Sherman 2008

Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

avoiding words "marginalia" and "reading": "These terms tend to bring with them a set of modern cultural assumptions and disciplinary tools that do not fit well with the evidence that survives from the pre-modern archive." (xiii)

instead, "book use", pulling from Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio (xiii), themselves drawing on Geoffrey Whitney (Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit)

"I am endorsing Stoddard's suggestion that textual scholars must also be anthropologists and archaeologists, putting books alongside the other objects taht can help us to reconstruct the material, mental, and cultural worlds of our forebears" (xiv)

Simon Goldhill, "Literary History without Literature"; "perhaps it is time to call for a history of reading without reading?" (xv)

• c.f. statistical analysis of texts, "distant reading"...

"the ineluctable specificity of readers and readings, and it is this (I would suggest) rahter than the fragmentary nature of the evidence that makes marginalia resistant to grand theories and master narratives" (xvi)

Introduction: Used Books

Renaissance readers taught to write/mark in books; John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (1612) (3)

• act as aid to memory (4)
• make use of the book: "reading is just part of the process that makes for fruitful interaction with books. Only with marking and practice can books lead us to the kind of understanding needed to make them speak to our present needs" (4)

"Printed images and texts were part of a dynamic ecology of use and reuse, leading to transformation and destruction as well as to preservation." (6)

by the end of c16, increasingly common for readers to take notes in notebooks or tablets (7)

"Looked at from the user's rather than the producer's perspective, there are significant continuities across the 'Medieval-Renaissance' divide -- not only in the visual forms of books but in the transformative techniques employed by their readers." (7)

cutting up and combining texts (9)

Natalie Zemon Davis: book as "carrier of relationships" (qtd on 18)

"marginalia" not generally used as term in Renaissance England; scholias, notes, glosses (20), adversia, animadversion, graffiti, epigraphs (22-3); comes into use in c19

• "The term becomes fixed, oddly enough, just as the practice it describes begins to wane -- or rather to be narrowed into an increasingly privileged form of writerly behavior on the one hand, and an increasingly transgressive form of readerly behavior on the other." (20-1)

pg23-4: possibility of taxonomizing marks across different platforms by their function (e.g., owners marks on books, owners marks on walls)

objects as exograms, external repositories for memories (John Sutton, drawing on Arjun Appadurai) (24)

Towards a History of the Manicule

between c12-18, possibly most common symbols used by readers in books (29); no standard name! (33)

"This practice [manicules] provides some of our most graphic evidence that after the printing press begins to give readers books that are relatively uniform, accurate, and easy to navigate, readers continue to customize them according to their needs and tastes." (36)

hand of God; hands on volvelles, pointers (37)

"clarify the organization of the text and ... to help individual readers to find their way around that structure and put their hands on passages of particular interest" (41)

"Far and away the most common function of the manicule was simply pointing to a passage that someone involved in producing or using the book considered worth noting: this is true of many printed manicules and the vast majority of the manuscript examples I have encountered." (43)

commonplacing, sententiae (44)

why bother?

• must "appreciate the extent to which, and the ways in which, the book and the hand were bound together in premodern culture" (47)
• early modern readers were trained in "manipulation of information -- in selecting, ordering, and applying resources gleaned from a wide variety of texts" (47)

gathering of flowers -- florilegium

modern readers aren't aware of their hands making their way through the book; in c16-7, though, "reading was a self-consciously embodied practice, no less a manual art than writing or printing; and readers picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand" (48)

• John Bulwer, Chirologia, "'Chironomia

indexicality -- Wittgenstein, Augustine's Confessions and ostensive definition

manicule is at once icon, index and symbol in Pierce's definitions (50-1)

Heideggarian Zuhandenheit ("readiness-to-hand)

"It is possible that, after a signature and a monogram, the manicule was the most personal symbol a reader could develop and deploy." (51)

"With modern readers, their handwriting is going to be distinctive while their symbols will tend to look pretty much like other people's symbols. For early modern readers it is the other way around -- their symbols, and in particular their pointing hands, are more likely to be recognizably theirs." (52)

Reading the Matriarchive

Derrida, Archive Fever; domiciliation / house arrest of the archive

• considering the role that women played in archival practices of early modern period

difficulty of establishing female ownership (56)

books to celebrate eminent women of the past: Thomas Bentley's monument of Matrons (1`582), Thomas Heywood's Gynaikeion (1624)

manuscript compilations made by women: commonplace books, etc. (58)

"There is some evidence ... that women used the printed books in their households not simply for guides to proper devotion or conduct but to store and circulate individual and collective records -- in other words, in just the same way that they used manuscript compilations." (59)

"strong sense in which the book is serving as an official place for individual readers or groups of readers to take stock -- of their families, their beliefs, their belongings, and their textual resources" (61)

Lady Anne Clifford; adorning her house with sayings (65)

Marking the Bible

early literacy meant reading the bible (72)

expected to find the Holy Book less marked than others; but incidence of marginalia "turns out to be almost identical" to that of the whole STC collection at Huntington

"How to take profite by reading of the holy Scriptures," published in many editions of the Geneva Bible (73)

"Signatures and other ownership notes are, predictably, the most common inscriptions and were one of the principal ways of not simply signaling that the Scriptures had become personal property but of placing the book in space and time -- and using the book, indeed, to mark one's own place in history, particularly after books had passed through multiple households or descended through multiple generations in a single family" (76)

not unusual to find variant versions / alternative translations copied in margins (79)

vogue for putting bibles in embroidered bindings in Tutor and Stuart England (80); "the function of these bindings is more than merely decorative. They are one of the places where we can see the persistence of religious images after Protestant scripturalism and iconoclasm have taken root in England, largely supplanting the image with the word and effectively banishing illustrations from the texts of Bibles and prayer books" (80)

categories of readers' marks in printed Bibles in first 100 yrs after break with Rome:

• ownership notes
• penmanship exercise
• cross-references
• liturgical instructions
• numbers of pages, chapters, verses
• corrections
• polemical notes
• dating

pious vs. impious marks -- Bible put in every "vulgar hand," now used less delicately (83-4)

An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

manuscript book of common prayer, made ~ 1560s

woodcut initials from printed books added in

"There are useful reminders of the fact that many books outlived the contexts for which they were originally produced, remaining meaningful and/or useful to readers who were willing to update them." (92) -- remixing historical past / residual media to meet current media ecology

"hybrid confections" of manuscript and print (Sandra Hindman)

books being cut up and destroyed, used as bookbinding materials, during the Reformation (102); could the initials have come from these books? if so, interesting that books burned for their Catholicism are remixed into manuscript book of common prayer

"the sue of scissor and paste was by no means inherently sacrilegious in the c16. It played a more central role in Tudor and Stuart textual culture than we have tended to realized, and is in fact part of a very long tradition of cutting and pasting with the best and even holiest of intentions" (103)

• Mary Erler, "Pasted-in Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books, c. 1480-1533"
• Ursula Weekes, Early Engravers and their Public' -- suggests cutting/pasting as devotional work of women in religious communities
• Little Gidding citation

leaf books -- collectors editions on early printed books, accompanied by cut leaf from the original (105)

problems of exceptional evidence; this book is "stubbornly transitional, almost uncannily in-between: it takes us across the traditional divide between script and print but also into a number of other early Elizabethan middle grounds" (108) (professional/amateur, production/consumption, public/private, Catholic/Protestant, medieval/Renaissance)

Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni and marginal cases

John Dee's Columbian Encounter

"One of the most consistent features of Dee's marginalia as a whole is their attention to the conditions of textual production and reception." (119) -- notes authorship, ownership, use of texts

traces of Dee's marginal conversations with Columb "are more trivial and tedious than uncannily ful of the will to be heard. They are bound to strike us as less compelling than the dramatic stories of exploration, piracy, and colonization ... [and they] lack, for the most part, the psychological and creative intensity that modern readers have come to look for in engagements with texts. " (126)