Richards and Schurink 2010

"The Textuality and Materiality of Reading in Early Modern England." Edited by Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink. Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (September 2010).

Introduction (Richards and Schurink)

"Models of utilitarian reading have often encouraged literary scholars to neglect the text. The focus on the records of reading—for example, marginalia and commonplace books—in isolation from other sources, and especially more literary, textual sources, and from the context of their use in early modern England has brought many scholars to the conclusion that contemporary readers tended to extract brief quotations with scant respect for their meaning and context in the larger text, and furthermore, that annotators and compilers of commonplace books read not to understand or appreciate texts on their own terms but with an eye to the application of these detachable textual fragments to the circumstances of their own lives." (351)

"To be blunt, if one’s only evidence of reading is fragments of texts, what conclusions can be drawn other than that readers “read in parts,” most likely out of self-interest?" (352)

"The dissolution of the original text into discrete fragments was not an end in itself but merely a first step in a process that was ultimately directed to the creation of new, and often morally thoughtful, writing." (353) -- discussing schoolboy manuals

Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book (Jason Scott-Warren)

names: "most prominent" form of graffiti in books (366); "tagging" books, even books that aren't one's own ("John Rogers / not his book"); abundance of signatures marking more than ownership -- "pen-trial" marks