O rare!

I've been looking at another book that a student was working on. It's unprepossessing on the outside, just a small, worn brown leather binding, with the remains of ties that have long since disappeared. But the book is much more interesting on the inside. Take a gander at some of the photos I snapped (I did these with my cell phone, so they're not super high quality, but they're not too bad either):

The whole book is like this, covered with marginalia. There are manicules, trefoils, asterisks, notes more and less extensive. It's a seriously used book.

And do you know who used this book so seriously? He inscribed his name right there on the title page:

O rare Ben Jonson! And while Jonson's book when he used it might seem unprepossessing, later owners certainly valued it for its association and house it accordingly, in its own locked box.

There's much more to be said about Jonson and his books but I wanted to get these pictures up before they burned a hole in my pocket. You can find the catalog record for this book here and I'll try to follow this up with a bit more Jonsonia.

(Oh, I suppose many of you got the title of the blog post, but just for clarification's sake: Jonson is buried in Westminster Abbey under a plaque that reads, "O rare Ben Johnson"--and yes, that's how it's spelled on the plaque, even though Jonson didn't spell his name that way.)

pointing to Carnivalesque submissions

A quick but important announcement first: I am hosting the next early modern edition of Carnivalesque. Please nominate your favorite early modern blog posts by using the Carnivalesque nomination form, commenting here, or by emailing me directly (you can find my email address through my profile). The no-holds-barred Carnival fun and wisdom is scheduled for publication on March 21st, so get me pointed in the right direction now!

And that last bit is my not very subtle transition to the lovely pictures below. I promised my last commenter that I would follow up that great pointing forefinger (or Fonz's thumb, depending on your tastes) with some more examples. So here's another great set of pointing fingers, this time complete with fancy ruffles. This is from a 1475 commentary on Aristotle--again, more commentary on commentary, as we saw with the Boethius. Some genres of writing would seem to invite more pointing notes than others. Here we've got not only the fists, but annotations and brackets. In fact, nearly the entire text on this page is marked off with brackets. (Zoomable image; catalogue entry)

Can I just say again how much I love these elaborate drawings? The best place to learn more about what these pictures are doing is William H. Sherman's Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (U Pennsylvania P, 2008). He's got a whole chapter on the subject, "Toward a History of the Manicule," that is fascinating reading and very fun to look at. (I've mentioned before that my source for all my blog images is the Folger's Digital Image Collection, a collection that is assembled in part deliberately and in part piecemeal through staff and reader requests. The pictures of fists that I've pulled out of the collection are there thanks to Bill Sherman, who requested them for his book. So we should all pause for a shout-out to him for that, even before we get to reading his book.)

I've been calling these images fists, which is how they tend to be identified in the Folger's catalogue. But as Sherman discusses, there is no standardized language for this image, even as we tend to instinctively understand what it is that the pointing finger is doing:

I have now found no fewer than fifteen English names for what I prefer to follow the manuscript specialists in calling the manicule: hand, hand director, pointing hand, pointing finger, pointer, digit, fist, mutton fist, bishop's fist, index, indicator, indicule, maniple, and pilcrow.

I can't do justice to his insights here, but it's worth reading Sherman's piece to think about the ways in which the very word that we use to describe this mark makes distinctions between origins in manuscript and print and suggests the various ways in which the mark is used to organize the text, the hierarchy of authorities governing it, and readers' responses to it. Go forth and read!

In the meantime, I leave you with a less fanciful manicule, one that doesn't provide a commentary on commentary, but that marks out a somber and beautiful passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene (image; catalogue):

I look forward to seeing your blog post nominations, fanciful, somber, or otherwise.

looking at Boethius

I failed to include any pretty pictures in my last post, so now I give you this:


It's a page opening from Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, printed in 1498 in Venice. Actually, that's a completely inadequate description of what we're looking at. And that's one of the reasons I like this image--there is a lot to see when you look at this book. For starters, there is the text in the large font, printed in several blocks over the two pages. That text is Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written around AD 524 while Boethius is imprisoned and awaiting trial for treason, for which he was to be executed. It was a highly influential piece in the medieval and early modern worlds, one that was studied and passed on in manuscripts and, eventually, printed texts. (You can find an online edition and an English translation at the University of Virginia Library's Electronic Text Center.)

Evidence of the traditions of commentary on Boethius's text can be seen in how it is presented on the page. Surrounding the blocks of text from De consolatione philosophiae is commentary by an early fourteenth-century Welsh priest, Thomas Wallensis. The commentary is in the same style of type, but a smaller size, and not laid out with as much open space. To my eye, when I look at the page, the commentary is clearly commentary, a subsidiary text to the primary Boethius. You don't even need to know what you're looking at to get that dynamic.

Surrounding and interlined with the printed text is an extensive manuscript commentary by an early user of the book. There are notes written in the leading between the lines of Boethius's text, as well as in the inner, outer, top, and bottom margins of the pages. It's evidence of someone who not only looked at this book, but who read it closely and really used it. There's commentary on commentary here. Describing this as Boethius's Consolation does not do justice to what is happening on these pages, even if that is how it is catalogued.

Finally, one last great image. The same reader who provided the manuscript commentary above has left annotations throughout the book, including this wonderful picture of a hand pointing to exactly where we should be looking.


For your further looking pleasure, you can find zoomable images of both Boethius pages here (don't forget to set your browser to allow pop-ups), and the catalogue entry in Hamnet for the book here.

bibles for historical occasions

When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, he will be using the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration in 1861. Much has been made of the symbolism of the moment, and of the many connections between the two men from Illinois, the one who freed the slaves and the one who will be our first African-American President.

The physical presence of Lincoln's Bible is key to making that connection explicit. It's not a physically imposing bible, as you can see from pictures. It's easily held, bound in burgundy velvet with gilt edges.


What I find the most interesting about it is that although it holds a great deal of significance to us, it did not for Lincoln. Lincoln's own family Bible was still en route to Washington with the rest of his belongings, so Supreme Court Clerk William Thomas Carroll purchased this Bible for the swearing-in ceremony. The Bible itself (an 1853 Oxford edition) was opened to a random page when the oath was administered. (There's a compilation of inaugural Bibles used and scriptures chosen put together by the Library of Congress.) But the importance of this object is brought home in Carroll's inscription at the end, certifying that this is the copy of the Bible that was used to swear in President Lincoln.

(A full set of images of Lincoln's Bible is on flickr.)

Lincoln's Bible is in contrast to the one that Joe Biden will be using when he is sworn in as Vice-President. He'll be using the same Bible that he's used every time he was sworn in as a senator, and that his son has used as Delaware's Attorney General, a Bible that has been in the family since 1893. As you can see from this photo (taken for the New York Times by Stephen Crowley), in which his wife Jill pretends to be staggering under its weight, this is no easily carried book.

According to news reports, Biden almost didn't have the Bible with him for the Senate swearing-in, but made it in time, complete with jokes about its size. (There's a nice story about this in Delaware Online.) Jokes aside, though, it is clearly something that is important to Biden and an integral part of how he sees taking office.

I've been struck with these stories about the Bibles being used for this Presidential Inauguration, and for others, because they aren't about what the Bible means. That isn't irrelevant, by any means. I happen to be fond of the story about John Quincy Adams, who took his oath of office upon a "Volume of Laws" because it was the Constitution he was swearing to protect. But what is driving so many of these stories is an emphasis on the physical book itself. Biden's Bible has been passed on through his family for generations. When Obama lays his hand on the Bible to become our 44th President, he is touching the same book that our 16th President did. The physical book makes connections through the generations.

I'll close with a couple of images of historical Bibles in the Folger's collections. Neither will ever be chosen to swear in a new President, and that's just as well--I don't think their resonances will play as smoothly.

The first is a copy of the 1568 Great Bible presented to Queen Elizabeth and probably used in her private chapel. It is bound in a crimson velvet with silver clasps and bosses engraved with Tudor roses and her coat of arms. It's a lovely book. (Full catalogue record here.)


The second is less beautiful but perhaps more haunting. It's a Salisbury Book of Hours that was given to Henry VIII by Anne of Cleves, also known as wife number four. At the back of the book she has written, "I besiche your grace h[umble?] when ye loke on this remember me. yo[u]r gracis assured anne the dowgher of cleues." (See the catalogue record.)


What did Henry think when he looked upon this? I can't imagine. But I do like knowing that she got to keep her head long after his had been laid to rest. Perhaps her Book of Hours helped her navigate her way past him.

Montelyon's sword

I've been thinking a lot recently about the social lives of books and how they take on meaning through our uses of them. That's come in part from the moving Yom Kippur service I was at and the use of a rescued Lithuanian Torah scroll. More on that, and how it has been making me think about the lives of books and readers, in a future post.

But for this post, a much smaller look at a book from our period and the social and emotional life it suggests. So: Emanuel Ford's The famous historie of Mountelyon, Knight of the Oracle, and sonne to the renowned Presicles King of Assyria. The Folger's copy of this book is, unsurprisingly given my recent theme, one that was owned by Frances Wolfreston, and it has her characteristic inscription on leaf A3r: "Frances Wolfreston her bowk."

What I like about this particular book is that she seems to have given it to her son Francis, who also carefully inscribed it on the first leaf: "Francis Wolferston his Booke." (You can see bleed-through from the other side, on which a later Wolferstan decendant has inscribed his name and has repeated the title of the book.)

In 1652, the year that Francis has dated his inscription, he would have been fourteen years old. And later on in the book is the sort of marginalia that I imagine a 14 year-old boy reading a romance would want to draw: the hero's spear and sword.

I love that Frances bought this book, and then passed it on to her son, and that both of them marked it as their own. The fact that she gave it to him when he was still young, rather than him inheriting it as an adult, as was true of the other books that his brother was willed, makes it seem so much more evocative of a parent-child relationship. Or maybe it's that drawing of the sword that gets to me. The Chaucer is a big important book, and the marginalia only confirms what I think we already know from looking at it. Frances and Francis's inscriptions make this book, which would otherwise be a slight romance, into something more tantalizing and meaningful.

not only Wolfrestons!

So my favorite Chaucer, as I've mentioned before, is inscribed by Frances Wolfreston and recorded as a gift to her from her mother-in-law Mary Wolfreston. And as we know from her will, discussed in my last post, Frances left her library to her third son with the instructions that it be made kept distinct from the family's other collections and made available for borrowing by her other children. As a result, her books were passed on through generations of the Wolfreston family. Elsewhere in this book are the inscriptions of two later family members: "T. Wolfreston anno D[omi]no 1717" and "J. Wolfreston ejus liber anno D[omi]ni 1718." The book itself is bound in an 18th-century reversed-calf binding that is inscribed on the front cover with "S. Wolfreston." For me, that's already a treasury of information about how this book was valued and passed on through a family.

But it gets better! The Wolfreston annotations are simply the traces of what happened to the book after it passed into Frances's hands after 1631. The Chaucer is full of other annotations, annotations that are more detailed and perhaps more indicative of the readers' relationships to Chaucer's texts. Check out the blank leaf reproduced below, covered with inscriptions:

Most prominent are three verses signed by Dorothy Egerton:

Saynct james in hys epistle sayeth vy are all offendours many Wayes but those that offende not in ther tongues Are trulye blessed. the tongue sayeth he is a small membr[e] but it Worketh wonders. Hitherto saynct james. DOROTHE EGERTON

He is neyther riche happye nor Wyse
that is abondeman to his owne avaryce
Dorothee Egerton

Fauour is decetful and beautye is a vayne thynge but the Woman that feareth god she shall be blessed. proverb 30

There is also the inscription of ANNE VERNON just after Dorothy's quotation of Saint James, some other words in a small, upside-down secretary hand at the bottom of the image, and lots of smudged-out words.

Who are these other people? Dorothy Egerton (who, you will have noticed, did not spell her name the standard way we do today) married Thomas Vernon; Anne Vernon is obviously a family member through that marriage. And the connection to Mary Wolfreston, Frances's mother-in-law? Her family name before she got married was Egerton. Not only did the Chaucer pass through the Wolfreston family hands, it passed through the Egerton family into the Wolfreston family. And its users left their traces all along the way.

More next time about those traces, their connection to Chaucer's poems, and what this book might have to tell us about readers and the networks they form through books.

Frances Wolfreston, book collector

Earlier this month I promised some more posts on Frances Wolfreston and her copy of Chaucer's works that we have at the Folger. It's one of my favorite books at the moment, so there will be lots more coming, but here's some starting information about Wolfreston's books.

Frances Wolfreston (1607-1677) seems to have started collecting books after her marriage in 1631 to Francis Wolfreston (1612-1666)--or at least she started inscribing them after her marriage, since none of them appear with her maiden name, Frances Middlemore.* Nor are there any books inscribed by anyone else in the Wolfreston family prior to her marriage; in other words, she didn't seem to sign books that were already in her husband's collection, but built her own library of books.

Paul Morgan characterizes Wolfreston's books as "the leisure reading of a literate lady in her country house." They include plays and poems, but also jest-books and religious works.** Among the books bearing her signature are Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, Lodge's Wits Miserie, Ford's Love's Sacrifice, Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, Catholic and Anglican catechisms, many of John Taylor's poems, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Richard II. Most prominent among her collection is the surviving copy of the first printing of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, subsequently owned by Edmund Malone and now held at the Bodleian. (You can see an image of the title-page of that book here, with her faint inscription just to the right of the printer's device.)

Her books clearly were important to her, since she singled them out in her will with careful instruction about their care and use:

And I give my son Stanford all my phisicke bookes, and all my godly bookes, and all the rest conditionally if any of his brothers or sisters would have them any tyme to read, and when they have done they shall returne them to their places againe, and he shall carefully keepe them together.

Her collection of books, inscribed and passed on to Stanford, and then through his descendants, remained at Statfold House until they were auctioned off by Sotheby's in 1856. A number of the books include not only her inscription, but those of her children and other family members. Taken together, Wolfreston's collection can teach us not only about her own personal taste, but about books and social networks. Plus, there is a real thrill in seeing the signature of the same person over and over again--it's a reminder that there are real readers who held and treasured these books that we now study. I'll talk more about the collection's integrity and the familial traces left in them in a future post.

*Not enough Francis/Frances names for you? Frances Wolfreston's mother was Frances Middlemore, and the eldest son of Frances and Francis Wolfreston was, yes, Francis Wolfreston. Incidentally, Frances's second son was named Middlemore (her maiden name), and the third son was named Stanfold (her mother's maiden name).

**Much more information about Wolfreston can be found in Paul Morgan's "Frances Wolfreston and 'Hor Bouks': A Seventeenth-Century Woman Book-Collector" The Library, 6th series XI (1989): 13-219. Especially notable is Morgan's legwork in tracking down over one hundred books from Wolfreston's collection; that list is included as an appendix to his article.

school books

Today's post is in honor of all students returning to school everywhere--and in honor of all their teachers. For me, one of the strongest markers of a new school year is the buying of books (and, as a professor, the endless copying of excerpts of books to be put on reserve). For generations of early modern English school boys, the foundational text of their study was William Lily's A short introduction of grammar generallie to be vsed. Compiled and set forth, for the bringyng vp of all those that intend to attaine the knovvlege of the Latin tongue. In1542 by Henry VIII made Lily's Grammar the authorized book for studying Latin, and the work was reissued repeatedly for more than a century, and continued to influence subsequent Latin grammars well after that point. (Lily himself died in 1522, years before all this--what we--and those school boys--refer to as Lily's Grammar is a text that, in fact, is only partially written by Lily himself.)

Reproduced above is the title page of from a 1557 edition. The most noticeable thing about it, I think, is that nearly all the white space has been written on by its users. I want to point out one particular set of scribblings, those words just above the printer's device and enlarged below:

Who does this book belong to? John Scott, who carefully notes that point with the phrase "Jhone Scott with my hand at the pene." John also seems to have started to write this inscription along the gutter, starting at the bottom of the page just to the left of the printer's device. (There's something else above that line, but at some point rebinding has made the gutter swallow the words.) At the back endpaper, both "Thomas Scott" and "Gulielmus Scott" have written their names, suggesting that this was a schoolbook that was handed down among the Scott family.

One other quick thing to point out: the printer's device is, in fact, an illustration of a print shop. If you look closely you'll see the compositor on the right laying out the type, the man in the middle pulling the press to print a sheet, and the man on the left inking the inkballs. More on printing presses in the future, and I promise a return to Frances Wolfreston once my teaching preparations settle down!

"Frances Wolfresston hor bouk"

My last post lamented pristine books that remained uncirculated and lonely on their shelves. This post is a teaser for future posts examining how very much we can learn about the ways that books circulate in readers' lives.

Above is a detail from a 1550 edition of Chaucer's collected works. On a leaf in the middle of the volume is carefully inscribed "Frances Wolfresston hor bouk geven her by her motherilaw Mary Wolfreston".

That in and of itself is a rich testament to the circulation of books. But there is more to be discovered. If you examine the Folger's catalogue entry for this volume, you will notice that one of the associated names is "Wolfreston, Frances, 1607-1677, inscriber". If you follow that link, you will discover that the Folger has an additional 10 books signed by Frances Wolfreston in its collections. Frances Wolfreston, you will soon realize, was an early modern book collector and her library of books, nearly all carefully inscribed with "Frances Wolfreston her bouk", can be found dispersed among some of the greatest library collections today. Another post will be devoted to exploring her and her collection.

One more tidbit teaser: you will also notice when looking at the catalogue entry that there are lots of other inscriptions recorded as being in this book. There are a number of other Wolfreston family members, suggesting that this volume was passed on down through the family; there are also a collection of other signatures from a different family suggesting that it was similarly passed down through their family. More about that, too, in the future.

In the meantime, two quick quirks that I like:

In her inscription, Frances spells her last name differently than how she spells her mother-in-law's. Her son Francis settled on yet a different spelling, choosing primarily to record his name as Wolferstan. We all know that early modern spelling was full of variants. But so, too, were early modern names. It seems very strange by our standards today: ask any other Sarah whether her name is spelled with an "h" or without the "h" and you'll discover that we are all very insistent on the importance of that difference.

Quirk two: when you follow the link for Frances Wolfreston to find other books that she owned in the Folger collection, what you actually find is that the Library appears to differentiate between those in which she is an "inscriber" and those in which she "signed". No difference in the books themselves. It's just a nice reminder of the many ways in which books are handled by many different people, and those human differences and foibles leave their traces everywhere.

do you write in books?

Some recent browsing on bibliophagia led me to (among many other things) a curious and disturbing discussion about writing in books. A sub-forum in a forum devoted to ChickLit, it consisted primarily of entries on how horrified posters were about people writing in books. I'm not talking about rare books, or library books, or even books borrowed from friends. I'm talking about people who won't write in their own books. Here's the words of one poster:

I am totally manic. I don't lend out my books. I don't write my name in books, nor do I write little comments in the margins. I don't break the spines. Ever. I won't even buy a book in a bookstore if the binding is the least bit damaged. I don't even highlight my college textbooks. The worst thing though: I refuse to buy "used" college textbooks that are highlighted/dogeared because it irks me so much. I will just pay full price. Sad, isn't it?

That's not so disturbing to me--I'm sympathetic with not wanting to buy a new book with a damaged binding, and I've never been convinced about highlighting as a useful reading strategy. Although how do you know you own a book if you don't write your name in it? And a number of posts confessed to being unable to lend their books out to friends because they were so bothered that they might be returned slightly dinged up. Isn't one of the great functions of books the way that they circulate socially? We bond over shared books, recommend them to each other, give them to one another. One of the great things about social network sites is that they allow you to share your bookshelves with your friends, and to discover new friends through their reading habits. The insistence on pristine books takes them out of our social networks, leaving them uncirculated and lonely on their shelves.

But here's the post that really got me going:

Last night, I looked over and my husband was writing in a library book. An [i]old[/] library book, circa 1880 or so. In pen. He tried to deny it but then sort of copped to it. I was so mad that I actually just left the room and went to sleep on the couch (and cold bitchy silence is not my usual MO with anger, honestly) until he came and apologized. I said that I know it's not actually my business, but that to me it seems like, I don't know, torturing a small animal or something just to see what happens. It's so completely arrogant and self-centered. Grrrr.

Writing in a book is akin to torturing a small animal? Put alongside the other posts in this thread, what comes across is a fetishization of the clean book, an idealization of books that seems to prioritize book form over book content. I of course think there is a great deal to be learned from the material form of a book. But don't the two work hand in hand? What's the value of a pristine book that has never been read? Especially in light of my last post about how readers make sense of their passages through books and about how necessary marking your book is, these posts to the ChickLit forum struck me as describing an impoverished relationship to books--for both their owners and for scholars of book history.

If those posts describe a near-exclusive focus on the form of the book, my husband tells a story that is the opposite. In grad school, one of his professors told a story about reading a Stanley Cavell book. As he was reading, he was finding Cavell more and more infuriating. And as he read further and further, the spine of the book began to crack and the pages began to fall out. Such was his fury that he took to literally discarding the pages as he read them--read a leaf, tear it out, throw it away.

It's a scenario that would probably kill those poor posters. And if those pristine books leave no traces of their readers in them for future scholars, the thrown-away text leaves neither readerly trace nor book. But there's a book that really mattered to its reader!

And in case you're wondering what those posts had to do with bibliophagia, here's the connection:

You're all going to hate me, but I promise, I don't do this any more (much). When I was younger, I used to eat books.

Really. Literally.

My copy of A Little Princess is more than well-loved, it's practically gone. I used to gnaw bits off the corners. It's incredibly annoying to me now. I haven't met anyone else who does that, probably for good reason. Still, as nervous habits go, I guess it's better than smoking. At least I always got my recommended daily allowance of fiber.

Here's to loving books.

(You can read these posts, and others, at the ChickLit Forums. There's much to be said about the term "chick lit" and what exactly it encompasses and what exactly it dismisses, but that's a topic for another blog.)

information overload

This is the time of year when I often feel assaulted by information overload: there are new books and articles being published in both of my fields of research, I'm behind on my New Yorker, novels are piling up by my bedside, and then don't forget all those blogs and websites to check in with! Sitting down and constructing my syllabus exacerbates all this. There are too many new works to read that I might want to include, and even worse, I can't always remember where I read that fascinating study that absolutely needs to be included. Didn't I read something in that gigantic book that will help us understand the mise-en-page of printed Bibles? But where? And has it been eclipsed by something more recent that I haven't gotten to yet?

Information overload. It often comes up as the bane of the electronice age, something that the email cockroaches and the endless web sites have unleashed on us. But Ann Blair argues that it is characteristic of the early modern world too.* The printing press was worried to have unleashed an overabundance of books, so many that they threatened to bury any useful knowledge in the sea of text. In response, early modern readers developed a host of reading and note-taking strategies to manage their information overload.

I've mentioned before the period's prediliction for commonplacing. But how do you commonplace when there are too many books and too little time? Marginal annotation is one way: noting in the margin particular passages that you might want to return to later. But how to write in the margins quickly? Abbreviations are good: n.b. for nota bene, for instance. Developing a set of marks, each with a different meaning keyed to different categories of information or response is another. In the book pictured below, an early modern user has written a key to their marginal notations just below the printer's device on the last leaf:

This particular book is a copy of Cicero's De oratore printed by the Aldine Press in 1569. There are actually two keys on the last page (the picture at the top of the blog shows the one below the device; there is a second key above the device as well). The two keys differ slightly, and some of the symbols do not appear in the De oratore, which might suggest that the reader was developing a notation system during the course of reading the book. Bill Sherman notes that "a trident was used for passages of augmentation or reasoning and the symbol for Venus signalled an interest in love."** Other symbols denote particular rhetorical devices.

Do we have a handy strategy for managing the information overload of the digital age? Google has tried hard to provide them for us. They've developed an appliance for searching effectively through an entire company's files, and unveiled it in the appropriately titled blog, "Tackling information overload, 10 million documents at a time." On a personal level, and one that connects directly with Renaissance reading strategies, is their Google Notebook. From their faq:

With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that's accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won't ever have to leave your browser window.

It's commonplacing! Although I have to point out that I find their last sentence a bit troubling: "you won't ever have to leave your browser window." Doesn't it seem to suggest that you don't even need to go on that trip that you've been research and clipping? Just more evidence that Google runs our lives.

*Ann Blair, "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700," Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 11-28. Online via JSTOR for those of you with access.

**William H. Sherman, "'Rather soiled by use': Renaissance Readers and Modern Collectors" in The Reader Revealed, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp 84-01. This essay was originally written for the catalog of a Folger exhibition; an expanded version of this piece is in his most recent book, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2008).

the dense latin bible

In my earlier post about the glorious 1527 Latin Vulgate Bible, I commented on the density of the text block. My point then was that verses were not numbered, and that a reader needed to use the marginal alphabetical system to cross-reference different biblical moments.

Now I want to look again at that dense, dark, gothic lettering to notice something else: the handwritten annotations.

One effect of the dense text is that it doesn't have easily visible placemarkers. In addition to making it hard to cross-reference, it makes it hard to skim. Where's that reference to the Tygris river again? Look for it--not in the printed text, but in the handwritten notes in the margin. Just by the printed letter "C"--the word "Tygris."

Many of the notes in the margin act as placemarkers of that very simple sort. Here's where Phison is mentioned, here Gehan, here Tygris, here the Euphrates. I'm not sure why the writer wants to recall the names of the four rivers, but now he's got them easily visible in the margin, rather than picking them out of the text.

Other notes serve as placemarkers and as commentary. One example is the last annotation, in the bottom right corner, and shown enlarged below. “Institutio sancti matrimonij,” comments on the phrase it is connected to by a line, “hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis.” It thus calls attention to Adam’s quote about Eve, “This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” as evidence of the sanctity of marriage.

And if I'm going to mention dense text blocks, it is worth noting the abbreviations that are used throughout the printed text, a convention that began with manuscript scribes to conserve paper and labor, and to format the text into nicely justified margins. In our underlined phrase, the second "n" from "nunc" is omitted and indicated with the macron (a tilde-like line) over the "u". And "ossibus" is written with the terminal "us" omitted and signaled with superscript figure that looks like a small "9".

This elaborate system of abbreviation continued from the manuscript tradition through the early years of printing. It took time for printed books to develop their own look, particularly when it came to heavily conventionalized texts like bibles. It is not that printers were trying to make people think that these printed books were actually written by hand, but that for a very long time, the form of a manuscript book simply was the form of all books.