Early Modern English Marginalia / Edition 1

by Katherine Acheson

Overview

Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit- ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu- scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume build on earlier scholarship that established marginalia as an intellec- tual method (Grafton and Jardine), as records of reading motivated by cultural, social, theological, and personal inclinations (Brayman [Hackel] and Orgel), and as practices inspired by material affordances particular to the book and the pen (Fleming and Sherman). They further the study of the practices of marginalia as a mode – a set of ways in which material opportunities and practices overlap with intellectual, social, and personal motivations to make meaning in the world. They introduce us to a set of idiosyncratic examples such as the trace marks of objects left in books, deliberately or by accident; cut-and-pasted additions to printed volumes; a marriage depicted through shared book ownership. They reveal to us in case studies the unique value of mar- ginalia as evidence of phenomena as important and diverse as religious change, authorial self-invention, and the history of the literary canon. The chapters of this book go beyond the case study, however, and raise broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions about the strange, marvelous, metamorphic thing we call the book, and the equally mul- tiplicitous, eccentric, and inscrutable beings who accompany them through history: readers and writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415418850
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/20/2018
Series:	Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Katherine Acheson is a Professor of English Language and Literature and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. "Cast me not away from thy face": Marginal Reflections on the English Reformation

3. Articles of Assent: Clergymen's subscribed copies of the Thirty—‐Nine Articles of the Church of England

4. Plus ça change: Renaissance Images in Medieval Books

5. Managing Animals: Sixteenth—‐Century Ecologies of Annotation

6. Studied for Redaction: Reading and Writing in the Works of John Higgins

7. Marginalia as Making: Robert Nicolson's Books

8. Marking Objects in Early Modern Books

9. Vide Supplementum: The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio in Seventeenth—‐Century England

10. Anne Clifford’s Copy of John Selden’s Titles of Honor

11. Marital Marginalia: The Library of Thomas and Isabella Hervey

12. Reading Mathematics in the Seventeenth Century: Evidence from Robert Hooke’s Notes and Marginalia

13. Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter

14. Afterword

Editorial Reviews

‘A wide-ranging and scholarly collection of essays, addressing early-modern marginalia from many different angles – this is the best expression of where scholarship currently is in this growth area of research.’ William Poole, New College, Oxford

From the Publisher