Used Books

1. Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained, 1. Stoddard revisits the catalogue and repeats this passage in “Looking at Marks in Books,” 27.

2. Since Stoddard there have been a number of exhibitions specifically devoted to the marks of readers from the European Renaissance: see Bernard M. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal Collection of Printed Books with Manuscript Annotations; John Considine (ed.); Adversaria: Sixteenth-Century Books and the Traces of Their Readers; Sabrina Alcorn Baron (ed.), The Reader Revealed; and Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700. It is also worth singling out the recent sale catalogues of Maggs Bros. for their exemplary attention to marginalia and other marks left behind by early readers—see especially Books and Readers in Early Modern Britain (1510–1815) (catalogue no. 1293), Books and Readers in Early Modern Britain (1478–1700) (catalogue no. 1324), and Books and Readers in Early Modern Britain (catalogue no. 1393).

3. See particularly Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books,” and Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers. Other useful disciplinary histories can be found in Bernard M. Rosenthal’s preface to The Rosenthal Collection; Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England; Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England; Steven N. Zwicker, “Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation”; Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England; and Adolfo Tura, “Essay sur les marginalia et tant que pratique et documents.”

4. William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. See also Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature; Anthony Grafton, “John Dee Reads Books of Magic”; and Hilde Norrgrén, “Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee’s Reading of Pantheus’s Voarchadumia.”

5. On Harvey, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” and Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of His Life, Marginalia, and Library; on Jonson, see Robert C. Evans, Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading, and James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism; on Jones, see Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition; on Blount, see Fred Schurink, “ ‘Like a hand in the margine of a Booke’: William Blount’s Marginalia and the Politics of Sidney’s Arcadia”; on Drake, see Sharpe, Reading Revolutions; on Montaigne, see André Tournon, Montaigne: La glose et l’essai, and M. A. Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes and Pen-marks; and on Kepler and Budé, see Grafton, Commerce with the Classics.

6. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 137–95; H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, 165–78; Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Steven N. Zwicker compares the marginalia in a number of copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost in “ ‘What every literate man once knew’: Tracing Readers in Early Modern England”; Elaine Whitaker classifies the marginalia in sixteen copies of Caxton’s Royal Book in her “Collaboration of Readers”; and in “What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Copies of Chaucer?” Alison Wiggins describes the marginalia preserved in more than fifty copies of Renaissance editions of Chaucer.

7. Jonathan Rose, review of Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, 251.

8. That is, the books catalogued in A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, and K. F. Pantzer, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. In the Huntington’s rare book stacks, the STC books are stored as a group, in the order of their STC numbers (and therefore in alphabetical order by author’s name). Other STC titles are scattered throughout the more specialized collections and in the vaults that house the especially rare volumes.

9. I deposited a copy of my notes with the rare book curators at the Huntington, with the hope that it would help their cataloguers and researchers. While some libraries have traditionally kept index card files of former owners, better catalogues of marginalia are badly needed to help future scholars locate the past readers and readings that interest them; and researchers will need to collaborate with cataloguers. Robin C. Alston’s Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library is a useful start, but since it is based entirely on the incomplete listings in the British Library’s old printed catalogues it will need to be updated and added to the fuller records that electronic catalogues allow. In this respect (if not in all others), the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a vast improvement on the printed STC since, for some libraries at least, it gives details of copy-specific features—including marginalia.

11. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia; cf. her earlier article, “Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities,” her retrospective essay, “ ‘Marginal Frivolities’: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading,” and her more specialized collection, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia.

12. For similar misgivings, see the extended reviews of Jackson’s Marginalia by Nicolas Barker and David C. Greetham.

14. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems (Leiden, 1586), 171 (emphasis mine). The emblem can be read in both positive and negative terms and Patrick Collinson has suggested that Perne may well have served (like the Reader-Fool depicted in Figure 34 below) as another example of a reader who cared more for show than for practice.

17. Simon Goldhill, “Literary History Without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World,” 84.

19. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, chap. 1; cf. Chartier’s “Labourers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader,” “Texts, Printings, Readers,” and his contributions to Pratiques de la lecture and to Cavallo and Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West.

20. [William Cecil,] The Execution of Justice in England (London: Christopher Barker, 1583).

21. [Cardinal William Allen,] A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics: the place and date of publication are carefully concealed, but the STC identifies them as Rouen: Fr. Parsons’ Press, 1584. The Huntington’s copy is RB 60060.

23. J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601, 153. The footnote here reads “L’Historia Ecclesiastica della Rivioluzion d’Inghilterra (Rome, 1594), now belonging to Professor Gordon of Reading University, who most kindly allowed me to see it.”

1. The OED also indicates that “mark” can be traced to the same Indo-European base word as “margin,” a connection that may derive from one of the earliest and most physical senses of marking, “To trace out boundaries; to plot” (early Old English).

2. This was hardly a period of universal access to education, of course, and not all readers went to school. For useful guides to current thinking about questions of literacy in early modern England, see Heidi Brayman Hackel’s Reading Material in Early Modern England, esp. the section on 52 ff. concerning “reading, writing, speaking, and spelling,” and Ian Frederick Moulton’s introduction to his edited collection, Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

3. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: or, The Grammar School, 46. Peter Mack usefully compares Brinsley’s lessons to those of Guarino, Agricola, Erasmus, and other humanist educators in his essay “Renaissance Habits of Reading,” and takes a closer look at his rhetorical teaching in “Rhetoric, Ethics and Reading in the Renaissance.”

4. Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 150–51: “Let them haue their paper books in octauo, of the one side to write the English which you giue them; on the other to set the Latine directly ouer against it, and word for word. To this end cause them to rule their bookes both sides at once, or at least the lines of one side directly against the other: their lines a good distance asunder, that they may interline any thing, if they misse any word; or for copie and varietie, to be set ouer the head if you will. On the first side toward the right hand, in which the English is to be set, to leaue a lesser margent: on the other side for the Latine a greater margent; because the Latine may bee written in a lesse space then the English; and also to write all the hard words in the margent of the Latine, and Nominatiue case of the Nowne and the first person of the Verbe, if so you please. Then cause so many as are to write Latine together (hauing books, pen, inke and copie before them, and euery thing so fitted) to write as you speake, so faire as possibly they can.”

7. Jardine and Grafton, “ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” 30.

9. Jan van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a City, Fifteenth Century to 1585, 173.

10. Roger Stoddard, “Looking at Marks in Books,” 32. Steven N. Zwicker, too, has noted this paradox: “Like other modes of consumption, reading seems to deny its material premise” (“Habits of Reading and Early Modern Literary Culture,” 171).

11. Monique Hulvey, “Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula,” 161. Cf. my full discussion of this matter in Chapter 8 below.

12. The Bridgewater library—which forms the largest part of the Huntington’s STC collection—displays a clear preference for clean copies: its proportion of annotated books is considerably lower than the average for the whole collection (though this may be partly accounted for by the high proportion of literary texts, since that is the subject with the fewest annotations across the board). For an account of Huntington’s attitudes and strategies as a collector, see Donald C. Dickson, Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries.

13. In a recent collection of essays on modern readers’ marks, Daniel Ferrer (“Towards a Marginalist Economy”) divided annotators into two groups: “marginalists” (whose notes are closely connected to the passages they comment on) and “extractors” (who “dismember” the text by transferring excerpts into notebooks). See Dirk Van Hulle and Wim Van Mierlo, “Reading Notes: Introduction.” I am grateful to Ann Blair for sharing this volume with me.

14. Peter Blayney has also suggested to me that the white space around texts would have been an important place to store memoranda: certain books were likely to occupy special places in the households—and memories—of Renaissance readers.

16. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the “Libro de Buen Amor,” xvi. Cf. Stephen G. Nichols, “On the Sociology of Medieval Manuscript Annotation,” and Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art.

17. As Stephen Orgel, Seth Lerer, Randall McLeod, and others have argued, early printed books were meant to be transformed into other books. Given that new books tended to be sold in sheets (i.e., unbound), the act of binding would constitute a first act of customization—and readers could add extra leaves for notes or put together works, or parts of works, not grouped by their producers.

18. The best introductions to this important and still little-explored subject are Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, and David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830.

22. See the range of practices surveyed by William W. E. Slights in Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books.

23. Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen, “Incunable Description and Its Implication for the Analysis of Fifteenth-Century Reading Habits,” 253–54. When Saenger revisited his and Heinlen’s earlier essay (in Paul Saenger, “The Implications of Incunable Description for the History of Reading Revisited”), he proposed some valuable modifications to their paradigm for cataloguing incunables, but did nothing to extend their argument to later printed books. See also Kristian Jensen, “Cataloguing Books with Marginal Annotations.”

24. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, introduction.

25. See Steven N. Zwicker, “The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading.”

26. See the examples in Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550–1700,” 17–19.

27. Again, this practice looks less radical if we connect it with late medieval practices of compilation and the binding together of disparate materials in a single volume. See, e.g., Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (eds.), The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, and Seth Lerer, “Medieval Literature and Early Modern Readers: Cambridge University Library Sel. 5.51–5.63.”

28. In academic communities these composite texts are still common in the form of photocopy packets, or “readers,” compiled by instructors. Some publishers of textbooks have started to offer customized texts of their own: in cooperation with the Ohio State University U.S. History Department, Simon and Schuster published Retrieving the American Past, which they call “A Customized U.S. History Reader.” A sticker on the front cover of sample copies invites instructors to “Choose from over 60 modules to create a custom book!”

31. Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum”; Roger Chartier, “Communities of Readers,” in The Order of Books.

34. Francis Bacon, The two books of Francis Bacon. Of the proficiency and advancement of learning, divine and humane.

35. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, 76–77, 87–88.

36. On sig. Pp2r, where Bacon says that nobody has yet supplied a sufficient system for commonplacing, a marginal note suggests that “This defect indeed is very great. Yong Sanderson hath well supplied it.” This is a reference to Robert Sanderson’s textbook on logic: when the book was published in Oxford in 1615, Sanderson was twenty-eight.

38. HEH RB 56251. Casaubon’s reading habits are in need of detailed study, but see Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614.

39. Casaubon was in exile in England from 1610 to his death in 1614 and may have been making a late, enforced attempt to work on his English at this time.

40. York Minster Library I.N.20: Il prencipe di Nicolo Machiavelli. The text is signed on the title page, “Bar. Barnes. 2s 4d.” The copy was first discussed by Mark Eccles in his short biography of Barnes in Thomas Lodge and Other Elizabethans, and Eccles surmised that Barnes would also have had Wolfe’s edition of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. Nigel Bawcutt has tracked this book to a sale catalogue from 1858, but its present whereabouts are unknown: see N. W. Bawcutt, “Barnabe Barnes’s Ownership of Machiavelli’s Discorsi,” 411. On Barnes’s use of Machiavelli, see Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli—The First Century: Studies in Enthuasiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance, 446–58.

41. Unless Barnes had another copy with underlining and notes in the sections he quoted, this example ought to make us wary of assuming that the marked sections were those the reader considered most useful (and vice versa).

42. Il prencipe, C1r. I cite the English translation of Peter Bondanella, 33–34.

43. Carl James Grindley, “Reading Piers Plowman C-Text Annotations: Notes toward the Classification of Printed and Written Marginalia in Texts from the British Isles, 1300–1641,” 77. I owe this reference to Ann Blair.

44. Adam Smyth, “Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-writing in Early Modern England” (unpublished paper, 2006).

50. This is not, however, to endorse James Nielson’s suggestion that manuscript materials necessarily give us access to authentic personalities, or that the “chirographic chaos” of Gabriel Harvey’s manuscript writings and notes “allow or even force us, as practical readers . . . to feel that we can get at the ‘real Harvey’ through his handwritten text” (“Reading between the Lines: Manuscript Personality and Gabriel Harvey’s Drafts,” 44–45).

51. More work needs to be done on how and where Renaissance readers picked up these surprisingly pervasive rhyming texts.

54. HEH RB 62472. Paul Morgan lists many of Wolfreston’s books—though not this one—in “Frances Wolfreston and ‘Hor Bouks’: A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector”; and Heidi Brayman Hackel discusses Wolfreston’s collection of playbooks in Reading Material in Early Modern England.

56. HEH RB 432871: Alexis of Piedmont, The Secrets . . . containing excellent remedies against diverse diseases, book 3, fol. 65r.

57. Robert de Maria, “Samuel Johnson and the Reading Revolution.” For a critical overview of this argument (which derives from the theories of Rolf Engelsing), see Reinhard Wittmann, “Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?”

58. George Joye, An apology made by George Joye to satisfy . . . W. Tindale to purge & defend himself against many slanderous lies fained upon [hi]m, fol. 43v.

61. Bernard M. Rosenthal, “Cataloging Manuscript Annotations in Printed Books: Some Thoughts and Suggestions from the Other Side of the Academic Fence,” 586.

62. Rosenthal, “Cataloging Manuscript Annotations,” 584–87. He is taking his cue from Giuseppe Frasso, “Libri a stampa postillati: Riflessioni suggerite da un catalogo,” an extended review of R. C. Alston, Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Library.

64. OED, s.v. “scholium” (2nd ed., 1989). In Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Anthony Grafton explains how Guillaume Budé drew on compilations of ancient scholia in entering his own annotations on Homer.

65. William W. E. Slights, “The Edifying Margins of English Renaissance Books,” in Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books, 49; see also the discussions in Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, and Bruce R. Smith, “On Reading The Shepheardes Calendar.”

67. Slights, “ ‘Marginall Notes That Spoile the Text’: Scriptural Annotation in the English Renaissance,” in Managing Readers; cf. Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England, chapter 1.

68. OED, s.v. “adversaria” (2nd ed., 1989); cf. John Considine (ed.), Adversaria: Sixteenth-Century Books and the Traces of Their Readers.

69. Nicolas Barker, “Marginalia,” 22. See also Marilena Maniaci, “ ‘La serva padrona’: Interazioni fra testo e glossa sulla pagina del manoscritto.”

73. Roberto Weiss, “The Rise of Classical Epigraphy,” in The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, chapter 11.

74. Colin Renfrew and Chris Scarre (eds.), Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage. G. Thomas Tanselle has drawn similar conclusions from recent art historical work on material culture: see his “Libraries, Museums, and Reading,” esp. 7.

75. John Sutton, “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” 138–39. Cf. Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800, where he describes the period’s museums, archives, and libraries as “externalized super-memories” (112).

76. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design.”

2. R. W. Hunt, “Manuscripts Containing the Indexing Symbols of Robert Grosseteste,” 242; cf. Hunt, “The Library of Robert Grosseteste,” and Malcolm Parkes, “Folia librorum quarere: Medieval Experience of the Problems of Hypertext and the Index.”

3. R. W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 193. However, Mary A. and Richard H. Rouse reproduce another index from the thirteenth century—probably the work of an Oxford student—that employs symbols like those devised by Grosseteste: see their “La naissance des index.”

4. Ann Blair’s recent work has excavated a wide range of techniques developed for organizing knowledge, particularly in the face of the early modern period’s “information overload”: see especially “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” but also “Note-Taking as an Art of Transmission,” “Scientific Reading: An Early Modernist’s Perspective,” and “Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy.”

5. In the 1491 edition of Cassiodorus’s commentary In Psalmos, for example, there is a tabular set of instructions to the reader explaining that the letters or symbols in the margins signify passages pertaining to “Idiomatic usage from law or divinity,” “a very necessary dogma,” “some definition . . . scheme . . . etymology . . . the interpretation of a name, something from the rhetorical arts, a place of argument, a syllogism, and something related to Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, or Astronomy” (fol. 1v).

6. Neil Ker, “The Library of John Jewel,” 256, 263. He evidently employed scholars to copy these passages into his commonplace books for him: John Garbrand reported that these marked passages “were all drawen forth and laid to their themes by certaine scholars, who wrote them out by such direction as he had given unto them” (Ker, 263).

7. Astrological symbols were natural candidates for such symbolic indexing. They were put to particularly good use by Gabriel Harvey, who used the symbol for Mars to designate matters relating to military affairs, that for Mercury to denote eloquence, and that for the sun to signal a passage on kingship or some other preeminent thing (see Virgnia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey, 141).

8. Cicero, De oratore, sig. F8v. The margins of the text itself are badly cropped, but some symbols survived the binder’s razor.

9. Cited in Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, 98. I owe this reference to Stephen Orgel.

10. Plutarch, Les œuvres morales et meslees. I am grateful to Stephen Clucas for sharing his unpublished transcription of this note: it is described and discussed in Gordon R. Batho and Stephen Clucas (eds.), The Wizard Earl’s Advices to His Sons, and Gordon R. Batho, “The Library of the ‘Wizard’ Earl, Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1564–1632),” 256.

12. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, trans. John Trevisa (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1495), sig. i3v.

14. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (eds.), John Dee’s Library Catalogue: the editors discuss Dee’s “pointing hand” on p. 25, and examples can be found throughout the facsimile of the catalogue (the De proprietatibus rerum is item M90). It is no longer clear what Dee’s pointing hands were supposed to signal, but there is something poignant in seeing them entered in a list of the books that he would soon leave in others’ hands as he prepared for a six-year sojourn on the Continent. The library was notoriously “spoiled” during his absence, and while he managed to recover some of the missing books many were lost for good.

16. Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts; M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect.

17. Joseph Moxon’s Mechanic Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–84), perhaps the best-known manual, makes no mention of them whatsoever, and they do not appear in the illustration of upper and lower cases. Fournier’s eighteenth-century Manuel typographique has detailed discussions of brackets, rules, flowers, and musical notes, but nothing on manicules (Pierre Simon Fournier, Fournier on Typefounding). They do, however, appear in printers’ specimens and typecases from the sixteenth century onwards: see the plates in the Catalogue of Speciments of Printing Types by English and Scottish Printers and Founders, 1665–1830, and the historic survey of typecases on the Web site for the Alembic Press (http://members.aol.com/alembicprs/#selc).

18. Slights does, however, refer to “the printer’s device of the maniculum,” and mentions its source in the “hand-drawn index marker” on p. 75 of Managing Readers.

19. Charles Hasler, “A Show of Hands.” The journal Typographica, in which Hasler’s essay appeared, was edited by Herbert Spencer and published sporadically between 1949 and 1967. Full sets and copies of the early numbers are now quite rare; but Rick Poynor’s Typographica provides a history of the journal and reproduces some sample pages from Hasler’s article.

20. Hasler, “A Show of Hands,” 4. The standard sequence of “reference marks” was *, †, ‡, §, ||, ¶, and

25. The use of “pilcrow” for pointing hand may derive from a misleading quotation in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (see John P. Chalmers’s posting to ExLibris on 17 June 1993 [http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/1993/06/msg00177.html]), but given Glaister’s definition of the symbol as a marker for new paragraphs it is easy to see how the term might migrate on its own.

26. Deborah J. Leslie, “Provenance Evidence and Printing and Publishing Evidence: Use and Revision of the RBMS Thesauri.” The example Leslie chooses from her thesaurus is “Fists,” which is a subheading within the broader term “Annotations,” itself a narrower term under “Markings.” “Fist” is supposed to be used “for previous owners’ indications drawing attention to text,” and it is supposed to be preferred to “index fingers,” “note signs,” and “pointing hands” (520).

27. In my initial trawl for manicules at the Folger Shakespeare Library, I discovered that the library’s bibliographical descriptions use at least two different names for the pointing hands inscribed by earlier owners—and “manicule” is not among them. Georgianna Ziegler (the reference librarian) suggested that I search the “Folger Copy Notes” field in the online catalogue for the phrase “pointing hand,” and this yielded seventy good examples from incunables and STC books. But during a conversation with Ron Bogdan, the person responsible for producing many of the descriptions for these books, I learned that his favored term is “fist.” A new search instantly took my tally to well over four hundred volumes. And it was Heather Wolfe, the Folger’s curator of manuscripts, who first introduced me to the term “manicule,” suggesting that it has become the standard term in the field of codicological description.

28. Gregory A. Pass, Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts; Marilena Maniaci, Terminologia del libro manoscritto, 201—where manicula is listed alongside manina (another diminutive for “hand”).

29. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307, 2nd ed., 172.

31. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader.

34. Nella Giannetto, Bernardo Bembo: Umanista e Politico Veneziano, 267. Bembo’s manicules are depicted and discussed in A. C. de la Mare, “Marginalia and Glosses in the Manuscripts of Sanvito,” esp. plate 48.

35. A. C. de la Mare, The Handwriting of Italian Humanists, 8, 20 (my emphasis). I am grateful to David Rundle for pointing me to this source and for alerting me to his own description of the English humanist John Tiptoft’s “distinctive pointing-hand” in his “Humanism before the Tudors: On nobility and the reception of the studia humanitatis in fifteenth-century England,” 33. Anthony Grafton reproduces Guillaume Budé’s elegant manicules in Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books & Renaissance Readers, figs. 2, 3, 4, and 6.

36. Hendrik Niclaes, Terra pacis, fols. 32v–33r—this is the copy reproduced on EEBO. I owe this example to David Wootton.

37. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge; also see his “Glossing the Flesh: Scopophilia and the Margins of the Medieval Book.”

38. Suzanne Karr, “Constructions Both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels, and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts,” esp. 124–27.

40. In the Folger’s copy of the herbal Rams little Dodeon [sic] (London: Simon Stafford, 1606), FSL STC 6988, there are manicules passim; but in the sections describing diseases of the male genitalia, the reader’s pointing hand changes to a pointing penis. I am grateful to Rebecca Laroche for pointing me to these examples of what she has wittily called “penicules.”

41. FSL Inc B683, Boethius, Works (1491); FSL Inc A1078, Copy 1, St. Augustine, Opuscula plurima (1491), fol. 66v.

42. FSL Inc A871, Aristotle, De natura animalium etc. (1492), fol. 4r. Here the subject of the annotations seems to provoke the use of a manicule: one finger pointing to the margin highlights the summary note, “Indices longe et breuis vite” [long index-fingers and short lives].

43. See Norma Levarie, The Art and History of Books, 164. Similar figures had already been used in Boner’s Edelstein, the second illustrated book printed in Germany (Levarie, 165).

44. Daniel de Simone (ed.), A Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books, fig. 73.

45. Philipp Melanchthon, A new work concerning both parts of the Sacrament (1548), A2r. I have not yet found this awkward ringed finger in any other book. Steven Mierdman was an itinerant Protestant printer from the Low Countries; he printed many books for English authors while in Antwerp and Emden and worked for Jugge and several other English printers while living in London between 1548 and 1554 (see Pollard, Redgrave, and Pantzer, Short-Title Catalogue, 2nd ed., 3:190). Mierdman had a conspicuous habit of using simpler fists to mark the beginnings and endings of texts, and I suspect that he brought the cuts with him to England, perhaps helping to establish the vogue there, particularly in religious texts.

46. Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; Ben Shneiderman, “Direct Manipulation.”

48. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; cf. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands.”

49. STC 19906, 19907, and 19907a. These geometrical patterns of manicules and other printers’ devices are also found, perhaps significantly, in the self-consciously archaic poetry of Edmund Spenser: see particularly the sequence of title pages in the 1591 Complaints volume (STC 23078).

51. The same technique was used simply to mark new material in a later edition of Conrad Heresbach’s The Whole Art of Husbandry, published in 1631: a note on the title page read, “All the new Additions you shall find to begin with this marke

and to end with this *.” It was also possible to use the manicule to mark the omission rather than the addition of text in a new edition: in a letter to Henry Stubbes regarding the new translation of Leviathan, Hobbes explained, “where you find this (

) I haue omitted a word which I conceiued redundant in y^e English” (Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, 1:271 [thanks to Timothy Raylor for bringing this passage to my attention]).

56. FSL Inc G25, Gaetano Tiene, Expositio in libros Aristotelis De anima (1486), sig. i4v.

57. G. K. Hunter, “The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances,” 171. Hunter refers to this practice as “gnomic pointing” (172ff.), drawing on gnome’s original sense (a pithy precept).

58. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, book 1, chap. 19, sig. M1v.

61. Charles Butler, Oratoriae libri duo, sig. A4v. I have drawn on the translation of Fred Schurink in his D.Phil. thesis, “Education and Reading in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” 62.

62. In the dedicatory epistle to Sir Robert Cecil he explained that he has “noted withall most of his Sentences and Prouerbes” (sig. a1r). In fact, manicules appeared in some sections of the earlier texts, and Joseph Dane has carefully studied their use as evidence in the transmission of Chaucer’s works through the sixteenth century (“Fists and Filiations in Early Chaucer Folios, 1532–1602”). He suggests that Speght’s copy-text was a copy of John Stow’s 1561 edition, with the small and incoherent selection of printed fists supplemented by the insertion of systematic manuscript manicules that were then translated into print.

63. Clare R. Kinney, “Thomas Speght’s Renaissance Chaucer and the solaas of sentence in Troilus and Criseyde,” 67–68.

64. See the account in Robert C. Evans, Habits of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading, chap. 4 (“Ben Jonson’s Chaucer”). For Jonson’s annotations in his 1617 Spenser folio, see James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Jonson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism.

66. Claire Richter Sherman (ed.), Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.

67. James Sanford, The Manuell of Epictetus, sigs. A2r and A3r. Sanford may have been imitating the period’s most influential “manual”: when Erasmus’s best-selling Enchyridion militis christiani was translated into English and published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1533, it was called The Manuell of the Christen Knyght.

68. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory, 5. The hand and the flower were combined in Thomas de Hibernia’s early fourteenth-century anthology, Manipulus florum (Handful of flowers): see Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse (eds.), Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the “Manipulus florum” of Thomas of Ireland. The contents were filed under 266 alphabetically organized subject headings.

69. Helen Solterer, “Seeing, Hearing, Tasting Woman: Medieval Senses of Reading.”

71. In using “indigitation” for pointing or showing with the fingers, Bulwer was following the Latin-English dictionaries of the sixteenth century in erroneously associating indigitare/-etare (to invoke or call upon) with “digit” (see OED, s.v. “indigitate”).

73. Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern; Michael Neill, “ ‘Amphitheaters in the body’: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearean Stage.”

74. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 5:132–33. On the significance of gesture in ancient Rome see Fritz Graf, “Gestures and Conventions: the Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators,” and D. Dutch, “Towards a Grammar of Gesture: A Comparison Between the Types of Hand Movements of the Orator and the Actor in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria 11. 3. 85–88.”

75. On Bulwer’s project, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the Senses, chap. 12; J. Wollock, “John Bulwer’s (1606–1656) Place in the History of the Deaf”; and H. J. Norman, “John Bulwer (fl. 1654), ‘The Chirosopher,’ Pioneer in the Treatment of the Deaf and Dumb and in Psychology.”

76. James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800.

77. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, esp. 2–17. Wittgenstein anticipates much later work in sociolinguistics and speech-act theory, and his meditations often return to what might be described as the life of signs in use: “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?” (108).

80. Raymond Tallis, The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, 2–3. Tallis’s project on the history of the hand forms the first book in a trilogy of monographs on the origins of human difference, and it grew out of his grapplings with Heidegger’s Being and Time in his Conversation with Martin Heidegger.

81. Heidegger’s discussion of “equipment” in Being and Time suggests that, in order to understand textual tools like manicules, we need an approach that is practical and not just theoretical (which is one of the reasons why I have deployed printed manicules throughout this chapter and why I have started to draw them in my own marginalia):

the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. . . . The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call “readiness-to-hand” [Zuhandenheit]. . . . If we look at Things just “theoretically,” we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character.” (98)

82. Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum (1605), cited in J. Wollock, “John Bulwer (1606–1656) and the Significance of Gesture in 17th-Century Theories of Language and Cognition”; Jean-Claude Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries,” 62.

Not long after finishing this essay, news reached me of Sasha Roberts’s fatal accident. I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of a young scholar who did as much as anyone to define the project it seeks to extend.

2. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy, 196–97; see also her “ ‘Boasting of silence’: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State,” “The Countess of Bridgewater’s London Library,” and the exemplary introduction to the collection of essays she has edited with Catherine Kelly, Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800.

3. Sasha Roberts, “Reading in Early Modern England: Contexts and Problems.” The tropical rainforest analogy is Robert Darnton’s (see his Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History, 110).

4. Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading,” and “Margaret Hoby’s Diary: Women’s Reading Practices and the Gendering of the Reformation Subject”; Margaret Ezell, “The Politics of the Past: Restoration Women Writers on Women Reading History”; Kathryn DeZur, “ ‘Vaine Books’ and Early Modern Women Readers”; Ramona Wray, “Recovering the Reading of Renaissance Englishwomen: Deployments of Autobiography”; Jane Donawerth,” Women’s Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell’s Women’s Speaking Justified”; Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England.

5. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 34. Cf. my essay “Digging the Dust: Renaissance Archivology.”

8. Archive Fever, 7. For a useful exploration of the “inside/outside” problem posed by Derrida’s account, see John Hunter, “Minds, Archives, and the Domestication of Knowledge.”

10. David Greetham, “ ‘Who’s In, Who’s Out’: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,” 13–14.

11. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College. This example was brought to my attention by the late Jeremy Maule, whose brilliant teaching in Cambridge did much to remedy the legacy of James’ prejudices.

12. Jean Klene’s edition of The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Books: Folger MS V.b.198 is just one of many recent examples of the scrupulous attention now being paid to manuscripts that James would have happily passed over in silence.

13. The shorter heading in Richard T. Spence’s entry in the ODNB also struggles with her identity: “Clifford, Anne [known as Lady Anne Clifford], countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery (1590–1676), noblewoman and diarist.” See Stephen Orgel’s chastening comments on our tendency to refer to Clifford by the title she relinquished when she was nineteen years old (“Marginal Maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates,” 285–89).

16. Thomas Bentley, The monument of matrons; Thomas Heywood, Gynaikeion; or, Nine books of various history.

17. Nonna Crook and Neil Rhodes, “The Daughters of Memory: Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion and the Female Computer.”

18. FSL MS V.b.139. Full descriptions of this and the other volumes mentioned here can be found both in the Folger Library’s online catalogue and on the Perdita Project’s Web site.

19. FSL MS E.a.1. On the use of “And Friends” in the period’s ownership inscriptions, see H. D. Hobson, “Et Amicorum.” On female textual communities, see especially Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Sociality of Margaret Hoby’s Reading Practices”; also Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Finally, on Denton’s education and intellectual milieu, see Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 201–3.

23. HEH RB 30691: Eucharius Roesslin, The Birth of mankind, otherwise named the womans book, trans. Thomas Raynalde (London, 1565).

24. Women played an active role in compiling, comparing, and applying medical and culinary information in this period, as documented in the extensive corpus of surviving “receipt books.” These are the subject of two important doctoral dissertations, Elaine Y. T. Leong’s “Medical Recipe Collections in Seventeenth-Century England: Knowledge, Text, and Gender” and Catherine A. Field’s “ ‘Many Hands Hands’: Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books and the Writing of Food, Politics, and the Self.”

27. The manuscript is BL Egerton MS 2614; for a partial edition, see Joanna Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605.

28. “Lady Grace Mildmay’s Meditations,” Northampton Central Library, Northamptonshire Studies Collection, 72. On Mildmay and her texts, see Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620, and Retha Warnicke, “Lady Mildmay’s Journal.” I am grateful to Kate Narveson for her generous introduction to Mildmay’s manuscripts.

29. Richard T. Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676); Spence’s entry in the ODNB; Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England.

30. J. P. Gilson (ed.), Lives of Lady Anne Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery . . . Summarized by Herself; Katherine O. Acheson (ed.), The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–1619: A Critical Edition.

32. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 222–40. The copy of Barclay’s Argenis is HEH RB 97024.

33. Edward Rainbowe, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honorable Anne Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery.

34. Cit. Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, 6.

35. Edward Rainbowe, A sermon preached at . . . the interring of the corpse of the right Honorable Susanna, Countesse of Suffolke, sig. D3r–v.

36. See Juliet Fleming’s discussion of this passage in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, 48.

40. Sian Echard has made a similar case for attending to the archive fever that has spread among scholars of medieval manuscripts in her “House Arrest: Modern Archives, Medieval Manuscripts.”

1. The classic account is Elizabeth Eisenstein’s “The Scriptural Tradition Recast,” in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. More detailed and/or more recent studies include S. L. Greenslade (ed.), Cambridge History of the Bible, volume 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day; Orlaith O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as Book: The Reformation; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation of the Bible / The Bible of the Reformation; W. P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, the Reformation and the Church; Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt, and Alexandra Walsham, “Religious Publishing in England, 1557–1640”; B. J. McMullin, “The Bible Trade”; Jean-François Gilmont, “Protestant Reformation and Reading”; Dominique Julia, “Reading and the Counter-Reformation”; Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible; David Daniell, The Bible in English; Christopher de Hamel, The Book: A History of the Bible; and Lori Anne Ferrell, The Bible and the People.

2. See Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” in The Kiss of Lamourette.

3. Gerald Hammond, “Translations of the Bible,” 166. In fact, prayer books, Psalters, and guides to the Bible may have outsold it.

4. Peter Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640, 211.

6. A valuable exception is Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” Harry Y. Gamble has provided an exemplary account for the earliest Christian texts in Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts, in which he addresses “questions about the production, circulation, and use of books in the ancient church, that are almost never raised by historians of the canon” (ix).

7. Again, it is worth bearing in mind that the most heavily used copies would not have survived—and this is particularly true of texts like the Bible where the text did not become obsolete with time (and where, in fact, the book tended to gain rather than lose significance). The number of ownership notes dated a century or more after the book’s publication is conspicuously high in Bibles.

8. This synoptic table is signed by “T. Grashop.” and it appears in the editions of 1579, 1580, 1581, 1586, 1587, 1592, 1599, 1607, and 1616. It is reproduced in full and briefly discussed in Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 63–65.

9. HEH RB 294479–80 (STC 2114). The table appears on the first of four pages bound in at the front of the volume.

10. These passages can all be found in Alfred W. Pollard (ed.), Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525–1611. For sample pages of these editions, as well as a concise history of the Bible, see the John Rylands Library’s Catalogue of an Exhibition Illustrating the History of the Transmission of the Bible.

11. William W. E. Slights, “ ‘Marginall Notes That Spoile the Text”: Scriptural Annotations in the English Renaissance,” in Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books; Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England, esp. chap. 1.

12. Eugene R. Kingtgen, Reading in Tudor England, 136; Maurice S. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations.”

14. Guy Bedouelle, “The Bible, Printing and the Educational Goals of the Humanists,” 96. Cf. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages.

15. Lori Anne Ferrell, “How to Read the Bible in Early Modern England,” in The Bible and the People (forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr. Ferrell for sharing this work with me prior to its publication.

16. Nicholas Udall’s preface to the reader in his translation of The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament, sig. C1v (my emphasis). I owe this reference to Lori Anne Ferrell.

17. Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, chap. 7; Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, 48–53. For more on commonplace books, see Chapter 7 below.

18. Edward Vaughan, Ten Introductions: How to read . . . the holy Bible, sig. K4v (my emphasis).

19. George Webbe, “A short Direction for the daily exercise of a Christian,” cited by Matthew P. Brown, “The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading,” 74.

20. John Downame, A guide to godliness, book 5 (“Of the meanes whereby we may be inabled to leade a godly life”), chap. 30 (“Of the duties required in the action of reading, that we may profit by it”), sect. 8 (“That we must reade orderly with diligence and constancy”).

25. HEH RB 112999. For the story of the siege, see Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate, chap. 9; Mary Frear Keeler (ed.), Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage; and Irene A. Wright (ed.), Further English Voyages to Spanish America—none of which mention this bibliographical booty.

26. The best examples I have seen are at the British Library. A 1546 Latin Bible (shelf mark C.51.i.6) has an orderly table in two columns headed “Index temporis praecipuarum & notarum historiarum ex veteris et novi testamenti”: it runs from anno mundi 1 to circa 2400 (the time of Joshua). Another table, added to the end of the index in a 1540 Estienne Bible (shelf mark C.23.e.1) runs from anno 130 (Adam) to 3954 (Christ).

28. HEH RB 292510 (STC 2109). The book is signed by a Thomas Taylor (and dated 1619) on the first page of the Gospel according to Matthew.

29. A 1634 Psalter (HEH RB 47877 [STC 2650.5]) is a particularly interesting example. A variant version of Psalm 2 is inscribed in its entirety, in which line 3 is changed from “Why did the Iewish people muse” to “Why did the foolish people muse.”

30. On this practice see Seth Lerer, “Errata: Print, Politics and Poetry in Early Modern England.”

32. This typo is reproduced on p. 52 of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, and it is described in Thomas H. Darlow and Horace F. Moule’s Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961, 162–63.

33. HEH RB 96523 (STC 2368). Thomas Rye has signed the book in several places and also used the book to practice his penmanship and draft a letter to his brother William.

35. Giles Barber, Textile and Embroidered Bindings; Mirjam M. Foot, Pictorial Bookbindings; Howard M. Nixon and Mirjam M. Foot, The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England.

38. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1, and “The Bishops’ Bible Illustrations”; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, especially the chapter “The Cultural Revolution”; John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660. Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 is a groundbreaking attempt to recover the interweaving of word and image in popular devotional culture in the century after the Reformation.

39. On the changing significance of the lectern and the liturgical uses of the Bible, see Susan Wabuda, “Triple Deckers and Eagle Lecterns: Church Furniture for the Book in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.”

40. In a 1611 Geneva Bible at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, a reader has written a table headed “The Old and New Testament dissected”:

Books in the Old	39
Chapters	927
Verses	23,214
Words	592,439
Letters	2,728,100

(Penn Forrest BS170 1611 L66, front flyleaves). The notes also include “The middle Chap. & least in Bible is Psalm 117. The middle Verse is the 8th of the 118 Psalm. The word And occurs in the Old Testament 35,543 times. The word Jehovah occurs 6,855 times.” And there is evidence that these calculations were copied from bible to bible: according to Peter Stallybrass, the same figures appear in Indiana University’s “Wicked Bible.”

41. In a 1578 Geneva Bible at Penn, the printed text ends with the claim that it was printed “5592 yeres, 6 moneths, and 16 dayes” after the creation. In 1747 a reader noted that he (or she) was writing 169 years after the book was published and reported, meaning that he (or she) was living exactly 5761 years after creation (Penn Folio BS 170 1578).

42. HEH RB 32153 (STC 2873). The signature of Rafe Moore and the date 1592 are found throughout the volume. Susan Collin has also signed the book.

43. John Dryden, Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith, lines 400–414. Three years later he would convert to Catholicism.

44. Greenslade, “Epilogue” to The Cambridge History of the Bible, 490–91.

45. For a general account of the relationship between children and Bibles, see Ruth B. Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children: From the Age of Gutenberg to the Present.

46. E.g., HEH RB 17040 (a massive 1628 King James Version Bible [STC 2282]) and HEH RB 40529–30 (a 1630 Bible [STC 2290]).

47. Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen, “Incunable Description and its Implication for the Analysis of Fifteenth-Century Reading Habits,” 253–54.

48. Scott Mandelbrote, “The Authority of the Word: Manuscript, Print and the Text of the Bible in Seventeenth-Century England.”

49. David Scott Kastan, “ ‘The Noyse of the New Bible’: Reform and Reaction in Henrician England.”

50. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580.

1. Huntington Library, 36th Annual Report, 28. For contemporary surveys of the collection see Dorothy Bowen, The Book of Common Prayer: The James R. Page Collection, and A Descriptive Catalogue of the Book of Common Prayer and Related Materials in the Collection of James R. Page.

2. Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1953, IA:6. The clipping can be found in the Huntington’s Institutional Archives (folder 12.14.2.4).

3. For a survey of used prayer books that ends roughly where this one begins, see Eamon Duffy’s new book, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570. Even in the more elaborate manuscript books of hours, marginalia were remarkably widespread: “Almost half of the 300 Books of Hours in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris have manuscript annotations and additions of some sort, and it was very common indeed for English owners too to annotate their books” (38).

4. HEH RB 438000:222 (STC 2557.3), front flyleaf: the passage from Job (in the King James Version) reads, “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: / Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.” On a back flyleaf Carter signed the book again: “John Carter his Booke 1700.”

5. HEH RB 438000:378F (STC 16353). Mary Erler has described the frequent inscription of family notes in late medieval books of hours in “Devotional literature,” 511.

7. HEH RB 438000:754 (STC 10067 and 10080). For Hall’s life and controversial writings, see the entry in the ODNB, and also the original DNB entry (which offers a fuller account).

8. HEH RB 438000:804 (STC 16417). On the Durham Book and Cosin’s role in it see G. J. Cuming, ed., The Durham Book, Being the First Draft of the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer in 1661, and Edward C. Ratcliff, The Booke of Common Prayer of the Churche of England: Its Making and Revisions, chap. 13.

9. HEH RB 438000:825F (STC 16403). See the notes on this item by Dorothy Bowen in the Huntington’s Institutional Archives (folder 12.14.1.1).

11. Philip Gaskell explains that binders could customize copies both by supplying sets of plates to be bound or tipped into standard texts, and by “ruling the margins in red, which was done in pen and ink before folding” (A New Introduction to Bibliography, 147). And H. R. Woudhuysen reports that “When the [Cambridge] university printer Thomas Thomas died in 1588, among his goods were “certayne paper ruled with read yncke” (6d.) as well as eight parchment skins ruled in the same way (2s. 8d.)” (Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640, 45–46).

12. There are embroidered bindings on HEH RB 438000:41, 70F, 200, 201, 372, 373, 374, 401, 483, 656, and 830. One of them (438000:401, a Bible printed in 1641) is attributed to the “the sisters of the Religious House at Little Gidding Northampton under Dr Nicholas Farrar temp. Chas: 1:.” As Howard M. Nixon and Mirjam M. Foot have explained, however, in the early twentieth century “one of the most persistent myths in booksellers’ versions of bookbinding history was that all English embroidered bindings of the first half of the seventeenth century were the work of the Little Gidding community. Yet it seems reasonably certain that they produced no bindings at all in this style” (The History of Decorated Bookbinding in England, 54). For the similar associational fantasies that were linking much of the period’s marginalia to Philip Melanchthon and Francis Bacon, see Chapter 8 below.

14. Martha W. Driver, The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources, 194–204, 212–14. Cf. Monique Hulvey, “Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula,” 169, and Duffy, Marking the Hours, chap. 9.

15. HEH RB 62311 (STC 16040). Such censorship was not, of course, restricted to prayer books: in her study of surviving copies of Caxton’s Royal Book (printed in 1485 and 1507), Elaine E. Whitaker found that approximately half of them were later censored—removing (in various copies) the phrase “of rome” after the word “church,” an entire section on purgatory, and even a woodcut illustration of a liturgical procession (“A Collaboration of Readers: Categorization of the Annotations in Copies of Caxton’s Royal Book,” 236).

16. Sandra Hindman, “Cross-Fertilization: Experiments in Mixing the Media,” 104.

17. Driver, The Image in Print, 8; Mary C. Erler, “Pasted-in Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books, c.1480–1533”; Lillian Armstrong, “Venetian and Florentine Renaissance Woodcuts for Bibles, Liturgical Books, and Devotional Books.”

18. Sandra Hindman, “Cross-Fertilization,” 102–3, 141, citing Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators. Other important accounts include H. Bekker-Nielsen et al. (eds.), From Script to Print: A Symposium; J. B. Trapp (ed.), Manuscripts in the Fifty Years after the Invention of Printing; Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (eds.), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, 12–16; Armando Petrucci, “L’écriture manuscrite et l’imprimerie: rupture ou continuitè?” 511–15.

19. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830.

22. HEH RB 438000:354 (HEH MS HM 47640). As befits its hybrid status, the volume has also been given a separate shelf mark in the manuscripts collection.

23. There is also evidence of additions by much later readers—for example, the capital O comprised of interlocking dragons, sketched in pencil in one of the many spaces left empty for decorated initials.

24. I am extremely grateful to Mary Robertson and Jonathan Alexander for their advice on this matter.

26. See, for a particularly clear account, Andrew Bennett’s introduction to Readers & Reading.

27. See Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours; Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture”; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (ed.), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, and Anneke Mulder-Bakke and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds.), Household, Women and Christianities.

28. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth.

29. FSL MS V.a.174. It was brought to my attention by Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts.

30. John E. Booty (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, 328, citing Stella Brook’s classic study, The Language of the Book of Common Prayer. Cf. David N. Griffiths, The Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer, 1549–1999.

31. See especially Booty, The Book of Common Prayer: “The Elizabethan Prayer Book . . . was, like its predecessors, an official book, an instrument of state. The use of and worship according to the Book of Common Prayer was enforced by statute” (372). In Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Judith Maltby calls the Elizabethan prayer book “the most pervasive agent of change” in the English Reformation (17).

32. Cited H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 2:138. Cf. Helen C. White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotions; Mary C. Erler, “Devotional Literature”; Matthew P. Brown, “The Thick Style: Steady Sellers, Textual Aesthetics, and Early Modern Devotional Reading.”

33. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England; Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, 36–43; John E. Booty, “Communion and Commonweal: The Book of Common Prayer.”

To him which considereth the grieuous and scandalous inconueniences whereunto they make themselues dayly subiect, with whome any blinde and secret corner is iudged a fit house of common prayer; the manifold confusions which they fall into where euery mans priuate spirit and gift (as they terme it) is the only Bishop that ordeyneth him to this ministerie; the irkesome deformities whereby through endlesse and senselesse effusions of indigested prayers they oftentimes disgrace in most vnsufferable manner the worthyest part of Christian dutie towards God, who herein are subiect to no certaine order, but pray both what and how they list . . . (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, sig. F4v).

35. For the full text of the Act see Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds.), Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 1, 1485–1553, 485–86. For the circumstances surrounding it, see James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation, 3:174–84, and Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 469.

38. Stella Panayotova, “Cuttings from an Unknown Copy of the Magna Glossatura in a Wycliffite Bible (British Library, Arundel MS. 104)”; cf. Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work, 49.

39. Béatrice Hernad, Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel. I owe this reference to Karlfried Froelich.

41. Ursula Weekes, Early Engravers and their Public, 167. Perhaps the most extraordinary image in her color plates (at least for those of us interested in mixed-media devotional texts) is a flyleaf from a fifteenth-century northern French manuscript onto which are attached a patch of embroidery with the monogram of Jesus and the instruments of the Passion, a hand-colored “Veronica miniature,” and a metal pilgrim badge (382).

42. There is a vast and rapidly growing literature on the Little Gidding community and its textual activities. Among the most useful accounts are J. E. B. Mayor (ed.), Nicholas Ferrar: Two Lives by His Brother John and by Doctor Jebb; B. Blackstone (ed.), The Ferrar Papers; Alan L. Maycock, Chronicles of Little Gidding; George Henderson, “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud”; and Margaret Aston, “Moving Pictures: Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding.”

43. Mayor (ed.), Nicholas Ferrar, 115–21—but for a critical discussion of the details here and an argument for a date of 1633 (rather than 1631, as reported in the life of Ferrar), see Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar. The copy of the concordance borrowed and annotated by King Charles is now at Harvard: see C. Leslie Craig, “The Earliest Little Gidding Concordance,” and Nancy G. Cabot, “The Illustrations of the First Little Gidding Concordance.”

44. Lucy Peltz, “Facing the Text: the Amateur and Commercial Histories of Extra-Illustration, c. 1770–1840”; Holbrook Jackson, “Of Grangeritis,” in The Anatomy of Bibliomania; Robert A. Shaddy, “Grangerizing: ‘One of the Unfortunate Stages of Bibliomania’ ”; and Robert R. Wark, “The Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books.”

45. Jefferson’s compilation was called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth and, while it was never published in his lifetime, it was printed in 1903 for the United States Congress—and continued to be distributed to new members for many years. The definitive edition is Dickinson W. Adams (ed.), Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels.

46. Adam Smyth, “ ‘Rend and teare in peeces’: Textual Fragmentation in Seventeenth-Century England,” 36.

47. James S. Dearden, “John Ruskin, the Collector,” 124–25. Christopher de Hamel warns us not to take such descriptions at face value, suggesting that Ruskin destroyed relatively few books and—unlike the other examples featured here—almost always kept the entire page intact (Cutting Up Manuscripts, 14–15).

49. Christopher de Hamel, “The Leaf Book,” 7. In justifying the breaking up of these valuable books, “[Their creators] will often record that the copy used was very imperfect, or already in loose leaves when acquired, usually abroad (which distances the responsibility). Newton said of the Gutenberg broken in 1921: ‘Had the book been perfect . . . it would have been an act of vandalism to remove the leaves from the almost contemporary leather covers which have for so many centuries protected them’ (the volume was incomplete, certainly, but hardly a fragment, with 588 of its original 641 leaves)” (22–23).

51. Cited Daniel W. Mosser, “William Caxton’s First Edition of the Canterbury Tales and the Origin of the Leaves for the Caxton Club’s 1905 Leaf Book,” 37–38.

52. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, 256–57, citing White’s The Tudor Books of Private Devotion. Duffy, however, calls Richard Daye’s Book of Christian Prayers a “Trojan Horse, harnessing the old forms to smuggle in the new religion,” suggesting that “the border decorations, superficially so close to those of pre-reformation books, were in fact carefully purged of papistical error and included many images of protestant religious activities” (Marking the Hours, 171–73).

53. Green, Print and Protestantism, 258; cf. Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation, 52.

55. Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, chap. 3 (“Devotional Themes and Textual and Pictorial Strategies”); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture; Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers, esp. chap. 4; Kathryn Starkey, Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Willehalm”; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, and “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” For a useful survey of work on this field—which remains more familiar to medievalists than to early modernists—see Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Study of Marginal Imagery: Past, Present and Future.”

56. See especially William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion, 112–19; Francis Procter, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, with a Rationale of Its Offices, 112; and Booty, The Book of Common Prayer, 346–47.

57. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England, 13–14.

58. For the background to this subject, see Henry R. Plomer, English Printers’ Ornaments, and Charles Szayle, “Initial Letters in Early English Printed Books.”

59. Cuming, The Durham Book, 2. These instructions appear in two different forms: those on the first fly leaf are in the hand of Cosin, and those on the second fly leaf are in the hand of Sancroft. I cite Sancroft’s version; Cosin’s reads, “Not to print any Capitall Letters with profane Pictures in them.”

60. Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life; Booty, “Communion and Commonweal,” 167–68; Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, chap. 2 (“Concepts of Time”).

61. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England, xii; Damian Nussbaum, “Reviling the Saints or Reforming the Calendar? John Foxe and His ‘Kalendar’ of Martyrs.”

62. John Plummer, “ ‘Use’ and ‘Beyond Use’,” in Wieck, Time Sanctified, esp. 149–50.

63. Edoardo Grendi, “Microanalisi e storia sociale,” 512. Heidi Brayman Hackel brilliantly applies this concept to the sparse evidence for women’s reading in her Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy, 221.

64. Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace,” 8.

65. This is, of course, the essence of the “thick description” proposed by Clifford Geertz; see Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory.”

1. Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo; nelle quali s’ha particolare, & vera relatione della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre . . . nuouamente di lingua Spagnuola tradotte nell’Italiana dal S. Alfonso Vlloa (Venice, 1571). First published thirty-two years after Ferdinand’s death and nearly eighty years after the events it describes, the Historie took an appropriately eccentric route to the press. Ferdinand wrote his account in Spain and in Spanish but that version never appeared in print. After his death in 1539, the manuscript found its way into the hands of the Genoese physician Baliano de Fornari, who took it to Venice to be translated by Alfonso Ulloa. When Fornari died, not only were the projected Spanish and Latin editions abandoned but the Spanish original was lost. For a lucid account of the text, and a listing of recent editions, see the English translation of Benjamin Keen, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, by his Son, Ferdinand. I cite Keen’s edition throughout.

3. Julian Roberts, “Additions and Corrections to ‘John Dee’s Library Catalogue,’ ” 333.

4. See entry number 1101 in Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson, John Dee’s Library Catalogue: “Historia del mondo nuovo di Fernando Colombo. 8o Ven. 1571.” This misleading description might be explained by the full title of the work: after “suo padre” the title continues, Et dello scoprimento, ch’egli fece dell‘Indie Occidentali, dette MONDO NUOVO, hora possedute dal Sereniss. Re Catolico (And of his discovery of the West Indies, called The New World, now the possession of the Most Serene Catholic King). If we imagine the title page being quickly scanned during a hasty survey, it is easy to see how the words “historia” (the first word) and “mondo nuovo” (in all caps) would be picked out.

5. The copy containing Dee’s annotations is shelf mark 615.d.7. The book does not appear in R. C. Alston’s Books with Manuscript: A Short Title Catalogue of Books with Manuscript Notes in the British Museum, and the British Library’s various printed and online catalogues give no indication that the volume is annotated at all (much less by Dee).

6. See especially E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485–1583, and D.W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times.

8. William H. Sherman, “John Dee’s Role in Martin Frobisher’s Northwest Enterprise.”

9. Though see the earlier examples described by Alden T. Vaughan in Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776.

11. Djelal Kadir, Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology, 1–2. My own John Dee opens, in fact, with an almost identical formulation.

12. Quoted on the back cover of Keen, Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus.

14. This is now Chetham’s Library (Manchester) Mun.7.c.4.116, and it is signed “Joannes Dee 1547” on the title page. The definitive English edition is Aidan Liddle (ed.), Arrian: Periplus Ponti Euxini.

15. Strabo, De situ orbis libri XVII. The classmark is LP (livre precieux) 3414 C. It is briefly described in Roberts and Watson’s edition of Dee’s library catalogue and, more fully, in Bibliothèque Royale: Quinze années d’acquisitions, 377–78. The Royal Library acquired the volume from H. P. Kraus (New York), who in turn acquired it from Dawsons of Pall Mall: inside the book there is a detailed description from the Dawsons sale catalogue, which calls it “a document of fundamental importance for the development of Elizabethan navigation and science.”

16. Sig. a1r. I cite the English text of the Loeb Classical Library Edition, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, 8 vols.

17. See, e.g., Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580–1620, chaps. 1 and 4. Among contemporary authors, perhaps the most important source was Olaus Magnus, whose Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples) was published in 1555. Dee’s copy (no. 283 in the Roberts and Watson edition of his library catalogue) would no doubt have been heavily annotated, but its whereabouts are not currently known.

18. For an accessible summary of Pytheas’s voyages and his account of northern regions and peoples, see Rhys Carpenter, Beyond the Pillars of Hercules: The Classical World Seen Through the Eyes of Its Discoverers.

19. Dee’s suggestion would be refined several centuries later by the great Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen: “What Pytheas saw may have been the ice sludge in the sea which is formed over a great extent along the edge of the drift ice, when this has been ground to a pulp by the action of the waves” (In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, 1:67).

20. It is shelf mark DD.dd.40–41: the survey in December 1997 was carried out by Mr. Ray Jordan. The volume came to Trinity College with the rest of Archbishop James Ussher’s library in 1661, but its history between Dee and Ussher remains a mystery. I am grateful to Julian Roberts and Stephen Clucas for bringing the volume to my attention and to Elizabethanne Boran and Charles Benson for their assistance in Dublin.

22. In a section on varieties of trees, there is a mention of the “Mostro della specie”: Dee notes, “The Monstre of Trees. I saw of it growing at Rome in a little forecourt of a lerned man that I was browght vnto. anno 1563. mense Juleo” (3:T4r).

23. There is no English edition of Ramusio’s magnum opus, but there is full facsimile with a useful analysis of the contents by George B. Parks. See also Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History.”

25. By the estimate of John Boyd Thacher, Ferdinand “gathered no less than 15,370 books and manuscripts” (Keen, Life, viii). A new descriptive catalogue of the library is currently being compiled from Ferdinand’s own “Repertorios”: Catálogo Concordado de la Biblioteca de Hernando Colón, ed. by Tomás Marín Martínez, José Manuel Ruiz Asencio, and Klaus Wagner. Mark P. McDonald’s new catalogue and CD-Rom of The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539), A Renaissance Collector in Seville contains the fullest account of the library currently available in English.

29. This appears in chap. 36 (K4v–K5r) in the original, chap. 37 (92) in Keen.

30. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, esp. chap. 2.

33. Next to a discussion of the Isle of Mona, Dee suggests it was named “for Memory of Mona in North Wales so named by the company of Madog ap Owen Gwyned prince of North Wales &c. Ao.1170” (3:cc4v). And when Cortés records a prophecy by the natives concerning the coming of a strange man, Dee relates it to “Madoc ap Owen Gwynedd. Ao 1170” (3:gg2v–gg3r).

35. Dee’s copy of vol. 1 of this two-volume work (no. 238 in the Roberts and Watson library catalogue) is now at the library of the Royal College of Physicians, London (shelf mark D5/8, 48f). For a sophisticated reading of “the geographical imagination” of Thevet—whose career parallels Dee’s in some interesting ways—see Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery.

36. Patrick Thollard, Barbarie et civilisation chez Strabon; Franceso Prontera (ed.), Strabone: Contributi allo studio della personalità e dell’opera.

37. The accounts published in Ramusio had prepared Dee for the possibility that voyages could take strange turns and taught him the lesson that a prudent explorer would adapt himself to the new opportunities: Dee underlines a passage reading “Hauendo noi deliberato di veder altri paesi, com’era il nostro disegno, ci ponemmo in mare, ma la instabil fortuna ch’essercitar suole il mutabile arbitrio suo nell’acque, similmente instabili, ne disuio alquanto dal proposito nostro” and summarizes the lesson in the margin, “The Mutability of intents in Sea Voyages” (1:u3v).

42. For a useful comparative perspective on these practices see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.

43. Gwyn Williams, “Welsh Wizard and British Empire: Dr. John Dee and a Welsh Identity,” 6.

44. John M. Headley, Tomasso Campanella and the Transformation of the World, 338.

46. Kadir, Columbus, x. This approach to Columbus became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s: cf. Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophesy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’ ” and Alain Milhou, Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica franciscanista española. For an English edition and explication of the key text, see August Kling and Delno C. West (trans. and eds.), The Libro de las Profecías of Christopher Columbus.

47. Stephen Clucas, “ ‘Thow shalt prevayle agaynst them’: John Dee and the Politics of the Elizabethan Court 1575–1585,” a paper delivered at Northern Arizona University, 13 February 1996. I am grateful to Dr. Clucas for sharing a copy of this paper with me and for ongoing discussions of Dee and his contemporaries.

51. Richard L. Kagan, Lucretia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in 17th-Century England; Diane Purkiss, “Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the 17th Century.”

52. Fernando goes on to explain that Henry eventually extended his patronage to Columbus, but not until it was too late: “After the King of England had seen that map and informed himself of the Admiral’s offer, he gladly accepted his proposal and summoned him to his Court. But God had reserved that prize for Castile, for by that time the Admiral had successfully completed his enterprise and returned home again” (37). In the notes in his Ramusio, Dee can be found using one Spanish source against another to defend the reputation of Elizabeth’s grandfather: when Oviedo suggests that Columbus was rudely cast away from Henry’s court, he writes in the margin, “That King Henry made a mock of this offer it is vntrue: for he did accept it: as you may see in the .11. chap. Of Don Fernando Columbus his historie, written of his fathers travayle, translated out of the Spanish into Italien by Alfonsus Vlloa” (3:K8r).

54. Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance, 5.

55. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West.

57. This was true of printed as well as handwritten marginalia: see William W. E. Slights, “The Cosmopolitics of Reading: Navigating the Margins of John Dee’s General and Rare Memorials,” in his Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books.

2. “Julius Adelmarius filius Caesaris Adelmarij, qui semper durante vita cognitus publice et appellatus Caesar per Illustrissimas Reginas Mariam et Elizabetham: transmisit eandem appellationem, idemque Nomen ad Posteritatem suam. . . . Jul. Adelmarius alias Caesar—aetatis suae an. 77. 1634” (folio 609r [616r]).

3. An elaborate—and possibly apocryphal—joke was preserved in Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. In 1628 Caesar had been keen to procure a particular office for his son Robert, but since the place had already been filled, the Lord Treasurer promised to put him forward as soon as it was vacant. When he neglected to do so, Caesar’s old friend the Earl of Tullibardine reminded him of his promise and gave him a note reading “Remember Caesar.” The treasurer “put it into that little pocket where, he said, he kept all his memorials which were first to be transacted,” but several days passed without any action, and when he changed his clothes his valet brought him the notes he found in his pockets. When he found a small scrap of paper warning him to Remember Caesar,

he was exceedingly confounded [and] sent for his bosom friends . . . [who agreed] that it could signify nothing but that there was a conspiracy against his life, by his many and mighty enemies: and they all knew Caesar’s fate by contemning or neglecting such animadversions. And therefore they concluded that he should pretend to be indisposed, that he might not stir abroad all that day. . . . And shortly after, the earl of Tullibardine asking him, whether he had remembered Caesar, the Treasurer quickly recollected the ground of his perturbation . . . and so the whole jest came to be discoursed. (6:64–67)

4. See the biographical entries in the DNB, ODNB, P. W. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons, 1558–1603, and Biographia Britannica: Or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who have Flourished in Great-Britain and Ireland, 3:128–31; L. M. Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy: The Public Career of Sir Julius Caesar, 1580–1636; and Hill, ed., The Ancient State, Authoritie, and Proceedings of the Court of Requests by Sir Julius Caesar.

5. Walter J. Ong, S.J., Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, 61.

6. For examples from all of these spheres—and more—see my two collections of microfilm editions, Renaissance Commonplace Books from the Huntington Library and Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library.

7. Recent work on the topic includes: Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England; Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought; Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century; Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy; Kevin Sharpe, “Uncommonplaces? Sir William Drake’s Reading Notes”; Steven N. Zwicker, “The Constitution of Opinion and the Pacification of Reading,” esp. 297–99; Anthony Grafton, “Les lieux communs chez les humanistes”; and Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass, “Reading and Authorship: The Circulation of Shakespeare, 1590–1619.”

10. The shelflist is BL MS Lansdowne 124, and the inventory of Italian books is BL MS Lansdowne 161, fols. 47–48.

12. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, 277–83.

13. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, 60; John G. Rechtien, “John Foxe’s Comprehensive Collection of Commonplaces: A Renaissance Memory System for Students and Theologians,” 84.

14. STC 11239. This is one of the most elaborate instances of what Peter Stallybrass has recently described as “printing for manuscript” (a concept he explored in his 2006 A. S. W. Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania).

15. In 1566, Daye printed Aelfric’s Testimony of Antiquity for Archbishop Parker (STC 159.5), featuring the first English set of Anglo-Saxon type, and, in 1567, Parker’s edition of the Psalter (STC 2729); in 1570, he printed the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry (STC 10560), featuring John Dee’s famous “groundplat” or overview of the mathematical sciences. See C. L. Oastler, John Day, the Elizabethan Printer, and Andrew Pettegree’s entry in the ODNB for these and other projects. Largely on the basis of his affiliation with Foxe, he has been associated primarily with an aggressively Protestant agenda; but ca. 1570, I would suggest, he was probably known more generally as the printer of choice for big books by big men.

16. Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 192–93. See also Eugène Thionville, De la théorie des lieux communs dans les topiques d’Aristotle et de ses principales modifications.

17. It would look like a more systematic version of Ben Jonson’s Timber; or, Discoveries, Made Upon Men and Matter, As they have flow’d out of his daily Readings; or had their refluxe to his peculiar Notion of the Times (first published in 1640). On the structure and sources of Sidney’s text see Geoffrey Shepherd’s introduction to his edition of An Apology for Poetry, and particularly his discussion of the ways in which Sidney’s text was not so much “epoch-making” as “epoch-marking” (16).

18. Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World, 12. Cf. Françoise Waquet (ed.), Mapping the World of Learning: The “Polyhistor” of Daniel Georg Morhof.

20. Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany, 4–5; Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot, 26–27.

21. This text was translated by Michel de Montaigne, who also made it the subject of the longest and most elaborate of his Essays, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” (book 2, chap. 12). This text was one of the primary sources for Montaigne, Caesar, and their contemporaries, of the idea that God gave two books to mankind, the Book of Nature and the Bible, along with the conviction that the quest for knowledge need not inevitably lead to the sin of pride; see M. A. Screech’s introduction to his translation of Montaigne’s Essays, xx–xl, esp. xxxii.

23. Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca universalis, sive Catalogus omnium scriptorum locupletissimus (1545); Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium . . . libri XXI (1548). And in 1549 he published a further volume, extending his subject index to the professional fields of medicine, law, and theology. On Gesner’s organizational methods and achievements, see Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, chap. 3.

25. William Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glass (STC 6119). Daye also used the border for the first English translation of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry (STC 10560) and his edition of Asser’s Aelfredi Regis Res Gestae (STC 863).

26. See Thomas S. Freeman’s ODNB entry on Foxe and his essay with Elizabeth Evenden, “John Foxe, John Day, and the Printing of the ‘Book of Martyrs.’ ”

27. Cf. Havens, Commonplace Books, 49–50. Later binders have cropped away most of the examples, but one of the Folger Library’s copies of the Cranmer text (STC 5992 Copy 1) has many pages where printed headings from the Pandectae are still visible, always upside down on the bottom of verso pages. At the bottom of p.360, for instance, is Foxe’s original heading “Nutritio. Nutrimentum. Nutrices. Digestio. Concoctio.” with the original signature and folio numbers (BBb4 and 406). Ironically, on this page Cranmer’s text actually fits Foxe’s topic: he is discussing the paradox of the sacrament, summarized by the printed marginal note, “Bread and no bread.”

28. STC 11239.5. The unused copy is preserved at the Lambeth Palace Library, and the used one is now BL MS Harley 783.

29. Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, 61. Cf. Rechtien’s claim that “Apparently the only copy to survive is an unbound copy in the Cambridge University Library, MS. Mm.3.7” (“John Foxe’s Comprehensive,” 83); and Ann Moss’s pertinent suggestion that “The copy . . . in Cambridge University Library has only the most desultory attempts at entries, but well-used copies would be precisely the ones which disintegrated” (Printed Commonplace-Books, 194). The revised Short-title Catalogue (published in three volumes between 1976 and 1991) identified several additional copies—including this one.

30. Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy, 255–56. Caesar’s will is dated 27 February 1635 and is now National Archives, PROB 11/170. It is curious that Caesar does not mention his copy of Foxe’s Pandectae—though it is just possible that he, and his sons, knew it as the “Polyanthea Caesaris.”

31. H. R. Plomer, G. H. Bushnell, and E. R. McC. Dix, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775, 193; BL MS Lansdowne 123, an annotated copy of Samuel Paterson’s catalogue for the 1757 auction of Caesar’s manuscripts (for bibliographical details see note 32), tipped-in note facing title page.

32. Samuel Paterson, A Catalogue of Several Thousands of the most singular and interesting Heads in the Collection of Manuscripts of the Right Hon. and Right Worshipful Sir Julius Caesar, Knt. (London, 1757), fol. 3r–v.

33. The annotation in the British Library’s copy of the catalogue mistakenly identifies Lot 2 as “MS. Add 6038,” despite the fact that it is only one volume and covers much more than the civil law. The correct item is clearly Lot 159, “Pandectae locorum communium, per Julium Caesarem,” which was purchased by “Chambers” for £1 11s. 6d. (p. 65). Inscriptions on the binding and flyleaves of the commonplace book itself indicate that it was subsequently acquired by the great bibliophile (and bishop of Ely) Thomas Dampier, who presented it to the British Museum in 1811.

34. It was originally purchased by Horace Walpole. It was acquired by the British Museum in 1842 and is now BL C.20.f.15–58.

35. Howard M. Nixon and William A. Jackson, “English Seventeenth-Century Travelling Libraries.” A color photograph can be found on the British Library’s “Images Online” Web site at http://www.imagesonline.bl.uk/britishlibrary/controller/textsearch?text=julius%20caesar&y=0&x=0&&idx=1&startid=1690. None of the printed books in Caesar’s portable library bear marginalia or other signs of use. I am grateful to Philippa Marks, curator of bindings at the British Library, for allowing me to examine this exquisite but fragile object.

37. Walter J. Ong, “Typographic Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare,” 432.

38. Caesar’s text is STC 4341. For a modern edition, see L. M. Hill, ed., The Ancient State, Authoritie, and Proceedings of the Court of Requests by Sir Julius Caesar; this quotation from Allsebrook is cited on p. xii. For a useful account of the history and jurisdiction of the Court of Requests and its relationship to the Star Chamber, see Sir John Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 6; 1483–1558, chap. 10.

39. “Without this topical guide,” Hill explains, “the collection of cases would have been uselessly antiquarian. When one consults the topics in the table and then follows the references to the collection of Caesar’s cases, his argument emerges from the mass of citations” (The Ancient State, xiii).

41. Folio 291r [300r]. This is a good example of the need for the alphabetical index at the back of the book: this group of headings is hardly the only, or even the most obvious, place for such a note, and the leaf is sandwiched between Foxe’s pages devoted to “Hell” (290r [299r]) and “Ingratitude. Ingrates. Inhumanity.” (292r [301r])—to which Caesar has added “Moroseness. Solitude. Rusticity. Melancholy.” Without a precise list of page references, not even the volume’s compiler would know where to look for these topics.

42. Holger Schott, “The Trials of Orality in Early Modern England, 1550–1625,” 128.

43. On this and other readings, see J. H. Baker, “Readings in Gray’s Inn, Their Decline and Disappearance,” in The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays, chap. 4.

45. Havens, Commonplace Books, 38. As late as 1680, lawyers could purchase the short printed text A Brief Method of the Law, Being an Exact Alphabetical Disposition of all the Heads Necessary for a Perfect Common-Place, which was (as the full title continued) “Printed in this Volume for the conveniency of Binding with Common-Place-Books” (Wing B4435A). BL MS Lansdowne 638 is an example of how this book would look when bound with blank leaves and filled, as intended, with legal cases and textual authorities.

47. Louis A. Knafla, Law and Politics in Jacobean England: The Tracts of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, 43–44; see also Knafla, “The Law Studies of an Elizabethan Student” and “Ramism and the English Renaissance.”

49. Knafla, Law and Politics, 42–43. Egerton’s manuscript indexes for these texts are now HEH Ellesmere MSS 1160, 1165, and 34/A/5.

52. Allen D. Boyer, Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age, 31; cf. Schott, “The Trials of Orality,” 135 ff.

53. They are now BL MS Harley 6687 and 6686. For a detailed description and discussion see J. H. Baker, The Legal Profession and the Common Law, chap. 12.

55. Abraham Fraunce, The lawyers logic (1588), cited by Havens, Commonplace Books, 39.

56. See Rechtien, “John Foxe’s Comprehensive Collection of Commonplaces,” 85–86. Indeed, Hardin Craig once called Ramus “the greatest master of the shortcut the world has ever known” (cited by Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 3).

59. “Introduction: L’art de l’extrait,” in Élisabeth Décultot (ed.), Lire, copier, écrire: Les bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle, esp. 11–16.

60. Compare Walter Ong’s observation in 1983 that Ramus’s dichotomous method anticipated the digital age by some four hundred years (“Preface to the Paperback Edition” of Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, viii), and the more recent perspectives on the subject in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print.

61. Biographia Britannica, 3:129. The original Latin reads “Omnibus Christi fidelibus ad quos hoc praesens scriptum pervenerit; Sciatis, me Julium Dalmare, alis Caesarem, Militem, utriusque Legis Doctorem; Elizabethae Reginae Supremae Curiae Admiralitatis Judicem, & unum e Magistratis Libellorum; Jacobo Regi a Privatis Conciliis, Cancellarium Scaccarii, Scriniorum Magistrum, hac praesenti Charta mea confirmasse, Me annuente Divino Numine, naturae debitum libentur solviturum, quam primum Deo placuerit. In cujus rei memoriam, Manum mean, & Sigillum apposui. Datum 27 Februari, 1635.”

1. The 1586 Book of Common Prayer with Psalter is STC 16311.3 and the 1583 Psalter is STC 2463. The shelfmark at the Huntington Library is RB 438000:87F. This is the copy that EEBO reproduces for both texts and some of the marginalia described here can be studied more carefully there; but it is a useful example of the limitations of that resource for scholars interested in marginalia (and other copy-specific attributes). First, the two texts are reproduced as separate items and there is nothing to indicate to users of EEBO that they have lived within the covers of the same binding for some four hundred years—clearly forming, for the original user of the book, a single bibliographical and devotional entity. Furthermore, since EEBO jumps straight to the title page, an online researcher will also miss the description from the sale catalogue, the bookplate of the purchaser, and any notes inscribed on the pastedowns and flyleaves. Finally, the high-contrast photography used for the microfilm facsimiles upon which EEBO is based tends to cast a dark shadow over the frayed edges of pages—obscuring much of the marginalia that can be easily deciphered when working with the original object.

2. Dorothy Bowen, The Book of Common Prayer: The James R. Page Collection, 6. The description from the sale catalogue is now taped to the front flyleaf, and the details of the purchase are noted in Page’s acquisition records in the Huntington Library’s institutional archives.

3. See, e.g., Psalm 68 in the 1586 version, where he noted, “Se the other translation, 6 ver: God setteth the solitary in familes” (E1r).

4. The number of psalms in the category of “thanksgiving” is not usually restricted to seven, and beneath Psalm 6 there is a much longer list of the verses from more than thirty psalms that can be used for giving thanks (A3v).

6. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, 239–40; see also her earlier essay, “Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities.”

7. Andrew Bennett, introduction to Readers & Reading, esp. 12–15; Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process; William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (eds.), Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life; Adam Phillips, “Clutter: A Case History”; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.

11. McKeldin Library’s copy of David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), table of contents.

12. Http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/marginalia. Cf. figure 10 in Jackson’s Marginalia, a page from the National Archives of Canada’s Guide to the Preservation of Archival Materials (1981), where a reader in a gorilla costume takes notes in the margins of a book while a man in a jacket and tie writes careful notes in a notebook.

14. Daniel Traister, “Is There a Future for Special Collections? And Should There Be? A Polemical Essay,” 66. A more conservative perspective on the question can be found in Jayne Ringrose, “Making Things Available: The Curator and the Reader.”

16. Robertson Davies, Happy Alchemy: On the Pleasures of Music and the Theatre, 372–73.

18. John Updike, “Me and My Books,” 39. Updike is no less depressed by the sight of his books being read on trains and in airports: “My instinct is to tear the book from the reader’s hands. . . . The stranger, with his or her grimy fingers and glassy gaze, is so clearly not the ideal reader, all-forgiving and miraculously responsive, whom I vaguely courted as I wrote.”

19. Quoted in Steve Leveen, “Writing in Books,” a column posted on the Levenger Web site (www.levenger.com).

20. Sheila Strongman, “John Parker’s Manuscripts: An Edition of the Lists in Lambeth Palace MS 737,” 6.

21. May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age, 36. Timothy Graham offers a more measured assessment of Parker’s interventions in “The Beginnings of Old English Studies: Evidence from the Manuscripts of Matthew Parker.”

22. Cited by T. A. Birrell, “The Reconstruction of the Library of Isaac Casaubon,” 64, my emphasis.

23. Ethel M. Portal, “The Academ Roial of King James I,” 191, citing Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London, 1622), 54–55. I am grateful to Ian Donaldson for bringing this passage to my attention.

25. Marc Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses, 17. I am grateful to Elizabeth Eisenstein for reminding me of this passage.

26. Robert D. Taylor-Vaisey, “Regulations for the Operation of a Medieval Library,” 50.

27. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, 157–59. For vivid examples of the “monstrous alphabets” found in the margins of medieval books, see Michael B. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art.

29. Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 124, 46–47. The practice suggested by Brinsley is still in use today. In his guide, How to Buy Rare Books, William Rees-Mogg offers the following advice under the heading of “soiling”: “Dust-soiling and dirty finger-marks can usually be partially or completely removed with a very soft eraser, or with fresh white bread used in the same way” (139).

31. Allen Ahearn, Book Collecting: A Comprehensive Guide, 49. Cf. Philippa Bernard, Leo Bernard and Angus O’Neill (eds.), Antiquarian Books: A Companion for Booksellers, Librarians, and Collectors: the entry for “Reading Copy” reads “This apparently otiose description is generally taken to mean that a book offered in a catalogue is little more than complete, and thus ‘readable,’ though not in suitable condition for a collector. ‘Working copies’ are usually even worse” (349), and “Marginalia” is defined as “Anything written in the margin of a book after it was published. . . . Although marginalia can be of considerable interest and importance—Boswell’s annotations to the works of Johnson, for instance—many, particularly in more recent books, are no more than defacements” (277).

32. Some marginalists, perhaps aware of these practices, seem to have protected their annotations by folding the edge of the sheet over.

33. Monique Hulvey, “Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula,” 161.

35. Randall McLeod, “Where angels fear to read.” The phenomenon is illustrated in Stoddard, Marks in Books, 6.

36. Nicholas Hadgraft, “The Significance of the Archaeology of the Book in the Context of Conservation Work”; cf. Erik Petersen, “The Archaeology of Texts and Codices,” and R. I. Page, “The Ideal and the Practical.”

40. Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1953, IA:6. The clipping can be found in the Huntington’s Institutional Archives (folder 12.14.2.4).

41. Bernard M. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal Collection of Printed Books with Manuscript Annotations, 9. The same language is still applied to much more recent—and much less erudite—examples of students’ scribblings. On 9 December 2003 I found a 1963 edition of the Harington translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso advertised on the Antiquarian Book Exchange website (www.abebooks.com): it was described as “Near Fine (minus). Tight and clean, two sentences underlined with ‘think’s he’s dead’ written in margin p. 185, rest excellent!”

44. Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus” and The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.

45. Owen Gingerich, “Researching The Book Nobody Read: The De revolutionibus of Nicolaus Copernicus,” 502–3.

46. Robert Alan Shaddy, “A World of Sentimental Attachments: The Cult of Collecting, 1890–1930.”

47. Michael Dobson has called Shakespeare’s First Folio “a high-prestige bequest to [American collectors’] fellow-citizens—or, to put it more cynically, a commodity of choice for humanist money-launderers” (“Whatever You Do, Buy,” 10).

52. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newbooks, 1641–1649, 257.

55. Rare Books, Original Drawings, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts Collected by the Late A. Edward Newton, unpaginated preliminaries to volume 1; my emphasis.

59. For a useful overview of this and similar practices, known as “sophistication” in the book trade, see Nicolas Barker, “Sophistication.”

60. Letter from N. M. Broadbent to John [sic for Joseph] Quincy Adams, 9 July 1931 (Folger Shakespeare Library, Catalog Office Closet, Correspondence Files, “Special Collections and Subjects,” folder for “Broadbent”), 1–4. An earlier letter from Broadbent to Folger himself (dated 2 May 1927), offering him his entire collection of annotated books for £7,500, is also in this folder. I am grateful to the staff at the Folger Library (and particularly to Suellen Towers and Elaine Shiner) for bringing these materials to my attention and to Sabrina Baron for discussing them with me.

61. Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1: 1450–1625, 20.

63. Facsimile images of the trefoils and a copy of Howell’s letter can now be found in British Library shelfmark LR.263.d.6.

65. The 1568–70 Geneva Bible is now FSL shelfmark 1427. Roger Stritmatter’s use of it to argue for Oxford’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is summarized on the Shakespeare Fellowship Web site (http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/bibledissabsetc.htm). For David Kathman’s critique of this argument, and a full transcription of the marginalia in question, see the Shakespeare Authorship Web site (http://shakespeareauthorship.com/ox5.html).

66. G. R. Rose, “The Libraries of Bacon and Ben Jonson: How They Marked Their Books.”

69. William T. Smedley, The Mystery of Francis Bacon, 157. Among Smedley’s books at the Folger (now PR2944.L4) is a copy of Oliver Lector’s Letters from the Dead to the Dead (1905). A note on the front flyleaf reads “I gave this book to my friend Wm T Smedley Esq on the day I conquered the Bacon problem. May 10 1910. W. M. Safford.”

70. James Phinney Baxter, The Greatest of Literary Problems: The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Works.

71. Smedley to Howell, 30 May 1917. This letter (along with the others cited below) is now in the Folger Library’s archives, accompanying the Catalogue of the Smedley Library of Shakespeareana & Baconia [sic].

74. Smedley to Howell, 22 September 1917. Since Smedley claimed he had access to some 2,000 books annotated by Bacon, Safford’s collection must have numbered at least 1,500. The Folger acquired some but not all of Safford’s books when they were sold by Sotheby’s in 1941.

78. Smedley to Howell, 9 September and 2 October 1923. Smedley was familiar with Howell’s credentials as both a Baconian and a rare book dealer. The two had corresponded about the Durning-Lawrence copy of The Advancement of Learning, and Smedley also knew that Howell had published and distributed a Baconian pamphlet by Walter Conrad Arensberg, the Philadelphia-based art and book collector. In the 1930s Arensberg created a “Francis Bacon Library” of his own, along similar lines to Smedley’s proposed “Bacon Memorial Library”: it was originally deposited at Claremont College and in 1995 it moved to its current home in the Huntington Library.

79. Howell to Folger, 13 December 1923 and 24 January 1924. In making his sales pitch Howell began by playing the Baconian card: “Every profound student of the subject I have ever known . . . [is] convinced that Bacon was responsible for the standardization of the English language, and the Renaissance of English Literature, which included among other things, the great achievement of the translation of the English Bible, and the immortal plays of Shakespeare.” But when Folger failed to bite (indeed, even to respond), Howell took a more measured line: “Mr. Smedley’s Elizabethan material should go with your library, not as a controversial matter, but to supplement your marvellous collection of Shakespeare”—and, he added, to give his collection “many sides,” like that of Mr. Huntington (whom he threatened to approach if Folger remained uninterested).

80. When other booksellers heard of the Smedley purchase, they began to approach him with other books supposedly annotated by Bacon. In March 1925, for instance, the London bookseller Thomas Thorpe offered Folger a Latin book on canon law “with markings and notes by Francis Bacon.” Folger sharply replied that “it of course interests me, but I think I should tell you that I already have quite a shelf of books from Bacon’s library, with his notes, similar to the one you describe, and the whole collection has not cost me as much as you are naming as the price for this one volume.”

84. Seymour de Ricci, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada.

85. Furthman’s 1603 Montaigne is now FSL MS V.b.327, and his working papers are MS Y.d.623.

86. There are several drafts of this text in FSL MS Y.d.623, folder 1. It has recently been published as “Shakespeare and Montaigne: A Symposium by Jules Furthman.”

87. Furthman to “Frank,” 3 May 1965 (FSL MS Y.d.623, folder 8). In an undated note in folder 3 he observed that, in some cases where the parallels were particularly strong, “Shakespeare not only left his fingerprints but his hat and coat.”

89. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, “Introduction: Fashion, Fetishism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Europe,” 7–11; Peter Stallybrass, O Casaco de Marx: Roupas, Memória, Dor. Cf. Andrew Taylor’s response to the question “But are you not fetishizing the manuscript?” in his Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers, chap. 5.

90. Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, 31–32. Cf. Steve Leveen’s essay on “Writing in Books,” where he casts these two types in ecological terms, as “Footprint Leavers” and “Preservationists.”

91. Rowan Watson, “The Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Photographic Reproduction,” 140.

1. The feature story to which this image belongs is the first of a series of articles addressing “the importance of libraries and their imperatives in the ‘Amazoogle’ age” (Simon Bains and David Dinham, “The Role of Libraries in the Digital Age,” 6).

2. The British Library’s “Turning the Pages Online Gallery” is http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html. The product was developed by Armadillo Systems and has become the application of choice for exhibiting on-site and online facsimiles at other major institutions, including the National Library of Ireland (Dublin), the Wellcome Library (London), and the National Library of Medicine (Washington, D.C.).

5. For an unusually measured assessment see Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book.

9. The report was written by a team chaired by medievalist Stephen G. Nichols and was published in November 2001. It can be found online at http://www.clir.org/PUBS/reports/pub103/contents.html. While the report does not explicitly address readers’ marks, the questions it poses are directly relevant to them (and vice versa): “What qualities of an original are useful or necessary to retain in their original form? Under what circumstances are original materials required for research? When is it sufficient and appropriate to capture intellectual content through reformatting and not necessarily retain the original?. . . . From both custodial and scholarly perspectives, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these various preservation options?” (“Executive Summary,” paragraph 3).