Tribble 1993

Tribble, Evelyn B. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003.

Introduction: Whose Text?

"I am concerned with books, the text embodied. More than embodied: dressed, bedecked, adorned -- with prefatory matter, illustrations, and most importantly, marginal notes."

"Modern editions which omit such accompanying matter in effect rewrite the text by effacing evidence of its collaborative nature, of the conversation between a text and its margins, of the play made possible by the space of the page." (1)

medieval period -- authority / auctor "always an other, located outside the writer and conferring authority from a historical distance" (2)

"The margins are not consistently a sit of subversion, consolidation, or containment, to invoke the rather limited possibilities offered by current historically oriented Renaissance debates. Rather, i argue that the margins and the text proper were in shifting relationships of authority; the margin might affirm, summarize, underwrite the main text block and thus tend to stabilize meaning, but it might equally assume a contestatory or parodic relation to the text by which it stood." (6)

Bible

• "tension between the desire to provide texts of the Bible and the fears engendered by the specter of its uncontrolled circulation" (7)
• "The history of the English printed Bible cannot be told apart from its margins" (7)
• marginal notes -- tried to both quiet and excite controversy

Authority, Control, Community: The English Printed Bible Page from Tyndale to the Authorized Version

Melanchton "declares a new mode of reading: 'Now away with so many frigid petty glosses, these harmonizings and "disharmonies" and other hindrances to intelligence'"