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)