Early Modern English Marginalia

Katherine Acheson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780415418850
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351857253
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Literature

Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit- ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu- scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume build on earlier scholarship that established marginalia as an intellec- tual method (Grafton and Jardine), as records of reading motivated by cultural, social, theological, and personal inclinations (Brayman [Hackel] and Orgel), and as practices inspired by material affordances particular to the book and the pen (Fleming and Sherman). They further the study of the practices of marginalia as a mode – a set of ways in which material opportunities and practices overlap with intellectual, social, and personal motivations to make meaning in the world. They introduce us to a set of idiosyncratic examples such as the trace marks of objects left in books, deliberately or by accident; cut-and-pasted additions to printed volumes; a marriage depicted through shared book ownership. They reveal to us in case studies the unique value of mar- ginalia as evidence of phenomena as important and diverse as religious change, authorial self-invention, and the history of the literary canon. The chapters of this book go beyond the case study, however, and raise broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions about the strange, marvelous, metamorphic thing we call the book, and the equally mul- tiplicitous, eccentric, and inscrutable beings who accompany them through history: readers and writers.

Section 1

Materialities

1 Reading Habits and Reading Habitats; or, toward an Ecobibliography of Marginalia

Joshua Calhoun

It may have simply been the next logical step for book historians, especially those thinking about the sociology of texts in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the rise of e-books so strikingly correlates, chronologically, to a scholarly interest in readerly annotation practices that one is tempted to assert causation. In 1989, the year before Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Project Gutenberg added its tenth book—The King James Bible—to its digital corpus.¹ The Sony Bookman appeared in 1992, as did Roger Chartier’s L’ordre des livres (1992).² In 1994, Lydia G. Cochrane’s English translation of that work, The Order of Books, was published, and Project Gutenberg added its 100th book (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare). In 1995 when William H. Sherman’s John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance appeared, Project Gutenberg was adding sixteen books per month; the next year that number doubled to thirty-two per month and David M. Bergeron’s essay collection Reading and Writing in Shakespeare was published. In 1998, the SoftBook Reader, the Rocket eBook Reader, and Adrian John’s The Nature of the Book were released. If my goal really were to argue for causation, I might go on tracking, year by year, the coincidental rise of e-readers and scholarly studies of Renaissance readers. Right in the midst of the timeline, just before a series of breakthrough devices such as Sony Reader (2006), Amazon Kindle (2007), Apple iPhone (2007), Barnes & Noble Nook (2009), and Apple iPad (2010), we would find Heidi Brayman’s Reading Material in Early Modern England (2005), a defining work in the history of early modern reading that shifted focus from professional scholars (such as Harvey and Dee) to “less extraordinary readers.”³ In the opening sentence, Brayman reflects on the book historical context of her own work: “This book was written over a decade that brought electronic communication and literacy into the offices and homes of a great variety of readers.”⁴ She goes on to suggest that the “proliferation of electronic media and its displacement of print have prompted a range of questions” such as “What practices does the codex encourage and allow?” “What should be preserved of this medium?” and “What might an electronic book look like?” From Brayman’s first sentence, we begin to learn about a period of new and exciting variety of readers of all kinds of printed books, and we learn all this in a study that was conceived during a period of new and exciting variety of readers of all kinds of e-books.

I can now read Brayman’s opening sentence in my printed copy or I can read the opening sentence in an electronic copy on Google Books, but things would get tricky if I tried to do the same kind of reading with both printed book and e-book.⁵ In my printed copy, next to the passage quoted above, I have scribbled the words “great variety of e-readers” in black ink in the outer margin.⁶ The writing is small and fits snugly in the 2 cm margin as a two-line annotation. It is evidence of a simple textual interaction, but one that would be impossible in an e-book version of Reading Material. Even if the annotation had no ts to cross, an action that can send an electronic page into spasms, I could never write sharply enough with a stylus to make an identical e-annotation. Or I would need to pinch, spread, scale, enlarge, or otherwise manipulate page or writing space or both. Or I would have to type the note instead of writing it. Or try to do one of the above and find I had “flipped” back to the Table of Contents. “Marginalia are supposed to be spontaneous and fluent,” writes Mark O’Connell in a 2012 New Yorker essay on marginalia.⁷ Instead, “‘[n]oting’ something on a Kindle feels like e-mailing yourself a throwaway remark.” In short, makers of e-readers have failed spectacularly when it comes to designing an e-book experience that allows an active reader to easily annotate its margins.⁸ With e-books in the twenty-first century, the problem is a feeling of being manually divorced from the text. The interface is clunky and unintuitive, and readers apparently feel they cannot get at the thing itself with their hands. It leaves one wanting the relative simplicity of pen and paper.

Brayman’s experience writing about margin-marking readers against the backdrop of an e-reader revolution has a mirroring counter-experience: Erik Schmitt was helping to design the first Kindle in 2007 when he inherited some of his grandfather’s books—books “filled with notations, comments, tick marks and translations,” with, as Schmitt puts it, “the thought process and interests of someone long gone.”⁹ He eventually created a visually rich online archive, the Pages Project, which explores material acts of reading and “the nature of the book as a transitory physical object in a digital age.” On the site and in interviews, Schmitt talks about his design work on the Kindle being part of a “disruptive revolution of communication” that would not only “transform” certain book models and features but also “eradicate” others.¹⁰ Whether handwritten marginal notes in e-books will be transformed or eradicated remains to be seen. A 2011 article in The Atlantic claims that “[a]t present, annotating an e-book with a stylus is about as handy as marking up a Norton anthology with a Crayola.”¹¹ The simile is apt, even painful. All the more so because, more than half a decade and dozens of hardware and software updates after the Atlantic article appeared, the same issues remain. The active book users I imagine reading this essay might, like me, prefer the fate of Tantalus to the prospect of spending an eternity alternately trying to annotate the margins of a printed book with a crayon and the margins of an e-book with a stylus.

The e-book context outlined above sets up the following simple thought experiment—a thought experiment that can help us see some common but erroneous assumptions that we tend to make about handwritten annotations in early printed books. Suppose three things:

1. By the year 2030, makers of e-readers have used haptic feedback and/or some other innovation to clear the design hurdle that has tripped them up so far.
2. E-annotation, in this brave new world, becomes not only possible but pleasurable, and readers take up the new technology with zeal.
3. Four hundred years later, in 2430, scholars studying annotation archives dating back to the earliest e-readers observe a gap in the marginal record. Instead of dwelling on this gap, they might surmise that readers of the earliest e-technologies were simply less interested in annotation.

To assume a lack of readerly interest in annotation in the early days of e-readers would, of course, be a scholarly oversight. Those twenty-fifth-century scholars would be missing some crucial bits of information. Lack of annotation in the early years of e-books is merely a symptom; lack of “annotatability” is the underlying condition. Just as scholars of the future might mistake a lack of annotatability for a lack of interest in annotation, scholars of early modern books tend to speak of books as either annotated or not annotated without considering whether or not the average book in England c. 1600 was annotatable in the first place.¹²

Studies of the history of reading have generally taken for granted the fact that readers could write in their books. In the traditional view, a volume either is or is not annotated with manuscript notes, but its “annotatability” is not questioned. For instance, in an expansive, major contribution to the history of reading, William H. Sherman draws from an impressive data sample in order to better comprehend and analyze Renaissance readers’ “patterns of use.”¹³ Sherman’s data sample is the entire Short Title Catalog (STC) at the Henry E. Huntington Library; he found that 1,531 of the 7,526 STC books, or 20.3 percent, “contain manuscript notes by early readers (not just signatures, underlining, and nonverbal symbols but more or less substantial writing).”¹⁴ From these scattered notes, a picture of Renaissance readers begins to emerge. These examples, Sherman observes, “can reveal…large-scale patterns of use and . . . can correct some of our most deep-seated assumptions about reading and readers.”¹⁵ But historical records suggest that early printed books, like early e-readers, were not always annotation-friendly reading objects. Sherman’s investigation of available evidence reveals a great deal about how historical readers used the books that have survived to the present day; however, making an argument about “large-scale patterns of use” based on percentages is trickier. Percentages assume that we are looking at a representative sample, a point Sherman raises when he claims that “the practice [of marking books with manuscript notes] must have been much more widespread” than his findings indicate, in part because “the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was to decay.”¹⁶ And yet the data suggest the direct opposite was true in some cases; some books, especially large books, that were meant to be heavily used were less vulnerable to decay. Their pages were generously coated with an animal gelatin that allowed readers to write with water-based ink, and this coating, in turn, has tended to preserve historical papers over time.¹⁷ Andrew Pettegree has convincingly argued that “diversification of format” was the strategy of “pragmatic,” profit- oriented early printers, who developed “new types of book[s] for new types of reader[s].” As I will argue here, the practice of coating the pages of a printed book with gelatin sizing was an added cost, one that savvy printers with an eye toward diverse book options for diverse book buyers had ways of reducing or even eliminating.¹⁸ And yet the important role that gelatin sizing plays in early printed books, from production to consumption, has been largely overlooked or misunderstood in book history scholarship.

Anyone who has turned the pages of an expensive, well-made sixteenth-century folio can probably recall the thickness and crispne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Marginalia, Reading, and Writing
• SECTION 1 Materialities
• SECTION 2 Selves
• SECTION 2 Modes
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index