgical reading schedule in the Bible. I was touched by the personal character of the note and it got me thinking about the various roles a book, and a Bible in particular, could play in a person’s life: not only as a carrier of text and a devotional object, but also as an open space for personal memories and the formation of identities.  

Editor: What do you find most interesting or powerful about marginalia? Can you give us an example?  

RH: In 1998, the Dutch writer and comedian Kees Torn wrote a song called ‘Streepjescode’ [Barcode], about the book collection of his late father (see: https://youtu.be/Caad5lsLc7k). He sings about how his father, whom he barely got to know, marked his books with pencil, underlining sentences. Torn writes: ‘Je hebt per ongeluk een zelfportret geschetst in streepjescode’ [‘You have accidentally sketched a self portrait in barcode’]. To me, that is the magic of marginalia. We often have little clue to why a certain book-user left a certain note, coloured a certain woodcut, pasted in a certain image. Still, in their marginalia, readers and book-users leave an image of themselves. A fleeting moment of interaction solidifies on the page, safely remaining for centuries between the protective boards of the book. As marginalia researchers, we can see the vague but irresistible reflections of other individuals that once slid their fingers between the pages of the same book we are holding now. Marginalia allow us a glimpse behind the curtains of passing time.  

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

RH: I think we’re moving away from marginalia studies as merely the study of the annotations of exceptional individuals and are broadening our understanding of the concept of marginalia, including verbal as well as non-verbal traces of reading and book use. I think these developments are crucial in creating a more inclusive field of study, in which spaces can be opened up for those voices that have been marginalized even in marginalia studies. Marginalia in the traditional sense of the word were often left by male, white, abled-bodied, scholarly people. These people have thus received ample attention in marginalia studies. However, premodern texts and books were used by a much wider variety of people, including people of colour, disabled people, and women. We need new ways of understanding and studying marginalia and readers’ traces to allow their voices to come through. 

Image 1: Dutch New Testament printed by Christoffel Plantijn in 1577 (Leuven: Maurits Sabbe Library P22.055.1/BIBL N.T. 1577). The inscription can be translated as: ‘This book belongs to Elisabet Imberecht; whoever finds it will receive a piece of silver [silver ring], but who demands even more will receive a blow to his ribs. 1676.” 

Cristoph Sander: Marginalia and the Horizons of Interpretation

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Today’s interview features Christoph Sander. He studied philosophy in Freiburg and Berlin. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. from the Technische Universität Berlin with a thesis on the conceptions of magnetism in the early-modern period. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome (Max Planck Institute for Art History) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His interests include the digital humanities, www.raramagnetica.de being his main platform to share his digital research.

Editor: What got you interested in marginalia?  

CS: I initially became interested in marginalia because they offer an intimate insight into the reception of a text at a specific time. Simply put, I wanted to see what a past reader spontaneously noted in their own copy. I was especially intrigued to see if this specific interest could be linked to the broader reception of a work. 

Editor: Do you remember your first marginalia?  

The first marginalia I examined as a historian were from the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s writings. I noticed that translators oddly translated Aristotle’s rare use of the word “demon” as “scientia”. Without delving into why they chose this translation, it was evident that individual readers of these translations either restored the original word “demon” in the margins or, conversely, added the translation next to another passage containing the word “demon”. I have written on this: Christoph Sander, “Der Dämon im Text: lateinische Lesarten von De somno 453b22 und De divinatione per somnum 463b12 zwischen 1150 und 1650,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 83, no. 2 (2016): 245–311.

Image 1: Aristotle, Textus Paruorumnaturalium Arestotelis per tractatus [et] capitula distinct[us] De nouo emendat[us], Leipzig 1496–99. Source: HAB Wolfenbüttel (A: 95.7 Quod. 2° (2)).

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

CS: As mentioned, I’m drawn to marginalia primarily because they provide a close look into readers’ understanding and interpretive horizon. This is particularly intriguing as it often reveals subversive readings that may not be captured in the reception history. Lately, another aspect has caught my attention: I aim to learn more about the contexts for marginalia, such as which themes in texts are most frequently annotated by readers. I view marginalia broadly as any intentional trace of reading and sense-making, including not just text in the margins but also underlining, strikethroughs, dog ears, and any marking interpretable as a trace of reading. Evaluating these traces quantitatively in relation to the subjects covered in the marked texts provides a complex network. Analyzing this network practically requires powerful computers and specific models. Also, a large amount of material is necessary to make connections visible. 

Editor: What marginalia are you working on now?  

CS: In my “Magnetic Margins” project, I’ve examined all the copies of early modern editions of certain works on magnetism and recorded all reading traces in a database. This database is publicly available at www.magnetic-margins.com. The benefit of this approach is that it’s essentially the same text across hundreds of copies. Thus, statistically, it’s relatively easy to determine which content particularly interested readers. The more markings related to specific content, the more interest in that content can be inferred. My hypothesis is that marking a chunk of text reflects an interest in its conceptual content. This assumption seems especially plausible for scientific texts. 

Image 2: Preliminary statistical graphical evaluation for William Gilbert’s De magnete (PNG download). All annotations are summed per chapter across all copies of all four editions and multiplied by the number of copies in which the corresponding chapter was annotated. This results in a relative weighting (so absolute y-values are irrelevant), which normalizes if very few copies have very many annotations for a chapter.

Editor: What do you see as the future of marginalia studies?  
 
CS: I believe the future of this research field lies primarily in collaboration – not only among researchers but also between researchers and libraries, and between researchers and IT specialists. There are already initial experiments using artificial intelligence to automatically identify marginalia in scans. This would be a huge help, even if it’s not always 100% accurate. 

Editor: Is there anything else you want to tell us?  
 
CS: I find it notable that there isn’t a unified vocabulary for describing marginalia. While the reasons are clear, library sciences have typically been more pragmatic. Historians and philologists, deeply engaged with this phenomenon of marginalia, sometimes overemphasize minute specific differences or discuss historical categories at a very abstract level, rather than recognizing the potential of a shared vocabulary. This shared vocabulary, even if imperfect or somewhat anachronistic at points, can create international synergies for collaboration. Furthermore, it’s disappointing that many libraries still don’t provide their scans with an open license. This can complicate the lawful use of this material and can sometimes be prohibitively expensive.  

Bill Sherman: Marginalia and Mentors

On By Kathy AchesonIn OtherLeave a comment

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.