Reading practices and marginalia

Abstract: The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.

Keywords: Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Sonnet Collections, Marginalia, Reading, Thickening, Affect

The keen interest medieval art studies have been devoting to the margin, the marginal and the liminal in medieval culture, now commonly and rather comfortably acknowledged under the concept of marginalia, has not yet entailed a thorough reflection on operative concepts or terminology. This refusal of an asphyxiating normalization may be seen as a sensible choice, allowing scholars uninhibited idiosyncratic contributions to the understanding of the unpredictable universe of medieval imagery. On the other hand, it may just be a babelic way of communicating, certainly not without its drawbacks.

Marginalität. Ränder. Der Begriff der Marginalität changiert zwischen Abstraktion und Bildhaltigkeit. Das macht ihn benutzerfreundlich - man weiss immer schon in etwa, was gemein ist. Andererseits macht es ihn ungreifbar, weil die Assoziationen, die sich mit dem Rand verbinden, nicht ohne weiteres auf einen Begriff zu bringen sind. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, verschiedene implizite Wertungen, die die topographische Suggestion transportiert, synthetisierend zu beschreiben. Berücksichtigt werden Randpositionen auf unterschiedlichen medialen Oberflächen (Bilder, Karten, Manuskriptseiten). Korreliert wird der Befund mit den Ergebnissen der Sozialtopographie. Welche Perspektiven eröffnet eine Engführung der baulichen 'mise en espace' mittelalterlicher Gemeinschaften, der 'mise en place' im Bild und der Karte sowie der 'mise en page' des mittelalterlichen Codex? Die These ist: Wenn man die historischen Raumkonzepte, die dem Begriff der Marginalität unterlegt sind, expliziert, dann ermöglicht das nicht nur, den modernen Begriff an das Imaginarium der mittelalterlichen Quellen anzuschliessen, sondern auch, den modernen “Vereinbarungsbegriff”  (Schubert) als Terminus zu präziseren. Der Beitrag bietet eine resümierende Skizze dieser Operation.

This is a version 2.1 of an older handout providing a handy overview of the most common annotation symbols in use in Latin manuscripts of the early Middle Ages. It is meant only as a supplement to my other publications and should be used as a guide, not as an authoritative source.

The new version is available at: https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/22292

The article studies some of Catullus’ textual and paratextual innovations generally attributed to early printed editions (Avanzi, Palladio and Guarini), in comparison with other earlier manuscript sources (Francesco Buzzacarini and Angelo Poliziano’s marginalia and three manuscripts belonging to Mynor’s θ group), in order to suggest mutual relationships and a possible common ground.

Статья посвящена впервые публикуемому экземпляру издания 1511 года «Десяти книг об архитектуре» Марка Витрувия Поллиона (M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus cum figuris et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi possit. Venetiis, 1511) c многочисленными маргиналиями XVI века из фонда Научной библиотеки ГМИИ им. А.С. Пушкина. Авторами рассмотрены состав и типология рукописных помет на полях и в тексте трактата, описан путь атрибуции текстовых маргиналий, представлен опыт их датировки. На основе анализа содержания помет, а также благодаря сопоставлению образцов почерка экземпляра из ГМИИ с рукописями из Национальной библиотеки Марчиана в Венеции (Италия), сделан вывод о принадлежности помет венецианскому гуманисту Даниэле Барбаро. Рукописные маргиналии датированы серединой 1560-х годов.

The article focuses on the copy of the 1511 edition of "Ten Books on Architecture" by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus cum figuris et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi possit. Venetiis, 1511), housed in the Research Library of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow, Russia). This treatise includes numerous marginal notes from the 16th century, the content and typology of which the article’s authors analyse in order to describe their approach in identifying the author of the writings and the process of dating. Based on the analysis of the markings and their contents, as well as by comparing the handwriting samples from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts with the manuscripts from the Marciana National Library in Venice (Italy), the authors concluded that the writing belongs to the Venetian humanist Daniele Barbaro and dates to the mid-1560s.

Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer
Edited by Patricio Ferrari and Jerónimo Pizarro
A collection of scholarly essays dedicated to Fernando Pessoa as English reader and writer including unpublished material from the author’s archive and private library
With Pessoa’s digitized private library online, the importance of English to Pessoa has become indisputable, particularly in his formative years: numerous English authors served as the bedrock from which his poetic sensibility emerged, developed and soared.
In fact, a significant amount of Pessoa’s writings in English and in Portuguese (including those attributed to his heteronyms and/or to other literary personae) were greatly informed by these (his) original sources. Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer provides ample evidence of his fruitful, lifelong relationship with the English language.
In addition to its thematic focus, this latest volume of Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies features sections dedicated to unpublished materials, new transcriptions of texts Pessoa originally wrote
in English and verse translations by Pessoa into Portuguese. Contributors to this volume include George Monteiro, Patricia Silva McNeill, Richard Zenith, and Stefan Helgesson.

The manuscript J II 44, held by the National Central Library of Florence (Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Conventi soppressi, ms. J II 44, also known under the shelf mark I II 44), contains several theological treatises originating in the heterodox milieu of mid-thirteenth-century Lombard Cathars from the Desenzano Church who were also called Albanenses. The main works in the manuscript – The Liber de duobus principiis and the Florence Ritual – were competently edited by Antoine Dondaine and Christine Thouzellier in the 1930s and 1970s. However, smaller pieces, additions, and marginalia in the manuscript have attracted less attention. Some of them remain unpublished and have passed almost unnoticed in recent scholarship. Probably the most interesting of these unpublished parts is a compilation from Old Testament sapiential books on fol. 51v-53r. This article provides an edition of this piece with an introduction and commentary explaining its interest. The compilation is by no means a result of the haphazard copying of biblical passages. Quite to the contrary, it shows careful and focused theological work. Albeit written down and most probably also compiled by the Cathar redactor of the Florence manuscript, this collection of quotes departs from what we know about Catharism, and serves as a warning against interpreting Catharism as a theological system limited to dualism, soteriology, and the criticism of the Catholic Church. No less importantly, however, this sapiential compilation and the Florence manuscript in general also help us to avoid the other extreme: interpreting Catharism merely as a popular movement with virtually no elements of theological learning.

A basic source for this study is a miscellany from 1789, which is popular among scholars as Obretenov’s collection (Obretenov Sbornik). The first introductive part of the paper discusses the problems concerning the book’ and its author’s lives, based on the scarce information, derived from autobiographical “primarily” notes (personal marginalia). Although “Grandfather” Obreten gave the name of a famous family during the Bulgarian national revival period his life is somehow shadowed by his acclaimed ancestors. Of particular interest here are the last few pages of the manuscript, in which Obreten filed his brief historical accounts comprising the years between 1772 and 1808.
The main methodological drive of the study is deciphering the protagonists and the socio-political context in some of Obreten’s brief historical accounts by cross-examining the Ottoman sources from the period. Juxtaposing the notes and the local kadi court entries and other diverse type of Ottoman documents brings to the fore some interesting details on the local elite clashes as well as the promotion of a local personage to the highest position in the Ottoman Empire – the grand vizier Rusçukli Hasan pasha (April 1790-February 1791). Moreover, this micro-historical approach casts some light on the entangled relations between high-level state officials and minor social actors as the local reaya representatives in a period of social disorder and natural disasters, epidemics and wars. The study on the paralleled memories gives us the opportunity of not only tracing the correlations but of presenting Obreten’s accounts as a unique source for the importance and the reflection of these events on the local Christian community.

Burroughs’ concern with the afterlife prompted him to write a number of “Books of the Dead” such as Cities of the Red Night, a novel that cuts across different times and spaces in a nonlinear way. The novel also depicts e a number of scenarios reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. The worlds described by Burroughs’ work are besieged by eerie plagues and rites; spacecrafts and futuristic medical procedures intermingle with retroactive pirate utopias, recurrent demonic possessions, and gruesome primitive ceremonies. Cities of the Red Night is a novel about mutation and radical change in the face of an ominous fate, something that could also be said about some of Bosch’s paintings, but not only does Burroughs borrow from Bosch in that sense. Burroughs’ novel admittedly makes extensive use of Bosch’s colour palette, and the semiotic hybrid creatures he describes draw heavily from the beings depicted by the Dutch painter. To demonstrate these connections, certain passages of the novel are examined in relation with Bosch’s oeuvre, and images of Burroughs’ scrapbooks from the time period when the novel was written are considered in the same vein. Intersections and dissonances between the two authors are also pointed out, with a number of conclusions  proposed for further discussion.

Early medieval manuscripts were commonly annotated not only by glosses but also by annotation symbols. These graphic signs inserted in manuscript margins provided manuscript text with layers of additional meaning and functionality. From the most common signs marking biblical quotations and passages of interest to the sophisticated systems of signs used by some of the early medieval scholars, annotation symbols represent perhaps the most common form of marginalia encountered in early medieval books. Yet, their non-verbal character proved a serious obstacle to their understanding and appreciation.

This book represents the first systematic study of annotation symbols used in the Latin West between c. 400 and c. 900. Combining paleographic evidence with the evidence of written sources such as late antique and early medieval lists of signs, this book identifies the most important communities of sign users and conventions in use in the early Middle Ages. It explores some of the notable differences between regions, periods, linguistic communities and classes of users and reconstructs a fascinating history of the practice of using signs, rather than words, to annotate text. Those who work with early medieval manuscripts will, furthermore, find this book to be a practical handbook of the most common annotation symbols attested in early medieval Western manuscripts or discussed in ancient and medieval sources.

Although an encounter between Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) seems unlikely, the possibility is real enough. During May and June in 1924, Borges, a few months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, visited for six weeks with his parents and sister the city of Lisbon, city that Pessoa, then thirty-six years old, had been living in ever since he returned from South Africa in September, 1905. The first to have entertained the idea of their meeting was Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who wrote of them sitting in the Brasileira do Chiado –one of the cafés in the Portuguese capital that Pessoa and other fellow writers frequented. More recently, Daniel Balderston pictured them conversing in an English that would have sounded somewhat antiquated to contemporary ears though entirely in keeping with the bookish English in which both of them were also at home.

On 17-18 April, 2015 voices from five different departments at Brown University will join with local poets, musicians, actors and scholars in a two-day celebration of Fernando Pessoa, a major twentieth-century writer known primarily for his Portuguese works (The Book of Disquiet and the heteronymic poetry). Two things make this event unique. In October of 1977 Brown hosted the first international symposium on Pessoa. At that time Edwin Honig pointed out that much remained to be said about the poet’s bilingualism, referring to his English output. No one more than George Monteiro has committed himself to exploring this largely ignored aspect of Pessoa, and his Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature (2000) breaks new ground in its discussion of the vast implications of Pessoa’s role as a voracious reader/writer of English. This conference, conceived and organized in that same pioneering spirit and coming full-circle almost forty years later, will focus on a body of poetry that continues to grow due to discoveries still being made in Pessoa’s archive. Open to faculty, students, writers and lovers of poetry.

Besides glosses and other textual annotations, early medieval Latin manuscript commonly feature technical signs, annotation symbols and sigla that reflect readership or provide a framework for interpretation and use. The early medieval Insular book users were particularly keen on using such devices. This article maps the usage of technical signs in a corpus of early medieval Irish manuscripts produced on the Continent or preserved and used there early after the production. In the centre of the inquiry are four manuscripts belonging to an Irish scholarly circle associated with Sedulius Scottus. The article concludes that: • Insular, and specifically Irish, annotators used a specific repertoire of technical signs; • This Insular/Irish repertoire is substantially distinct from the repertoire of technical signs used by Carolingian scribes and therefore allows for discerning books annotated by Insular/Irish users on the Continent; • A noticeable difference exists between various identifiable clusters of manuscripts annotated by Insular/Irish users, suggesting that different annotators and circles drew on different parts of the Insular repertoire; • The manuscripts from the Sedulius group stand out from among other Irish books produced on the Continent on account of the specific mode of annotation, which seems to have been particular to the circle of scholars that produced them; • The Greek Psalter of Sedulius, which contains the subscription of Sedulius Scottus, displays a pattern of sign use distinct from the one found in the manuscripts from the Sedulius group and therefore does not seem related to them; • One or two lightly-annotated manuscripts contain traces of annotation in the manner of the Sedulius circle and therefore may reflect activities of the scholars from this scholarly group.

NEL VAT. LAT. 3214 Il Vat. lat. 3214, cartaceo, contenente il Novellino (ff. 1r-87v della più recente cartulazione) e una raccolta d'impronta stilnovistica di liriche volgari dugentesche (ff. 88v-170v), è la copia, fedele sin nel mantenimento delle forme grafiche, che Giulio Camillo Delminio fece eseguire a Bologna da un antico esemplare in suo possesso oggi perduto.

The intellectual rivalry of F.A. Hayek and J.M. Keynes has recently caught the attention of historians of economic thought, journalists and the broad public. However, how was it viewed at the time? This article uses archival material in the form of marginal annotations made by G.L.S. Shackle to determine contemporary reading responses to the theoretical developments of the 1930s. Shackle’s unique reading style that includes legible, dated, annotations and the fact that a substantial part of his academic library survives, gives us a unique vantage point from which to explore anew this period of intellectual history.

This article reconsiders all the additions and marginalia and some of the reader marks in the Cathar manuscript J.II.44 held by the National Central Library of Florence (Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Conv. soppr., ms. J.II.44, also known under the shelf mark I.II.44), revises the identification of scribal hands, and draws some conclusions concerning the genesis and use of the codex. The additions and reader marks were undervalued and partly misinterpreted in Antoine Dondaine’s, Arno Borst’s, and Christine Thouzellier’s classical presentations of the manuscript.  A careful reassessment of the reader marks and additions shows that these important witnesses to further use of the manuscript do not come from an inquisitorial milieu, as Borst and Thouzellier hypothesized for some of them, but mostly point to the milieu of the Cathar Church of Desenzano in the mid-thirteenth century. The additions reveal at least two rather unexpected strands in the thought of the readers of the compilation, the first being moralistic and sapiential, and the second, apocalyptic. This identification of sapiential and apocalyptic tendencies in the Florence codex significantly enriches available knowledge of the religious culture within the Desenzano Church.

"Small, inexpensive, and well-designed, Peter Pauper Press books fit fetchingly into a suitcoat pocket or evening bag. With dependably colorful, decorative dust jackets and entertaining, easily digestible content, few books could be as cheering to give and receive. Perhaps this is why so many found their way into US upper-middle class (and striving) den bookshelves and kitchen cupboards in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Pauper’s attractively printed cookbooks, poetry volumes and lifestyle hints now recirculate through libraries, discerning used bookstores and as collectibles on eBay. Tantalizing traces of consumption linger in these used books – some apparently stored, tight and unopened, in a bedside table, forlornly filed away in an attic trunk, or boxed and forgotten in a basement bin, while others indicate heavy use, as cherished recipe book, favorite collection of poems, or crucial guide to concocting cocktails. Via an examination of collective collecting memory, this chapter explores the aesthetic dimensions of books – given, received, coveted, and inscribed, then rediscovered and displayed as cultural icons or nostalgic treasures.

We argue that the popular value of used goods – including books – contradicts the notion that ‘clean’ and ‘new’ determine the borders of consumer desire. We analyze examples from a proliferating personal library in some detail, describing and examining the material pleasures of these used texts, including ‘inscriptions’ such as previous owner’s marginalia – written annotations, highlights and notes left in the pages. Opening these thin volumes for the reader illuminates the gift book genre, the used book market, and the collectibility of particular books."

Several manuscripts of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde contain various works from contemporary authors. Prominent among them is Huntington Library MS HM 114 (Ph), a multi-text manuscript that contains Troilus and Criseyde, Piers Plowman, Mandeville's Travels, The Pistel of Swete Susan and The Legend of the Three Kings.

Richard Osbarn, the prolific scribe who copied Ph and whose hand has been identified in five manuscripts, was also responsible for British Library, MS Harley 3943 (H2). In stark contrast with Ph, H2 only features Troilus and Criseyde, but the textual similarities between the text of Troilus as copied in Ph and H2 are so pronounced that they evince the existence of a shared exemplar. However, the absence of the other works in H2 and the disonnances in the treatment of extra-textual elements speak of fundamental differences in the methods of production and in the purposes of both manuscripts. How are the different scribal attitudes towards Late Medieval vernacular literature exemplified in Ph and H2?  In which way did the method of production of both manuscripts determine the characteristics of the texts?

Kρίσεις-Αναφορές

• Πέννυ Τομπρή, ραδιοφωνική εκπομπή «Υλικό ονείρων» (Κωστής Παλαμάς, «Σημειώματα στο περιθώριο», εκδόσεις Πατάκη), ΕΡΤ3-95.8, 30 Ιουλίου 2018 [webradio.ert.gr/958fm/30iol2018-yliko-oniron-kostis-palamas/]
• Ελένη Γκίκα, «Κωστής Παλαμάς: “Σιγοκουβεντούλες που σβήνανε μόλις άρχιζαν…”», εφ. «Φιλελεύθερος», 2 Αυγούστου 2018  (αναδημοσίευση και στο  ηλεκτρονικό περιοδικό «Fractal» [https://goo.gl/UbG73S])
• Θανάσης Νιάρχος, «Κωστής Παλαμάς. Η αποκάλυψη του ποιητή», εφ. «Τα Νέα Σαββατοκύριακο», Ένθετο: Βιβλιοδρόμιο, 11-12 Αυγούστου 2018 [https://goo.gl/wmk9W5]
• Μάρκος Καρασαρίνης, «Οι “αναρτήσεις” του Παλαμά», εφ. «Το Βήμα της Κυριακής», Ένθετο: Βιβλία, 9 Σεπτεμβρίου 2018 [https://goo.gl/dyNegA]
• Μανώλης Κοττάκης, «“Τι γυρεύρεις πάλι εδώ κάτω;"», εφ. «Εστία», 5 Νοεμβρίου 2018
• Σάρα Θηλυκού, «Μοντέρνοι και υπερμοντέρνοι», εφ. «Η Αυγή της Κυριακής», Ένθετο: Αναγνώσεις, 25 Νοεμβρίου 2018 [https://goo.gl/vGxKsL]
• Ευριπίδης Γαραντούδης, «Ο κριτικός Παλαμάς: Η ποιητικοποίηση των πάντων», «Η Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών», Ένθετο: Ανοιχτό βιβλίο, 22-23 Ιουνίου 2019 [https://bit.ly/2JBX7DA]
• Γιάννης Παπακώστας, «Ένας λυρισμός εν πυκνώσει», περ. «Φρέαρ», τχ. 27+ (Ιούλιος 2020), σ. 208-210
• Ασημίνα Ξηρογιάννη, «Κωστή Παλαμά "Σημειώματα στο περιθώριο"», Culture Book, 11 Μαΐου2024 ["https://culturebook.gr/grafeio-pezografias/gonimi-gi/kosti-palama-simeiomata-sto-perithorio-grafei-i-asimina-xirogianni/]

This is an older version of a handout I made for myself and my colleagues in 2016 to provide us with a quick overview of the most important annotation symbols that can be found in the early medieval manuscripts from the Latin West. It lists the symbols of various signs with their early medieval or modern names and classifies them according to their basic function.

An up-to-date version of this handout can be found at: https://mittelalter.hypotheses.org/22292

If you have questions about any of the signs or sign categories, comments or suggestions, do not hesitate to contact me at: [email protected]

In this article, we present the results of thorough research that encompasses these two collections [Casa Fernando Pessoa (CFP) and Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP)] as well as a third, which consists of books and magazines that belong to Pessoa’s relatives and that have been appearing at a Lisbon auction house since October 2007. Our work entails (1) cataloguing all dust jackets in Pessoa’s literary estate now in the BNP and the small collection owned by his niece and heir, Manuela Nogueira; (2) determining whether they belong or not to books in Pessoa’s private library (see annexes I and II) and (3) checking if the annotations on the dust jackets are in any way connected with the book contents or not.

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde has a very complex textual history, in which different traditions seem to be intermingled - either because of diverse layers in the composition or transmission of the poem. Among the sixteen different manuscripts which are extant nowadays, we are especially interested in one of them, MS British Library Harley 2392 (H4). Although this copy of the text has been disregarded by some as a "thorough mess" (Hanna 1992: 179) from a textual point of view - it is a conflation of two groups of manuscripts -, however, there are some aspects in it that have caught our attention, namely the high amount of marginalia which are original to this particular copy. While other manuscripts have several ordinationes in common, and a few of them include glosses resembling the Italian titles for each section of the Filostrato, H4 has many marginal annotations which do not appear in any other extant exemplar. Our aim in this paper is to analyse the original glosses in this copy of Troilus in order to explore the role played by the scribe of the manuscript, "Style": his additions to the marginalia seem to hint at something beyond the task of a copyist, as those glosses are not mere indicators of the subject matter or simple bibliographical references, but they entail an interpretation of what Chaucer wrote.

York, York Minster Library MS XVI E. 32 is a late medieval codex, primarily written in English, which seems to be a living example of what a vernacular guide for medical practitioners was in fifteenth-century England. The manuscript is basically composed of herbal recipes; however, it also includes other texts considered to be scientific at that time, such as a chiromancy diagram, to interpret character from the lines on the palm of a person’s hand, or a bloodletting man, to know the veins that had to be cut to cure certain diseases.

A codicological analysis of the volume shows that a compiler and/or binder arranged its ten independent booklets to fit a purpose. It is my belief that this person’s aim was to assemble a group of utilitarian texts which turned out to be useful even to post-medieval readers, as suggested by the marginalia. I intend to provide a description of its treatises and collections in order to show the kind of medical texts that were thought to be indispensable in late medieval England.

This paper focuses on the marginalia of two Catullus’ manuscripts: London, British Library Burney 133 and Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Lat. XII 153 (4435). A comparative study highlighted painstaking scholia and several similarities that may suggest a common scholarly source.

This essay explores silent conversations with the past, but also navigates through the labyrinth of artistic process, with its manifold passages of research, chance occurrence and aesthetic experimentation. The double metaphors of silent conversations and labyrinths apply to the essay and the artwork within it, to the research and to the practice. Unfolding as both explication and demonstration, this essay presents a manifestation of the process of artistic research and practice as well as a description of it.

This essay explores silent conversations with the past, but also navigates through the labyrinth of artistic process, with its manifold passages of research, chance occurrence and aesthetic experimentation. The double metaphors of silent conversations and labyrinths apply to the essay and the artwork within it, to the research and to the practice. Unfolding as both explication and demonstration, this essay presents a manifestation of the process of artistic research and practice as well as a description of it. IJEA Vol. 14 Special Issue 1.2 http://www.ijea.org/v14si1/ 2 Introduction Art making might seem to imply an artist’s movement toward a central goal, as one would intend to move upon entering a labyrinth. But if we can start immediately down a divergent corridor, “...let’s imagine a Labyrinth without a central quid (neither Monster nor Treasure), so one that’s a-centric, which basically means a labyrinth without a final signified to discover...possibly with nothing at the cente...

Images of monsters, hybrid creatures, and lewd scenes in the margins of medieval manuscripts have intrigued, perplexed, and even offended scholars for as long as these codices have been studied.  While early scholarship grappled with the fundamental question of meaning, more recent scholarship, such as the work of Anne Rudloff Stanton on the role of marginal narratives in Gothic prayerbooks, foregrounds the intersection of the “primary” contents (text and larger images) with marginalia in an effort to illuminate the ways in which such “marginal” images purposefully and designedly contributed to the intended function of devotional manuscripts.  The Macclesfield Psalter, a deluxe psalter produced in England in the 1330s for a young, upper-class, male cleric, provides an excellent opportunity to further probe text-image relationships in the most popular type of personal devotional manuscript of the Middle Ages.  Using the manuscript as a case study, I argue that marginal hybrids are integral to the devotional utility of the Psalter.  Marginal hybrids, I contend, served as sites for the second step in the process of monastic reading (lectio divina) called meditatio, a term that accords more or less to the modern concept of meditation. Contemplation of these images facilitated the process of meditatio by providing locations for the eye to explore at the same time as the visuals inspired the mind to assimilate, contemplate, ingest, digest, and re-fashion what was read.  More specifically, marginal hybrids functioned as aids to the initiation of meditatio, provided way-points or signposts for the eye and mind in the composition of a meditation, invited further contemplation by slowing the reader down, and energized the reader to remain focused during his meditation.  As guides for the compositive and contemplative process of medieval meditatio, marginal hybrids acted as indispensable agents in the spiritual self-cultivation that was made possible only through meditation on the divine word.

Contemporary and later owners and readers of medieval medical manuscripts used the margins and the blank spaces of their books to write notes of diverse nature. Written at different historical periods, these annotations frequently contain information the annotators were willing to store and recall: information which, in most cases, is related to the text where it was copied and conveys a reaction to it. By flagging up a few late medieval instances, this paper will show how, like modern diaries, some of these medieval and post-medieval annotations were intended to act as reminders of personal and/or professional facts the annotators, often medical practitioners, considered valuable and worth keeping close at hand.

Paper for international conference "Libraries, Scholarship, & Science at the Crossroads, from Copernicus to Dee, 1490-1610" (Kraków, May 21-25, 2017) co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, Singleton Center/Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences

The paper deals with the fragment of glosses on Prudentius’ Psychomachia in the manuscript of the National Library of Russia Lat. O. v.IV № 1, which is labelled in Russian catalogues as “Handbook of chronology”. Analyzing the choice of glosses which were copied by the scribe, one can conclude that the glosses on Psychomachia had been considered in the second quarter of XIIth century as a source of encyclopedic knowledge, applicable to any thematic domain. In the manuscript under investigation the glosses on Psychomachia comment different fragments of chronological treatise contained in the codex.

В статье рассматриваются фрагменты глосс к «Психомахии» Пруденция, входящие в состав кодекса РНБ, Lat. O. v. IV № 1, известного, как «Руководство по хронологии». Тщательный анализ состава рукописи, а также подробное рассмотрение выбора определенных глосс из всего корпуса позволяет сделать вывод, что составитель рукописи использовал глоссы к прославленной позднеантичной поэме в качестве источника энциклопедических справок и выбрал из них те, которые поясняют что-то в прочих текстах, входящих в состав рукописи.

The recent facsimile edition of Henricus Glareanus’s Chronology of Livy, prepared by Anthony T. Grafton and Urs B. Leu provides access to a primary source, which is unique from the point of view of the history of science and scholarship and history of the book and reading. The basis of the edition, a copy of Chronologia annotated by Glareanu’s disciple Gabriel Hummelberg II, now preserved at the Princeton University Library, serves to both scholars as a point of departure for outlining hypotheses on the teaching methods of early modern humanists as well as role of chronology in the humanist curriculum. My reading of their edition is based on three points. Firstly, I am putting the primary source of their choice in a context which includes provincial early modern educational centres as I believe that their enterprise could clear the way for future narratives on forgotten scholars who dealt with the issues of technical chronology. Secondly, I am showing the importance of Grafton’s and Leu’s thesis on the procedures of transmission of teachers commentary which, according to them, is documented by the Princeton copy of Chronologia. Thirdly, I argue that the seemingly conservative decision to publish a paper edition of annotated volume at the moment when digital tools for such editions are being created should open a discussion among the historians of book and reading, science, and education that would lead to determination of standards for the scholarly editions of libri annotati.