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)