Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England 9780812203448

Citation preview

Used Books

M AT E R I A L T E X T S Series Editors Roger Chartier Joan DeJean Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton Janice Radway Peter Stallybrass A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Used Books Marking Readers in Renaissance England

WILLIAM H. SHERMAN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright  2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

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Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4043-6 ISBN-10: 0-8122-4043-X

For Claire, my ideal reader

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

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part i. of marks and methods 1. Introduction: Used Books

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2.  : Toward a History of the Manicule 3. Reading the Matriarchive

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part ii. reading and religion 4. ‘‘The Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’: Marking the Bible 5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

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part iii. remarkable readers 6. John Dee’s Columbian Encounter 7. Sir Julius Caesar’s Search Engine

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p a r t i v. r e n a i s s a n c e r e a d e r s a n d m o d e r n collectors 8. Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks Afterword: The Future of Past Readers

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Contents

List of Abbreviations Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

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Illustrations

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19. Figure 20.

‘‘The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise,’’ from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586) xiv Title page of Cardinal William Allen, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense xviii Richard Topcliffe’s marginalia in Allen’s True, Sincere, and Modest Defense xix Dueling marginalia in a Catholic text 11 Isaac Casaubon reads Francis Bacon for English practice 14 Ownership inscriptions in The Treasury of Amadis of France 19 The Levenger Company’s ‘‘How to Leave Masterly Marginalia’’ 26 Reader’s key to his symbolic indexing system in Cicero’s De Oratore 28 John Dee’s manicules in Pantheus’s Voarchadumia 31 Archbishop Matthew Parker’s characteristic manicule 31 Bernardo Bembo’s lifelike manicules in his commonplace book 35 Elaborate manicules in a commentary on Aristotle 37 Reader playing with the space of the page 38 ‘‘A Show of Hands’’: Charles Hasler’s printed manicules 39 Ben Jonson’s emphatic manicule in Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy 46 Mary Crewe’s notes on faith in John Ball’s Short Treatise 60 Dorothy Clegge’s notes in William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties 62 Lady Grace Mildmay’s autobiographical and spiritual meditations 64 Richard Topcliffe’s note on the Bible seized by Sir Francis Drake during his raid on Santo Domingo in 1586 78 An embroidered binding on a 1616 Bible: the front (Old Testament) cover 81

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Figure 21. An embroidered binding on a 1616 Bible: the back (New Testament) cover 82 Figure 22. A child’s embellishments of the royal arms in a 1628 King James Bible 85 Figure 23. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62): typographical initial featuring rose and serpent 88 Figure 24. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62): plundered initials from late medieval manuscripts 89 Figure 25. Censored prayers in a 1545 primer 93 Figure 26. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62): amateur mock-woodcut initial 97 Figure 27. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62): professional mock-woodcut initial 98 Figure 28. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62): recycled initial with Christ displaying wounds 99 Figure 29. Sir Julius Caesar’s additions to the index in Foxe’s Pandectae locorum communium 133 Figure 30. Caesar’s notes on curiosity in Foxe’s Pandectae locorum communium 135 Figure 31. Caesar’s revisions of The Ancient State . . . of the Court of Requests 143 Figure 32. Marginalia in a 1583 Psalter 153 Figure 33. Sign on readers’ tables from Cambridge University Library 156 Figure 34. ‘‘Unused Books’’: a foolish reader from The Ship of Fools (1509) 160 Figure 35. William Smedley’s table of Bacon’s marginal marks 171 Figure 36. ‘‘Finger on the future’’ at the National Library of Scotland 180

Preface

In 1985, Roger Stoddard published his seminal catalogue, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained, and his opening sentences set an agenda that has challenged a generation of scholars, librarians, conservators, and collectors: ‘‘When we handle books sensitively, observing them closely so as to learn as much as we can from them, we discover a thousand little mysteries. . . . In and around, beneath and across them we may find traces . . . that could teach us a lot if we could make them out.’’1 Over the last two decades, students from across the humanities and information sciences have been increasingly concerned with making out, and making sense of, the mysterious marks that get left behind in books as and after they are produced.2 Stoddard’s book coincided with—and to some extent helped to initiate—a new phase in the history of reading as a proper discipline (or interdiscipline), in which readers’ marks featured as a general source of evidence for a wide range of practices, moving well beyond the traditional interest in erudite commentary and the narrow search for the signatures and source materials of famous writers.3 My own work in this field began with a famous (or rather infamous) reader, the Elizabethan polymath John Dee.4 In studying Dee’s massive library and the active uses to which he put it, I worked very closely with one particular category of readers’ marks: manuscript ‘‘marginalia,’’ or notes written in the margins and other blank spaces of texts. My project on Dee has taken its place in what is now a substantial series of case studies: these have been devoted either to the marginalia and related notes produced by individual readers (including Gabriel Harvey, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, William Blount, William Drake, Michel de Montaigne, Johannes Kepler, and Guillaume Bude´)5 or to the notes by different readers in multiple copies of a single text (Heidi Brayman Hackel has devoted a chapter to the readers’ marks in 151 copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, and Heather Jackson to the marginalia in 386 copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, while Owen Gingerich has published a best-selling book on his thirty-year hunt for annotations in all of the 600 surviving copies of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus).6 But there has been a pressing need for bigger pictures and broader brush-strokes. Jonathan Rose’s frustrations are typical among recent reviewers of work in this field:

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Every scholar knows that thrilling moment when we lay out all our index cards before us, and the patterns emerge from the masses of data. That epiphany has so far eluded historians of reading. We are enjoying some success in recovering the interpretive strategies and inner experiences of readers, but we have yet to arrange those facts into the kind of narratives that political, social, and economic historians have produced. Our stories, such as they are, tend to be random and discursive. . . . The evidence we have of individual readers, especially before 1800, is too thin, too scattered, too ambiguous.7

While this book makes no claim to a disciplinary epiphany, it is the product of many ‘‘eureka’’ moments; and the isolated traces upon which it rests do yield some larger patterns and a more systematic sense of how a wider group of readers used a wider range of books than in previous accounts of pre-modern marginalia. In pursuit of a preliminary database for such an overview, I carried out a reasonably comprehensive survey of one of the world’s major repositories of English Renaissance books—the more than 7,500 volumes printed between 1475 and 1640 that make up the so-called STC collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.8 I searched for traces left behind by early readers and, while I tried to take note of the presence of owners’ signatures and of nonverbal markings, I was primarily concerned with more substantial annotations.9 I have since conducted a similar study of the much smaller but no less interesting collection of books and manuscripts created by Archbishop Matthew Parker and bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (where it is now housed in the library bearing his name); and I have followed up these systematic surveys with smaller-scale studies of other readers and materials in a number of collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Like other scholars who have caught the marginalia bug, I have been astonished by the sheer volume of notes produced by early readers. More than one in five of the Huntington’s early printed books preserve the notes of early readers (and for certain subjects and in certain decades the proportion is far higher), and the annotations in many books from the Rosenthal collection are so thorough they threaten to overwhelm the text: one extraordinary copy of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, printed in Leipzig circa 1500, has some 59,600 words of annotation on its 68 pages; and the nearly 50,000 words of marginalia in a 1516 Bible are limited to only 41 pages (producing a tally of more than 1,200 manuscript words per page), where they are often found piled three or four deep between lines of the printed text.10 I have been equally astonished by the variety of techniques, habits, and interests they document, and if I manage to convey even part of that variety in the chapters that follow then I will consider this book a success. These notes represent a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the

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lives of their readers that we have only begun to explore, and it is the primary purpose of this book to make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to new and experienced scholars alike. Anyone who turns to marginalia with high hopes of easy answers quickly discovers that the evidence they contain turns out to be (if not always thin, scattered, and ambiguous) peculiarly difficult to locate, decipher, and interpret. As this book took shape I found myself not only gathering stories about specific readers and readings but also grappling with a series of methodological problems—and throughout this book I will keep one eye on what we can learn from readers’ marks and another on what we need to learn, unlearn, and relearn in order to do so. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 1, part of the problem lies in the very terms traditionally used to define this area of study, and that is why I have (somewhat perversely) avoided the words ‘‘marginalia’’ and ‘‘reading’’ in my title—even though this is a study of both of those things. These terms tend to bring with them a set of modern cultural assumptions and disciplinary tools that do not fit well with the evidence that survives from the pre-modern archive. The largely literary and mostly modern framework that has allowed Heather Jackson to write brilliantly about marginalia in the best general book on the subject defines these readers’ notes as witty, personal, and directly responsive to the text.11 But the notes produced by Renaissance readers are both disappointing in these terms and unexpectedly rich in others. Literary texts turned out (on the whole) to be annotated far less frequently than those used by the period’s lawyers and far less wittily than those involved in the period’s religious controversies. Renaissance readers tended to be more systematic and less psychologically revealing than post-Romantic readers. And a large percentage of the notes produced by readers had no obvious connection with the text they accompanied—but nonetheless testified to the place of that book in the reader’s social life, family history, professional practices, political commitments, and devotional rituals.12 As for ‘‘reading,’’ I have come—like Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio—to prefer the language of ‘‘use.’’13 And, like them, I have taken my cue from Renaissance texts such as Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems, which features a poetic lesson dedicated to the Cambridge scholar Andrew Perne under the motto, ‘‘Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit [The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise]’’(Figure 1): The volumes great, who so doth still peruse, And dailie turnes, and gazeth on the same, If that the fruicte thereof, he do not vse, He reapes but toile, and never gaineth fame: First reade, then marke, then practise that is good, For without vse, we drinke but LETHE flood.14

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Figure 1. ‘‘The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise,’’ from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (1586). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

I am partly acknowledging the fact that not all of the uses to which books can be put should be described as ‘‘reading.’’ I am also trying to avoid that word’s associations with particular protocols and etiquettes— including privacy, linearity, and cleanliness. I am endorsing Stoddard’s suggestion that textual scholars must also be anthropologists and archaeologists, putting books alongside the other objects that can help us to reconstruct the material, mental, and cultural worlds of our forebears: ‘‘traces of wear can tell us how artifacts were used by human

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beings. Books no less than tools, apparel, and habitats can show signs of wear, but their markings can be far more eloquent of manufacturing processes, specific of provenance, telling of human relations, and suggestive of human thought.’’15 And, finally, I am attempting to take us closer to the Renaissance period’s own surprisingly rich vocabulary for book use (in which the word ‘‘use’’ is itself crucial—as Whitney’s emblem suggests and as we shall see in virtually every chapter below). One of Gabriel Harvey’s elaborate and self-reflexive marginal notes in his copy of Peter Ramus’s Œconomia will suffice to suggest that modern readers and scholars of reading have lost some of the scope and sophistication of the Renaissance period’s framework (linguistic, conceptual, and technical) for using books: This whole booke, written & printed, of continual & perpetual use: & therefore continually, and perpetually to be meditated, practiced, and incorporated into my boddy, & sowle. In A serious & practicable Studdy, better any on[e] chapter, perfectly & thorowghly digested, for praesent practis, as occasion shall requier: then A whole volume, greedily deuowrid, & rawly concoctid. . . . No sufficient, or hable furniture, gotten by unperfect posting, or superficial overrunning: or halfelearning: but by perpetual meditations, repetitions, recognitions, recapitulations, reiterations, and ostentations of most practicable points, sounde and deepe imprinting as well in ye memory, as in the understanding: for praegnant & curious reddines, at euery le[a]st occasion. Every Rule of value, and euery poynt of vse, woold be continually recognised, and perpetually eternised in your witt, & memory.16

The Elizabethans evidently had as many words for ‘‘reading’’ as the proverbial Eskimo has for ‘‘snow.’’ In an essay on reading practices in ancient Greece, Simon Goldhill has called for a ‘‘Literary History without Literature.’’ He objects to ‘‘the destructive poverty of the category of ‘literature’ for the way in which the critical engagement with language production and consumption functions in the ancient world. The establishment of the sphere of the literary with its various exclusions does not merely distort the interconnections between the texts of poetry, say, and the other textual productions of the ancient world, but also thoroughly twists the connections between those texts and the culture in which and for which they were produced.’’17 To the extent that the same can be said for ‘‘reading,’’ perhaps it is time to call for a history of reading without reading? The definition of reading—and the range of agents and activities it has been used to describe—has, at any rate, progressively narrowed since the word entered the English language. The Teutonic root word raedan’s primary senses of deliberating, advising, and governing have all fallen away, as have most of the meanings of the Latin verb legere—the source of many English words related to reading, such as ‘‘lecture,’’ ‘‘les-

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son,’’ and ‘‘legend.’’ Legere originally referred to a broad cluster of activities involving observing and pursuing, in which the taking in of texts was neither the earliest nor the most dominant meaning; and many of the mental and physical activities it covered—including gathering, choosing, overhearing, stealing, wandering, and tracking—now survive only in specialized applications or metaphorical associations (some of which are reactivated in Michel de Certeau’s suggestive essay ‘‘Reading as Poaching’’).18 The marks left behind by Harvey, and the words he used to describe the practices that generated them, bear eloquent witness to the fact that, while there are some basic continuities in the ways in which people process texts, almost every aspect of reading has undergone profound historical transformations as we have moved from a culture in which readers take hold of texts for specific purposes to one in which texts generally take hold of readers who may not be looking for anything beyond ‘‘a good read.’’ Who is allowed to read and how are they trained to read? Using which techniques and tools? What forms do texts take and through which parts of the body are they meant to be experienced? What kinds of texts are available to what kinds of readers and how do they gain access to them? Which spaces are appropriate for reading and which are inappropriate? The answers to these questions vary from context to context, and the conditions and practices that we have come to associate with reading turn out to be far from universal. Historians of books and readers have uncovered a series of general developments that mark significant changes in what is possible and (to some extent) what is normal for readers to do. They are usually formulated as ‘‘from . . . to’’ narratives and sometimes characterized as ‘‘revolutions,’’ but they should not be seen as absolute rules governing all reading at a given time or place, or as immediate and unidirectional shifts. As Roger Chartier has forcefully and repeatedly argued, these factors always constrain but never completely determine the responses of specific readers to specific texts.19 They are better approached, therefore, as a set of mental, material, and spatial parameters within which specific acts of reading can be placed. This study contains lesson after lesson on the ineluctable specificity of readers and readings, and it is this (I would suggest) rather than the fragmentary nature of the evidence that makes marginalia resistant to grand theories and master narratives. Readers’ marks are better at providing examples (and still better at providing counterexamples) than general rules; but if we cast our net widely they can reveal both large-scale patterns of use and extraordinary encounters of individuals and their books. The former can correct some of our most deep-seated assumptions about reading and readers. And the latter, if we are patient and lucky, can help us to solve some of the ‘‘thousand little mysteries’’ contained in Renaissance books.

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One such mystery was posed by one of the very first books I examined in the survey that began this book, and it was not solved until I returned to it more than a decade later, as the book was in its final stages—and it will serve as an emblem for the signs of life (and death) in the margins it sets out to explore. In 1583, William Cecil (Lord Burghley) published an official defense of the execution of Edmund Campion and other Catholics in 1581: it was entitled The Execution of Justice in England and its argument was captured in its running title, ‘‘Execution for treason, and not for religion.’’20 In 1584, Cardinal William Allen wrote a pointby-point rebuttal on behalf of the English Catholic community: it was entitled A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics That Suffer for Their Faith Both at Home and Abroad Against a False, Seditious and Slanderous Libel entitled The Execution of Justice in England.21 Although the mere possession of this text was grounds for imprisonment (and its distribution for execution), a heavily annotated copy survives at the Huntington Library (Figure 2). The annotator was careful to record a patriotic disclaimer on the title page: ‘‘To be redd & vsed for ye Service of God, Q Elizabethe, & the peace of Englande, & for No other purpose, Or Cause.’’ He also subjected the book to a point-by-point rebuttal on behalf (once again) of the English Crown: he began by adding a subversive preface to the title, ‘‘A false, sediccoos, & immodest offense: sett ovt by English traytors abroade (& svmme at home) Groaning for the Gallows, vnder Collor & Shaddowe off [A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense . . .].’’ There are vehemently Protestant notes throughout the text, and wherever such a note is found it is marked by a red silk thread that has been sewn through the margins: while tabs and threads were often inserted in medieval manuscripts to serve as finding aids for new sections of the text, this is the only place I have seen them used to help a reader find his way back to his own marginalia (Figure 3). But who was that reader? This book passed to the Huntington as part of the Bridgewater Collection—which suggested that it once belonged to Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere. And since the notes were consistent with Egerton’s role as Queen Elizabeth’s solicitor general, I assumed they were produced by him. But the striking hands with sharply pointing fingers (what I will call ‘‘manicules’’ in Chapter 2 below) drawn in the margin next to roughly half of the notes stayed in my mind, and they ignited a spark of recognition as I saw them again in a manuscript account of ‘‘The examination of Jesuits and Seminary priests’’ from 1587, exhibited at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2004—which also featured a grisly sketch of a gallows in the margin next to the name of a prisoner marked for death.22 And when I again called up the Huntington’s copy of Allen’s book during a visit in the spring of 2005, I found a new note by a recent reader, Frank Brownlow, explaining that the marginalia were not by Egerton but rather ‘‘in the hand—and spelling—of

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Figure 2. Title page of Cardinal William Allen, A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense (1584, RB6060). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Richard Topcliffe, pursuivant, torturer, Queen’s servant, &c.’’ And this in turn reminded Alexandra Walsham (with whom I was examining the book) of a haunting passage in J. E. Neale’s Elizabeth I and her Parliaments concerning that curious, sadistic gentleman, Richard Topcliffe; a man of birth, education and religious zeal, who revelled in his official task of torturing Catholics. His strange character remains portrayed for us in marginal comments written in his copy of an Italian history of the English Reformation, where from time to time he drew pictures of gallows, ‘‘for the author and William Allen and for his Pope, Clement VII,’’ ‘‘The viper’’; ‘‘the villain’’; ‘‘the bastard’’; ‘‘I wished that I had this Doctor in Westminster Hall without weapon, and the author of this book in St. John’s Wood with my two-handed sword’’: these are samples of his private exuberance.23

Figure 3. Richard Topcliffe’s aggressive annotations in Allen’s True, Sincere, and Modest Defense (RB6060). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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What had earlier struck me as witty rebuttals, artful manicules, and quaint red threads took on a sinister edge as I imagined the notorious Topcliffe torturing Elizabethan Catholics, marking their arguments with his accusing fingers, and perforating their pages with needles trailing crimson strings. * * * I will close this preface by making some suggestions for using this particular book. Readers who have a general interest in the history of books and reading, and those who have not yet read or thought much about the subject of marginalia, may want to turn to the last chapter (Chapter 8) first: it provides a more accessible introduction to the range of possible investments in the topic than the more specialized survey offered by my opening chapter, and it poses more sharply the complex question of our own attitudes toward writing in books. Readers coming from specific corners of Renaissance studies may want to enter the book via the chapter that most closely engages with their interests—Chapter 2 for books, bodies, and symbols; Chapter 3 for women, memory, and household management; Chapters 4 and 5 for reading and religion; Chapter 6 for navigation and exploration; and Chapter 7 for politics and law. If my research on readers’ marks has taught me anything, however, it is that you will do what you want or need to do, regardless of my attempts to inform or control you.

Bookes receiue their doome according to the Readers capacity. —Classical aphorism (‘‘Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli’’), as rendered in the preface ‘‘To the Reader’’ in William Camden’s Britain (1610) . . . the human hand finds it very hard to give up the elusive possession of sense. . . . something is at work to restore life to inert inscription. —Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant (1999)

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Part I

Of Marks and Methods

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Used Books

‘‘Mark my words.’’ So the authors, editors, and printers of English Renaissance texts exhorted their readers; and mark they did, in greater numbers than ever before and more actively, perhaps, than at any time since. Marking was a matter, then as now, of attending to words, listening to their stories, thinking about their arguments, and heeding their lessons. But Renaissance readers also marked texts in the more physical and social senses captured in the phrase ‘‘making one’s mark’’—making books their own by making marks in and around them and by using them for getting on in the world (as well as preparing for the world to come). Indeed, if the date ranges in the Oxford English Dictionary are to be trusted, the mental connotations of the word ‘‘mark’’ follow on from the material and graphic practices it designated: ‘‘To notice or observe’’ comes after ‘‘To put a mark on’’ and ‘‘To record, indicate, inscribe, or portray with a mark, sign, written note, etc.’’ Among the earliest definitions is ‘‘To write a glossarial note or commentary against a word or passage’’; this meaning is described as ‘‘obsolete’’ now but it was certainly current throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance and is, in fact, the form of marking that will concern me for much of this book.1

How to Read a Book, Circa 1600 Taking note was often a matter of making notes; and Renaissance readers were not only allowed to write notes in and on their books, they were taught to do so in school.2 Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia (quoted in my preface above) describe the active practices used by one of the period’s most advanced scholars in marking the texts he deemed useful. But from John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), one of the period’s most influential handbooks for teaching young students to read and write, it is clear that the same methods—and the language used to describe them—were introduced at an early age: difficult words, or matters of speciall obseruation, [which] they doe reade in any Author, [should] be marked out; I meane all such words or things as eyther are

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hard to them in the learning of them, or which are of some speciall excellency, or vse. . . . For the marking of them, to doe it with little lines vnder them, or aboue them, or against such partes of the word wherein the difficulty lieth, or by some prickes, or whatsoeuer letter or marke may best helpe to cal the knowledge of the thing to remembrance. . . . To doe this, to the end that they may ofttimes reade ouer these, or examine and meditate of them more seriously, vntill that they be as perfect in them, as in any of the rest of their bookes: for hauing these then haue they all.3

When working with Latin texts, Brinsley suggests that beginning readers should take the time to ‘‘note the Declension with a d, ouer the head, and a figure signifying which Declension,’’ ‘‘The Coniugation with a c, and a figure,’’ and so on. ‘‘As they proceede to higher fourmes,’’ Brinsley continues, they should ‘‘marke onely those [things] which haue most difficulty, as Notations, Deriuations, figuratiue Constructions, Tropes, Figures, and the like: and what they feare they cannot remember by a marke, cause them to write those in the Margent in a fine hand, or in some little booke.’’ These blank notebooks could also be used for compiling glossaries of difficult Latin words,4 as well as for digesting sermons.5 The reason for all this methodical marking—what a printed marginal note signals as ‘‘The ends of marking their bookes’’—was that the students ‘‘shall keepe their Authours, which they haue learned’’ (140–41). Such annotations are, then, first and foremost an aid to the memory, which is ‘‘the reason that you shall [find] the choysest bookes of most great learned men, & the most notablest students, all marked through thus’’ (46). But in Brinsley’s teaching, the knowledge stored up is not just to be kept in mind but put into use: ‘‘Legere & non intellegere negligere est. To read and not to vnderstand what wee read, or not to know how to make vse of it, is nothing else but a neglect of all good learning, and a meere abuse of the means & helps to attaine the same’’ (42). As in Whitney’s emblem on the scholar Andrew Perne (whose motto reminds us that ‘‘The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise’’), reading is just part of the process that makes for fruitful interaction with books. Only with marking and practice can books lead us to the kind of understanding needed to make them speak to our present needs. Appropriately enough, the Huntington Library’s copy of this text has been carefully marked by someone named Thomas Barney. In preparing for his own work in the Renaissance classroom, Barney puts Brinsley’s annotational precepts into action. In the book’s cramped margins, he either summarizes Brinsley’s teaching or expands upon it: for instance, next to Brinsley’s definition of the ‘‘phrase’’ (147), Barney writes, ‘‘a phrase is nothing ells but an apt and fitt composeinge and connectinge of words for elegancie and sweettnes of methode or stylle:

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that it maie be like Orpheus harpe to moue or rauish ye hearers or readers,’’ and next to Brinsley’s first use of the word ‘‘gloss’’ (176), Barney enters a gloss of his own, ‘‘a greco. it signifieth a tongue, alsoe an exposition of a darke speech.’’ And he uses the blank flyleaves to distill Brinsley’s scattered advice on a number of subjects, including the best methods ‘‘for translatinge into latine,’’ the chief differences between transitive and intransitive verbs, and the most useful texts for teaching young readers, writers, and speakers: ‘‘Tullies sentences to teach schollars to make latine purely and to translate into Latine: Apthonius for easie entrance to make Theames for vnderstandinge the matter and order: Drax: for Phrases both english and latine. Flores Poetarum: to learne to versifie ex tempore of anie ordinarie Theame: Tullie de natura deorum for sweet stylle in disputation in the vniuersities. . . . Of all other bookes buy the little booke called the schoole of good Manners, or the new schoolle of vertue for ciuilitie translated out of ffrench./’’6 While Barney was concerned with the cultivation of classical eloquence among students who were evidently destined for university and court, the lessons of Whitney and Brinsley applied to the marking of texts for many purposes beyond learning Latin and to readers from all over the socioprofessional spectrum. And if those readers were not always as ‘‘goaloriented’’ as Gabriel Harvey,7 most of them were trained to be mindful, when they picked up a book of almost any kind, of the possible uses it could be made to serve in a range of contexts.

Patterns of Use Marginalia and other readers’ notes are by no means universal, but they are very common—shockingly so if we are used to working with the clean texts of modern editions, in libraries where writing in books is now forbidden, among readers who are no longer taught why or how they might want to write in their books. Just over 20 percent of the books in the Huntington’s STC collection contain manuscript notes by early readers (not just signatures, underlining, and nonverbal symbols but more or less substantial writing);8 and there are several reasons why the practice must have been much more widespread than that figure suggests. First, the copies of Renaissance texts that have survived represent only a fraction of those that were produced; and the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was to decay. The astonishingly low survival rates discovered by Jan van der Stock in his work on the popular prints produced in Antwerp during this period led him to the paradoxical conclusion that ‘‘the larger the quantity of impressions made and the larger number of people they reached, the smaller was the chance of the mate-

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Marks and Methods

rial being preserved.’’9 He cites the example of the more than 9,500 prints of St. Ambrose made by the guild of the Antwerp schoolmasters between 1536 and 1585—not one of which survives today—and suggests that they perished not through indifference, but because they served their purpose. . . . Most devotional prints . . . were simply cherished to destruction. They may have been attached to the inside of a traveling case, or—sometimes cut into smaller sections—pasted to a manuscript. Or they vanished between the cracks of the wooden floor of a monastery church, to be rediscovered centuries later. In a few cases they were cut up and pasted to the wall as decoration. . . . In Bruges some woodcuts were even found pasted to the damp layers of plaster in a crypt. . . . Prints with topical value, such as posters, advertisements, or calendars, were generally simply discarded after a while. . . . Sometimes a print was recycled as lining for a book cover or as the flyleaf in a register of archives. . . . In the Antwerp city archives, a sixteenth-century woodcut advertising the work of a pin-maker was fortuitously preserved, because it spent centuries serving as wrapping paper for the wax seal attached to a document. (174–79)

Printed images and texts were part of a dynamic ecology of use and reuse, leading to transformation and destruction as well as to preservation. And reading, as a form of textual consumption, is not just a producer but also (as Roger Stoddard reminds us) ‘‘the eradicator of vital signs. The squeeze and rub of fingers stain and wear away ink and color, fraying paper thin, breaking fibers, and loosening leaves from bindings. Rough hands sunder books, and over time even gentle hands will pull books apart.’’10 Second, in the course of these books’ long and varied lives, many later readers (and the binders and sellers who served them) felt no compunction whatsoever about modifying or altogether effacing the marks of earlier readers. In her survey of incunables at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Monique Hulvey pointed out that ‘‘The destruction of manuscript annotations reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when printed leaves were washed and bleached in a concerted effort to ‘clean’ the margins of the books, and the edges were cropped as much as possible in rebinding, in order to get rid of all the ‘mutilating’ marks’’11 that might make the book less attractive to a new breed of wealthy collectors. Most of the Huntington’s post-1500 items were (fortunately) not considered valuable enough to warrant this special treatment, but no less than 40 percent of the Huntington’s incunables bear evidence of one or both of these methods. While Henry Huntington did not himself express an antipathy to marginalia, the copies in the collectors’ libraries that he bought en bloc tended to be unusually clean—and other (more randomly assembled) collections are likely to have a higher proportion of annotated books.12

Introduction

7

And third, by the end of the sixteenth century it had become increasingly common for readers to take their notes in loose-leaf or bound notebooks or erasable writing tables.13 Brinsley’s diligent students, as we have seen, used both marginalia and blank notebooks, but by the middle of the seventeenth century there were signs of a general drift from the former to the latter. Paper remained relatively expensive, and blank notebooks relatively scarce, throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: indeed, paper accounted for much of the cost of a book—which meant that, unlike today, the scraps of paper most readily available for miscellaneous notes were those that surrounded printed texts.14 But the impact of mass-produced notebooks can be clearly glimpsed in the pictorial encyclopedia of Johannes Amos Comenius (1659): ‘‘The Study is a place where a Student, apart from men, sitteth alone, addicted to his Studies, whilst he readeth Books, which being within his reach, he layeth open upon a Desk and picketh all the best things out of them into his own Manual, or marketh them in them with a dash, or a little star, in the Margent.’’15 In the illustration for which this text serves as an explanatory caption, Comenius’s ideal student writes in a blank book rather than in the margins of the book (and even if the student were to enter his notes directly in the printed book open before him, Comenius assumes that he would need margins only wide enough for the simplest of symbols). Once I opened my eyes to them, I discovered that the margins of Renaissance books were teeming with the traces left behind by actual readers. My experience was comparable to that of the medievalist John Dagenais, who, turning to manuscripts after years of working with pristine modern books, found texts that ‘‘had rough edges, not the clean, carefully pruned lines of critical editions; . . . edges . . . filled with dialogue about the text—glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations . . . activities by which medieval people transformed one manuscript into another.’’16 Dagenais’ terms, I would suggest, should be extended to the texts of early print culture: Renaissance readers regularly transformed one printed book into another,17 and, indeed, they occasionally turned one back into a medieval manuscript (as in the case of the ‘‘Uncommon Book of Common Prayer’’ discussed in Chapter 5). Looked at from the user’s rather than the producer’s perspective, there are significant continuities across the ‘‘Medieval-Renaissance’’ divide— not only in the visual forms of books but in the transformative techniques employed by their readers.18 Some preprint practices passed to readers in the age of print (including rubrication, or the use of curly brackets in the margin, decorated with foliage or transformed into portraits in profile) and no doubt helped them come to terms with the new medium by marking its products with traditional features. Other practices traveled from scribal culture into typographic and even digital cul-

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Marks and Methods

ture, such as the pointing hand which few of us still use in our marginal notes but which has survived as a typographic symbol that can now be produced by most word processing programs. Another scribal tradition that enjoyed a surprisingly rich afterlife was the ‘‘anathema’’ (or book curse) that owners inscribed on their books to prevent them from being lost or stolen.19 Even well into the seventeenth century, owners of books were adding such curses to their signatures: on the last page of a 1639 Psalter at the Huntington we find, To Stephen Dance this book belong and he that steale it dowth him rong lev it alone and pase there by in euery place where it doth lye,20 while the owner of Thomas Blundeville’s 1613 Exercises was more aggressive, warning ‘‘hee that douth this bouke stayll hee shall be hanged.’’21 Looking at Renaissance marginalia from the end of the period, in fact, we find that these transformative manuscript marks do not die away as quickly as our most authoritative narratives would have us believe. As printed books gradually freed themselves from the visual and organizational models of the manuscript tradition, William Slights has shown that the use of the margins for authorial or editorial annotations increased steadily.22 And since many of these notes provided the kinds of apparatus that readers were used to writing in for themselves, scholars have assumed that manuscript marginalia decreased proportionally. In their landmark essay on fifteenth-century reading habits, Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen argued that in the first few decades of printing, books still contained enough in the way of illuminations, rubrications, and annotations that they deserve to be catalogued as if they were manuscripts. But by the second decade of the sixteenth century, they claim, this was no longer the case: ‘‘The printer’s provision of all the aids that previously had been added [by hand] . . . effected the final step in the transformation of reading. In antiquity reading had implied an active role in the reception of the text. . . . Throughout the Middle Ages readers, even long after a book had been confected, felt free to clarify its meaning through the addition of . . . marginalia. Under the influence of printing, reading became increasingly an activity of the passive reception of a text that was inherently clear and unambiguous.’’23 Adrian Johns has recently cast doubt on whether the texts that printers produced were ever ‘‘inherently clear and unambiguous’’ (at least during the hand-press period): in his account, readers were still learning to trust printed books throughout the seventeenth century.24 Marginalia in surviving books cast further doubt on whether reading became ‘‘an

Introduction

9

activity of passive reception’’ at any point in the sixteenth century. While the average proportion of annotated books from the incunable period is very high (between 60 and 70 percent), it is not much lower a full century later: among the Huntington’s books printed as late as the 1590s, 52 percent still contain contemporary marginalia. While the numbers do decline after that date (before picking up again in and after the English Civil War25), the proportion for some subjects—such as religious polemics and practical guides to law, medicine, and estate management—remains well over 50 percent for the entire STC period. The evidence left in English Renaissance books suggests that readers continued to add to texts—centuries rather than decades after the invention of printing—and that printed books did not contain everything that every reader needed to make sense of (and with) their texts. The addition of personalized indexes and tables of contents to books that already included them provides clear evidence (throughout the STC period) that authors and their printers were not providing everything individual readers needed to serve their specific purposes.26 In Chapter 7 we will examine Sir Julius Caesar’s additions to John Foxe’s already massive index to his apparently comprehensive commonplace book—first by writing in new entries alongside Foxe’s printed list and then by adding two new manuscript indexes of his own. This is only the most elaborate of examples, and the Huntington’s books are full of expanded indexes and small lists of key words with page numbers on title pages, flyleaves, and pastedowns. The most striking indication that printing did not automatically, or immediately, render readers passive is the survival of what might be described as radically customized copies—copies, that is, where the text is not just annotated but physically altered, sometimes even cut up and combined with other texts. There is evidence of reading so active and appropriative that it challenges the integrity of the entire printed book.27 Readers could actively alter their books (when they were bound or rebound) by inserting blank leaves for extensive marginalia, by rearranging the sections, or even by combining sections from different texts.28 In 1673, for instance, a reader signing himself only ‘‘GF’’ filled the margins of a 1638 textbook on mathematics with a running summary of the principles of geometry and inserted several diagrams cut out of other books.29 In more extreme cases, the results make it difficult to identify which is the primary text that is being added to: in the Huntington volume which is catalogued as John Bate’s Mysteries of Nature, and Art, all that remains of Bate’s text is the third of its four books.30 In the place of books 1 and 2 are large sections of books 1 and 2 of Henry Peacham’s Gentleman’s Exercise, while book 4 is replaced by nine pages of manuscript

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Marks and Methods

notes—turning Bate’s encyclopedic text into a narrowly focused anthology on drawing and painting. Even when books remained integral and isolated, they could be put to dramatically divergent uses. Many students of reading—including Stanley Fish and Roger Chartier—have wrestled with the fact that the same text can be interpreted or used in radically different ways,31 and there are two ways to comb the margins for evidence of this phenomenon. Sometimes a single copy of a single text preserves the contrasting responses of multiple readers—and one such case is the Huntington Library’s copy of A Christian Directory, published in 1585 by the English Jesuit Robert Parsons (Figure 4).32 This text generated both pro- and anti-Catholic responses, but the Huntington’s copy records voices from both camps within the covers of a single book. One sympathetic reader has written such sober endorsements as, ‘‘Reade over thes two portions over [sic] manye Tymes: diligentlye,’’ often accompanied by ostentatious hands with pointing fingers. A different hand registers the outrage of an obviously Protestant reader with such comments as ‘‘A most lewd & grosse lie, & popish slander.’’ The other method is to examine multiple copies of a single book. In her survey of some 150 early copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, Heidi Brayman Hackel discovered an astonishing array of early readers’ marks in no less than 70 percent of the copies, ‘‘ranging from signatures to a few stray scribbles to elaborate polyglot marginalia and indices.’’ The range of marks is representative of the entire archive of Renaissance marks, the only surprise being that it is found in a work of literature: Fragments of verse, lists of clothing, enigmatic phrases, incomplete calculations, sassy records of ownership: some of these traces merely puzzle. Drawings and doodlings in other copies hint at other associations or preoccupations: a shield painted in watercolors, impish faces peering out from the margin, geometric figures on a flyleaf, a mother and child on a blank sheet. Pens are not the only objects that have left impressions in these books; pressed flowers survive in two volumes, and the rust outlines of pairs of scissors [in] two other copies. . . . Fiftysix percent of the books carry marginalia or scribblings on flyleaves, most commonly in the form of penmanship practice, emendations, underlinings, and finding notes.33

On a much smaller scale, I have been recording the marginalia found in multiple copies of the first (1605) edition of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning.34 It is fitting that this text, which advocated the active digestion and application of books, preserves many signs of engaged reading, culminating in the example of Sir William Drake, who cut out pages from his already annotated copies of The Advancement of Learning and pasted them into two of his commonplace books (now at the University of London Library).35 Of the six copies at the Folger Library,

Figure 4. Dueling marginalia in a single copy of a popular Catholic text by Robert Parsons (1585, RB433864). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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three have significant marginalia by early readers. Copy 6 has only a few notes, and they present us with a reader who looks for exactly what we would expect a Renaissance reader of the author of England’s best essays to look for: on sig. Ii3v, next to Bacon’s passage, ‘‘We come therefore now to that knowledge, whereunto the ancient Oracle directeth vs, which is, the knowledge of our selues,’’ the reader has repeated ‘‘knowledge of oure selues’’ in the margin. Copy 5 has the same passage marked with the same phrase repeated in the margin, some rhetorical figures identified, and an extremely efficient set of running summaries in the margins. Copy 3, however, is heavily annotated by a much more resistant reader—his identity is not yet known, but references in the marginalia place him in Oxford around 1615 (quite possibly in the faculty of divinity).36 The tenor of his comments is clear from the outset, where he bridles at Bacon’s effusive dedicatory epistle to King James. When Bacon claims that ‘‘there hath not beene since Christs time any King or temporall Monarch, which hath been so learned in all literature & erudition, diuine & humane,’’ the reader lists three English kings ‘‘since ye Norman conquest [who] were excellent Scholers’’ (A3v); and where Bacon credits the King with knowing all things, our reader interjects, ‘‘Per hyperbolen. And indeed ye opinion is foolish. For all things cannot be knowen by creatures . . .’’ (A2v). Finally, Bacon’s praise of James for his virtue and fortune rather than his religion provokes a pious marginal note: ‘‘Faith is forgotten; which is ye chiefe intellectual & gives life & forme of true goodness to all other intellectuals’’ (A3r). When Bacon notes ‘‘That if all Sciences were lost, they [could] be found in Virgill,’’ our reader wryly responds, ‘‘Very superficially, forsooth’’ (K3v). More seriously, this reader’s marginalia regularly take Bacon to task for being a superficial student of Aristotle. On sig. Ff4v, Bacon’s critique is condemned as ‘‘grosse sclander,’’ and on the following pages the reader mounts a spirited defense of Aristotle: ‘‘This againe is idle’’ (Gg2v), ‘‘not deserved . . . he being full of inkhorne terms to little purpose’’ (Gg3r), ‘‘But Aristotle is againe wrongd’’ (Ii2v), and ‘‘1. Sense. 2. History. 3. Induction. 4. Universall experience are ye foure instruments of Invention taught by Aristotle & knowen unto most men, & forgotten by this otherwise very worthy knight’’ (Nn1v). And where Bacon wonders why Aristotle ‘‘shoulde haue written diuers volumes of Ethiques, and neuer handled the affections,’’ our reader wonders again about Bacon’s apparent amnesia: ‘‘The honourable knight hath forgotten ye sixt booke of ye Ethicks & ye third booke of ye same Aristotle de anima. . . . And Thomas of Aquin in ye morall part of his Summa Theologica. . . . He hath forgotten also what Tully besides his scattering discourses, hath . . . written in ye .4. booke of his Tusculan questions. He hath forgotten Scaliger & many

Introduction

13

others’’ (Xx4v). Most seriously of all, he accuses Bacon of being a secret follower of Machiavelli.37 When we come to Bacon’s famous praise of ‘‘fained [or fictional] historie,’’ we fully expect our reader to record a dissenting view—though not, perhaps, to go so far as to side with Plato in calling for poets to be banished from the republic. Bacon follows Sir Philip Sidney in finding fiction a better teacher than history: ‘‘Euents of true Historie, haue not that Magnitude, which satisfieth the minde of Man; Poesie faineth Acts and Euents Greater and more Heroicall’’ (Ee2r). For our sober reader, however, ‘‘it is madnes to seeke satisfaction in falshood. . . . This, I say, is not onely madnes but wickednes. And therefore if poesie have no better end: poets had better be idle then ill occupied, & Plato did well to shut his citie gates against them.’’ But he saves his fiercest and most extended outburst for the final section, where Bacon excuses himself for not covering matters of divinity because (he feels) that topic has been exhaustively handled by others. The reader begs to differ and drafts an outline of the subjects the section should have addressed: ‘‘But surely great unsufficiencie both in ye Methodicall & Solute Theologie, to use his owne uncouth monasticall termes; is yet in the writings of both ancient & moderne authors of Divinity. Who hath written sufficiently of ye 1. Applying of ye meritive & redemptive Theandricke obedience? 2. Of mariage? 3. Of oathes? 4. Of Fasting? 5 Of ye Autonomie of ye church? 6. Of callings?’’ One final copy of the same text from the Huntington Library preserves the annotations of a reader who was much closer to Bacon’s wavelength. They are the work of the Genevan scholar Isaac Casaubon, perhaps the finest philologist of his day.38 Here, then, is an encounter between two of Europe’s most celebrated scholars, in the margins of a work that is itself concerned with the management and application of information. Casaubon marked up the book in his usual scholarly fashion (Figure 5). At the bottom of the page reproduced here he has transcribed a lengthy passage from another work (by the Greek orator Themistius) that praised the ruler in terms similar to those contained in Bacon’s address to King James. We can also find him translating some of Bacon’s English phrases into Latin and Greek (across from ‘‘wisest,’’ for example, he has written ‘‘Sapientiss.’’) and labelling rhetorical devices (next to Bacon’s ‘‘And as the Scripture sayth of the wisest King: That his heart was as the sands of the Sea,’’ Casaubon has written ‘‘Cor Regis Simile [a simile for the king’s heart]’’). But alongside these standard philological techniques there is a more original and enigmatic practice: Casaubon has marked (or had someone mark for him) the accented syllable of every word with more than one syllable, suggesting that he read

Figure 5. Isaac Casaubon reads Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605, RB56251) for English practice. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Introduction

15

it aloud and used the text, at least in part, to practice his pronunciation of English.39

Following Rules in Unpredictable Ways Such examples capture the challenge of extrapolating general taxonomies of readerly behavior from the traces of interaction preserved in the margins of Renaissance books. Marginalia rarely speak directly to the questions we most want answered, and often reveal a different side of a reader we thought we knew. Another case in point is Barnabe Barnes’s annotated copy of Machiavelli’s Il principe, now at York Minster Library.40 After Christopher Marlowe, Barnes was Elizabethan England’s most infamous invoker of Machiavelli: his play The Devil’s Charter (1607) featured a cast of depraved Italians motivated by Machiavellian precepts, and his meditation on Cicero’s De officiis (published the year before and dedicated to King James) offered a scathing commentary on both The Discourses and The Prince—calling the latter a ‘‘puddle of princely policies’’ and in several places quoting directly from named chapters. His comments in the margins of his Prince are surprisingly spare, stopping well short of the sections cited in his Four Books of Offices, and they are disappointingly restrained in their tone.41 Barnes picks out one of Machiavelli’s most controversial passages (in which he argues that necessary ‘‘cruelties are well used . . . that are carried out in a single stroke’’), but marks it only with a marginal flower, the conventional symbol for quotability.42 Most of his marginal notes simply translate key words from Italian into English or Latin, and his most emphatic markings highlight an enigmatic passage that seems to refer more to textual interpretation than to the kind of political manipulation for which Machiavelli was notorious: ‘‘through the great length and continuity of [a prince’s] dominion, the memories and causes of innovations die out, because one change always leaves indentations for the constructions of another [lascia l’addentellato per l’edificatione dell’altra]’’ (Bondanella, 8). Many of the notes left behind by readers bear no discernable relationship whatsoever to the texts they accompany. In his survey of marginalia in medieval and Renaissance copies of Piers Plowman, Carl James Grindley found three categories of notes: the first ‘‘are without any identifiable context,’’ the second ‘‘exist within a context associated with that of the [book],’’ and only the third are ‘‘directly associated with the various texts that the [volume] contains.’’43 The blank spaces of Renaissance books were used to record not just comments on the text but penmanship exercises, prayers, recipes, popular poetry, drafts of letters, mathematical calculations, shopping lists, and other glimpses of the world in which they circulated—and this is not only true of almanacs, which were

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Marks and Methods

the most conventional repositories for this sort of information.44 The Huntington’s copy of Boccaccio’s Amorous Fiammetta contains only one manuscript note: on the verso of the title page an early owner has inscribed a recipe for a leek and herb sauce.45 And in a copy of Erasmus’s De copia, the only note written by its owner, William Anderson, records that ‘‘On the 18th of May anno Domini 1585 there was heard a great terrible thundering.’’46 But for all of their unpredictability, Renaissance readers usually offer indications of the kinds of training and equipment they brought to bear on their encounters with texts, and the kinds of interests and needs they could be made to serve. Elaine Whitaker suggests that although readers’ alterations are idiosyncratic, they fall broadly into the following scheme: I. Editing A. Censorship B. Affirmation II. Interaction A. Devotional Use B. Social Critique III. Avoidance A. Doodling B. Daydreaming.47

In elaborating upon his three types of typical marginalia (mentioned above), Carl James Grindley has proposed a much more elaborate scheme. Within the category of marks with no identifiable context he includes ‘‘Ownership Marks,’’ ‘‘Doodles,’’ ‘‘Pen Trials,’’ and ‘‘Sample Texts’’; among those notes with an oblique relationship to the books that contain them he includes ‘‘Copied Letterforms,’’ ‘‘Copied Illuminations,’’ ‘‘Copied Passages,’’ ‘‘Additional Texts,’’ ‘‘Marks of Attribution,’’ ‘‘Tables of Content,’’ ‘‘Introductory Materials,’’ and ‘‘Construction Marks’’; and (most usefully of all) he divides the marginalia that constitute ‘‘a coherent reader response to a particular text’’ into the following categories: I. Narrative Reading Aids A. Topic B. Source C. Citation D. Dramatis Personae E. Rhetorical Device F. Additional Information G. Translation H. Summation 1. Textually-gleaned Marginal Rubrics

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2. Paraphrased Marginal Rubrics 3. Condensed Overviews 4. Textual Extrapolations II. Ethical Pointers A. Preceptive Points B. Exemplifications C. Exhortations D. Revelatory Annotations E. Orative Annotations F. Disputative Annotations III. Polemical Responses A. Social Comment B. Ecclesiastical Comment C. Political Comment IV. Literary Responses A. Reader Participation B. Humour and Irony C. Allegory and Imagery D. Language Issues V. Graphical Responses A. Illuminations B. Initials C. Punctuation D. Iconography48

Conventional practices are evident in even the humblest examples, such as the notes found on the blank verso of the final page of the Huntington’s copy of The Treasury of Amadis of France (a popular collection of speeches and letters).49 At least two early readers have completely filled the page with scribbles, penmanship exercises, and a set of surprisingly complex notes of ownership (Figure 6). A long note at the top reads, ‘‘Thomas Shardelowe ow[n]eth this book God geue him grace on it to look[.] if I it lose and you it find I pray you be not so vnkind but geue to me my booke againe and I will please you for yor payne[.] the rose is read the leafe is grene God preserue our noble king and queene but as for the Pope God send him a rope and a figge for the King of spayne.’’ Lower down the page, another reader has drafted a series of phrases from which an ownership formula finally emerges: ‘‘Be it knowne Dale Heaver,’’ ‘‘Dale Havers oweth me he is my veri,’’ ‘‘Dale Havers oweth me he is . . . Dale Havers oweth me,’’ and, finally, ‘‘Dale Havers oweth me/ he is my veri tenet [owner] / and I this booke confesse to be/ quicunque me invenit [whoever finds me].’’ These notes may not do much to acquaint us with Shardelowe or Havers, and they offer next to nothing about their interpretation of this particular text, but they do preserve a human presence that makes this copy unique.50 More important, they allow us to excavate some of the textual formulae—which must have cir-

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Marks and Methods

culated, formally or informally51—available to Renaissance readers for displaying their property, handwriting, and political allegiances. As this relatively simple illustration suggests, marginalia provide some wonderfully literal examples of the way in which a book must be understood (in Natalie Zemon Davis’s words) ‘‘not merely as a source for ideas and images, but as a carrier of relationships.’’52 It is not unusual, for instance, to find the phrase et amicorum (and friends) accompanying a signature on a Renaissance title page or binding and several generations of family histories inscribed on flyleaves or pastedowns—as we shall see in several chapters below (and not just the one dedicated to Bibles, with which such notes now tend to be associated). And complex relationships of friendship and patronage were captured by the inscriptions on books given as gifts.53 Marginalia sometimes record a general judgment, such as that offered by Frances Wolfreston in the Huntington Library’s copy of Shakerley Marmion’s play A Fine Companion (1633). Beneath the list of dramatis personae she wrote, ‘‘A resnabell prity bouk of a usurer and his 2 daughters and their loves with other pithy pasiges.’’54 At times such judgments could be more politically pointed (as in a compilation containing Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, where a reader has remarked that ‘‘the Rebellion of Oct[ober] 23. 1641 justified Spencers wisedome and deep insight into that barbarous nation’’)55 or more consequential (as in a collection of medical recipes, where a reader has deleted many passages, noting that ‘‘All theas receiptes ar verye falsly written. but being corrected heer they ar trew’’).56 Marginalia can identify other texts a reader associated with or even read alongside a particular book. Cross-references and passages copied verbatim from other books are frequent enough to attest to the widespread practice of what has been called ‘‘extensive’’ rather than ‘‘intensive’’ reading and to suggest that (for some groups of readers at least) this mode started in England well before what Robert DeMaria has called the ‘‘reading revolution’’ of the eighteenth century.57 While we might expect readers from the legal profession to have knowledge of and access to a wide range of statutes and precedents, it is striking how often readers of sermons, herbals, or husbandry manuals were able to reference other books and authors in their reading. Only with a much more comprehensive survey of marginalia in surviving books will statistical patterns become more reliable: at present, the findings in one collection have a disturbing habit of contradicting those in another. For instance, my survey of Renaissance books at the Huntington revealed a clearly marked preference (among marginal annotators) for larger books: marginalia were more than twice as likely to appear in folios than in quartos and smaller-format books. We might expect this

Figure 6. Ownership inscriptions in The Treasury of Amadis of France (1572?, RB12924). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Marks and Methods

to be the case across the board for the simple reason that larger books tended to provide the reader with larger margins in which to exercise their pens. At Archbishop Parker’s library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, however, the opposite turned out to be true: Parker’s marginalia are much sparser in his folios, and generally hone in on one point or section rather than digesting the entire text. In fact, there are significant differences between Parker’s habits of use in the two classes of printed books: not a single one of his folios has the characteristic monogram he devised for inscribing his initials on title pages, or the cramped summaries that are so common on the flyleaves in his smaller books (as well as his manuscripts). So we are left with the unexpected impression that—at least as a reader—Parker may have drawn a sharper distinction between big printed books and small printed books than he did between printed books and manuscripts.

Terms of Engagement In scholarly circles, ‘‘marginalia’’ has become the standard term for the notes (both written and printed) that accompany the text in many of the books (both written and printed) that come down to us from the English Renaissance. But it was not the standard term in the Renaissance itself—at least not in English. When George Joye published his response to William Tyndale on the subject of biblical translation in 1535, he concentrated on what he described as ‘‘scholias, notis, and gloses in the margent.’’58 ‘‘Marginall notes’’ or ‘‘notes in the margent’’ are common enough in the period’s prose; but ‘‘marginalia’’ itself is very rare. While the word appears in neo-Latin texts from the sixteenth century (if not earlier), it does not seem to have entered the English language until the nineteenth century. The OED’s earliest citation is a letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge dated 22 April 1832, in which he proposed ‘‘A facsimile of John Asgill’s tracts with a life and copious notes, to which I would affix Postilla et Marginalia.’’59 Coleridge’s use of the term here is clearly Latin rather than English, which undermines its value for the OED’s attempt to fix a precise point of origin. But according to H. J. Jackson’s recent account, Coleridge had already made it an English word—and an English literary genre—when his ‘‘marginalia’’ were published under that label in 1819 (and he would be followed, in the ensuing decades, by Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, Hester Thrale Piozzi, William Blake, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Charles Darwin, and others—though some of these authors used the term loosely to gather their miscellaneous observations, whether or not they had their source in marginal annotations).60 The term becomes fixed, oddly enough, just as the practice it

Introduction

21

describes begins to wane—or rather to be narrowed into an increasingly privileged form of writerly behavior on the one hand, and an increasingly transgressive form of readerly behavior on the other. What were notes for and by readers called in late medieval and Renaissance England, where both the practice of writing in books and the terms for describing it were so wide-ranging? And what do we gain and lose by joining Coleridge (and Jackson) in settling on ‘‘marginalia’’ instead of following Joye in using ‘‘scholias,’’ ‘‘notis,’’ ‘‘gloses,’’ or any of the other terms preferred by his contemporaries? There is something to be said, to be sure, for standardized terminology. A shared vocabulary is not only useful for research but to some extent necessary for all communication—particularly for that basic task (traditionally performed by titles and indexes in scholarly writing) of ensuring that your reader or auditor knows what it is that you will be discussing. And common terms are important, perhaps even essential, for the process of discipline formation: ‘‘marginalia’’ has played a central role in establishing the emerging field of the history of reading as a legitimate pursuit, with shared objects of study. As Bernard M. Rosenthal has observed, ‘‘we can say with some assurance that the ‘incubation period’ for this new and broader interest in manuscript annotations began independently in the minds of a number of people in the 1960s and that by the end of the 1990s it has emerged as a recognized field of study. For better or worse, the informality and improvisation which has marked the beginnings will have to yield to guidelines, definitions and an acceptable nomenclature.’’61 Rosenthal goes on to propose the adoption of a particular term in common use in Italy, though whether or not it proves acceptable in the English-speaking world only time will tell: for printed books with handwritten annotations—traditionally catalogued as ‘‘libri impressi cum notis manuscriptis’’ (Curt Bu¨hler) or ‘‘books with manuscript notes’’ (Robin Alston)—he suggests that we follow Giuseppe Frasso and his colleagues in calling them ‘‘postillati.’’62 The OED describes ‘‘postil’’ as ‘‘Now only Hist[oric]’’, and there is something decidedly antique about the term. Its primary meaning is indeed that of a ‘‘marginal note or commentary’’ upon a text—but it was used as often for printed records of writing as for manuscript traces of reading.63 Furthermore, it was associated from the start with the explication of the Scriptures, particularly the Gospels; and in most of the many titles it appears in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the context is explicitly religious. Indeed, in many cases it becomes a form of writing that is closer to a sermon than an annotation: the OED’s most specialized definition is ‘‘an expository discourse or homily upon the Gospel or Epistle for the day, read or intended to be read in the

22

Marks and Methods

church service,’’ and many of the published ‘‘postils’’ of the period were collections of such texts penned and delivered by famous churchmen. Likewise, ‘‘scholia’’ was used to signify an ‘‘explanatory note or comment’’ in general, but in most cases it involved an ancient text—either ‘‘an ancient exegetical note’’ or a ‘‘comment upon a passage in a Greek or Latin author.’’64 ‘‘Postils’’ and ‘‘scholia’’ could be used for pious and learned notes on the Bible or Homer, say, but would they have been appropriate for comments on Shakespeare or (for that matter) genealogical notes in a family Bible? Part of the charge in E. K.’s beguiling scholia in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579) comes from what William Slights calls the ‘‘intriguing discontinuities between amorous pastoral poetry and the depoeticizing glosses.’’65 Spenser’s annotated eclogues offer up a third—and much more familiar—term for ‘‘comment, explanation, interpretation’’: ‘‘gloss.’’ Evolving in the sixteenth century from the earlier form ‘‘gloze,’’ the word shared the same associations with canonical texts as ‘‘postil’’ and ‘‘scholia,’’ but its applications came to suggest the narrower activity of explaining an obscure word in the text—hence its extension beyond the margins of books to the explanatory entries in glossaries or dictionaries. At the same time, however, it carried with it what the OED describes as ‘‘a sinister sense,’’ implying that the interpretation being offered was ‘‘sophistical or disingenuous.’’66 As William Slights and Evelyn Tribble have shown (and as I will explore in more detail in Chapter 4 below), glosses on the Bible were particularly suspect, and the authorities fought a losing battle to contain the contestation of meanings that accompanied successive translations of the scripture.67 In the terminology itself, then, we can already find intimations of an antagonistic relationship between the reader and the text, an awareness of the gap between the author’s words on the page and the meaning particular readers want to derive from them. This sense emerges even more strongly in the history of the use of ‘‘adversaria,’’ another early seventeenth-century word for ‘‘collections of miscellaneous remarks or observations,  MISCELLANEA; also commentaries or notes on a text or writing.’’68 The term derives from the Latin term for ‘‘against’’ or ‘‘facing,’’ and it strictly refers to the location of notes (on the side of the paper facing us or in the space next to the text being annotated) rather than their character. For Nicolas Barker, this points to the ‘‘ancient and compelling example’’ of the page layout employed by classical and medieval glossators, ‘‘never far from the imagination and habits of those who adorned and disfigured the margins of later printed books.’’69 But recent scholarship has inevitably found in ‘‘adversaria’’ the more common sense of ‘‘adversarial’’—not just opposite, that is, but oppositional. In the sixteenth century another term emerged, carrying precisely this

Introduction

23

sense of critical (often censorious) commentary: ‘‘animadversion.’’ This critical spirit is also conveyed by the common emphasis on structures of argumentation in the notes of Renaissance readers (particularly but not exclusively in rhetorical, philosophical, and religious works). Readers who used marginal notes and tables to simplify or clarify the structure of the text routinely focused on disagreements or ‘‘doubts’’ and their ‘‘resolutions.’’ All of these terms could be grouped under the general heading of ‘‘annotations’’: to study them is to examine what the classic collection Annotation and Its Texts describes as ‘‘the play of note against text.’’70 All of these words (including, perhaps, ‘‘marginalia’’—at least in its strictest sense) define a body of writing that not only accompanies a text but directly engages with it. But as we have already seen (and will continue to see in most of the chapters that follow), by no means all of the interesting notes written by readers in the margins and other blank spaces of books comment directly or indirectly on the text they are found in. Many of the notes that readers wrote in their books—doodles, pen practices, ownership formulae, and a wide variety of quotidian marks that were entered in books simply because they offered a convenient space for writing and archiving—do not qualify as ‘‘annotations.’’ Are students of marginalia and readers’ marks supposed to study these inscriptions and, if so, how are they to be described and approached? In a sense, they are ‘‘graffiti’’ of the (not necessarily derogatory) sort described by Juliet Fleming. Fleming argues that writing was not contained by the page in early modern England, with ‘‘posies’’ and other inscriptions appearing on walls, rings, and pots; but these texts were also inscribed, in a similar spirit, in the blank spaces of texts.71 Her observations—that ‘‘I was here’’ is ‘‘the graffito’s most simple and paradigmatic instance’’ (72), and that ‘‘the prohibition against writing on the interior walls of a house is now deeply internalized’’ (30)—are repeated almost verbatim in Heather Jackson’s study of marginalia, and modern readers who prefer clean books often use the term ‘‘graffiti’’ to deride other readers’ marginalia. A less loaded term (indeed, a potentially boring one) is suggested by the subfield of classical archaeology that studies ‘‘epigraphs’’—what the subtitle of one recent collection describes as ‘‘Ancient history from inscriptions.’’72 By the early seventeenth century—just as English scholars were beginning to develop tastes and methods for collecting and interpreting textual fragments, some two centuries after their Italian counterparts—the term came to signify an inscription of just about any sort on just about any durable surface (but particularly coins, tombs, and public monuments).73 Again, there is considerable overlap between the kinds of things writers left behind on buildings and in books; and we

24

Marks and Methods

have only begun to learn from the archaeologists who have wrestled with epigraphic materials and the issues they raise. One particularly promising area for comparison is the archaeological concept of ‘‘external symbolic storage’’—which is an appropriate description of the function of many used books in early modern England, not least because it conveys the dual status of most books as both utilitarian and symbolic objects (that is, as bearers of symbols and containers of special associations).74 Building on the influential work of Arjun Appadurai on ‘‘the social life of things,’’ John Sutton has combined anthropological and cognitive concerns to outline the ways in which objects serve as ‘‘exograms,’’ or as external repositories for our memories.75 And like ‘‘pets and landscapes and cars and friends and ghosts . . . like films and knots and bowls and buildings and unreliable machines,’’ annotated books ‘‘don’t just trigger and unlock memory retrieval, but can also stagger it, halt it, haphazardly twist it, and leave it in disarray’’ (139). Coming from a still different direction—the fields of information theory and human-computer interaction—John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have drawn our attention to the ways in which artifacts tend to develop ‘‘border resources’’: at the boundary between center and periphery, users find new uses for canonical artifacts.76 And this takes us back, finally, to that crucial space from which ‘‘marginalia’’ itself takes its name. The margins bring with them a rich set of historical, sociological, philosophical, and poetic associations—and a repertoire of suggestive terms such as ‘‘parergon,’’ ‘‘frame,’’ ‘‘fringe,’’ and ‘‘edge.’’77 It is these aspects that connect marginalia to a much wider (and trendier) field of inquiry, and they will no doubt give the term a secure place in our scholarly lexicon for as long as the scholarly imagination finds power in them. This final section has been little more than a preliminary glossary of Renaissance glosses. Its purpose has not been to take us closer to an approved nomenclature as much as to take us closer to a state of terminological self-consciousness. To prevent these terms from becoming loosely interchangeable or unintentionally anachronistic, we need to recover not only their embedded linguistic histories but also their complex relationships to scholarly disciplines, cultural values, and material practices.

Chapter 2

: Toward a History of the Manicule

The seconde [finger] hyght Index and Salutaris . . . For with him we grete, and shewe, and teche all thynges. —Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum The kind of Being which equipment possesses . . . we call ‘‘readiness-to-hand’’ [Zuhandenheit]. —Martin Heidegger, Being and Time The history of the hand in relation to the book is above all the history of the index (in the multiple senses of that word). —Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘Navigating the Book’’

Readers who mark their books have always tended to develop systems of signs, a visual shorthand for breaking texts down into manageable sections or signaling key subjects and claims at a glance. In 2002 the Levenger Company published a table on its Web site to share the techniques submitted by its customers, offering it as a guide to making ‘‘masterly marginalia’’ (Figure 7).1 If medieval or Renaissance readers examined this list, they would recognize some of the marks—‘‘def.,’’ ‘‘Rx,’’ ‘‘⬖,’’ and ‘‘,’’—and many of the associated functions (‘‘interesting,’’ ‘‘memorize this,’’ ‘‘compare,’’ ‘‘versus,’’ ‘‘cross-reference,’’ and ‘‘important message’’), but they would wonder why there were so many abbreviated words (‘‘vo’’ for vocabulary word, ‘‘vy’’ for very, ‘‘w/o’’ for without) instead of nonverbal signs like asterisks, flowers, astrological symbols, and any number of subject-coded ciphers. One of medieval England’s most learned readers, Robert Grosseteste (the thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln), devised an extremely sophisticated system of symbols for annotating his books and for classifying the wide variety of theological materials they contained. His extensive marginalia employ some four hundred symbols, including the letters of the

Figure 7. ‘‘How to Leave Masterly Marginalia’’: the Levenger Company’s suggested symbols. Courtesy of Steve Leveen and the Levenger Company.

History of the Manicule

27

Greek alphabet and geometrical figures; and he left a tabular key to the system in a copy of the Bible—rediscovered in the twentieth century at the Bibliothe`que Municipale in Lyons—where each symbol is accompanied by a set of references to the Bible, the Church Fathers, and other writers. Its purpose, according to R. W. Hunt, was ‘‘clearly to build up a theological subject index. In the table the references on a given subject are collected together. In the margins of the manuscripts the symbols made it possible to find the passage wanted.’’2 But Grosseteste’s elaborate index proved to be too unwieldy, and he eventually abandoned the system in favor of more straightforward annotational techniques.3 The old practice of using symbols to index—that is, both to classify and to point out—particular subject matter took on new life in the early age of print.4 It was quickly deployed by authors and editors as a means of giving order to their printed texts;5 and it continued to be used by new readers (if never again with the ambition of Grosseteste’s early system) to give their own order to the growing amounts of information that made its way into their hands. The marginalia of medieval and Renaissance readers often made use of letters and symbols that clearly served an indexing function: in the library of John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury (purchased by Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early 1570s), the numbers found next to many underlined passages clearly correspond to specific subjects—172 for reading the scriptures, 71 for marriage, and so on.6 But without a detailed key such as that found in Grosseteste’s Bible it is rarely possible to reconstruct the complete system used by readers. A Renaissance reader’s own key to his indexing symbols can, in fact, be found on the last page of a copy of Cicero’s De Oratore, published by the Aldine Press in 1569 and now housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library (Figure 8). Here we can see an anonymous reader inventing (or, more likely, adapting) a system to be employed in the margins of this book—and, presumably, others. He tried out various symbols but once he had settled on a system he wrote it neatly toward the bottom of the page and surrounded it by a rough decorative border: he lists the signs used for tagging passages on particular topics (a trident was used for passages of argumentation or reasoning and the symbol for Venus signaled an interest in love, and so on7), and for marking particular rhetorical devices (such as ‘‘amp[lificatio],’’ ‘‘metap[hor],’’ and ‘‘sim[ile],’’ each of which is signified by a symbol that looks like a flower).8 In focusing on rhetoric and in limiting the range of symbols employed, this reader was following the teaching of the great humanist pedagogue Desiderius Erasmus. In his ‘‘De ratione studii’’ (On the Method of Study), Erasmus advocated the following method for indexing books: ‘‘you will, as you read the authors, methodically observe

Figure 8. A reader’s key to his marginal symbols in Cicero’s De Oratore (1569). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

History of the Manicule

29

occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, cleverly contrived or well adapted arguments, brilliant flashes of style, adages, example, and pithy remarks worth memorizing. Such passages should be marked by an appropriate little sign. For not only shouldn’t a variety of signs be used, but they should be employed systematically so that it is clear to what sort of thing they refer.’’9 The annotational system devised by Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland (the so-called ‘‘Wizard Earl’’), was simpler still and almost entirely concerned with Aristotelian logic. On a flyleaf in his French edition of Plutarch he explained his use of lines, points, circles, and triangles throughout his marginalia: The places enterlined ar sutche whiche concerns generall heds if the name of the head be set down in the margent, if not then is it somme simile or notable saing or sutche like. Theas points in the end . . . . . . . . . . . signifies the end of that matter. Theas treakes in the margent ⬅ ar doubts with this kind of periods in the beginning ⬖ When theas markes ⬅ ar dascht [with a vertical line] the doubts are resolved. . . . The chapters which ar of greatest note are marked with a triangle.䉭 Note that sutch titells of chapters as ar noted with O ar red.10

And toward the end of the seventeenth century, John Locke published the methodical system by which he used letters and symbols in his ‘‘adversaria’’ and commonplace books to find his way around his extensive notes.11

Taking the manicule in hand But of all the symbols used by Renaissance readers and lost in the modern methods captured in Levenger’s table, the most interesting and least studied must be the small pointing hand—what I will call the ‘‘manicule’’ for the reasons to be explored below—that so often served to mark noteworthy passages. Between at least the twelfth and eighteenth centu ries, it may have been the most common symbol produced both for and by readers in the margins of manuscripts and printed books. The margins of Renaissance texts are littered with severed hands, frozen in gestures that cannot fail to catch the eye. When we encounter them among the asterisks, trefoils, ticks, ‘‘treaks,’’ crosses, brackets, running commentaries, and endless nota benes, they have an uncanny power to conjure up the bodies of dead writers and readers. Some of these hands are printed and some handwritten; some are clothed in the simplest of sleeves and others emerge from billowing cuffs with pendant jewels; some suggest the merest outline of a hand while others capture the sinews, joints, and even nails with a precision that rivals the most artful anatomical study.

30

Marks and Methods

What all of these hands are doing, wherever and however they appear, is pointing; and their most important feature (from a functional perspective at least) is the index finger that extends from the hand toward the text, calling our attention to a particular section of the page. The richest description of the second finger and its functions can be found in the De proprietatibus rerum, the late medieval encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, translated for Renaissance readers by John of Trevisa. I have used Trevisa’s 1535 translation as my first epigraph above, but the text of the 1495 edition is both richer and stranger: ‘‘The second [finger] hyght Index, & Salutaris, also yt is gretter, for by hym is moche shewynges made, and is namyd Likpot, and also ye techer. For wyth hym we grete, & shewe, and teche all thynges.’’12 I first encountered these marginal hands in the library of the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, the first reader I studied intensively and the one who opened my eyes to the sophisticated information-processing techniques used by Renaissance readers.13 In annotating the texts from his massive library, Dee sometimes drew neat hands, with gently arching index fingers leaning toward the text from almost perfectly circular sleeve ends. He used them to single out many items in the library inventory that he had prepared in 1583—including, as it happens, his manuscript copy of ‘‘Bartholomaeus Anglicus de proprietatibus rerum.’’14 There are more elaborate examples in his copy of Johannes Pantheus’s Voarchadumia, an important alchemical text, where on a single page four different pointing hands (with sleeves of various fashions) highlight Dee’s extensions of Pantheus’s cabalistic analysis, pointing to obvious sources for his own all-encompassing symbol, the ‘‘hieroglyphical monad’’ (Figure 9).15 And manicules that were even more eye-catching turned out to be a common habit in the annotations of another important Elizabethan reader: they are one of the most conspicuous features of the marginalia preserved in the books bequeathed by Archbishop Matthew Parker to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge—where they remain, more or less intact, forming the core of the college library that now bears his name. Along with a simple three-leafed flower (or ‘‘trefoil’’), an ownership monogram that became ever more elaborate as his collection and stature grew, and a mysterious symbol that nobody has managed to decipher, the mark that I came to associate most strongly with Parker (as I set off in search of his marginalia a few years ago) turned out to be the pointing hand (Figure 10). Especially when he drew them in the red pencil or crayon that he used for his most authoritative annotations, Parker’s pointing fingers effectively do the work of ‘‘indexing’’ in the expanded sense described by Bartholomaeus—‘‘greeting, showing, and teaching.’’

Figure 9. John Dee’s manicules in Pantheus’s Voarchadumia (1530).  British Library Board. All rights reserved. C120.6.4[2].

Figure 10. Archbishop Matthew Parker’s chunky manicule. By permission of The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

32

Marks and Methods

When I looked for guidance on the history and theory of the manicule, I expected to turn to a classic survey on the subject and was surprised to find that there is nothing in the way of sustained attention to the use of the symbol within manuscript, print, or digital cultures—by bibliographers, literary critics, or historians of the book. They are not even mentioned (much less discussed) in the sources I habitually turn to for help with this sort of thing—Michelle P. Brown’s illustrated glossary, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, and Malcolm B. Parkes’s writings on the history of punctuation (especially his Pause and Effect).16 While they often appear in the fonts advertised by particular printing houses, they do not figure in the major guides to the printer’s art from the last few centuries—not even in chapters that are explicitly concerned with textual symbols.17 There is no description of them in John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors—despite the fact that serious bibliophiles almost certainly own examples of them and that Carter’s glossary itself uses them to illustrate some of its key terms. They adorn the jackets of most of the recent studies of marginalia—including Anthony Grafton’s Commerce with the Classics, William Slights’s Managing Readers, Roger Stoddard’s Marks in Books, Kevin Jackson’s Invisible Forms, and Heather Jackson’s Marginalia—but none of these books describes the symbol in any detail.18 Finally, there are facsimiles of pointing hands on the spine and back cover and scattered throughout the margins of the essays in Sabrina Alcorn Baron’s exhibition catalogue The Reader Revealed; but none of the essays (including my own) gives them more than a passing glance. The only publication I am aware of that attempts anything like an overview of the topic is a short but heavily illustrated survey of printers’ hands by Charles Hasler.19 Hasler’s 1953 essay ‘‘A Show of Hands’’ opens with two entries from the American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, published in 1894: Fist: An expression for an index mark, sometimes called a mutton-fist in England, and made thus: . It is also called a hand in America. It serves to call attention to the words following. Index: The mark , commonly called a fist or hand in a printing office. . . . As a mark of reference an index is the seventh, immediately following the paragraph.20

The only more recent and detailed definition I have found is in G. A. Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book, where the following information is found in the entry for ‘‘digit’’: ‘‘Digit 2. the printer’s symbol . This type ornament has a long history, the printed outline of a hand being used as a paragraph mark by, among other early printers, Huss at Lyons in 1484 in the edition of Paulus Florentinus’s ‘Breviarum totius juris canonici’ he printed with Johannes Schabeler. As with other typographic

History of the Manicule

33

conventions this was taken from scribal practice, carefully drawn hands pointing to a new paragraph being found in early 12th century (Spanish) manuscripts. It is also known as a fist, hand, or index.’’21 Getting a handle on this almost universal symbol poses all kinds of methodological problems, but the most immediate challenge is clearly deciding what to call it. Most people have an intuitive grasp of the symbol’s function when they see it, but there is no single word that will conjure it up for everyone. I would even suggest that it may be the most  pervasive feature in the history of textual culture that does not have a standard name. Not long after the invention of the list server, professionals and amateurs interested in rare books began to address this terminological confusion. On 16 June 1993 a query was posted on ExLibris, the electronic discussion forum for rare book and manuscript specialists. A librarian who had been stumped by a patron sent out a plea for information to his colleagues: ‘‘Does anyone know the term or name for the ‘pointing hand’ one frequently finds drawn in the margins of manuscript and early printed books? . . . I can find no documentation.’’ The replies came in and the terms proliferated until Donald Farren weighed in with what his subject heading described as ‘‘The last word on pilcrow, paragraph, hand, [and] fist?’’22 But that proved to be wishful thinking. The same exact question generated another thread on ExLibris in the spring of 1998—with no reference to the same community’s discussion less than five years earlier23 —and it has since been discussed on at least three other list servers: InfoD (dedicated to information design), SHARP-L (for members of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing), and Typophile (for lovers of typography, one of whom pointed out that the manicule in Garamond’s 1530 font had six digits rather than five).24 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. The last two terms are outright mistakes. ‘‘Maniple’’ may simply be a misapplication of the technical term for the cloth draped over the arm by a priest during communion, but I suspect that the word ‘‘manicule’’ is being fused with ‘‘manciple’’ (since the example occurs in a study of Chaucer, one of whose Canterbury Tales is delivered by a manciple). ‘‘Pilcrow’’ properly designates the symbol used to mark new paragraphs (); many of us still use the symbol in editing texts but, again, few of us could recognize or recall the technical term for it.25 But the rest of the names have all been correct at some point in the history of texts, and many of them can still be found in recent literature.

34

Marks and Methods

The only way a single name could be established is if librarians can agree upon a standardized terminology for marks like this one and then achieve universal dissemination among their staff and readers. Librarians have been hard at work on the first of these tasks—creating official lexicons for bibliographical descriptions26 —but they are unlikely to make much headway in the second. And it may not, in fact, be desirable to lose the history of associations preserved in terms like ‘‘bishop’s fist’’ and ‘‘mutton fist’’—even if we can no longer imagine what a pointing hand has to do with either clergymen or sheep or why a hand with an extended finger would be described as a fist. There are, however, clear benefits in knowing that the word you are using to describe something will be the same word used in the databases you (or your readers) might want to search and that it will be understood by most people without requiring a trip to the dictionary.27 For my part, I have settled on ‘‘manicule’’ because it is the most general, accurate, and neutral description of the symbol: it derives from the Latin maniculum, simply meaning ‘‘a little hand’’ (in any posture). Another thing that ‘‘manicule’’ has going for it is that it applies equally to little hands in all kinds of texts, and to those produced by readers as well as for them, whereas ‘‘fist’’ has its origins in printers’ slang and should properly be restricted to the products of the printing press. The biggest problem with ‘‘manicule’’—aside from its failure to account for the pointing finger—is that it is not (officially) an English word, and will be easily confused with ‘‘manacle’’ and ‘‘manicure.’’ It is apparently the standard term for the symbol in modern romance languages and it is belatedly being imported into English, but it is not yet in the OED or any other dictionary of current usage. Nor does it appear in any but the most technical guides to the description of manuscripts.28 So if readers do not already know that the term refers to a textual pointing hand, they are unlikely to figure it out on their own. Nor are they likely to understand what functions it has served in the textual cultures of the past, based on the guidance provided by current reference books such as Glaister’s. What the rest of this chapter will offer, then, is not so much an argument as a set of pointers toward the longer and more fully illustrated account the subject deserves. First, while Glaister defines the manicule—or ‘‘digit’’—as a ‘‘type ornament,’’ he usefully draws attention to the fact that (like so many other phenomena in early printing) it ‘‘was taken from scribal practice.’’ I have not yet carried out a systematic search for manicules in medieval manuscripts and have to take Glaister at his word that they stretch back at least to twelfth-century Spain. They had certainly migrated to the British Isles by the end of the thirteenth century. Michael Clanchy describes their use in the institutional records of Barnwell Priory in 1288.29 The same sym-

History of the Manicule

35

Figure 11. Bernardo Bembo’s lifelike manicules in his commonplace book.  British Library Board. All rights reserved. MS Additional 41068A.

bol was found at the center of the seal used by that pivotal figure in late medieval literary history Thomas Hoccleve, whose famous portrait of Chaucer in the early fifteenth-century poem De regimine principum, or The Regement of Princes, has the arch-author pointing to the text from a box in the margin.30 And pointing fingers figure prominently in the early fifteenth-century marginal annotations and illustrations of the Douce manuscript of Langland’s Piers Plowman—both as detached manicules and attached to a bewildering array of bodies.31 Pointing hands were increasingly common in the manuscripts produced and annotated by humanist readers in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Italy, and these manicules could be shockingly fanciful and delightfully stylized. The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has a fourteenth-century copy of Cicero’s Paradoxa stoicorum with heavy annotations by an early reader, featuring a singularly fantastic

36

Marks and Methods

manicule alongside the concluding paragraph. The rubbery fingers stretch out to many times their natural length, bracketing and subdividing a crucial passage that is also summarized in the space provided by the pointing hand’s unusually capacious sleeve.32 The most lifelike manicules I have come across to date appear in the late fifteenth-century zibaldone (or commonplace book) compiled by the illustrious Venetian scholar-statesman Bernardo Bembo (father of the more famous Cardinal Pietro Bembo), now in the British Library (Figure 11).33 Bembo uses careful shading and sharp angles to position the hands in dramatic acts of pointing. A recent account of this manuscript describes them as ‘‘maniculae molto caratteristiche.’’34 Stylish manicules were also designed and deployed by the great Italian humanists Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Sozomeno of Pistoia. Their manicules are simpler than Bembo’s, but they are no less ‘‘characteristic’’: in the words of the leading scholar on their handwriting, ‘‘[Petrarch’s] hands are distinctive: they have long index fingers, generally with the nail marked, a cuff is indicated by two parallel lines, and although no thumb is shown there are often five fingers, which makes the hand look very odd,’’ and ‘‘[Boccaccio’s] elegantly drawn pointing hand with a long index finger, and sometimes a buttoned sleeve, is distinctive, and so are the lines which often curl at the end into a flower or spray of leaves that he uses to bracket sections of text.’’35 Readers continued to incorporate manicules in their manuscript marginalia after the invention of printing—throughout the transitional incunable period and well beyond. This practice provides some of our most graphic evidence that after the printing press begins to give readers books that are relatively uniform, accurate, and easy to navigate, readers continue to customize them according to their needs and tastes. Nowhere is this clearer than on pages where printed and manuscript manicules coexist (and not always peacefully): in the Huntington Library’s copy of the 1575 Familist tract Terra pacis, the anonymous reader’s manicules draw attention to a completely different set of passages than those marked by the printer’s fists, and in at least one section of the text they point at each other across the gutter of a single opening.36 Not all manicules took long to draw, and in some cases the style was very simple—no more than two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest outline of a pointing hand. In others, however, they were clearly the product of considerable skill and imagination (Figure 12). These images raise some of the same questions as the grotesque and sometimes scatalogical visuals in manuscript illumination that Michael Camille studied so brilliantly in his Image on the Edge over a decade ago.37 These manicules are excessive and quirky in a way that may be more interested in play than in beauty; but either way, they certainly catch the eye. In fact,

History of the Manicule

37

Figure 12. Elaborate manicules in a commentary on Aristotle (1475). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

while the printers’ manicules tend to be restrained in style and rigidly locked into their horizontal position alongside the texts they are highlighting, manuscript manicules often played with the space of the page. In some cases they are intentionally made to look like they are extending in from a now invisible reader’s body off the edge of the margin (Figure 13)—almost like a comic version of the hand of God coming down from the clouds in Renaissance emblems and in rings with moving dials and pointers.38 Even when they are not being particularly playful, readers exercised both flexibility and ingenuity in deploying their manicules. Fingers point down at the text from above,39 or they stretch across the entire width of the page; they become phallic pointers as they highlight discussions of male genitalia,40 or sprout leaves and flowers, mimicking the foliage that sometimes adorned brackets or illuminated borders;41 they point not just to passages in the text but in the reader’s own annotations.42 Readers are still routinely using simple manicules to draw attention to specific passages in seventeenth-century books and manuscripts, but the practice seems to die out as we move through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century—which is precisely when the printed manicules begin to take on some of the variety and playfulness of their manuscript counterparts in their humanist heyday. During the incuna-

Figure 13. A reader plays with the space of the page in the margins of Boethius (1497). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Figure 14. ‘‘A Show of Hands’’: Charles Hasler’s collection of printed manicules (1953).

ble period, printers began to experiment with printed images of pointing hands. In 1498, when Friedrich Biel of Basel printed a Spanish edition of the Directorium humanae vitae, he illustrated the text with 125 page-width woodcuts and placed little figures of men and women in marginal compartments, where they point out the morals summarized in the margin.43 In Jacob Cromberger’s Spanish edition of Aesop (1521), the morals of each story are summarized in marginal scrolls whose frames are decorated with pointing hands.44 And in Steven Mierdman’s 1548 printing of Melanchthon’s treatise on the sacrament, there is a unique and peculiarly decorated manicule at the beginning of the text.45 Such experiments were relatively rare, however, and throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, printers’ fists remained very limited in size and surprisingly uniform in appearance and function. The picture changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when, as the examples collected in Hasler’s ‘‘A Show of Hands’’ reveal, printers’ designs became markedly more elaborate, and more common in a wider range of publications (Figure 14). Hasler was particularly interested in their use in commercial and industrial settings, and they come to play a crucial role in the visual vocabulary of advertising—as well as in public signage (most obviously in ‘‘fingerposts’’) and in a wide range of official documents (including the ‘‘Return to Sender’’ stamp used by the US Postal Service).

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With the advent of personal computing, and particularly the development of the internet, manicules would be put back in readers’ hands— giving a new (or rather old) literal meaning to the digital age. ‘‘Digital’’ here technically refers to the use of discrete numbers, which were originally reckoned on the fingers; but the developers of operating systems and graphic interfaces have had the hand’s indexical functions in mind from the start. By the late 1970s, Allen Kay and his team had developed Smalltalk, the first fully-fledged ‘‘object-oriented programming’’ language and evidently the first to use a hand-shaped cursor, for the Xerox Star (a major inspiration for Apple’s Lisa project, which would soon evolve into the Macinstosh). And in 1981, Ben Shneiderman coined the phrase ‘‘direct manipulation’’ to describe the developers’ goal of replacing typed line commands with visual objects that could be handled in ways familiar from the real, physical world. Both Kay and Schneiderman were in close contact with the field of child development, and took their inspiration from practical experiments on the ways in which children use to learn basic tools (particularly those that are closest to hand). One of their basic principles was that users should be able to ‘‘point and click.’’ Another was that the operating system should be structured by a central metaphor: while they eventually settled on the ‘‘desktop’’ they began with a virtual hand as an interface between mind, body and tool (with good precedent—it was Aristotle, after all, who described the hand as ‘‘the instrument of instruments’’). Once again, for the basic business of ‘‘greeting, showing, and teaching,’’ the hand turns out to be the perfect graphic user interface (GUI).46

Taking the Text in Hand Glaister’s entry on the pointing hand identifies only one function for manicules, whether they appear in manuscripts or in printed books. He explains that ‘‘early printers’’ used ‘‘the printed outline of a hand . . . as a paragraph mark’’; and he reminds us that scribes can be found using ‘‘carefully drawn hands pointing to a new paragraph’’ as early as the twelfth century. There are three substantial limitations in this account. First, Glaister describes only drawn or printed hands and fails to mention the extended finger that turns an open hand (the symbol for stop or hello) or a fully clenched one (a proper fist) into a pointing one. Second, Glaister describes these hands only as the work of the producers of texts (first scribes and then printers); but as we have seen, some of the most interesting examples and issues relate to their use by readers. This is quite a serious limitation, and it points to the fact that readers are generally given short shrift in reference materials on the history of the book. And third, the marking of a new paragraph turns out to be only one of

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many jobs that images of pointing hands perform in the margins of texts: far from being the manicule’s only function, I have in fact found very few scribes, printers, or readers using them in this way. The primary functions served by the manicule are designed, on the one hand, to clarify the organization of the text and, on the other, to help individual readers to find their way around that structure and put their hands on passages of particular interest (especially when they return to a book after some time). On the most general level, in other words, the function of the manicule is to prevent the text from getting  out of hand. I want to stress that this is more than mere wordplay—or at least that it is playing with associations that have been in place for a very long time. According to Helkiah Crooke’s 1615 anatomy text Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, ‘‘The true office of the Hand is to apprehend or to holde, and his proper action is apprehension (for Hand and Hold are Conjugates as we term them in Schooles).’’47 Again, this anticipates the educational theories of the early 1980s, and particularly Howard Gardner’s influential concept of ‘‘bodily-kinetic intelligence’’ whereby the body learns the hand-eye coordination needed to apprehend directly actions, feelings, and ideas.48 Probably without knowing it, Gardner was drawing on a long tradition of putting instrumental hands at the center of the pedagogical scene. Scribes and printers have occasionally used them (as Glaister suggests) to draw the reader’s attention to new paragraphs; but they were much more likely to be used to mark new sections in key places— especially at the beginning or ending of a book. Both a manicule and a paraph are used to mark the beginning of the preface to the reader in the 1536 edition of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament; and in Taverner’s 1539 Bible, a cluster of symbols—including manicules and hederas (typographical ornaments in the shape of ivy leaves)—mark the ‘‘table for to fynde manye of the chyefe and principall maters conteyned in the Bible,’’ followed by another manicule for the opening ‘‘exhortation to the diligent studye of the holy scripture gathered out of the Bible.’’ And on the last page of Mierdman’s printing of The Apology of John Bale Against a Rank Papist, the manicule is used to index the end of the index and also (in conjunction with a paraph) to point to the errors in need of correction. As the printed book hit its stride and title pages began to come into their own, there was no section more in need of highlighting than the title itself. The pointing hand became increasingly associated with announcing events and advertising products (including books). Hasler provides several images of playbills and other early advertisements where single fists or rows of fists are used to draw the eye to a title—and there is evidence that this now familiar advertising strategy was already

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in use in the first century of printing. They feature in the decorative schemes of the three editions of Langland’s Piers Plowman printed by Richard Grafton for Robert Crowley in 1550.49 A similar technique employing vertical manicules can be found in the title compartment of Mierdman’s 1553 printing of the so-called Great Bible and in an edition of the psalms printed for William Seres in the same year, where manicules point up at the title.50 In religious contexts like these a hand with a finger pointing upward was always open to other—and holier— meanings: it would almost certainly have been recognized as one of the most common gestures in all of Renaissance art, signaling either a divine benediction or a reminder to think of heaven. In addition to being used to mark important titles or subsections, manicules were also used by authors and printers within the text proper to signal the appearance of particular subjects or kinds of material. Thomas James’s Manuduction, or Introduction Unto Divinity (1625) placed special emphasis on his extensive use of manuscript sources, and a note on the title page explained ‘‘This marke  noteth the places that are taken out of the Indices Expurgatorij: And this , a note of the places in the Parchments.’’ Manicules could also be used to highlight passages that were added to a new edition of an old text. When Michael Dalton’s widely used handbook for justices of the peace, The Country Justice, was issued in a fourth edition in 1630, the title page explained, ‘‘Now the fourth time published, and reuised, corrected, and inlarged, the additions being thus marked, .’’ The laws of the realm were perhaps the classic example of texts that kept accumulating new information and became harder to organize as they did so. The 1608 collection of statutes used manicules and asterisks to mark the beginnings and endings of passages concerning the work of those same justices of the peace at whom Dalton’s book was aimed.51 When they appeared in the text itself, manicules were a standard signal that an authorial annotation could be found in the margin or elsewhere in the book. The Great Bible of 1539 was a particularly important (if singularly unsuccessful) experiment in the use of symbols for this purpose. In a letter to Cromwell dated 9 August 1538, the translator and printer outlined their intentions: ‘‘As touchynge the maner and order that we kepe in thesame worke, Pleaseth your goode lordship to be aduertised that this merke  in the text, signifieth, that vpon the same (in the later ende of the booke) there is some notable annotacion, which we haue writen, without any pryuate opinon, onlye after the best interpreters of the hebrues for the more clearnesse of the text.’’52 But annotations were always a bone of contention in translations of the Bible, and in this case they were blocked by the authorities—at what

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must have been a late date, because the manicules inserted to flag them remained in place. A ‘‘prologue’’ in the printed text offered this explanation to its bewildered readers: We haue also (as ye maye se) added many handes both in the mergent of thys volume, and also in the text, vpon the which, we purposed to haue made in the ende of the Byble (in a table by them selues) certen godly annotacions: but for so moch as thet there hath not bene soffycient tyme minystred to the kynges moost honorable councell, for the ouersyght and correccyon of the sayde annotacyons, we wyll therfore omyt them, tyll their more conuenient leysour. Doynge now nomore but beseke the moost gentle reader, that when thou commest at soch a place where a hande doth stande (or any other where, in the Byble) & thou canst not attayne to the meanynge and true knowledge of that sentence, then do not rashly presume to make any pryuate interpretacyon therof: but submyt thy selfe to the iudgement of those that are godly learned in Christ Jesu.53

The resulting pages give off what Evelyn Tribble has described as very mixed messages: ‘‘The page presents a strange appearance; little printer’s hands are scattered throughout the margin and in the text itself, pointing at various places. . . . In essence, a pointing hand warns the reader that the passage at hand is church property; that there are ‘godly’ or officially sanctioned readings of these texts. . . . The pointing hands, then, signify hands off to the readers; interpretation is a privileged enterprise to be conducted by the church. At the same time, of course, the pointing hands undoubtedly served to draw attention to suspect passages.’’54 The manicules in the Great Bible were, in effect, pointless without their matching annotations. But it was common practice to insert a symbol of some sort in the text wherever an annotation appeared, and to key the passage to the annotation by repeating the symbol at the beginning of the annotation in the margin. The French term for this kind of sign is signe de renvoi, and manicules served in that capacity alongside hederas, asterisks, and the other symbols that printers had available in their cases55 —on many pages from Tyndale’s 1537 text The Obedience of a Christian Man they are all used in sequence to organize the glosses and summary headings. Far and away the most common function of the manicule was simply pointing to a passage that someone involved in producing or using the book considered worth noting; this is true of many printed manicules and the vast majority of the manuscript examples I have encountered. In the Folger’s copy of a 1486 commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, the annotator has taken the trouble to spell out what is implicit in most manicules: the pointing hand is functioning as a visually striking version of the most common marginal annotation of all—nota or nota bene.56 Aside from writing out the word ‘‘nota’’ in full or abbreviated form, the

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manicule served alongside the asterisk and the flower as the most visible technique for marking noteworthy texts. As Bembo’s zibaldone has already indicated, manicules came to play an important role in the Renaissance culture of commonplacing. The marking of sententiae (sententious or epigrammatic sayings) and, more generally, the recording and reusing of exemplary passages from authoritative books, became a basic skill in the Elizabethan schoolroom; and it became a correspondingly pervasive feature in the printed books of the period. In a classic essay on the marking of sententiae in Elizabethan literature, G. K. Hunter explained: ‘‘The use of certain typographical devices to pick out sententiae is fairly common in certain classes of books printed in Europe between the approximate dates 1500 and 1660.’’57 The practice is self-explanatory and it is rare to find anyone reflecting explicitly upon its technical or symbolic potential; but one of the most intriguing examples occurs in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. In the story of Zelmane and Philoclea, the image of a lover kissing the hand of her suffering paramour leads to an unlikely cameo by the manicule: ‘‘But Zelmane that saw in him the glasse of her owne miserie, taking the hande of Philoclea, and with burning kisses setting it close to her lips (as if it should stande there like a hande in the margine of a Booke, to note some saying worthy to be marked) began to speake these wordes.’’58 In a 1985 article on Canto 26 of Dante’s Purgatorio, Richard Abrams suggests that when Dante has the pilgrim’s shadow fall on the pentitents before him as an ‘‘indizio,’’ he is invoking the gestural sign of the manicules used in textual margins by Dante’s contemporaries.59 And in her Shakespeare from the Margins, Patricia Parker sees in Othello’s conspicuous use of ‘‘index’’ a potent semantic web weaving together information, accusation, occularity, and surrogacy.60 Hunter’s opening paragraph quotes what may well be the most explicit acknowledgment of the practice in the entire period, Charles Butler’s 1633 textbook on oratory: ‘‘It can henceforth be noted that it is useful to indicate the most worthy Precepts or Sententiae, particularly those upon which something is added at the end of the work, with some sign, such as an Asterisk * or a Hand , standing out in the margin.’’61 In order to illustrate the practice, he points to this very passage with a hand in the margin. That is exactly what the editor Thomas Speght did when he produced a new text of Chaucer’s works at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. In his first edition of 1598, he had complained about not having sufficient time to do all of the editorial work he had planned, and on the errata sheet he bitterly noted: ‘‘Sentences . . . which are many and excellent in this Poet, might have been noted in the margent with some marke, which now must be left to the search of the Reader.’’ His improved text of 1602 set out to remedy this failing: the title page adver-

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tised the new feature that can be found running down the margins on most pages—‘‘Sentences and Prouerbes noted’’ with printed manicules.62 In Clare Kinney’s words, ‘‘The pointing hands on the printed page do not simply draw one’s attention to the ‘sententious’ moments in a given work; they also construct a digest of Chaucer for the reader’s consumption. . . . Speght is, as it were, pre-selecting the Chaucerian entries for a Renaissance commonplace book.’’63 But Renaissance readers of the sort who were compiling commonplace books were rarely satisfied with the selections made by others. The Folger Library’s copy of Speght’s 1602 Chaucer has been annotated by the playwright Ben Jonson. David McPherson, who compiled the catalogue of Jonson’s library, apparently thought that the printed manicules scattered liberally throughout the book were written in by Jonson, who was an avid annotator—particularly of his poetic forebears. Witness the British Library’s copy of George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie, bearing what may be some of Jonson’s most emphatic annotations (Figure 15). On this page from the first chapter of the book, Jonson has used his typical manicule (along with his typical flowers and asterisks) to mark the entire section on Homer’s extraordinary poetic powers. Here Jonson extends the reach of his highlighting symbols without resorting to brackets by trailing both the stem of the flower and the line of the cuff down the margin. Sadly, in the Folger’s Chaucer, Jonson’s annotations are much fainter and sparser, and they appear only in a couple of short (and, as it turns out, apocryphal) texts. However, Jonson did enter some small and distinct manicules next to sententiae that Speght had missed but he considered worthy of marking for his Chaucerian digest.64

Why Did Readers Bother? And Why Don’t They Now? For the rest of this chapter I would like to address the deceptively simple question that has no doubt been at the back of the reader’s mind. Why did so many readers (until relatively recently) take the trouble to stop and draw a whole hand when they simply wanted to mark something as important? And why did so many authors and printers use the increasingly heavy-handed image of the manicule to direct the attention of their readers? In his discussion of the manicule found in Barnwell Priory’s register, Clanchy suggests that ‘‘The use of a sign, like Barnwell’s hand with outstretched index finger, to mark a particular item in a document was a simple way of facilitating the retrieval of information. Such signs are not essentially different from the rubrics, capital letters, running titles, introductory paragraph flourishes, and other aids to the reader which are usual in medieval manuscripts.’’65 But I hope that my

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Figure 15. Ben Jonson’s emphatic manicule in Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589).  British Library Board. All rights reserved. G.11548.

introductory survey has pointed to a number of ways in which the manicule is indeed essentially different from the other signs used for similar purposes. And modern readers need not be familiar with Bartholomaeus Anglicus to grasp the ways in which the manicule, on the one

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hand, is uniquely suited to the business of indexing and, on the other hand, usually involves more than simply helping us to find our way around a text. First, it is crucial to appreciate the extent to which, and the ways in which, the book and the hand were bound together in premodern culture. This worldview was beautifully reconstructed a few years ago in the exhibition ‘‘Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,’’ curated by Claire Richter Sherman.66 Her catalogue assembled an extraordinary array of images in which inscribing and inscribed hands and fingers are used as calculators and calendars, as companions to singing and speaking, as aids to memory and prompts for meditation, as maps of mortal fortune and emblems of divine truth. There are examples of every kind of textual finger, in fact, except the manuscript or printed marginal pointer. Partly because it is so pervasive and partly because it is an anthropomorphic rather than an arbitrary sign (mimicking a human action that we come to understand intuitively), the manicule has been easy for scholars to overlook, not worrying much about what they are called, where and when they have been used, and which needs they have been used to serve. Early modern readers were trained in schools, universities, Inns of Court, and even common households in what might be described as the manipulation of information—in selecting, ordering, and applying resources gleaned from a wide variety of texts. ‘‘Manipulate’’ is one of our many terms derived from manus, the Latin word for ‘‘hand’’ (which is itself the source of the synonymous ‘‘handle’’); and I have used it to describe an activity that was very much a matter, in the English Renaissance, of taking the text in hand and fitting it to the purposes at hand. For instance, when James Sanford began his career as a translator in 1567 with a collection of quotable aphorisms called The Manual of Epictetus, he drew on precisely these terms to describe his handiwork in the dedication to Queen Elizabeth: ‘‘I toke in hand this little Boke, as a triall in the true trade of interpreting [i.e., translating]. Which done, I thought not my trauaile mysspent, but worthie to be published abroad for common vse and commoditie, and meete that of all estates he be vsually read, dayly to be had in hande, and continually to be had in remembraunce.’’ In calling his book a ‘‘manual’’ Sanford was explicitly invoking its etymological association with the hand, an association that would become even more explicit once the Anglo-Saxon word ‘‘handbook’’ entered mainstream English in the nineteenth century. As he explained in the preface ‘‘To the Reader,’’ ‘‘This booke (gentle Reader) is entituled a Manuell, which is deriued of the Latin word Manuale, and in Greeke is called Enchyridion, bicause he may be contained εν χειρι that

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is, in the hand. It is a diminutiue of Manus, as it were a storehouse, & which ought always to be had in hand, as the handle in the sword.67 The mnemonic ‘‘storehouse’’ that the premodern readers were supposed to construct for themselves in and through the texts that came to their hands was often figured as a gathering of choice flowers, sometimes marked visually with the image of a flower or leaf and often labeled rhetorically with the name ‘‘florilegium’’—which Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski have usefully described as ‘‘a collection of sayings, maxims, and stories collected from past works . . . [in which] the flowers of (one’s extensive) reading [were] gathered up in some orderly arrangement for the purpose of quick, secure recollection in connection with making a new composition.’’68 Current work on memory, rhetoric, and reading has paid considerably less attention to the florilegium’s handy counterpart, the manual—perhaps because (unlike the obsolete and exotic ‘‘flower-book’’) the ‘‘hand-book’’ has become one of our most mundane genres, losing much of the richness of its figurative associations with the hand. Both literally and metaphorically, however, reading used to be considered as much the province of the hand as of the other faculties (sight, intellect, and emotion) and activities (cogitation, meditation, and digestion) associated with the taking in of texts. For most literate adults now, reading is a fully internalized process, a matter of invisible and inaudible communication between the eyes and the brain; and, in our most idealized and disembodied accounts, we imagine a cerebral communion with absent authors in the virtual space created by the page. Unless we are wrestling with an unusually large volume or feeling our way through an unusually delicate book; unless we are reading a text in Braille or carefully transcribing passages into a notebook or laptop; and unless we are the kind of reader who follows along with our index fingers or gives them a good lick before turning the page, it is probably safe to say that we’re not even conscious of our hands as we make our way through a text.  But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as in the Middle Ages),69 reading was a self-consciously embodied practice, no less a manual art than writing or printing; and readers picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand. That power may have reached a peak in 1644, when the English physician John Bulwer published a volume containing his two extraordinary treatises on hand gestures, Chirologia and Chironomia. The full title of Bulwer’s work will provide a sense not just of the scope of his project but also—through its relentless play on the Latin manus and the Greek chiro—of the extent to which the association between hands and texts is embedded in the English language (and remains so even after the age of the manuscript gives way to the printed book and the texts being read

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are no longer automatically and directly produced by hand): ‘‘Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand. Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Consisting of the Natural Expressions, digested by Art in the Hand, as the Chiefest Instrument of Eloquence, by Historical Manifestos, Exemplified Out of the Authentic Registers of Common Life, and Civil Conversation.’’70 The bulk of the text is an explication of Bulwer’s diagrams of gestures involving the finger or hand, called ‘‘chirograms,’’ illustrating them with passages from biblical and Classical texts. Among Bulwer’s tables are the ‘‘Alphabet of naturall Gestures of the Fingers’’ and the ‘‘Alphabet of Action, or Table of Rhetoricall Indigitations,’’ and both feature the pointing index finger (labeled ‘‘Indico’’ in the former and ‘‘Indigitat’’ in the latter).71 And among the dedicatory verses included at the front of the volume (sig. a1v) is this particularly telling praise from an obscure writer named William Diconson: . . . At first sight we learne to read; and then By Natures rules to perce and construe Men: So commenting upon their Gesture, finde In them the truest copie of the Minde. The Tongue and Heart th’intention oft divide: The Hand and Meaning ever are ally’de. Bulwer may have been more obsessed with hands than anyone in history: he signed this work ‘‘J. B. Gent. Philochirosophus’’ and he even went so far as to name his adopted daughter Chirothea (‘‘hand of God’’).72 But he was very much the product of his period, and of the literary, rhetorical, pedagogical, and political movements that were giving new force to the old alliance between the hand and meaning.73 First, he was educated during the heyday of the recovery of classical rhetoric, in which persuasive speaking involved both a verbal and a gestural component. Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (written in the first century A.D.) became a foundational text for Renaissance readers, writers, and speakers; and it divided the subject of ‘‘delivery’’ into ‘‘utterance’’ and ‘‘gesture.’’ In book 11 Quintilian describes in detail the appropriate actions involving the head, arm, and hand; and among them is one that takes us very close to the work of the manicule: ‘‘When three fingers are doubled under the thumb, the finger which Cicero says Crassus used so well is extended. This finger is important in reproach and in pointing things out (which is why it has its name [indice in Latin, index in English]). Turned slightly downwards, with the whole hand raised and turned towards the shoulder, it expresses strong statement; pointed down towards the ground, facing downwards, as it were, it insists on a point.

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Sometimes also it indicates number.’’74 These were also the pioneering years in the development of sign language, and Bulwer himself would soon contribute to the search for alphabetical and gestural systems that could be ‘‘spoken’’ with the hands. His Philocophus: The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Friend of 1648 was the first English treatise on the education of the deaf.75 But the most mysterious claim (at least to modern ears) is hinted at in Diconson’s suggestion that while the tongue is vulnerable to distortion and deceit, the gestures of the hand will always be ‘‘the truest copie of the Minde.’’ Bulwer’s work was part of the seventeenthcentury quest for a universal language, one that would not only allow people from different places to communicate with each other but would, more importantly, recover the integrity of language before the Tower of Babel and even before the Fall itself.76 But hands—and particularly fingers—play a crucial role in the process of learning any language; and what Diconson describes as the alliance between hands and meaning neither begins nor ends with Bulwer. The opening section of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) is an extended reading of the crucial passage in St. Augustine’s Confessions in which he describes the process of his own coming into language: ‘‘When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples’’ (I.8). In Wittgenstein’s discussion, ‘‘ostensive  [that is, showing or pointing] teaching’’ is one of the primary vehicles for the ‘‘language games’’ by which we learn to use words.77 And indeed, images of late medieval and Renaissance schoolrooms very often feature conspicuous pointing figures: in the late fifteenth-century grammatical textbook of Johannes Baptista Cantalycius, for instance, the schoolmaster points to a tiny pupil (whose head is dwarfed by the oversized hand of his master), and a small boy sitting on the floor points at his text in imitation.78 The semiotic theory of Charles S. Pierce offers another important perspective on the special status of the pointing hand in the management of meaning.79 For Pierce, any sign will be one of three things: an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign that looks like the thing it signifies (like a computer icon). An index has an actual or physical connection to the thing it signifies, but does not necessarily resemble it (as in the way that smoke indicates the presence of fire or the weathervane points to the direction of the wind). And a symbol is a conventional or taught representation of a thing (for Pierce it is completely arbitrary, but in Saussure’s use of the term it becomes ‘‘motivated’’). The manicule is

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 evidently the only sign that serves all three of these functions: it is at once icon, index, and symbol. So the hand is not just the ‘‘instrument of instruments’’ (as Aristotle called it) but also the sign of signs, when it comes to learning how to communicate and representing our relationship to the tools we use. For Heidegger, indeed, this handiness (and not just our opposable thumbs) plays a key role in defining what makes us human. In Raymond Tallis’s lucid account, ‘‘readiness-to-hand’’ (an English translation of the word Zuhandenheit) is a term Heidegger uses to denote one of the fundamental, indeed primordial, categories of Being in his ontology. According to Heidegger, the world is composed primarily of ‘‘handy being’’; and ‘‘handiness’’ is central to his so-called ‘‘existential analytic.’’ The world . . . far from being the traditional collection of ‘‘objective presences’’ that constitutes the physical universe of science, facing the equally traditional isolate subject, is a nexus of ‘‘the ready-to-hand’’ disclosed in, by and to Da-sein or ‘‘being-there.’’ It is not a rubble-heap of matter, or discrete physical objects, but a network of meanings embodied in the ready-to-hand.80

If we come to know the world (and the objects that constitute it) by using our hands, then the manicule is the handiest of textual tools.81 Finally (to return to the Renaissance), unlike the simple line or even the figural flower and asterisk, the manicule has a gestural function that extends beyond its straightforwardly indexical one. In Francis Bacon’s typically suggestive phrase, gestures are ‘‘transient hieroglyphics’’: they have a live and passing quality that has led Jean-Claude Schmitt to lament the fact that ‘‘Gestures, like words, belong to an ephemeral world. Usually they do not leave any traces for historians.’’82 On one level, this is painfully true: the movements and accents of speakers and actors are notoriously difficult to reconstruct before the age of moving pictures and phonographic recordings. We do not know what Bulwer’s voice sounded like, and we have no visual record of his own ‘‘Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures.’’ On another level, however, Schmitt’s observation is less disabling than it sounds. Both the words and the gestures of the past have been recorded in durable representations, both visual and verbal; and Bulwer’s heavily illustrated texts give us a vivid sense not just of his peculiar way with words but also of the sorts of things he and his contemporaries did with their hands while they spoke (or, sometimes, in place of speaking). And like all gestures, pointing hands tend to be both generic and individual. While they share some basic features and functions, their appearance is extremely distinctive (as the visual examples gathered here will no doubt have suggested). It is possible that, after a signature and a monogram, the manicule was the most personal symbol a reader could develop and deploy. This thought first occurred to me when surveying

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the marginalia produced by Archbishop Parker and his scholarly circle. I found that, given the range of scripts employed by Parker through the course of his career, and the similarity between his hands and those of his secretaries (and, indeed, other readers trained to write at the same time and place), it was usually difficult and often impossible to identify a set of annotations as Parker’s—except when he used manicules. Like Bembo’s manicules, Parker’s are ‘‘molto caratteristiche.’’ Parker’s pointing hands are instantly recognizable: they have the simple lines of a cartoon, but they become as much of a visual signature as the famous sillhouette of Alfred Hitchcock in profile. And perhaps the most compelling proof that manicules work in this way is that what led me to make the connections between the various documents annotated by Richard Topcliffe (described in the Preface) was not the handwriting but the peculiar style of the manicules: they formed a distinctive pattern in my mind, even when encountered in different libraries in different decades. With modern readers, their handwriting is going to be distinctive while their symbols will tend to look pretty much like other people’s symbols. For early modern readers it is the other way around—their symbols, and  in particular their pointing hands, are more likely to be recognizably theirs. And that may, finally, account for the trouble they took in drawing manicules. Aside from the rich set of associations these hands brought with them (of speaking gestures, alphabetical indexes, digital calculations, and so on), they were also recognizable as their marks and must have played an important role in the personal process of making a book meaningful.

Chapter 3

Reading the Matriarchive

[S]he had digested her hours into methods for affairs, repasts, readings of Books of Humanity, Divinity, Devotion chiefly, as may appear both by the Books marked in the Margent, and noted with her own hand, as also by her papers and memorialls. . . . She had marks of severall kinds, some for difficulties, some for Memorialls of choyce places, or pertinent to some peculiar purposes. . . . When she began to read an Author is sometimes to be found in her Calendar, and in those books, where she most delighted, how far she had read, and with what she was most affected, is to be seen by marks in the Margent. —Edward Rainbowe, funeral sermon for Susanna Howard, 29 May 1649 Without the . . . force and authority of this transgenerational memory . . . there would no longer be any question of memory and of archive, of patriarchive or of matriarchive, and one would no longer even understand how an ancestor can speak within us, nor what sense there might be in us to speak to him or her, to speak in such an unheimlich, ‘uncanny’ fashion, to his or her ghost. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1996)

After several decades of innovative and committed feminist scholarship, the voices of women writers from the English Renaissance are more audible than ever before.1 But the women readers of the period remain elusive, and the new methods and materials that have given the history of reading its energy and force have inevitably done far more for our appreciation of men’s engagements with texts than those of women. As Heidi Brayman Hackel has explained, insofar as marginalia have emerged as a prized and even privileged source of evidence in accounts that tend to favor ‘‘goal-oriented, professional, and contestatory readings,’’ the activities and traces of women have remained relatively marginal. After all, among the ‘‘prescribed forms of female readerly silence’’ in a culture that was predominantly patriarchal were the ‘‘cultural and material practices that discouraged women from annotating their

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books.’’ These and a number of more general constraints on women’s intellectual and economic autonomy served to make women like Susanna Howard—and tributes like Rainbowe’s—quite rare.2 The question of how best to recover women readers now sits alongside the relative invisibility of nonelite readers and the relationship between single cases and larger patterns as one of the thorniest problems facing early modernists venturing into the ‘‘tropical rain forest’’ that is the history of reading.3 Brayman Hackel has joined Mary Ellen Lamb, Margaret Ezell, Kathryn DeZur, Ramona Wray, Jane Donawerth and Sasha Roberts (among many others) in calling for new approaches that will help us to assess the place of books in the lives of Renaissance women—and the contributions of women to the life of the Renaissance book. By turning to manuscript testimony in contemporary letters, diaries, and commonplace books, to fictional representations of consumption, to commentaries on and translations of patriarchal texts, and to evidence for ownership and exchange on both small and large scales (including signatures, bookplates, library inventories, and visual representations of exemplary figures), they have given us new ways of pursuing, and reading, the female readers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.4 My own modest contribution to this project will focus on what I will call (following Derrida’s suggestive neologism) the ‘‘matriarchive’’ and on the role played by women in organizing goods, information, and history in the early modern household. Recent developments in the history of reading and in the history of women’s writing have gone hand in hand with a growing critical concern about the documentary collections and systems of organization that not only structure the lives of people in the past but shape the conditions of our access to them in the present. In his meditation on memory, myth, and psychoanalysis, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida called for ‘‘a project of general archiviology, a word that does not exist but could designate a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive.’’5 While he never explains what such a project might be or do, he does offer a suggestive diagnosis of our problematic relationship to archives. The English title Archive Fever perfectly captures the double-edged condition identified by the French phrase mal d’archive. We are ‘‘en mal d’archive, [or] in need of archives’’—that is, we both desire them and lack them. We are therefore possessed by a mal d’archive, an archival passion or malady: ‘‘It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness.’’6 Derrida reminds us that this condition is built into our very language and, as was his habit throughout his work, he begins his account with an

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extended lesson in etymology. The word ‘‘archive’’ derives, on the one hand, from the Greek arkhe (the primary, the beginning—‘‘the most archaic place of absolute commencement’’) and, on the other, from the Greek arkheion (meaning the residence of the ‘‘archons’’—the guardians, magistrates, or custodians of the law).7 Archives are therefore points of origin that both preserve and order—and here he introduces the important site of the house (oikos) ‘‘as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.’’ He offers Freud’s house, which is now a museum of psychoanalysis, as the perfect example of an archive that ‘‘takes in all these powers of economy.’’8 If it is ‘‘thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place,’’9 it should be clear that women play a crucial but problematic role, at once included in and excluded from the ‘‘eco-nomic’’ work of the archive. Derrida’s ‘‘archons’’ are ‘‘patriarchs’’; and most of those who laid down the laws and organized the emergent archives of the early modern state were indeed male. But in reading what might be called the matriarchive we need to consider, on one hand, the role that women may have played in the archival practices of the early modern period, and, on the other, the place they have traditionally occupied in the archives we now use to access their lives and works. In a discussion of the Oxford English Dictionary that is part of a wide-ranging account of ‘‘The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,’’ David Greetham explains that archives have too often been seen as neutral rather than gendered: ‘‘while it has become a critical commonplace that pre-feminist literary analysis, even when conducted by female critics, was usually conducted as if from a male viewpoint, the historical critique of linguistic, documentary, or cultural archives has resisted the charge of being coloured by prejudice dependent on gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, or any of the other ‘personal’ identifiers that might sully the objectivity of the ‘harmless drudges’ who produce dictionaries or catalogues.’’10 But the catalogues that M. R. James prepared for the manuscripts in Cambridge colleges, to take one striking example, reveal an interrelated set of biases of period, genre, and gender. In the volume for Pembroke College, James followed his usual practice of skimming over manuscript material from after the invention of printing (cutting back from the one or two pages he devotes to medieval volumes to one or two perfunctory lines for those of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), explaining that ‘‘There is usually a residue—one is tempted to call it a sediment—of paper books containing legal, theological, and historical collections, epic poems, medical receipts and so forth, which have been bequeathed by their fond authors to an undisturbed repose on the shelves of a college library. A certain pathos attaches to these: a faint wish may be felt by the investigator to give them the publicity which their parents desired

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for them; but I believe that it is the truest kindness to the memory of those parents to leave them where they are.’’11 It is hard to miss the patronizing and indeed patriarchal tone of James’s justification for passing over precisely the kinds of manuscripts produced by early modern women that are now being painstakingly catalogued, edited, and published.12 There are both obvious and subtle exclusions of women in the ways our own archives are organized, and this is an area where women have clearly suffered from the maleness of the mal d’archive. The very fact that catalogues and indexes tend to be organized by surname makes the textual traces of women more obscure or diffuse than those of men. Books purchased by or given to women tended to disappear behind the surname they adopted when they married and to be subsumed into their husband’s estate. And when a woman remarries and/or inherits land and titles of her own, our reference materials will struggle to identify her. Take the unusually complicated case of the woman now usually referred to as Lady Anne Clifford (whose books and readings we will return to below). The first entry for her in the Huntington Library’s old card catalogue reads ‘‘Pembroke, Anne (Clifford) Herbert, Countess of; see also Clifford, Anne; Sackville, Anne (Clifford); Dorset, Anne (Clifford) Sackville, Countess of; and Herbert, Anne (Clifford).’’ And this list deprives Clifford of the two titles she fought hardest to claim, Baroness of Skipton and Baroness of Westmorland.13 A related problem is that traditional methods of classification are not well suited to the kinds of texts I will be discussing here: volumes tend to be catalogued as either manuscripts or printed books and books with manuscript marginalia will often fall between the cracks. We also stumble over the same general problems that have confronted decades of feminist historiography on early modern women. In examining the documents that might constitute a matriarchive it is difficult to determine whether or not they were written by women; and when it comes to the ownership and annotation of books, it is often impossible to isolate the hands of women. Heidi Brayman Hackel has recently surveyed the difficulties of reconstructing female book ownership and identifying women’s books within general household inventories: ‘‘Common law restricted a married woman from making a will and allowed a widower to claim all of his late wife’s property. . . . Further, a woman did not have to die in order for her husband to subsume her property, and women’s libraries seem often to have been incorporated into their husbands’ holdings during their lifetimes.’’ But she cites one fascinating example in which a ‘‘seventeenth-century woman, clearly aware of the danger of her book being mistaken for someone else’s property, inscribed her copy of Culpepper’s Directory for Midwives with her name three times on different pages of the book, one

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with the further clarification, ‘Elizabeth Hunt her Booke not his.’’’14 And Brayman Hackel points to the growing number of women for whom we have multiple ownership inscriptions (the tally for Frances Wolfreston’s books currently stands at ninety-six), and other indications of at least small libraries: there is a reference to the Duchess of Suffolk’s ‘‘chestful of books’’ in 1580 and to the three ‘‘truncks of bookes’’ Lady Anne Southwell moved to her new household in 1631.

What Does a Matriarchive Look Like? In attending to the matriarchive, I would suggest, we might move beyond the tendency to see women primarily in oppositional roles and take a closer look at their exemplary work within the spaces and with the tools prescribed to them. In meeting Renaissance women on their own ground, the term ‘‘matriarchive’’ also has the potential to extend the recent work of Natasha Korda, Wendy Wall, and others on women’s productive roles in the early modern household.15 But what might an early modern matriarchive look like? Two types of text suggest themselves immediately: printed books intended to celebrate the eminent women of the past and instruct the women of the present, and manuscripts compiled by women to archive a wide range of information. Among the former, two volumes stand out: Thomas Bentley’s Monument of Matrons (1582), and Thomas Heywood’s Gynaikeion; or, Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women (1624).16 In his preface ‘‘To the Reader,’’ Bentley described his enormous collection of prayers and writings by women in the following (matriarchal and archival) terms: ‘‘So haue you good reader, by the goodnesse of God . . . here now at the length in this Monument or collection conteined . . . not onelie a burning Lampe for virgins, but also a christall Mirrour for Matrones: as also a delectable Diall to direct you to true deuotion, with a perfect President or register of holie praier for all women generally to haue recourse vnto, as to their homelie or domesticall librarie’’ (B1v). Bentley went on to describe this single-volume domestic library as ‘‘plentifullie stored and replenished both of the best approoued president of christian praiers and diuine meditations . . . and also of the chosen sentences and perfect precepts of holie scripture concerning the christian duties of all degrees and estates of women in their seuerall callings, together with the pleasant histories and memorable acts, liues, and death of all maner of women good and bad, by name or without name’’ (B2v). And he concluded his preliminaries with ‘‘A breefe catalog of the memorable names of sundrie right famous Queenes, godlie Ladies, and vertuous women of all ages, which in their kind and countries were

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notablie learned’’ (B7r)—a comprehensive alphabetical list of queens, prophets, saints, martyrs, goddesses, and other legendary women. Heywood’s equally exhaustive survey of the histories of eminent women was organized according to the nine Muses, who offered a conventional female map for his archive of knowledge and action. The muses also point to the specifically female character of memory itself: they are the daughters of Memory, born from the union of Mnemosyne and Jupiter, and at the heart of Heywood’s text is ‘‘Polyhimnia,’’ traditionally the Muse of lyric poetry but described by Heywood as ‘‘Mistresse and Ladie of Memorie’’ (316). According to Nonna Crook and Neil Rhodes’s recent article on Heywood’s text, this whole book is intended to compensate for the fact that women were rarely trained in the art of memory (and therefore often written out of memory itself ) by providing both female and male readers with what they call a ‘‘female computer.’’17 The Perdita Project has been drawing our attention to the survival—in significant numbers—of manuscript compilations by early modern women. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, for instance, there is the detailed household account book kept by Mary Petway between 1628 and 1631 on behalf of ‘‘my master Sir William Pope’’: Petway was clearly a woman responsible for managing the household archive, and in an enormous oblong ledger she kept track of receipts for rents, expenses for the house and farm, and so on.18 FSL MS V.a.347 contains Dorothy Philips’s notes on sermons from 1616–17; recipes for stews and puddings; a list of marriages, births, and deaths in the Hanmer family from 1621 to 1694; and a set of theological notes in Latin. FSL MS V.a.468 is described as Elizabeth Fowler’s cookery book from 1684, but it also contains notes on sermons, a hymn, a poem, and various medical recipes. FSL MS X.d.177 is the so-called commonplace book of Elizabeth Clarke, but hers is only one of several names in this volume—a common feature of Renaissance women’s manuscripts, and one that is not well served by the single-author bias in modern catalogues and databases. It combines poetry, religious notes, and records of financial transactions. Aside from the miscellanous and often communal nature of these manuscripts, it should already be clear that many of the notes derive from reading. The commonplace book associated in the Folger catalogue with Anne Denton is a collection in the fullest and most strictly etymological sense of the term (remembering that it derives in part from col-legere, implying not just a bringing together but a reading together). On the first page it is inscribed in Denton’s beautiful italic, ‘‘Sum Annae Denton & amicorum’’—a formula that is familiar from the title pages and bindings of the books of male humanists but not generally associated with circles of female friends.19 It includes notes about births, deaths, and marriages,

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medical and culinary recipes (some of which cite volume and page numbers from unidentified sources), some later notes on Mary, Queen of Scots, and—on the last page of the book—a memorandum in Denton’s hand to check the standard legal sources on the payment of rents. So, we have printed books about women (on the one hand) and manuscript compilations by them (on the other). But Renaissance readers would not have felt as sharply the line that divides the two for us, and the traces of the period’s reading practices call into question the traditional dichotomy between the passive reading of printed books and the active writing of manuscript miscellanies. There is some evidence (even if the surviving traces are now few and far between) that women used the printed books in their households not simply for guides to proper devotion or conduct but to store and circulate individual and collective records—in other words, in just the same way that they used manuscript compilations. What we refer to as the ‘‘marginalia’’ of Renaissance readers, again, often had little or nothing to do with the text they surrounded. Given the price of paper and the fact that a printed book could contain a whole notebook’s worth of blank paper (both around individual pages of print and bound in as blank leaves before or after the text), it is not surprising that readers used these blank but bounded spaces not only to register their reactions to the book but to turn the book itself into an archive—of culinary, spiritual, familial, financial, intellectual, medical, and even meteorological information. To take a simple example from the Huntington Library, there is a copy of Clement Cotton’s Christians Concordance (1622) with the beginning of a woman’s signature on the front flyleaf (she only got as far as ‘‘Elizab’’). On the back flyleaf she inscribed the volume’s only marginal note, a carefully written recipe headed ‘‘to ease the goute.’’20 A more interesting case is the Huntington’s copy of John Ball’s Short Treatise: Containing all the Principal Grounds of Christian Religion (1631).21 This was a small octavo with metal clasps, clearly made to be carried around with the owner. The first sign of the owner’s identity is found on the fore edge, where we can still see the faint initials ‘‘MC.’’ The full name of MC is revealed in a manuscript note on the front pastedown: ‘‘Mary Crewe her Book my husband gaue it me sept. 7. 75.’’ On this page there is also a cryptic note on the nature of ‘‘F’’ (short for ‘‘faith’’), and Mary’s notes on this and other topics are scattered on the thirty-two blank leaves bound in at the front and back of the printed text (Figure 16). One of the most familiar (and pervasive) categories of manuscript inscription in printed books associated with women is family records. We tend to think of them as being inscribed in family Bibles, but—at least in the early modern period—they can more often be found in other reli-

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Figure 16. Mary Crewe’s notes on faith in John Ball’s Short Treatise (1631, RB15856). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

gious texts such as the Book of Common Prayer and collections of sermons and homilies. The most logical place for such notes, however, would be in books devoted to childbirth, and at the Huntington there is a copy of James Guillemeau’s Child-Birth; or, The Happy Delivery of Women (1612) with notes from the 1620s providing details of the births of William and Samuel Holles in Berwick.22 These are probably not written by a woman (raising the question of whether or not men could create matriarchives), and there is a later (and more possibly female) note on the fly leaf facing the title page identifying this book as ‘‘A treatis of ye secrets of woman.’’ Such books—particularly those with practical instructions for midwives—seem to be very commonly annotated in the period. At the Huntington there is a copy of Eucharius Roesslin’s The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Named the Woman’s Book (1565),23 with learned notes at the

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beginning and end in a contemporary secretary hand by an anonymous reader—one who may or may not have been a woman but who was intimately involved in the work of the midwife. Indeed, the epistle to the reader identifies the intended audience for this book as ‘‘mydwyues and all other matrones’’ (B1r), and the prologue explains that the work is called ‘‘The womans booke’’ because ‘‘well neare all therein entreated of, dooth concerne and touche onely women’’ (B1v). Around the bottom and side of the last page of the text there is a remedy for the ‘‘suffocacyon of the mother’’ (which involves the smelling of asafetida, castor, and galbanum steeped in vinegar), and the blank verso of this page contains a long set of notes on ‘‘the flux of blood in the matrix.’’ The text ends with a set of fetal diagrams headed ‘‘The Birth Figures,’’ and a note at the bottom of the first one reads ‘‘These ar ye campes or feeldes of mankynde to be engendred yr in’’ (T7r).24 In the cases I have described there is a strong sense in which the book is serving as an official place for individual readers or groups of readers to take stock—of their families, their beliefs, their belongings, and their textual resources. Perhaps the most potent example I have come across is the Huntington’s copy of William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties (1634).25 A reader named Dorothy Clegge signed the volume in 1709 on the title page, and also inscribed a set of cross-references to Gouge’s other works. On the facing flyleaf there is a table of Clegge’s family history (containing the significant information that our Dorothy was in fact the second Dorothy born to the Clegges, the first having died while still a baby); and on the verso there is a note headed ‘‘Dorothys Bookes are these’’: ‘‘Dr. Gouges Dom: Dutys & on L[ord]s prayer/ the whole Armer of God & 3 small treatisses in one quarto & Allso Christ All in All: in 4to by Ra[lph] Robinson, & his perfect Pattern 8o’’ (Figure 17). Like Derrida’s example of Freud’s house, here is a single object that takes in the various powers of archival economy. Another angle of approach would be to look among early modern readers not for matriarchives but for matriarchivists. Lady Margaret Hoby (1570/1–1633) left behind an extensive correspondence and a detailed diary for the period 1599–1605: in the words of Mary Ellen Lamb, they capture ‘‘a life saturated by print,’’26 one both informed by and structured around her textual interactions. She read privately but also in the company of the members of her household and carried on a series of scholarly conversations with a young chaplain. The signs of her active reading can be found in surviving copies of books from her library, in a set of notebooks, and in many of the entries in her diary. To quote those from the month of August 1599 alone, 10 August: ‘‘went to praier and to writ some notes in my testament’’ 12 August: ‘‘I wrett some notes into my bible tell :3:’’

Figure 17. Dorothy Clegge’s notes at the front of William Gouge’s Of Domestical Duties (1634, RB214745). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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13 August: ‘‘then I wrett out the sarmon into my book preached the day before’’ 14 August: ‘‘In the morning I praied priuatly and wrett notes in [my testament] tell :7: a clocke: then I took order for diuers thinges touchinge the house’’ 22 August: ‘‘I wrett out notes in my testament’’ 26 August: ‘‘wret out notes in my bible’’ 27 August: ‘‘wrett out a sermon that I was behind with’’ 29 August: ‘‘. . . after dinner, I continewed my ordenarie Course of working, reading, and dispossinge of busenes in the House’’ 30 August: ‘‘wrett of my Common place book’’27 Another female life saturated by print and preserved in thorough manuscript records is that of Lady Grace Mildmay (1552–1620), who left behind a massive ‘‘journal’’ combining medical notes, spiritual meditations, and an autobiographical reckoning—all presented as a legacy to her children and grandchildren. She began with a long series of ‘‘observations’’ on ‘‘the best course to set our selues in from the beginning vnto the end of our lyues,’’ and the very first item was ‘‘the Scriptures to read with all diligence . . . continually euery daye.’’ She went on to recommend particular texts for histories and chronicles, antiquities, law, philosophy, and medicine. And she ended her ‘‘Exhortations’’ (Figure 18) by directing her readers to other sections of her manuscript, using a complex system of signes de renvoir (including trefoils, paraphs, and manicules): ‘‘And lastly I desyre you in the name of the Lorde, to pervse often & diligently these places of scripture quoted in the Margin which is the lyfe of these myne exhortations to the[e] and your excercise therein maye make the more deepe impression in your mynde. . . . Your Louing Grandmother, Grace Mildmay.’’28 But the leading candidate must surely be Lady Anne Clifford (1590– 1676).29 She certainly stands out for the extent to which she fought—in long and public legal disputes over her father’s will—to claim her rights to her family’s lands and titles. And she also compiled an autobiographical record that must be unique in its detail and its generic range: it encompassed the three volumes of the so-called ‘‘Great Books of Record,’’ various other summaries of historical documents relating to her family (some of which were gathered from her reading and some from the records she had inherited), a narrative of her life entitled ‘‘The Life of Me,’’ and a set of now-famous diaries, which are full of references to reading—and being read to.30 Clifford inherited her mother’s library and built up, according to a contemporary observer, ‘‘a library stored with very choice books, which

Figure 18. The autobiographical and spiritual notes of Lady Grace Mildmay (d. 1620), with her textual exhortations to her grandchildren. By permission of the Northampton Central Library.

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she read over, not cursorily, but with judgement and observation.’’31 Heidi Brayman Hackel has examined her reading practices in some detail, reconstructing her library—and teasing out her own attitudes toward it—by working closely with the dramatic triptych portrait known as The Great Picture. She has also described the annotations entered by Clifford and her secretary in a copy of John Barclay’s prose romance, Argenis (1625), now at the Huntington Library.32 And she quotes at length from Edward Rainbowe’s funeral sermon for Clifford, where he again singles out her reading practices for particular praise.33 Marked books seem to have been a trope in the funeral tributes of the period. In his ‘‘funerall poeme upon the death of the late noble Earl of Devonshire’’ (1606), Samuel Daniel praised the earl for heeding the advice of Geoffrey Whitney, Gabriel Harvey, and John Brinsley: . . . thou hadst not bookes as many have For ostentation, but for use. . . . Witnesse so many volumes whereto thou Hast set thy notes under thy learned hand, And markt them with that print as will shew how The point of thy conceiving thoughts did stand.34 As in his earlier sermon on Susanna Howard, Countess of Suffolk,35 Rainbowe paints a surprisingly detailed portrait of an exemplary woman who was an exemplary digester and disposer of information. But in the case of Clifford, the emphasis is even stronger on the place of that program in the ordered business of household management. Rainbowe’s choice of biblical text for his sermon is telling: ‘‘Prov[erbs] 14.1: Every wise Woman buildeth her House’’ (4). While he acknowledges that the man is the ‘‘primum mobile [prime mover]’’ in life and ‘‘directs the general motion of all’’ (28), he reminds us that King Solomon himself ‘‘set out the praise of a wise Woman, or rather of Wisdom, under the Scheme and Figure of a Woman. . . . where even the chief Government of the Family is in the woman, singly, yet her part will be most within the House. . . . The House is the womans Province, her Sphear wherein she is to Act, while she is abroad she is out of her Territories; she is as a Ruler out of his Jurisdiction’’ (12–13). Clifford distinguished herself, according to Rainbowe, by combining effective household management with effective textual management: ‘‘she would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her Memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors, and with these her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Papers, and her Maids to pin them

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up. . . . So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a Library’’ (40).36 But for our purposes, her most interesting matriarchival evidence must be the copy of The Mirror for Magistrates (printed in London in 1609–10) that Stephen Orgel recently purchased and analyzed.37 It was owned by Clifford toward the end of her life and annotated—in her own hand and that of her secretary—with several kinds of information. She indicates where and when she read or had read to her different sections of the book: aside from revealing that this book traveled with her to her various households, her notes provide evidence that Clifford did not read the book in a linear sequence. She also registers her moral and political sympathies by writing notes such as ‘‘A good vearse’’ or ‘‘Marke this’’ or, in a few cases, summarizing the lesson that could be drawn from a particular passage. This book had a more than academic interest to Clifford, and its lessons hit close to home: the Thomas Sackville who coauthored The Mirror for Magistrates was her first husband’s grandfather (and, in fact, the man who first proposed the marriage between his grandson and Lady Anne), and her marginalia signal the presence of people from both her family and her household throughout the text. Next to a passage about ‘‘That famous horse-man, launce-fam’d Clifford hight,/ The great Heroe noble Cumberland’’ she writes ‘‘this was my ffather George erle of Cumberland,’’ and in another place identifies ‘‘Russell that martiall Knight’’ as ‘‘Sr Wm Russell he that was my Mothers younger Brother’’; and next to a mention of ‘‘noble Bingham’’ she comments ‘‘this Sr Richard Bingham had a neece that served mee a good while as my chief gentlewoman.’’ This was not simply a book, then, but (in Orgel’s words) ‘‘in a real sense a family heirloom.’’38

Recovering the Lost Property of the Woman Reader As we move away from extraordinary figures like Clifford, we need to cast the net very widely to catch sight of women as owners and readers of books: Brayman Hackel cites the fascinating case of Lady Mohun, whose considerable library we know about only because she took out a newspaper advertisement in 1679 offering a reward for the return of ten books that had been stolen from her closet.39 In Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589, Jennifer Summit has traced the figure of the ‘‘lost’’ woman writer back to the medieval and Renaissance periods, suggesting that we need both to recover those writings that have not been lost and also to recognize the ways in which the trope plays a central role in defining the emerging canon of English literature (usually through absence and opposition). This is an important story to set alongside Derrida’s Freudian archive (which suffers from a death-drive

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that makes it self-effacing and ultimately silent); and Summit’s account could be usefully extended to women’s practices and positions as readers (well into the seventeenth century). I have tried to make at least an initial case for following early modern women across the reading/writing divide and the manuscript/print divide. Whether or not the term ‘‘matriarchive’’ catches on, the materials and methods it points to may help us bring into sharper focus the presences and the absences of Renaissance women in the archives (both early modern and modern). In doing so, it may help us to recover some of their lost property and to liberate at least some of them from their long period of textual house arrest.40

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Part II

Reading and Religion

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Chapter 4

‘‘The Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’: Marking the Bible

These Bibles have been used. —S. L. Greenslade, The Cambridge History of the Bible

As we approach the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James (or Authorized) Version, historians of the printing revolution and the Protestant Reformation have put us in an ideal position to appreciate the process by which the Bible became a layperson’s book.1 To gain a fuller understanding of this crucial development in Western culture, however, we need to push beyond the limits imposed by traditional bibliographical and ecclesiastical history and examine ‘‘the Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’ (as John Dryden put it in a decidedly ambivalent formulation to which I shall return); to take a more intimate look, that is, not just at the Bible’s production by translators, editors, and printers, and its circulation by booksellers and preachers, but also at its reception and use by readers. For obvious reasons, the need to attend to all of the agents and activities in Robert Darnton’s socalled communications circuit2 is especially pressing with a text such as the Geneva Bible, which went through more than 140 editions between the 1560s and the 1640s and sold more than half a million copies in the sixteenth century alone—making it, in all likelihood, the most widely distributed book in the English Renaissance,3 and the one that played the most crucial role in changing the patterns of lay book ownership in the age of print. By 1600, there had been a dramatic increase in the number of people in England who owned a book compared with only forty years previously, and the mass production of the Geneva Bible had an immediate impact: the probate records that Peter Clark has examined in Kent show an increase in book ownership between the 1560s and the 1600s from 8.3 to 33.3 percent in Canterbury and from 15 to 40.6 percent in Faversham.4

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Indeed, the bible was closely connected to the drive toward literacy: as early primers show, literacy did not mean just reading; it meant reading the Bible. The New-England Primer is a striking example: along with a cut of the Marian martyr John Rogers (one of the translators of the vernacular Bible) it featured a rhyming alphabet. For B we find ‘‘Thy life to men/ This Book attend’’ (sometimes illustrated with a cut of the ‘‘Holy Bible’’), and for H, ‘‘Thy Book and Heart/ Must never part.’’ And most primers also included a catechism with the alphabet: to learn A, one learned ‘‘Adam,’’ and thus the entry into the alphabet was not just associated with the first name-giver but mapped onto the genesis of mankind and the beginning of the Bible.5 And this ought, at least, to give us pause for thought when we find the penmanship exercises that cover so many leaves of early modern Bibles dismissively described as ‘‘childish scribbles’’ rather than as a sign of someone joining the community of godly readers. For a host of less obvious reasons, scholars have been surprisingly slow to take a closer look at what the growing number of readers did with the growing number of religious texts that were made available to them.6 Despite the fact that Renaissance households were far more likely to contain a Bible than any other volume, religious books have attracted less attention from historians of reading than used books from the fields of literature, rhetoric, politics, law, mathematics, and medicine. Early printed Bibles are now historical relics, and they are often encountered—literally and figuratively—behind glass: if this is notoriously true of the Gutenberg Bible, the string of vernacular translations leading up to the King James (or Authorized) Version of 1611 also share something of its special status. It is easy to lose sight of the spaces and hands through which these volumes have passed, from the moment of their inception to the arrival in their current resting places. But the transcendence of their texts notwithstanding, Bibles—like all books and, in some ways, more than other books—are material objects, created, circulated, and used by actual people, in specific settings, for particular purposes. And while religious texts shaped almost every aspect of the lives of Renaissance readers (structuring their daily routines, guiding their beliefs and behaviors, and even inflecting their language), readers for their part did not hesitate to leave their own marks on religious texts— including the Holy Word itself. When I first entered the stacks at the Huntington Library and stood before the long rows of glass cases housing its vast STC collection, I quickly decided to make my work more manageable by skipping the seemingly endless section of Bibles. Influenced by my own exposure to religious communities in which holy books were treated as the most precious of objects, I assumed that in front of this sacred textual space even

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the most active readers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have set down their pens and pressed their palms together in a posture of quiet (if not altogether passive) veneration. When I later returned to the Bibles to complete my survey, I learned how wrong I had been. The overall frequency of marginalia in Bibles and prayer books at the Huntington Library turns out to be almost identical to that of the whole collection: just over one book in five contains significant inscriptions by early readers.7 When Renaissance readers were told to mark some feature of the biblical text, as they often were in printed and verbal instructions, this marking was as much a matter of active exercise as it was with the most practical of books. This was most visible, perhaps, in the set of guidelines headed ‘‘How to take profite by reading of the holy Scriptures,’’ which was issued in many editions of the Geneva Bible: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Earnestly and vsually pray unto god. . . . Diligently keepe such order of reading the scriptures. . . . Vnderstand to what end and purpose the Scriptures serue. . . . Remember that Scriptures containe matter concerning: Religion[,] Common wealthes[,] Families and thinges that belong to houshold[,] The priuate life and doings of euery man [,] The common life of all men. . . . 5. Refuse all sense of Scripture contrary to the: Articles of Christian fayth [and] Gods commandements. 6. Marke and consider the: Coherence of the text[,] Course of times and ages[,] Maner of speach proper to the Scriptures [,] Agreement that one place of Scripture hath with an other, whereby that which seemeth darke in one is made easie in an other. 7. Take opportunitie to: Reade interpreters[,] Conferre with such as can open the Scriptures [,] Heare preaching.8

One striking indication that this text was itself marked—that is, both heeded and modified—is the fact that one reader found it useful enough to copy a version of it into the front of his Bishops’ Bible, but chose to compress the seven points into four.9 And as several points in the list suggest, readers were instructed not simply to mark their Bibles but also to search them: the slogan ‘‘Search the Scriptures’’ from John 5:39 could be found in many notes for and by readers, and they deployed a wide range of tools for making the text their own and taking it into their hearts, minds, and lives.

Reading, Marking, and Bearing Away The methods by which readers marked their Bibles did not always leave traces, of course; and they did not necessarily involve setting one’s own words alongside those of God and his earthly ministers. There were

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devices within the printed text, such as prefatory epistles and scholarly commentaries, which were designed to assist readers and influence their interpretations. Especially important were the editors’ and translators’ marginalia that increasingly accompanied the printed text in vernacular versions. In 1538, Miles Coverdale wrote to Thomas Cromwell seeking permission to include annotations in the Great Bible: ‘‘Pitie it were,’’ he explained, ‘‘that the darck places of the text . . . shulde so passe undeclared.’’ Tyndale, who made pioneering use of marginalia in his 1534 New Testament, informed his readers that ‘‘I have in many places set lyght in the margent to understonde the text by.’’ And the 1560 Geneva Bible, the most heavily annotated of the English Bibles, ‘‘endeavored . . . to explicat[e] all suche [dark] places,’’ to profit not only people ‘‘already advanced in the knollage of the Scriptures, but also the simple and unlearned.’’10 But, as Evelyn Tribble and William Slights have shown, this practice of casting light on the dark places of the text was double-edged, and the authorities were never entirely comfortable with it.11 In practice these annotations served one of two functions, each of which was potentially dangerous. Many printed marginalia offered interpretations of obscure passages, and—instead of leaving these mysteries to the mediation of a carefully directed priesthood—these notes served to advance one doctrinal position over others and even extended some interpretive license to the reader. The other form of annotation, linguistic glosses on source words or textual variants, could claim to be more neutral; but these too created a contested space on the edge of the text and revealed to readers a multiplicity or indeterminacy in the transmission of God’s Word. There was a general concern, among the ecclesiastical authorities, that the Geneva Bible had gone too far, and the translations that followed were considerably more restrained in their marginal illumination. Those responsible for the 1568 Bishops’ Bible (led by Archbishop Matthew Parker) were told ‘‘to make no bitter notes upon any text or yet set down any determination in places of controversy.’’12 And the preface to the King James Bible acknowledged that ‘‘Some peradventure would have no varietie of sences to be set in the margine, lest the authoritie of the Scriptures . . . by that shew of uncertaintie, should somewhat be shaken.’’13 The first wave of humanist pedagogues and printers had forcefully advocated a return ‘‘to the sources’’ (ad fontes) with classical and biblical texts alike. The French scholar Lefe`vre d’Etaples, for instance, called for a stripping away of the ‘‘glosses and wild imaginings’’ that had surrounded and all but swallowed the earlier versions of the Bible (including the Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra, the Additiones of Paul of Burgos, and so on). Around 1510, therefore, ‘‘editions of the Bible began to set aside the commentary in order to publish a text purified of its appendages,

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making room, visually as well as verbally, for the Word of God to stand alone.’’14 But as the Bible was disseminated among a new class of readers whose distance from the fontes could not be bridged without assistance, Christian humanists and scholarly reformers quickly supplied the guidance needed in a range of popular reference books.15 When the schoolmaster Nicholas Udall edited Desiderius Erasmus’s first volume of commentaries on the New Testament in 1548, he explained that the great scholar’s ‘‘diligent observation and markyng’’ of ‘‘al libraries, al writers, al bookes’’ had resulted in a single set of comprehensive ‘‘annotacions.’’ By turning to this textual ‘‘instrument,’’ he promised his readers, ‘‘thou maist (without any ferther travail then onely reading, marking, & bearing it away) so easily attain to the clere understanding of the ghospel.’’16 Readers could also consult the printed anthologies of biblical and theological excerpts gathered under carefully ordered subject headings called ‘‘loci communes’’ (or ‘‘common places’’). The most popular Protestant example was Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes, which was first published in 1521 and appeared in at least eighteen editions by 1525. Sixty years later, English readers could still turn to encyclopedic collections such as John Merbecke’s Book of Notes and Common Places: with their Expositions . . . a work both profitable and also necessary, to those that desire the true understanding and meaning of the holy Scripture.17 And they were also trained to compile their own collections on bound or loose-leaf pages, either following the subject headings of a trusted authority or devising a scheme that met their particular needs. In fact, the period’s most explicit set of instructions on how to construct a commonplace book can be found not in a humanist pedagogical treatise but in Edward Vaughan’s 1594 guide to Bible study, Ten introductions how to read . . . the holy Bible: ‘‘The conclusion of all acts and studies do consist in three parts; to weet, Reading, Noting, and Exercise. To the end you may make perfect use of your Reading, I have thought good to compose this order for your Noting; then (Gods spirit assisting) your Exercise will be easie.’’18 Matthew Brown has recently surveyed the guides to devotional practice that were selling in staggering numbers by the beginning of the seventeenth century, and found that the instructions they offer the sermon-goer and Bible-reader are—like Vaughan’s—emphatically interactive. In his lesson on ‘‘How to carry our selues in Sermon time’’ (first published in 1610), George Webbe exhorts the attentive auditor to take a copy of the Bible to church and to make note of the passages discussed by the preacher: ‘‘marke the Text, observe the division; marke how every point is handled: quote the places of Scripture which he alledgeth for his Doctrine proofe, fold down a leafe in your Bible from which the place is recited, that so at your leasure after your returne from the

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Church, you may examine it.’’19 Webbe’s ‘‘marking’’ did not necessarily involve pen and ink, but the course of intensive reading prescribed by other preachers such as John Downame explicitly encouraged the use of marginal annotations. Once we have found a book that is ‘‘sound and sauoury, vsefull and profitable,’’ Downame writes, ‘‘we are to read it againe and againe . . . neuer thinking that we haue perused it sufficiently, till we haue thorowly vnderstood it, layd it vp in our memories, applied it to our hearts, and drawne it into vse and practice.’’ Since there is no text more profitable than the Bible, we should ‘‘Read ouer the whole Scriptures seriously twice or thrice, and to obserue as we goe, both these Chapters of lesse ordinarie vse, and others of greatest excellencie, and most profitable for our edification, and as we goe, to prefix before them, with our pen, a seuerall marke: as for example; before the former sort, this *; before the other, this , or some such like: that we may readily chuse the one vpon extraordinary occasions, and more seldome reade the other in our ordinary course.’’20 While Downame leaves it up to his readers to decide ‘‘to vse or not to vse’’ this method, it is clear that many readers found some method of annotation an indispensable practice for digesting and mobilizing the text.

Memorable Notes Webbe’s dog-eared leaves and Downame’s marginal asterisks only begin to prepare us for the range of marks found in early printed Bibles. Signatures and other ownership notes are, predictably, the most common inscriptions and were one of the principal ways of not simply signaling that the Scriptures had become personal property but of placing the book in space and time—and using the book, indeed, to mark one’s own place in history, particularly after books had passed through multiple households or descended through multiple generations in a single family (where it was common to register the births, marriages, and deaths for decades and even centuries). The Bishops’ Bible described above (with the Geneva Bible’s table ‘‘How to take profit by reading of the holy Scriptures’’ copied in) was published in 1575, but it bears the notes of at least three readers from the seventeenth century: one set describes important events in the Blennerhassett family from 1601 to 1646, a second testifies to the ownership of John Bell in 1655 (in a somewhat scurrilous verse formula, ‘‘this is my hand this my deede[,] he is a knaue that doeth it reede’’), and a third consists of ‘‘Memorable notes sett downe by me William Hirds[on] the xxviiith daye of November, Anno Domini 1659.’’ A Geneva Bible from 1614 contains a family history running from the 1640s to the 1660s.21 There are notes from the Howard family between 1607 and the 1680s in a 1582 Bible at the British Library, and

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a note on the flyleaf dated 1649 explains that ‘‘This was my mothers Bible, & the old closures beinge decayed I gott it new bound.’’22 A 1549 Matthew Bible at the Huntington preserves the signatures of no fewer than eight booksellers along with the family notes of Edmund Chatherton (b. 1564) and the Trafford family (from 1624 to 1637).23 Some preliminary pages in the Huntington’s Bibles supply the names of more famous owners and record events of greater significance in the life of the nation. A 1521 Latin Bible (in a beautiful binding featuring the royal coat of arms) bears an inscription in the hand of Archbishop William Laud identifying this copy as the very Bible kissed by King Charles I when he swore the peace with Spain in 1630.24 And another Bible at the Huntington was involved in one of the actions that sparked an earlier phase of Anglo-Spanish hostilities some fifty years prior. It is a Latin Bible, published in Paris in 1541, and according to a note on the first page it was among the spoils of Sir Francis Drake when he attacked the Spanish outpost at Santo Domingo in the West Indies on New Year’s Day, 1586.25 When Drake returned to England he presented it as a souvenir to none other than Richard Topcliffe (the anti-Catholic agent whose graphic marginalia we have already encountered). Topcliffe recorded the gift with a suitably patriotic note (Figure 19): ‘‘This Booke was founde, & taiken, by my right woorthie frinde Sr francis drake Knight, when he was in the Indeas at St domingo, where he and or Nacion did wynne great fayme: Emongs other favors he bestowed this Iewell upon mee: Wch will indewor [i.e. endure] for ever, & his fayme Longe: Ric: Topclyffe:.’’ And a 1538 New Testament, now preserved at the British Library, documents a fascinating chain of social interactions, initiated by Queen Elizabeth herself. On one of the flyleaves at the front of the volume, Elizabeth inscribed a rhyming dedication to her maid of honor Anne Poynts: ‘‘Amonge good thinges I proue and finde the qui[et] life doth muche abounde, and sure to the contentid mynde, there is no riches may be founde.’’ She signed this note ‘‘Your louinge frend’’ and then, remembering her position, crossed out ‘‘frend’’ and replaced it with ‘‘maistres.’’ On the facing page Anne entered a rhyming aphorism of her own: ‘‘More suifte then swallowys flyte our yung dayse fly away then age cawlys for hys ryghte and dethe wil haue no staye bothe day by nyte and nyte by day our corrys chayngys to and fro so lyfe by dethe and dethe by lyfe shall brynge vs all to well or wo[e]. Your frend ane poyntes.’’ The volume continued to pass around—and beyond—Anne’s family: other notes refer to ‘‘your louyng mother’’ and ‘‘yowre ffryndly sester,’’ and still others are signed by ‘‘ff B’’ and ‘‘A G.’’ Within the books of the Bible proper, most marginalia were concerned with clarifying and digesting the text, making it easier to read and apply to particular (and often peculiar) needs. While there are no

Figure 19. Richard Topcliffe’s note on the Bible seized by Sir Francis Drake during his raid on Santo Domingo in 1586 (RB112999). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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cases at the Huntington as elaborate as some of the Renaissance Bibles at the British Library, where learned commentaries in a number of hands completely surround the printed text, there are a number of heavily annotated Bibles and dozens with more selective marginalia. Flyleaves were often filled with references and citations, with commentaries on points of particular interest to the reader, glossaries of difficult or useful words, and chronological tables of biblical history.26 One 1582 Geneva New Testament at the Huntington has been covered with notes on the pastedowns, in the index, and on the colophon in which passages are copied out under such headings as ‘‘Against astrologers.’’ In the text itself we find the full range of annotational techniques—including brackets, underlinings, cross-references, and running summaries.27 Very often the notes and underlinings simply serve to highlight noteworthy passages, but it can be interesting to see which sections particular readers took a special interest in. One of the readers of a 1574 Bishops’ Bible at the Huntington has only annotated passages in the Apocrypha (in fact, almost exclusively in the books of Esdras), systematically picking out verses on angels, prophecies, signs, and tokens.28 The absence of notes in the more canonical books of the Bible does not necessarily mean that they went unread, but the presence of notes here signals a set of focused interests that the reader wanted to be able to recall for his own use (or, perhaps, that of others). Some readers clearly had access to more than one Bible and took an active interest in what the King James Version called ‘‘the varietie of sences.’’ It is not unusual to find variant versions, or alternative translations, copied out into the margins.29 Readers regularly made the corrections identified in the lists of ‘‘faults escaped in the printing,’’ and also did not hesitate to enter their own emendations when it was clear that the printer had garbled the text.30 In a 1580 translation of Calvin’s commentaries on the First Epistle of St. John, the text seems to have been badly mangled: among the reader’s corrections are the substitution of ‘‘the fault of our flesh’’ for ‘‘the fault of our faith.’’31 Throughout the history of the printed English Bible, compositors’ slips have had serious consequences—nowhere more so than in the infamous ‘‘Wicked Bible’’ of 1631, where the seventh commandment appeared as ‘‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’’32 The Huntington’s printed Bibles (even those from the late sixteenth century and beyond) contain a surprising amount of illumination, rubrication, and colored ruling and underlining. It is often crudely executed; and in some cases it defaces more than beautifies the text (as in one 1540 Coverdale Bible, in which a reader has recopied some of the woodcuts, making grotesque modifications).33 Others contain artistry

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similar to that found in a 1576 Geneva Bible, where the woodcuts have been beautifully and vividly colored by an unidentified artist.34 A related practice is the decorative packaging of books: in Tudor and Stuart England there was something of a vogue for putting bibles in embroidered bindings.35 These are especially plentiful in smaller format Psalters; and, indeed, the Huntington has a fine collection of these, including one tiny sixteenmo book of Psalms with a delicate needlework binding with cartouches depicting King David playing the harp.36 It is considerably less common to find them in larger formats, and of this variety the Huntington has a little-known treasure. A large folio Bible from 1616 features an elaborate velvet binding with embroidered portraits of Moses and Aaron (representing the Old Testament) on the front cover (Figure 20), and the crucifixion (representing the New Testament) on the back (Figure 21).37 It is worth noting that the function of these bindings is more than merely decorative. They are one of the places where we can see the persistence of religious images after Protestant scripturalism and iconoclasm have taken root in England, largely supplanting the image with the word and effectively banishing illustrations from the texts of Bibles and prayer books.38 But these images too were vulnerable to attack, and on the New Testament side of the Huntington’s embroidered 1616 Bible, the figure of Christ and the cross to which he is nailed have been carefully and completely excised, leaving the other figures intact to stare in sorrow at a familiar shadowy shape. Perhaps the most pervasive indication of readers’ access to and assimilation of the Bible, finally, is the extent to which it figures in their marginalia in other books—religious and otherwise. The frequent cases, found especially but not exclusively in printed sermons, where a reader notes the precise reference for an unidentified scriptural passage, suggest how thoroughly familiar many lay readers had become with the Bible (to the point where they could cite, as the phrase now goes, ‘‘chapter and verse’’). It is possible, then, to identify at least eight typical categories of readers’ marks in printed Bibles during the first century or so after the break with Rome. 1. Ownership notes, often drawing on rhyming formulae and regularly (among Protestants) asking for God to give the reader ‘‘grace’’ to look in or on the Book. 2. Penmanship exercises, including letters and phrases copied from the printed text (often under or above the relevant line), drafts of letters, and isolated words from prayers or poems. 3. Cross-references, sometimes supplementing existing printed crossreferences or indexes.

Figure 20. An embroidered binding on a 1616 Bible (RB438000:70F): the front (Old Testament) cover. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 21. An embroidered binding on a 1616 Bible (RB438000:70F): the back (New Testament) cover. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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4. In lectern Bibles, liturgical instructions for the reading of lessons (‘‘begin here,’’ ‘‘end here,’’ and so on), and the appropriate date for each of the psalms.39 5. Numberings of pages, chapters, verses, columns, and words for ease of reference. It became something of a tradition to count the units that compose the Book.40 6. Corrections. 7. Polemical notes (noting the bible’s support for or against a given view, as in the notes ‘‘Against astrologers’’ mentioned above). 8. Dating of various kinds. Many readers of many different books subtracted the date of publication from the present year to mark the passage of time. But with bibles these calculations take on added significance.41

Using and Abusing the Bible It should be clear that the margins of early bibles contain sources of edification not simply for their original readers but also for modern scholars attempting to recover their outlooks and practices. But we should not underestimate the difficulty of accessing biblical marginalia and of interpreting the motives and mentalities that lay behind them: they are often as mysterious as the ‘‘dark places’’ in the text itself which the printed marginalia were designed to illuminate—nowhere more so than when they fade away into silence. And when readers did make their encounters with the visible Word visible, can we confidently draw the line between use and abuse? Do we have a reliable sense, in other words, of what the marks of pious versus impious use would look like in Bibles and other religious texts in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries? After all, some readers were not only crude in their comments but notably rough in their handling of their books: in a case like the 1566 Tyndale New Testament at the Huntington, where the penmanship exercises, doodles, and pious prayers (such as ‘‘O Lord God saue me’’) surrounding the printed text are inscribed with such pressure that they have ripped holes in the page, can we comfortably say that the reader ought to have marked the text with more respect?42 Such rough treatment was an inevitable by-product of putting Bibles into ‘‘every vulgar hand.’’ As he looked back on the course of the Reformation in England, John Dryden evidently had mixed feelings about the advent of this ‘‘knowing age.’’ In his satirical poem Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), he pondered a middle way between the Catholic dependence on priestly guidance and the Dissenters’ insistence on individual interpretation, suggesting that ‘‘This good had full as bad a conse-

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quence,’’ one figured as an assault not just on theological doctrine but on the very pages that conveyed it: The Book thus put in every vulgar hand, Which each presum’d he best could understand, The common rule was made the common prey; And at the mercy of the rabble lay. The tender page with horny fists was gall’d . . . . Plain truths enough for needful use they found; But men would still be itching to expound: Each was ambitious of th’obscurest place, No measure ta’en from knowledge, all from grace. Study and pains were now no more their care: Texts were explain’d by fasting, and by prayer: This was the fruit the private spirit brought; Occasion’d by great zeal, and little thought.43 And while Greenslade noted that the ‘‘fourth-century apostolic constitution’’ had aimed to ‘‘place every book of Scripture in the hands of children,’’44 even in an age before the invention of the crayon they had to know that children would do with the Bibles that were thrust into (or covertly seized by) their hands what they tend to do with every other book—namely use it for entering their signatures, for practicing their penmanship, and above all for coloring.45 Coats of arms (royal or otherwise) proved particularly irresistible to young readers, and thus it was often the grandest productions that ended up doing double duty as coloring books (Figure 22).46 Bibles were bound to be consumed more actively and more literally than other texts, after they entered household economies and the spiritual lives of readers. The Book of Revelation (10: 8–10) contains a passage in which the angel instructs John to ‘‘take the book and eat it up’’; and not every reader understood this command metaphorically. In his essay ‘‘Books as Totems,’’ David Cressy cites reports of people eating Bibles for their curative or prophylactic powers as late as the nineteenth century. I would suggest that we have a long way to go in understanding the ‘‘book etiquette’’ (to borrow Saenger and Heinlen’s useful phrase) of Renaissance England’s godly readers: clearly they did not share the modern attitude (discussed in detail in Chapter 8 below) that ‘‘views the printed page as sacrosanct and consequently all handwritten additions to the printed page as . . . detrimental’’47—not even when the page in question is as sanctified as they come. Finally, while it is remarkable how quickly after the advent of printing Bibles made their way into the hands—and under the pens—of lay read-

Figure 22. A child’s embellishments of the royal arms in a 1628 King James Bible (RB17040). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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ers, we should be wary of seeing this as an easy and unequivocal triumph for clarity and democracy.48 We should not forget, first, the ambivalent attitudes of the authorities toward lay reading of the Bible: by 1543 King Henry VIII had embraced the basic tenets of Protestantism but still felt the need to prohibit women, husbandmen, and laborers from reading the Scriptures in the vernacular. As David Scott Kastan has explained, the desire ‘‘to prevent interpretive debate was destined to fail, and by 1543, the Act for the Advancement of True Religion would pointedly restrict access to the Bible itself, forbidding it to all subjects ‘of the lower sort.’ ’’49 And, second, while new sectors of the population gained access to the Bible in this transitional period, the readers themselves often drew on traditional techniques and attitudes. Considered from the user’s rather than the producer’s perspective, there are significant continuities in both the textual and the devotional cultures associated with what Eamon Duffy has labeled ‘‘traditional religion,’’ and it is not surprising that older practices proved persistent in accommodating the new religion and the new media that were used to propagate it—a phenomenon that will become even clearer in my discussion of the Book of Common Prayer in the next chapter.50 Looking at readers’ marks in early printed Bibles, then, what is most striking is the diversity of uses to which the book—and the Book—could be put. Perhaps King Henry VIII was right to be worried: once you gave independent readers unmediated access to the Bible it was ultimately impossible to control what they would do with it. And in this way, while the Bible penetrated the homes of individual readers, playing a more intimate role in their lives, minds, and words, it may have lost some of its monolithic integrity and unquestionable authority. What seems clear is that well after the transitional period of incunables—indeed, even two centuries after the printed book had left the cradle—both print culture and Protestant culture were still experiencing birth pangs.

Chapter 5

An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

‘‘. . . and what is the use of a book,’’ thought Alice, ‘‘without pictures or conversations?’’ —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Alice’s question applies not just to Victorian storybooks but also to Elizabethan prayer books, and this chapter offers one of them as an object lesson, a curious devotional volume that not only contains pictures and conversations but raises a series of searching questions about the uses of books in the English Renaissance. It is a manuscript copy of the entire printed Book of Common Prayer and Psalter—the two texts that together formed the established script for the ritual conversations between a minister and his congregation, on the one hand, and between individuals and God, on the other. It was made in the early 1560s and it features an elaborate decorative scheme drawing on the visual conventions of both printed books and manuscripts. The most striking feature (at least at first glance) is the ornamental initials that adorn almost every page, including some seventy capitals devised in the style of woodcuts from contemporary printed books (Figure 23), and another seventy illuminated letters that were recycled from three or more late medieval manuscripts using scissors and paste (Figure 24). Even these superficial details are sufficient to pose a number of immediate questions, few of which can be answered with confidence but all of which are worth exploring. Why would someone bother to make—or have made for them—a manuscript copy of the recently printed and readily available Book of Common Prayer and Psalter (and its 598 pages of closely written text could not have been either easy or cheap to produce)? Who might have wanted a book that looked like this, and who might have wanted them not to want it? In what spaces, and for what activities, was it intended to be used? Where might it have been produced, and was it the work of an amateur or a professional, a single scribe or a proper scriptorium? Where did the appropriated initials

Figure 23. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): typographical initial featuring rose and serpent. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Figure 24. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): plundered initials from late medieval manuscripts. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB438000:87.

come from and what did they mean to the person(s) who owned this book—did they just think they looked pretty and/or holy, or did they carry specific (and even charged) associations with the not-so-distant medieval past or with the Catholic devotional culture that had only recently been forced back underground? What kind of religious and textual mentality, in other words, could account for a book like this, and how does it fit into our received narratives of the transition from script to print and from Catholicism to Protestantism?

James R. Page’s Used Prayer Books This volume caught my eye as I was making my way through the collection of prayer books and related materials assembled by James R. Page,

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one of the Huntington’s trustees and one of the directors of Union Oil of California. When the Page Collection was presented to the Huntington Library after Page’s death in 1962, its annual report called it ‘‘The outstanding special acquisition of the year’’; and it remains a rich and relatively unknown resource for scholars interested in the production and reception of devotional books between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Since I was more interested in the reception than in the production of religious books—and particularly in the marks left behind by early readers—I was pleasantly surprised to find that, unlike most of his fellow collectors, Page preferred books that are (as he himself put it in a passage I will consider more fully in chapter 8) ‘‘enlivened by the marginal notes and comments made by the many people . . . through whose hands they passed.’’2 By pursuing—or at least not shying away from—customized and quirky books, and even those considered by others to be ‘‘imperfect’’ or ‘‘soiled,’’ he not only found some extraordinary bargains but did a great service to future historians of past reading. The majority of Page’s acquisitions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries preserve contemporary signatures and annotations, with examples of most of the things English Renaissance readers did with, and to, their liturgical and devotional books. Many different kinds of traces testify, once again, to many different forms of interaction between books and readers—physical and intellectual, social and spiritual, political and personal.3 There are ownership notes of various kinds, from simple signatures to elaborate formulae. In 1692, for instance, John Carter inscribed his 1617 Psalter with a conventional couplet, ‘‘John Carter his Booke[,] god giue him grace therein to look’’; but instead of going on to offer rhyming insults aimed at the enemies of the English Crown or to warn potential thieves (as these notes typically did) he went on to express concerns that were altogether more cosmic, continuing ‘‘if a man shall die shall he liue again[:] all the dayes of my Apointed time will I waitt until my change cometh and though after this skinn worms destroy this Body of mine yett in my flesh shall I see god whome mine eyes shall behold and not another’’—a close paraphrase of Job 19:26–27.4 There are title pages and flyleaves covered with prayers, pious phrases, recipes, notes for further reading, and records of payments: the flyleaves bearing John Carter’s ownership inscription also contain a reminder that ‘‘Wee are to remember our end,’’ a memorandum that ‘‘I paid to Mr Toringue of Warwick for Binding of This Booke—0–4-6,’’ and a nostrum for an unspecified ailment combining ‘‘one dram of . . . sulfur’’ and two ounces of ‘‘the sirrup of violets.’’ There are family histories, which were very common in the period’s books (and not just its Bibles, as we have already seen). In a 1619 Book of Common Prayer, for instance, Giles Hungerford used a flyleaf at the

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front of the volume to record his marriage to ‘‘my most deer and loveinge wiefe’’ Elizabeth in 1624, and then her departure from ‘‘this wretched World’’ in 1632. One year later he literally turned over a new leaf: on a blank page at the back of the book he documents his second marriage to ‘‘Ione [i.e., Joan] my deere and loveinge wiefe’’ and records the birthdates, names, and godparents of the four children she bore him over the next five years.5 Several volumes preserve the efforts of the English Crown to propagate the new faith, along with the efforts of individual readers to advance or resist it. There is a copy of the Thirty-nine Articles, printed in 1571 and used to document the public subscriptions to the articles in six different parish churches between 1579 and 1672 (including the church of Conington in Huntingdonshire in 1603, where Robert Cotton and William Camden were among the witnesses, having fled London to escape the plague).6 There is a copy of the ecclesiastical constitutions of 1599 bound with the Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of 1640, heavily annotated by Thomas Hall—a spirited preacher, polemicist and book collector who was imprisoned five times during the Civil War and finally ejected from the Anglican Church in 1662.7 His marginal outbursts on the subject of synods will suggest why. On the title page to the second work he has written ‘‘That Synods may erre & that fouly to, this of 1640 proves with a witnesse,’’ and at the end of the text he has written a scathing critique in punning Latin: Quid Synodus? Nodus. Patrum chorus, integer? Aeger. Conventus? Ventus. Sessio? Stramen. Amen. [What is a Synod? A knot. A healthy chorus of fathers? Diseased. An assembly? Wind. A sitting? Scattered straw. Amen.]

There is a copy of the 1639 Book of Common Prayer with an early eighteenth-century transcription of John Cosin’s manuscript annotations in the so-called Durham Book, described by G. J. Cuming as the first draft of the revised prayer book of 1661.8 And there is a copy of the 1636 Book of Common Prayer which has been interleaved, allowing a learned reader named William Bullock to compose a detailed commentary on the English liturgy in the early 1660s, drawing on a wide range of historical sources and often providing parallel passages in Latin and Greek.9 There are countless examples of added color, in the form of rubrication and limning: the addition of red ruling around the printed text was a particularly common practice in prayer books, drawing in the eye and bounding the text, marking the margins off as a separate zone.10 This would have been executed by printers and binders as well as readers, and may have been an attempt to compensate for the relative disappearance of rubrication from English liturgical books.11 As with the Bibles

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surveyed in the previous chapter, not a few of these volumes evidently served as coloring books for children (with or without the permission of their parents): coats of arms and other visuals are often embellished. And there are eleven embroidered bindings of various sizes, some featuring velvet backgrounds, metallic threads, and delicate depictions of King David or Adam and Eve.12 There are useful reminders of the fact that many books outlived the contexts for which they were originally produced, remaining meaningful and/or useful to readers who were willing to update them. There is a copy of the Ordinal section from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer that was both annotated and emended during the reign of James I: small slips of paper were carefully pasted over all references to Elizabeth and replaced with new text referring to James—even changing every instance of ‘‘she’’ to ‘‘he’’ and ‘‘her’’ to ‘‘his.’’13 More typical and consequential are the modifications that can be found in pre-Reformation prayer books still in use after the Reformation. Martha Driver has recently described the survival of religious books that have been selectively defaced to remove material that was now thought objectionable (particularly texts addressed to the pope, St. Thomas Beckett, or the Virgin Mary): it is interesting to note the number of medieval books . . . which, though censored, defaced and annotated by later Protestant commentators, survive to this day, though some have been so badly damaged that they are scarcely decipherable. . . . One answer might be that books continued to be valued as comparatively expensive commodities that were worth keeping. But another answer might be found in the complex relationships Protestantism had with Catholicism. . . . English owners of books deemed heretical were generally circumspect in their emendations, keeping the books and presumably continuing to use them while crossing out only the offending texts and, much less often, pictures. . . . Perhaps . . . we can also detect an impulse to preserve the medieval past while emending texts and images to fit contemporary religious and political trends in the early years of the Reformation.14

Among the prayer books at the Huntington with similar modifications is an interesting 1545 Primer (Figure 25) in which the Ave Maria and related prayers have been scored through and marked ‘‘Vacat’’ [leave out]. This volume was evidently owned by someone in the royal household—perhaps by the ‘‘John Norton bocher’’ whose name appears in the financial records preserved in the blank leaves, which include payments for ‘‘haye for the kinge’’ and ‘‘wheate for the kinge.’’15 Finally, the Page Collection contains two examples of the ‘‘experiments in mixed media’’ that were common in the early years of printing, particularly in devotional contexts. In her pioneering account of this period of ‘‘cross-fertilization,’’ Sandra Hindman has surveyed what she

Figure 25. Censored prayers in a 1545 primer (RB62311–2). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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describes as ‘‘the vast middle ground between the manuscript which copies a printed book and the printed book which simulates its manuscript model [where] there is much material which relates to both media while conforming to neither.’’16 She is particularly interested in hybrid confections that combine manuscript texts and printed images— some removed from their original contexts and some apparently produced for individual use, to be hung on walls or inserted into customized devotional collections.17 Such examples, she suggests, are ‘‘nearly endless and they bespeak, in the words of [Curt] Bu¨hler, ‘one of the most curious and confused periods in recorded history.’ ’’ The work of recovering and interpreting such books is still in its early stages, but ‘‘what is already obvious . . . is the continual interchange between the hand- and machine-produced book . . . marking the latter half of the fifteenth century as a period of intensive experimentation.’’18 There is ample evidence to suggest that this period of experimentation should be extended through the latter half of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, at least: while the discrete conventions of the two media were clearly worked out by the 1510s or 1520s, certain contexts allowed the models to mingle and the formats to mix throughout the early modern period.19 Perhaps the most familiar examples from recent scholarship are the scribal communities that flourished as religious communities went underground—the exiled Marian Protestants, for instance, or the Elizabethan recusants.20 The Page Collection contains a typical volume produced by an unidentified English Catholic in the early 1570s, combining a manuscript copy of Catherine Parr’s prayers and meditations from 1541 with a series of fifty-four woodcuts and engravings (most of them hand-colored), depicting the Passion, Evangelists, saints, and spiritual exercises. Structured around a brand new set of engravings, evidently acquired from the Continent, the manuscript also contains xylographic prints at least a century old, giving this collection the look of a personalized devotional scrapbook.21

An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer This takes us, at last, to item 354 in the Page Collection.22 Page bought this item from the booksellers Meyers & Co. in 1952, for the shockingly low price of £35. The sale catalogue described it as ‘‘[The Book of] Common Prayer, with the Psalter. Manuscript, very beautifully written, with illuminated Capitals; half morocco 8vo. 1562.’’ Implying that the illuminated initials were produced at the same time and by the same scribe as the rest of the writing, this description makes the volume sound more conventional (and straightforwardly ‘‘beautiful’’) than it is, glossing over the jarring juxtapositions and vexing bibliocultural mysteries contained

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within its covers. Between 1560 and 1562, then, someone copied out the entire text of the Book of Common Prayer and Psalter—and while there are very few clues about the identity and location of the volume’s maker(s) and user(s) we can be fairly certain about the dates of production. First, the dates 1560, 1561, and 1562 appear in several places, worked into the decorative initials. Second, the separate title page for the Psalter is dated 1562. And third, the standard thirty-year almanac in the front of the book runs forward from 1561 instead of 1559. After the almanac and calendar (which evidently derive from the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1561), the content follows the wording of the first Elizabethan edition of 1559 very carefully. The order of the preliminary sections does not, however, exactly match any of the surviving copies I have seen of either edition; and both the spelling and the layout are thoroughly different from all known printed exemplars. The first surviving section, the full text of the Act of Uniformity, not only prevents us from jumping to the immediate conclusion that this is the prayer book of a closet Catholic opposed in principle to the new Protestant settlement but effectively captures the hybrid quality of the textual presentation. The opening initial W combines the decorative foliation found in printed woodcuts and engravings (within the frame of the letter) and in illuminated manuscripts (along the adjacent margin). The extensive use of red ink for emphasis also draws on the rubrication common in medieval manuscripts; but the layout of the text throughout follows the models established by printers—though, again, it does not match the layout of the texts being copied. The end of the preface, for instance, follows a standard typographical layout featuring tapered and centered text and completed with a triangle of asterisks. This configuration is very commonly used to mark the end of sections in printed books; it does not, however, appear at this point in the printed Book of Common Prayer. So unless this is a copy of a printed exemplar that has since disappeared (which is not impossible, given the relatively low survival rates of these early editions), we appear to have a scribe who has assimilated the design conventions of both printed books and manuscripts, deploying them separately or in combination with a surprisingly free hand. He also exercised considerable latitude in the design of the mockprinted initials. These are usually found in the same place as cut or engraved initials in the printed Book of Common Prayer, but they are never directly copied from them—and I have not, in fact, found a single example which offers a definite source for the initials found in the manuscript. Some of these initials are extremely crude, suggesting either experiments that failed or copies that went horribly wrong; and grotesque designs like the initial A covered in and surrounded by eyes

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go some way toward capturing the fanciful air of the entire production (Figure 26). But some of them required skills of design and execution that put this production well beyond the reach of a casual penman or artist (Figure 27). This aspect of the decoration is so far from consistent, in fact, that it is difficult to characterize the scribe as either amateur or professional—and indeed suggests that more than one person had a hand in its production. The hand of the text is careful but not particularly accomplished, by sixteenth-century scribal standards; and it is entirely possible that the scribe (or, perhaps, one or more of the volume’s owners) tried to fill in some of the blank spaces for decorated initials left after as many as possible were filled with professional work and with the available initials cut out from medieval manuscripts.23 As for the recycled medieval initials, they are not particularly old or beautiful—as decorative capitals go. They fall into several distinct styles, most of which can be roughly dated and located.24 The oldest style dates from the mid- to late fifteenth century, and it almost certainly derives from a French manuscript. The rest of the letters date from the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century, and they are either from Flemish manuscripts or from English manuscripts designed to look like Flemish manuscripts. There is also one capital A in bright blue ink and on paper rather than parchment, and it was probably borrowed from a sixteenth-century English manuscript—or quite possibly from a rubricated initial added to an early printed book. Very few of the initials contain a pictorial component, but one small O with a bust of Christ displaying his wounds was clearly associated with the cult of the wounds of Jesus and was probably removed from the associated rubric in a book of hours (Figure 28). Eamon Duffy suggests that this cult was one of the most popular religious movements in late medieval Europe and was actually gaining adherents in England ‘‘up to the very eve of the Reformation.’’25 While our scribe was not necessarily invoking the Catholic liturgy with this initial, he does seem to have thought about the content of the image: it is probably more than coincidence that this particular initial is placed at the beginning of the Collect for St. Bartholomew, next to the text, ‘‘By the handes of the Apostells, were many signes & wonders shewed emonge the people’’ (144r). I have been using male pronouns until now to refer to the producer(s) and user(s) of this book, but I would like to entertain the possibility not simply that the volume was used by a woman but that a woman also played an important role in its creation—as with so many of the books of hours that form its most direct precursors. The ‘‘return of the reader’’ to literary and historical studies over the last two decades has involved a more or less adversarial division between those who study ‘‘imagined,’’ ‘‘implied,’’ or ‘‘ideal’’ readers and those who study the

Figure 26. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): amateur mock-woodcut initial. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 27. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): professional mock-woodcut initial. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 28. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): recycled initial with Christ displaying wounds. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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traces of ‘‘real,’’ ‘‘actual,’’ or ‘‘historical’’ readers.26 In piecing together the clues contained in this unusual volume, I have developed a strong sense of what might be described as the ‘‘imagined actual reader’’; and the implication of the evidence—the choice of italic rather than secretary hand, the use of recycled goods, the preference for a devotional textuality that combines the verbal and the visual—points in many ways toward the material world of the early modern woman. There are striking similarities with the medieval religious books associated with female patrons and owners, on the one hand,27 and, on the other, the domestic practices of the genteel Georgian women studied by Amanda Vickery and of the much less genteel colonial women studied by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.28

Re-forming the Prayer Book Whether or not it was created by or for an Elizabethan woman, it should already be clear that it is not just facile wordplay to describe this book as ‘‘uncommon.’’ It is obviously unusual or special, but we can be more precise and more historically nuanced than that. First and foremost, the various elements brought together in this volume are extremely rare and I am not aware of anything else quite like it from the Elizabethan period. I have come across one other contemporary manuscript copy of the Book of Common Prayer (sans Psalter), produced in 1576. It is now housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library and was produced either by or for Robert Heasse, curate of St. Botolph without Aldgate in London, whose initials are found in many places.29 It also features a vivid decorative scheme, with elaborate (if amateurish) ornamental borders stuffed with Tudor roses—but there are no medieval initials or any other added elements of any kind. Second, as a manuscript—which is to some extent inherently customized and privatized—this volume cuts against the very nature and purpose of the printed Book of Common Prayer. The text played a central role (alongside the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) in the Protestant program of using print not simply to make the word of God a matter of public ownership but to do so in a standardized, centrally sanctioned form—and the fact that so many of its key features and phrases remain in use to this day suggest how successful the campaign was: indeed, John Booty has suggested that its impact on the English language was deeper and more lasting than the King James Bible.30 By being required at every church, which all subjects were forced by law to attend every week, the new prayer book was designed to be common in several early modern senses.31 Like the new English books designed for private devotion and spiritual instruction that sold in vast quantities, the Book of Common

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Prayer was deemed, in the language of John Daye’s popular 1558 collection, the Pomander of Prayer, ‘‘meet . . . to be used of all degrees and estates.’’32 Furthermore, it was intended to replace the Catholic primer’s range of local liturgical structures (or uses, as they were known). As the preface to the first reformed prayer book of 1549 put it, ‘‘And where heretofore there hath been great diuersitie in saying and synging in churches within this realme: some folowyng Salsbury [or ‘‘Sarum’’] vse, some Herford vse, some the vse of Bangor, some of Yorke & some of Lincolne: Now from henceforth, all the whole realm shall haue but one vse.’’ And finally, the Book of Common Prayer was part of the Protestant church’s strong emphasis on the public and communal nature of the devotional performance.33 In her recent account of the culture of common prayer, Ramie Targoff argued that ‘‘in designing the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer and his fellow reformers actively sought to create a liturgical practice that did not accommodate personal deviation’’ (my emphasis). While this may be too strong a formulation, it is certainly the case that the strong resistance by nonconformists focused on the ‘‘imposition of a mechanical and artificial practice that inhibit[ed] devotional freedom’’—and this was the complaint that Richard Hooker addressed in the first systematic defense of the Anglican approach to common prayer (in book 5 of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity [1593]).34 And it is also true that there were plenty of more appropriate printed prayer books to be turned into a customized manuscript with medieval associations—including Reformed, English versions of the traditional primer or book of hours and any number of Protestant anthologies of private prayers. So what kind of use might our manuscript have been intended for, and to what extent does it represent the kind of textual and devotional deviation that Cranmer and his successors wished to suppress? Since the scribe included most of the prompts for public performance—including the speech headings for the priest and the rubrics that Booty has aptly described as ‘‘stage directions indicating what the actors . . . are to do in relation to the words’’—was this text meant to be used for personal or domestic prayer, serving as the script for a liturgical closet drama? Or was it supposed to be taken to church, where the owner and perhaps the members of his or her family could follow along with the public service? If so, then the most uncommon feature of all in the volume—the illuminated initials harking back to the aesthetic and devotional models of the medieval manuscript prayer book—might well have attracted the attention of their neighbors, if not the suspicion of the authorities. In the preceding chapter I mentioned the iconoclastic drift of the Protestant reformers, part of their general preference for a purified printed word that could replace traditional images as objects of veneration and

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edification. The defining moment came in 1549, the year of the first English Book of Common Prayer, when King Edward VI and his ministers were so exercised by the persistence of traditional devotional practices that they issued a royal proclamation ordering the destruction of religious images and (more important for our purposes) the confiscation of all old service books—including ‘‘all antiphonaries, missals, grails, processionals, manuals, legends, pyes, porcastes, tournals, and ordinals, after the use of Sarum, Lincoln, York, Bangor, Hereford, or any other private use, and all other books of service, the keeping whereof should be a let to the using of the said Book of Common Prayer.’’ If the sweeping nature of this prohibition is shocking (especially when we consider that it was issued a full decade before Rome had published its first index of prohibited books), so was the intended treatment of confiscated volumes: ‘‘you should take the same books into your hands, or into the hands of your deputy, and them so deface and abolish, that they never hereafter may serve either to any such use as they were first provided for, or be at any time a let to that godly and uniform order which by a common consent is now set forth.’’35 This act may, in fact, explain why there were medieval manuscripts available for cutting up, or perhaps caches of colorful initials that had already been snipped from contaminated texts. Christopher de Hamel has called the Reformation ‘‘the great heighday of the use of cut-out leaves of manuscripts as sewing-guards, flyleaves, and as wrappers of bookbindings,’’ citing John Leland’s complaint to Thomas Cromwell (in 1536) that ‘‘cuttings from ancient manuscripts were being used by iconoclasts to clean their shoes and candlesticks, and for sale—‘to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent ouer see to ye bookbynders . . . at tymes whole shyppes full.’’’36 And although the act of Edward VI was repealed by Queen Mary and was not revived by Queen Elizabeth, Henry Gee explains that ‘‘the provisions were [still] observed in some places without such legal re-enactment. The Lincoln return proves that the books were, as a rule, destroyed in 1559.’’37 Might the creator of our manuscript him- or herself been given access to books called in by the ecclesiastical or civic authorities, or had they come down to him or her within his or her family? Were the initials salvaged from a heap of books destined for the flames, or were they cut out of family heirlooms that no longer had a comfortable place in the Protestant home? In the first case, the reuse of the initials might have been a defiant act of preservation; in the second, it might have been the by-product of a compliant act of abolition. The fact that the text contained all the right words and none of the wrong ones (including the Act of Uniformity), and that the Tudor rose features prominently in its

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decorations, suggests that it might have belonged to a Protestant with traditional tastes in book design rather than a church papist sneaking the old religion in through the back door. Either way, to the extent that the recycled initials turn the Book of Common Prayer back into a book of hours, they might have been sufficient to get its user in trouble— though readers of the Bishops’ Bible had to get used to satyrs with erections, and a large initial C used in the 1615 Book of Common Prayer depicts Jove with Ganymede in his lap. Both the size and the setting would have been important—smaller images were often untouched while larger ones were excised, and both Lutherans and Laudians would have been more tolerant of ‘‘idolatrous’’ images. And while modern readers would tend to associate the cutting up of old books—especially those of a religious nature—with the destructive zeal implied in the ‘‘defacing and abolishing’’ called for by the 1549 act against old prayer books, the use of scissors and paste was by no means inherently sacrilegious in the sixteenth century. It played a more central role in Tudor and Stuart textual culture than we have tended to realize, and is in fact part of a very long tradition of cutting and pasting with the best and even holiest of intentions. It extends back into the Middle Ages: Stella Panayotova has identified an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite Bible featuring marginal illustrations cut from a twelth-century Magna glossatura.38 It continues in the early age of print: alongside his role in editing the great Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, the humanist physician Hartmann Schedel pasted many early printed images into albums, adding text around them and sometimes coloring them;39 and Mary Erler’s important account of ‘‘Pasted-In Embellishments in English Manuscripts and Printed Books’’ examines a series of examples from the first half-century of print culture in England. In Erler’s account, religious texts in this period are far from immune to such radical modification: prayer books were evidently among the most common recipients of visual embellishment with components taken from other texts.40 Indeed, Ursula Weekes suggests that this sort of textual modification was long associated with the devotional work of women in religious communities. Among her examples is a striking book of hours in Middle Dutch, written about 1470, with a series of engravings sewn onto the parchment leaves using red and green silk thread—turning ‘‘the relevant folios into three dimensional, embroidered objects.’’41 Such practices were not only alive and well in the reign of Charles I but they were taken to a new level by the women of Nicholas Ferrar’s Anglican lay community at Little Gidding, whose famous biblical ‘‘concordances’’ or ‘‘harmonies’’ formed an important part of their daily devotional routine. These exquisite volumes were composed by cutting several copies of the four Gospels into separate lines, phrases, and even

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single words, and then pasting them into a new order to form a unified, continuous story—which was then illustrated with images gathered from various sources (some of which were, in fact, composed of parts of several prints cut up and rearranged to form a new whole).42 By 1633, word of these ‘‘rare contrivements’’ had reached the king himself and he asked to have one sent to him. After many months of silence, Charles sent one of his men to the anxious Ferrar, and he reported that the king liked it so much he had annotated it in his own hand—and would only agree to return it if they ‘‘would make him one for his daily use.’’ Ferrar agreed and the king’s man returned the borrowed work, and the household marveled not just at the presence but also at the nature of the king’s marginalia: ‘‘The book being opened, there was found, as the gentleman had said, the king’s notes in many places in the margin; which testified to the king’s diligent perusal of it. And in one place, which is not to be forgotten . . . having written something . . . he puts it out again very neatly with his pen. But that, it seems, not contenting him, he vouchsafes to underwrite, I confess my error: it was well before (an example to all his subjects): I was mistaken.’’ The royal commission was completed within a year and it pleased the king so much that he immediately requested a second volume, a harmony this time not of the Gospels but of the stories of biblical kings. When it finally arrived, Charles declared it one of his prize possessions: ‘‘I will not part with this diamond, for all those in my jewel-house. For it is so delightful to me, and I know the virtues of it will pass all the precious stones in the world. It is a most rare crystal glass, and most useful.’’43 As this story suggests, the physical skill and visual ingenuity involved in the Little Gidding volumes are exceptional—but they hark back to the textual productions of late medieval nuns and anticipate the later craze for extra-illustrated religious and historical books44 as well as Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to cut and paste his way to a better Bible.45 More important, they are very much of a piece with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century vogue for creating hybrid miscellanies of printed and manuscript fragments. Weekes, Driver, Erler, and other scholars of early engraving have documented the widespread production of printed images to be inserted into other texts—both written and printed. And in his account of the prison notebook compiled by the Yorkshire Royalist Sir John Gibson during the Civil War, Adam Smyth observes that while ‘‘several scholars have turned their attention to handwritten additions to printed books . . . the related early modern practice of inserting, pasting or binding printed pages [and other textual extracts] . . . has been largely overlooked.’’46 The cutting up of initials and other ornamentation from medieval manuscripts—to create visual samplers or redeploy them in new compo-

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sitions—reached new heights (or depths, depending on your perspective) in the nineteenth century. The most spectacular example is undoubtedly that of the Victorian critic, collector, and provocateur John Ruskin, who subjected his considerable collection of medieval manuscripts to some fairly extreme treatment: Use was his only criterion and books which had ceased to interest him were sold or given away. The margins of a page, he thought, were not provided to frame the text, but as a place for him to make notes and textual criticism. . . . And if any book was too tall to fit its shelf, Ruskin did not hesitate to take a saw and cut off the head and tail! . . . The manuscripts did not stand safely on his shelves. He annotated them copiously or broke them up, framing some pages, giving others away to his friends or students. ‘‘Missals,’’ he wrote, ‘‘for use, not for curiosities.’’ On 30 December 1853 he noted in his diary ‘‘cut some leaves from large missal’’; on 1 January ‘‘put two pages of missal in frame,’’ and two days later, ‘‘cut missal up in evening—hard work.’’47

Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe’s recent exhibition ‘‘Medieval Illumination in the Modern Age’’ puts Ruskin’s (ab)used books in context. Among their exhibits are the Burckhardt-Wildt album, a scrapbook of ornamental strips excised from the foliated borders of illuminated manuscripts and pasted into shapes such as classical urns, and another album from the household of Phillip A. Hanrott in which initials cut from a Carmelite missal were used to spell the names of Hanrott’s children.48 Was our Book of Common Prayer created with a mentality closer to that captured by these examples or to that of the Little Gidding community? Without further evidence, it is impossible to say. The ethical and historical complexities that accompany the cutting up of texts have been explored in another recent catalogue, from the Caxton Club’s 2005 exhibition on the so-called ‘‘leaf book’’—a somewhat paradoxical tradition in the history of connoisseurship where deluxe studies of rare early printing were published in limited editions for collectors and accompanied by an original page (or leaf ) cut from the book being venerated. As Christopher de Hamel explains, from one view this practice involved the destruction of one book ‘‘so that its pieces might be used to ornament or improve another book’’—indeed, the destruction of the very book being commemorated by those other books.49 From another view, though, this is just a bibliographical variant of the age-old practice of ‘‘relic-collecting.’’50 And while Paul Needham has rightly decried the breaking up and rebinding of early collections of Caxton imprints as a profound ‘‘failure of historical imagination,’’51 it is entirely possible that our recycled medieval initials represent the product of a different kind of historical imagination, one with an equally profound desire to keep in touch with the past and a deep-seated investment in the religious power of illuminated letters.

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If it is difficult to interpret the motivation behind the apparently violent act of cutting up books, it is also easy to overstate the spread and success of the image-purging program of the iconoclasts. While traditional images retained their place in the furniture and decoration of a surprising number of post-Reformation churches (as Eamon Duffy showed in his pioneering work The Stripping of the Altars), Protestant books also retained their dependence on traditional visual strategies. Ian Green explains that the 1569 and 1578 prayer books published by John and Richard Daye were ‘‘heavily decorated in a manner found in many earlier printed French primers, with selected scenes from Christ’s life and Old Testament prefigurations of the same, gesticulating prophets . . . and the medieval dance of death/ . . . all flanked by architectural, floral, and grotesque ornaments. The result, suggested Helen White, ‘must have looked to any informed reader like a resurrection of the old Primer.’’’52 And he goes on to observe that ‘‘it is perhaps a relic of the primer’s hold that devotional works were much more likely to have a woodcut or engraving attached to them than any of the other genres. . . . There is a certain irony here, and presumably a selling point too, in that the primers in the hands of ordinary laymen before and immediately after the Reformation had been generally plain, but under Mary and again from the late 1560s readers of middling rank were quite likely to have a devotional manual with at least some illustrative stimuli.’’53 These stimuli served several possible functions. Duffy has suggested that the ‘‘ornamentation that most primers contained would have established for their readers the fact that they were, in the first place, sacred objects . . . channels of sacred power independent of the texts they accompanied.’’54 But they also served to structure the text—particularly before running titles and chapter headings became standard—helping the reader to find his way around and to find his way back to particular sections. It is instructive, once again, to read forward from the Middle Ages, where there was a long and lively tradition of intermingling words and images—in books of devotion but also other texts involving meditation and memory, from historical chronicles to legal decretals.55 And while the use of images for mnemonic and didactic purposes has generally been associated with unlettered readers still making the transition from orality to writing, these functions are still operative in the margins of books in contexts where textual and even typographical literacy were well advanced. It is worth recalling, further, that the Protestant prayer book itself retained a number of features—both visual and verbal—from the traditional liturgy: for the more zealous reformers, indeed, it did not go far enough in removing the devotional residue from England’s Catholic

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past.56 In her important work on so-called church papists, Alexandra Walsham has reminded us that This was a context in which meaningful religious distinctions were only gradually evolving, an age in which those deceptively neat denominational labels we are so tempted to employ were profoundly anachronistic. The term ‘‘church papist’’ was one symptom of this state of flux. Identifying a sector of the population that occupied a kind of confessional limbo, it was stretched to designate a bewildering variety of opinions and attitudes, a wide spectrum of positions and stances. . . . Clear-cut divisions between ‘‘Catholicism’’ and ‘‘Protestantism’’ did not pass into being in rural and urban localities as smoothly or rapidly as the legislation of [Elizabeth’s first] year: for several decades, continuity may have been more marked than change.57

And these continuities can even be found in the design of the new prayer book. It has not, I think, been observed that the use of decorative initials in the Protestants’ printed Book of Common Prayer is itself conspicuously ‘‘retro’’: when Elizabeth issued a revised prayer book in 1561, the frequency and range of initials increased to the point where it rivals even the most fanciful pages of our manuscript.58 It is not surprising, then, that among the seven instructions given to the printer for the wholesale revision of the prayer book in 1661—telling him to ‘‘Set a faire Frontispiece at ye beginning of ye Booke,’’ to ‘‘Page the whole Booke,’’ and to ‘‘Adde nothing. Leave out nothing. Alter nothing, in what Volume soever it be printed. Particularly; never cut of[f] ye Lord’s prayer . . . with an [‘]&c[’] but . . . print them out at large’’—was this telling item: ‘‘Print noe Capital Letters with profane pictures in them.’’59 The retrofitting of the Elizabethan prayer book (and one final feature in our manuscript) is easiest to see not so much in the battle over contested sections of the liturgy but in the temporal frame that was put around them: the Book of Common Prayer, like the book of hours before it, prescribed a structure and sequence for readings from the Bible and Psalter and contained a calendar for special services and holidays for the entire year—both books made time itself holy.60 But if the traditional prayer book represented ‘‘Time Sanctified,’’ then the fate of the calendar in the Tudor prayer book is a story of time desanctified and partially resanctified. In the traditional Catholic primers leading up to the Reformation, almost every day in the calendar had a particular saint attached to it. These names became some of the earliest and most persistent targets of the Protestant Reformers, and they were steadily weeded out from the calendar: when the first Book of Common Prayer was published in 1549 they were almost completely purged from the calendar. Not surprisingly, they were fully restored in the Catholic primer issued by Queen Mary in 1555. The first Elizabethan prayer book of 1559 heralded a return to the virtually saint-less days of Edward VI, but over the

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next few years she moved steadily away from the ‘‘godly purity and simplicity’’ desired by the more zealous reformers. In 1560 she issued a Latin prayer book in which most of the saints were restored; this calendar is positively medieval and remains the most ‘‘sanctified’’ calendar ever to appear in an Anglican prayer book. Finally, in her English Book of Common Prayer of 1561, she settled on a compromise, with some saints finding their way back onto the calendar alongside the astrological information, dates of legal terms, and accession anniversaries of the English monarchs—and they stayed there for nearly a century. So while David Cressy is right that Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I gradually secularized and nationalized the calendar, replacing religious festivals with commemorations of historical events, and while Damian Nussbaum points out that Foxe put a provocative calendar in his Book of Martyrs with saints replaced by Protestant martyrs, many of Elizabeth’s subjects in 1561 would have felt she was reversing this process.61 But our manuscript of 1560–62 was produced by or for one of that other group of subjects, who were not ready to do away with the saints; and when it came time to copy the calendar, our scribe followed the recently revised calendar of 1561—though it is also worth noting that he did not add saints to the standard list, which some annotators did in their Books of Common Prayer, a practice that has allowed scholars of medieval books of hours to connect specific volumes with regions associated with particular saints.62

The Problem of Exceptional Evidence This odd volume has forced us to survey a wide range of possible beliefs and behaviors and has ultimately presented us with an object that unsettles some of the easy oppositions that we often fall back on to make sense of this complex and even confused moment in the history of books, readers, and religion. It is a book that is itself stubbornly transitional, almost uncannily in-between: it takes us across the traditional divide between script and print but also into a number of other early Elizabethan middle grounds (to recall Hindman’s useful phrase)—between Catholic and Protestant, medieval and Renaissance, public and private, professional and amateur, production and consumption. I have not found firm answers for many of the questions posed at the outset of this chapter; but, while there are few activities as satisfying to the scholar as solving mysteries, sometimes our historical investigations are more productive when we cannot pin things down. Our uncommon Book of Common Prayer presents itself as an exemplary instance of what Edoardo Grendi has called a ‘‘normal exception’’ (in an innovative program for combining microhistory and social history that has much to

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offer historians of reading).63 In their useful gloss on this concept, Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni argue that ‘‘a truly exceptional . . . document can be much more revealing than a thousand stereotypical documents. As Kuhn has shown, it is the marginal cases that bring the old paradigm back into the arena of discussion, thus helping to create a new paradigm, richer and better articulated. These marginal cases function, that is, as clues to or traces of a hidden reality, which is not usually apparent in the documentation.’’64 This, I would suggest, is this is the benefit—as well as the challenge—of working out from a single, seemingly peculiar text instead of starting with an argument and looking for examples that will illustrate it. Even when we cannot know how representative a single object or practice is, it can shed light on larger logics (structural, social, and symbolic) that only can be glimpsed in their particular manifestations.65

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Part III

Remarkable Readers

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Chapter 6

John Dee’s Columbian Encounter

On at least two occasions, the Elizabethan polymath John Dee (1527– 1609) encountered the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506). The medium was Columbus’s son Ferdinand, and they met in the margins of Ferdinand’s famous Historie . . . della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo [History . . . of the Life & Deeds of the Admiral Christopher Columbus], one of the most important accounts of Columbus’s epoch-making voyages to the New World.1 Dee purchased the work sometime after its long-delayed publication in 1571—and quite possibly in that very year, when he made a short visit to the Continent to acquire furnishings for his laboratory.2 He digested it carefully, entering several sets of marginal notes that are thorough even by his own exceptional standards: Julian Roberts has recently described it as ‘‘one of the most heavily annotated of all Dee’s books.’’3 In 1583 the book was recorded, under a garbled title, in the library inventory he had prepared before leaving again for the Continent—this time for six years.4 When he returned to London he found that his library had been spoiled by some of his former associates, including the Arctic explorer, pirate, and navigational theorist John Davis. Dee managed to recover some of the missing items, but over the next few decades the collection he had so painstakingly assembled was broken up: this particular volume drifted away and, after a later owner obliterated the signature on the title page, it lost all connection with Dee. It ultimately washed up in the collections of the British Library, where I stumbled upon it—as so often happens, in both library research and voyages of exploration—while looking for something else.5 Columbus had set out from Spain expecting that his westward course would take him clear across to the eastern coast of Asia; when he made his landfall in the Caribbean, his sources led him to suppose that he was somewhere near Japan. When I called up the British Library’s three copies of the Life of Columbus, the reader I was looking for was not Dee: the person who encouraged me to examine these books had vague memories of marginalia by Gabriel Harvey. Two copies turned out to be virtually note-free, but in the third I found extensive marginalia that were

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unmistakably in Dee’s hand and style—a realization that filled me with apprehension as well as excitement, since my own study of Dee (with its detailed assessment of his contribution to English maritime expansion) had already gone to press. In the final section of that study I tried to survey the primary and secondary sources pertaining to Dee’s place in the history of exploration. Following the lead of E. G. R. Taylor, D. W. Waters, and others, I argued that he did more than anyone in Elizabethan England to improve the foundation of the science of navigation and to apply the history of empire to the nascent territorial aspirations of the Crown.6 Throughout his career, he provided scholarly service to the voyages and publications that would gradually allow England to catch up with (and ultimately to surpass) its Continental rivals. In a series of treatises, maps, and conferences, Dee developed an expansionist program which he called ‘‘this British discovery and recovery enterprise.’’ Calling for both the discovery of new lands and the recovery of regions that were once arguably subject to the British crown, Dee eventually claimed for the queen a vast territory covering most of the water and much of the land in the northern hemisphere.7 Dee’s most concentrated work on this project falls between the years 1570 and 1583, and his most detailed and original writings on navigation and empire cluster around 1576 to 1578—the precise dates of Martin Frobisher’s three voyages to the Canadian Arctic, for which Dee served as the primary scholarly advisor.8 And the Frobisher venture provides the crucial context, I would suggest, for Dee’s Columbian encounter. More than eighty years after Columbus’s discoveries, and in a very different part of the world, Frobisher’s enterprise saw the first sustained contact between English explorers and North American natives9 and the first attempts at a permanent colony. Although they were unsuccessful on almost every level, they marked England’s belated entry into direct competition with Spain and (along with the more successful voyages of Sir Francis Drake in 1577–80) the beginning of its rise as an imperial power. We now tend to put the mental business of reading and the physical work of sailing in separate spheres, but geographical and textual exploration went hand in hand during this early period, and libraries played an important role in the launching and directing of voyages of exploration and colonization. This was true of Dee and his massive collection; but it was also true of Columbus himself. Recent work has revealed the extent to which his readings in a wide range of texts inspired and informed his New World encounter.10 The library he handed down to Ferdinand (who developed it into the largest private collection of the period) has been largely dispersed, but it still contains a number of books that belonged to Columbus and bear his marginal annotations.

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And in relating these readings to the two men’s often enigmatic texts and actions, scholars have turned to similar sources and analogues: a recent description of Columbus as ‘‘a Hermetic character’’ who ‘‘was aware, it would appear, of his existence on the cusp of two temporal worlds’’ would not be at all out of place in a book on Dee.11 Dee’s Columbian encounter, then, represents more than just an extended footnote to previous accounts of Dee’s life and library, and more than a curious and hitherto unknown chapter in the reception of Columbus in early modern England. This meeting in the margins of the book that Washington Irving called ‘‘the cornerstone of the history of the American continent’’12 provides the occasion for some new thinking about the influence of reading on cross-cultural contact and imperial ambition in the first age of exploration.

Reading Around Surviving books from Dee’s library suggest that he read actively in the 1570s on the geography of the Northeast and Northwest Passage and on the history of imperial ventures in both old and new worlds. In doing so, he first (re)turned to books he had acquired while studying on the Continent some thirty years earlier. In the summer of 1547 he made a short trip to the Southern Netherlands (‘‘to speake and conferr with some learned men, and chiefly mathematicians’’),13 and while there he made one of the earliest purchases for his library, Froben’s 1533 Greek edition of Arrian’s Periplus Ponti Euxini (Circumnavigation of the Euxine Sea).14 Flavius Arrianus was a Greek historian born ca. A.D. 96, who was appointed governor of Cappadocia by the Roman emperor Hadrian; and his Periplus is the learned and literary record of an administrative tour of duty around the Black Sea. As with the other books in what his library catalogue labels Historici libri ad navigationem pertinentes (Historical books related to navigation), Dee’s marginalia draw attention to the lengths of journeys from one place to another, the names of historical figures, a wide range of place names (particularly when they had become known by other names in the intervening centuries), and any mention of Britain—including one curious observation that ‘‘Brytish dogs did help Celtish Warriers agaynst theyr enemyes’’ (m1r). But his most active annotations occur whenever Arrian mentions the northern regions. In one place Dee tags a discussion of ‘‘Navigatio in Scythiam’’ (h4R), and in another he writes an elaborate note in English, Latin, and Greek to summarize Arrian’s description of the north—and in particular ‘‘The old manner of sayling’’ in it (e2r, bottom margin). Another classical geographer—Strabo—would play an even more formative role in the thinking of Dee, and a more direct role in his service

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to the Frobisher expeditions. In 1967, the Bibliothe`que Royale in Brussels acquired Dee’s copy of Strabo’s De situ orbis, published in Basel in August 1549.15 Dee had himself acquired it just a few months after it was published, during a period of postgraduate study at the University of Louvain; his note on the title page reads: ‘‘Joannes Deeus 1549. Decembre. Lovanij. 10s.’’ He turned to it several times with pen in hand, writing (over the course of several decades) some 2,400 marginal notes. Strabo’s Geography, as it is now generally known, was one of the key texts during the Renaissance for the study of the terraqueous globe and its application in voyages of exploration. Its emphasis on the interrelation of different disciplines involved in apprehending the wider world (mathematics, climatology, astrology, rhetoric, politics, and so on) fit neatly with the ‘‘cosmopolitical’’ outlook of Dee and his contemporaries. As Strabo put it on the opening page (in a passage eagerly underlined by Dee), ‘‘wide learning, which alone makes it possible to undertake a work on geography, is possessed solely by the man who has investigated things both human and divine—knowledge of which, they say, constitutes philosophy.’’16 And on a more practical level, Strabo sat alongside Ptolemy as the primary classical guide to the limits of the known world, those boundaries which voyages like Frobisher’s set out, self-consciously, to extend. When Frobisher’s men fixed their sights on the region now known as Baffin Bay, they named it ‘‘Meta Incognita,’’ or ‘‘Unknown Limit’’—quite possibly influenced by Dee’s reading of Strabo.17 The opening pages of the Geography immediately suggest its relevance to both Dee and Frobisher: in the sixth section of the first chapter, Strabo discusses Homer’s use of the term ‘‘arctic circle.’’ Dee underlines this passage and adds a gloss of his own, paying particular attention to the mention of the people of the north. Where Strabo writes, ‘‘Furthermore, Homer knows of the men who live farthest north; and while he does not mention them by name . . . he characterises them by their mode of life, describing them as ‘nomads’, and as ‘proud mare-milkers, curd-eaters, and a resourceless folk’’’ (sig. a2r), Dee notes, ‘‘Gentes septentrionales, Homero haud ignote’’ (Of the northern people, Homer was not ignorant). And Dee’s annotations are especially dense in the sections relating to the location and nomenclature of ‘‘Britannia’’ and ‘‘Thule.’’ In book 2, chapter 4, section 1, Strabo describes the controversial testimony of the Greek explorer Pytheas (ca. 380 to ca. 310 B.C.) about the quasi-mythical region of Thule, specifically citing ‘‘his story . . . about those regions in which there was no longer either land properly so-called, or sea, or air, but a kind of substance concreted from all these elements, resembling sea-lungs—a thing in which, he says, the earth, the sea, and all the elements are held in suspension’’ (sig. i1r).18 In one of the volume’s most remarkable annotations, Dee speculates

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that Pytheas was, in fact, describing icebergs of the sort encountered by Frobisher and his men. He underlines the entire passage and writes in the margin, ‘‘I think it was the Mowntaynes of Ise; somme of a myle long; some longer; and 40 or 50 faddom high such as Owen Griffith saw anno 1576 and Mr Christopher Hall.’’19 Griffith (or Griffin) and Hall were pilots on Frobisher’s ships, and Dee had been brought in before their departure to give them their geographical and navigational bearings. This note is the only evidence we have that they reported back to him upon their return. The primary reason for the Elizabethans’ optimistic exploration of the frozen north was their need to avoid routes and regions already claimed by explorers and described by writers across the Channel—and particularly on the Iberian Peninsula. But the English read the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian accounts with interest (and envy), and Dee was among his country’s most active collectors (and annotators) of these texts. We do not know if Dee owned a copy of Richard Eden’s pioneering Decades of the New World (1555), the first English collection of the voyages of Columbus and his successors; but for serious scholars the essential publication was Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s three-volume Italian anthology, Navigationi et viaggi (Navigations and Voyages, printed in Venice between 1559 and 1565), and Dee’s copy of this hefty collection surfaced at the library of Trinity College, Dublin, during a conservator’s survey in 1997.20 There are no signatures on the title pages, but there are extensive notes in Dee’s hand in English, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, employing most of his characteristic marks (including manicules, trefoils, initialed notes, and brackets featuring faces in profile): in fact, Julian Roberts suggests that it has ‘‘probably gained the title of Dee’s most heavily annotated work.’’21 The notes have much to teach us about Dee’s personal interests and experiences: they are a forceful reminder of his ease with Italian, and one note in Oviedo’s Generale et naturale historia dell’Indie testifies to his familiarity with Italy, recording his (previously unknown) presence in Rome in July 1563.22 But the text is even more valuable for what it reveals about what England’s leading advocate of a British Empire knew and thought about earlier voyages by other nations, since it served as the sixteenth century’s most important textbook on the history and theory of territorial expansion. Ramusio’s three volumes systematically cover the known world: volume 1 is devoted to Africa, India, and Asia, and it features accounts of Leo Africanus, Vasco de Gama, Amerigo Vespucci, and Antonio Pigafetta; volume 2 is devoted to the Near East, the Ottoman Empire, and the East Indies, and its key figures are Marco Polo and Pietro Quirino; and volume 3 is devoted to the New World, with crucial narratives about the travels of Columbus and Corte´s.23 And if Ramusio’s

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tables of contents are silent about the icy seas explored by the English, the texts he publishes are not: Dee unfailingly highlights discussions of northern routes to Asia and the geographical, climatic, and ethnographic features of the Orient. In one of Ramusio’s summary discourses in Volume 2 Dee notes, ‘‘Our Northeast Voyages,’’ ‘‘Northwest Passage by the Northen sea to Cathay,’’ and ‘‘Note for the Northwest Passage’’ (aaa4v, aaa5v); and in Ramusio’s general preface to volume 3 Dee tags a passage with ‘‘To Catay by the Northwest’’ and adds underlining, brackets, and a manicule for emphasis (A4v). Ramusio presented Dee and his countrymen with much more recent navigational and cartographic data than that found in classical texts such as Strabo, Arrian, and Ptolemy. Dee keeps one eye on the maps of his old friends Mercator and Ortelius and another on the instructions he would give to England’s explorers as he picks out all geographical detail that either reinforces or challenges the established record: • ‘‘These names are otherwise now’’ (1:U3v). • ‘‘From Kithay lake to Cambalu, two months iornay: after 24 myle in 56 daye: will be 1344 miles: which in the parallell of 46: do take vp allmost 32 degrees of longitude: but Cambalu being in 154: will leave the lake in Kithay in 122. and there abowts hath Gerardus [i.e., Gerard Mercator] set it’’ (1:aaa5r). • ‘‘Ortelius hath this point Iaquete not well: for it shold be in the Ile next to Diu. . . . Note that there are two Capes called by the name of Iaquette: one at the persian gulph mowth and an other against Indus mowth’’ (1:ccc3v). • ‘‘This latitude differeth much from the Chart of Asia of Ortelius in Bochar. his Latitude which there is put almost 48 and longitude 107. deduct 10’’ (2:15r). • ‘‘Here doth Ortelius Map differ from this order of the Cities’’ (I2:B5r). • ‘‘This cannot be verifyed in Mercators map’’ (2:F1r). • ‘‘Hee wold haue vs think that these Iles [are] ner the Hesperides of the Ancients but it is not so’’ (3:L5v). And he regularly summarizes the time it takes to travel certain distances under particular conditions: • ‘‘In a day and a half with a great wynde from Adem to Bebel: 108 myles. But with contrary wynde from Bebel to Zidem in 25 days. myles 72’’ (1:z5r). • ‘‘Betwene Cambalu and Quinsai, 15 days iornay: it is far more’’ (1:uu3v).

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• ‘‘750 leagues in 25 dayes from the Canaries to Desiata, and from Desiata to Santo Domenico 150 Leagues. So is the totall summe of the Est and West course 900 Leagues: in the parallell of 27 1/2’’ (3:L6r). And finally, the trading activities and territorial possessions enabled by these voyages provided Dee with ample fodder for national comparisons, both positive and negative. Some of the Portuguese methods (such as the falsification of their maps to bring the Moluccas into their territory) provoke indignant notes such as ‘‘The wrong Title of the King of Portingale.’’ But in the face of Ramusio’s relentless record of Portuguese outreach, Dee can only muse, ‘‘What it is to be Masters at the Sea’’ (1:z4r). And as he looks back, with Ramusio, upon the enviable success of Columbus, we can almost hear his plea to Queen Elizabeth as he notes ‘‘The royall reward of a Noble and Discrete Discoverer of strange forreyn lands’’ (3:A5v).

Marking Columbus One of the most consistent features of Dee’s marginalia as a whole is their attention to the conditions of textual production and reception: he regularly notes any reference in the text to the author’s life as well as the authorship, ownership, or use of any other texts. The very first marginalia in the Life of . . . Columbus concern Ferdinand’s textual legacy. Next to the passage, ‘‘I, who had sailed with [Columbus] for some time, and had written of lesser things,’’ Dee jotted, ‘‘Note other bokes of this Author.’’24 But Dee was even more interested in Ferdinand’s ownership of books—not surprisingly, since Ferdinand was perhaps the most serious bibliophile of his day. He quickly abandoned his career as a colonial administrator to devote himself to book and print collecting and to the general advancement of learning; and by the 1520s the collection had evidently achieved almost universal coverage.25 A dedicatory epistle in Ferdinand’s Historie praised the collection in the following terms: ‘‘Ferdinand . . . left to the cathedral of Seville . . . a library that was not only very large but rich, full of the rarest works in all the sciences and regarded by all who have seen it as one of the most remarkable things in all Europe.’’26 Dee tagged the passage with the simple word ‘‘Bibliotheca,’’ but it must have had particular resonance at a time when he was attempting to create a similar collection on the banks of the Thames. These notes, like the ones in which Dee provided information about when and where an author lived, and where other related books could be obtained, owe much to the uncertainties of textual transmission in his day—especially the difficulty of identifying and accessing books in an age

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before lending libraries or national libraries and in which cataloguing was still very primitive. In the maritime sphere the textual record was even more uncertain. First, Dee knew how important it was—when places and phenomena were being observed, potentially, for the first time—for explorers to keep detailed records. Reading that ‘‘the Admiral was very careful to keep a journal of all that happened on the voyage: wind directions and currents, the distance run by each ship, and all that they sighted on the way,’’ Dee wrote in the margin, ‘‘Note what things are to be noted in a voyage by Sea.’’27 On more than one occasion Dee was responsible for briefing English mariners on precisely this practice and, in fact, played a significant role in the development of ships’ logs.28 Dee was especially interested in Columbus’s techniques for ensuring that reports of his discoveries would make it back home even if he did not. In chapter 36 Ferdinand cites a dramatic passage from his father’s log when, on 14 February 1493, a storm scattered Columbus’s ships: Then, with my thoughts in this whirl, I thought upon Your Highnesses, and considered some means whereby, even were I dead and the ship lost, you might get news of the success of my voyage. . . . Therefore I wrote on a parchment, as briefly as the state of things required, how I had discovered those lands as I had promised to do; the length of the voyage and the route thither; the goodness of the country and the customs of its inhabitants; and how I had left Your Highnesses’ vassals in possession of all I had discovered. This writing, folded and sealed, I addressed to your Highnesses with a written promise of 1,000 ducats to whoever should deliver it sealed to you. . . . I straightaway had a great wooden barrel brought to me, and having wrapped the writing in a wax cloth and put it in a cake or loaf of wax, I dropped it into the barrel, which I made secure with hoops and cast into the sea; and all thought this was an act of devotion.

Along the top of that page Dee wrote, ‘‘Note these Practices to saue his Letters and Aduertisements to the King of Castile.’’29 Geographical and navigational notations were themselves subject to uncertainty, as previously canonical texts and previously current maps were being rendered obsolete by new experiences.30 Not surprisingly, Dee’s marginalia display a constant concern with Columbus’s itinerary; with the distances he traveled and the means he used to measure them; and with the location of various points in the New World. For the Spaniards and their competitors, the most celebrated and contested location was, naturally, their first site of contact. Dee identified this spot in Ferdinand’s narrative by noting, ‘‘The first place of the Spaniards inhabiting and the Rutter [or directions] how to arrive at it.’’ In several places, Dee commented on Columbus’s mistaken landfall: he drew special attention to the passage, ‘‘[he] was mistaken in his belief that the first lands to which one would come would be Cathay and the empire of the Great Khan’’ (C3r). Given his own goal of finding a navigable northern route

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to Cathay—which was, after all, the initial purpose of Frobisher’s voyages—Dee was extremely attentive to Ferdinand’s summary of classical and medieval sources on the subject (particularly those that had led to Columbus’s mistake). Columbus’s reckonings—and Ferdinand’s accounts—were full of inconsistencies, and Dee was careful to note ‘‘A marvaylous error in Latitude’’ (T5v), a ‘‘great error in Mariners reckoning’’ (T5v), and a ‘‘Diuersitie in Reconing’’ (F7v). His own work on the science of navigation, especially in the polar regions, brought him up against the vexing problem of magnetic variation; and at several points he drew attention to ‘‘the variation of the Cumpas’’ (e.g., T5r, X3v). There was almost as much variation in Columbus’s place-names as in his reckoning; and in a string of notes Dee struggled to sort out the group of names apparently given to single islands, and the single names given to groups of islands. When Ferdinand names several ‘‘sub-polar islands’’ in chapter 9—such as Friseland, Greenland, and (most important for Dee’s claims on behalf of a British Empire) St. Brendan’s Isle—Dee’s pen was predictably active. Elsewhere I have discussed Dee’s reliance on, and propagation of, the myth that three hundred years before Columbus, the Welsh prince Madoc sailed to America and left behind a tribe of Welsh Indians.31 One of the main lines of proof for this surprisingly persistent myth was a perceived similarity between the Welsh language and certain Native American dialects. In Gwyn Williams’s fascinating account of this story, there is a chapter entitled, ‘‘Marginal Madoc’’32 —and Madoc makes several appearances in the margins of Dee’s Columbus (and in his Ramusio too33). In the bottom margin of sig. M7v, Dee speculated that the word ‘‘Zaunia’’ derived from ‘‘the Welsh pronunciation of Iohn,’’ and that ‘‘Huino’’ was ‘‘perhaps so named of some Owen which cam with Madoc ap Owen Gwynned.’’ When Ferdinand reported that the Indians recite the names of their ancestors, Dee found another Welsh parallel: ‘‘Note . . . custom of . . . rehersing the names of theyr parents . . . after the Welsh manner.’’ These linguistic fantasies notwithstanding, it should be clear that Dee’s concerns were remarkably pragmatic. There is very little attention, here, to prophecy or the supernatural—and, indeed, surprisingly little in the way of wonder, which Stephen Greenblatt has identified as the primary mode by which early modern Europeans apprehended the New World and its inhabitants.34 In his related annotations in Andre´ Thevet’s Cosmographie Universelle, by contrast, Dee was more clearly interested in novelties and curiosities, noting the people of Madagascar who live to the age of 160, ‘‘the first Invention of Letters Hieroglyphic,’’ and the people of Zipangu (Japan) who ‘‘eat flyes.’’35 There are a handful of ref-

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erences to the indigenous people’s beliefs in the spirit world (e.g., a page headed ‘‘Spirites appearing,’’ where Dee speculates that the apparition named ‘‘Goeiz’’ might be related to the English ‘‘Ghost’’ [Historie, R5r]), but Dee’s Columbian marginalia focus above all on the behavior of the Spaniards and their practical methods and ‘‘policies’’—perhaps the most commonly used word in the notes (after, of course, ‘‘nota/ note’’ itself ). Some of these concern the voyages themselves, as in Dee’s notes on the number of men on the ships or the reward for the first man who spotted land. Others concern the establishment of a colony on that land: he notes descriptions of forts and deliberations about leaving men behind. Most, however, are policies for successful interaction with, and exploitation of, the indigenous population. Strabo had perpetuated an opposition between barbaric and civilized cultures that must have been especially useful for those who were backing early colonial ventures.36 On sig. k4r of his copy of the Geography, for instance, Dee draws attention to ‘‘The Converting of Barbarousnes into Ciuilitie by good Pollicie.’’ And in the Historie Dee continues to chart this process, identifying tricks for securing the faith of the people, extracting information from them, and—what would become the most familiar colonial scenario of all—exchanging worthless trinkets for valuable commodities. A sickening number of Columbus’s practices that Dee labels ‘‘policies’’ entailed the forceful seizure of natives: ‘‘7 interpreters taken’’ (G6r), ‘‘12 indians taken’’ (H3v), ‘‘a woman gotten’’ (H7v), ‘‘An indian in a canoe taken’’ (H8v), and so on. This, along with the detailed discussions of how to procure the natives’ permission to leave men behind, and how many men were needed to keep that colony safe, takes us close, once again, to Frobisher’s own voyages, in which a total of four Inuit natives were seized (one of whom while still in his kayak), and which—had not a ship gone down carrying building materials and provisions—would have led to the first English winter colony in the New World. Frobisher’s venture is also invoked by Dee’s careful attention to any mention of gold. Gold was the master commodity and at least the indirect object of all European exploration, so it is not surprising to find Dee noting (as he had in Oviedo’s account in Ramusio) ‘‘a shew of gold’’ (H5v) and, later, a ‘‘great quantity of gold’’ (I5v). But, more specifically, Dee attended to the fact that gold was accidentally discovered on Columbus’s first voyage and that in subsequent voyages hired laborers from Spain were taken to mine the ore—a sequence of events that would be precisely replayed in the voyages of Frobisher, whose first expedition created an unprecedented gold rush and whose second and third voyages were equipped primarily as mining ventures.37 Not all of Dee’s notes were quite so ruthless about the domination of

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the New World. Annotations in the Historie and related volumes reveal Dee’s fascination with natural phenomena: at one place he noted, ‘‘Flying fish’’ in the margin (F6r), ‘‘Mighty great Tortuces [i.e., tortoises]’’ at another (P3r), and along the edge of another page he jotted, ‘‘Melons in two monthes grown; Cucumbers in 20 dayes; Wheat in a month’’ (O2v). He was also capable of a more sympathetic attitude toward the native population: he noted several descriptions of the people (especially those of Cuba, as opposed to the hostile ‘‘Caribi’’) as gentle, tractable, and apt to learn languages; and compared their social and religious institutions favorably to those of Europe. But one senses that this is less ethnographic admiration, of the sort found in Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), than an attempt to play up the atrocities committed by the Spanish conquistadores on an innocent population. Ferdinand was not especially concerned with screening out Spanish abuses (except those that directly implicated his father), and his text provided much fuel for Dee’s anti-Spanish sentiments. He identified several descriptions of what he labeled ‘‘ill rule’’ among the colonists, such as the point in the narrative when Columbus returned to Espan ˜ ola and ‘‘asked about the Christians he had left there and was told that some had died of sickness, some had separated from the rest, and . . . all had four or five wives apiece.’’38 Dee suggested in the margin of Q3v that the Spaniards were too harsh in punishing the Indians and too lenient with their own men, and observed that ‘‘The Indians [were] seduced by the Spaniards to vse violence.’’39 When Ferdinand suggested that ‘‘The Admiral would not permit his men to take anything . . . [so] that the Indians might not regard the Christians as thieves,’’ Dee quipped, ‘‘Wel done if you had kept that rule allwayes.’’40 And when Ferdinand reported that some of the settlers had almost degenerated into cannibals themselves (‘‘some, like Caribs, proposed to eat the Indians aboard . . . and would have done it, too, if the Admiral had not forbidden it, saying that as . . . human beings, they should not be treated worse than others’’), Dee scathingly remarked, ‘‘Well sayd, if you allwayes made such account of them.’’41 But Dee saved his most vehemently critical, and explicitly political, outbursts for Ferdinand’s frequent assertions of Spain’s claims to territorial possessions in the New World. Dee was well aware of the obstacle the Spanish claims presented to his ‘‘discovery and recovery enterprise.’’ What he did with Ferdinand’s account is the textual equivalent of Francis Drake’s piratical raids on Spanish ships: he learned what he could about the various methods of taking possession (the legal procedures, military strategies, ritual dedications, and so on) before refuting the validity of their application to Spain.42 On L5v Dee wrote along the top margin, ‘‘A more close and just title by the Popes gift then by force of

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sword: neyther good, as it was vsed,’’ and alongside the text on that page he entered two simple words—‘‘Possession’’ and ‘‘Noe,’’ echoing a marginal note from several pages back, ‘‘No good Possession.’’ Ferdinand’s text ends with a brief section, probably added by the translator, which describes Columbus’s funeral and celebrates his legacy. On these last few pages Dee hung a final string of objections: ‘‘Note Lyes,’’ ‘‘Note this Aequivocation,’’ and ‘‘By what justice?’’ In the end, Dee could only match the text’s triumphant conclusion—‘‘History knows of no man who ever did the like, wherefore the world will ever remember the first discoverer of the West Indies’’—with a final, emphatic ‘‘Not true.’’

The Secrets of the Universe As in the sources I have discussed in my previous accounts, this encounter reveals a Dee who is more concerned with advocating pragmatic courses of action gleaned from his reading of historical texts than with establishing (or theorizing) anything like ‘‘a quasi-mystical, quasi-scientific, quasi-religious world order’’ based on his own prophecies.43 Nevertheless, history and prophecy are inextricably linked in Renaissance thought and its extensions into the New World. For Dee’s contemporary Tomasso Campanella, ‘‘the figure of Columbus ultimately possesses apocalyptic and broadly eschatological significance,’’ and his discovery of America promised the realization of biblical prophecies of a single, global community.44 There is evidence to suggest that Dee himself gave in to a ‘‘prophetic impulse’’ not unlike that which had driven Columbus into terra incognita. Djelal Kadir’s provocative study Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology describes Columbus’s ‘‘self-perceived role as providential agent with . . . a prophetic task,’’45 in which he is ‘‘the elect hero and privileged emissary to play out the last and climactic act of this cosmic theater.’’46 In a useful paper describing the 1583 angelic conversations that accompanied (and to some extent accounted for) Dee’s precipitous departure from England and almost complete withdrawal from the imperial projects he had helped to set in motion, Stephen Clucas finds a new strain of apocalyptic prophecy: ‘‘Dee hoped for a divine millennial comedy,’’ he concludes, ‘‘whose catastrophe would be universal forgiveness and the apotheosis of his nation.’’47 And important new work by Glyn Parry has argued that ‘‘the hidden centre’’ of Dee’s imperial writings from 1576 onwards contained an argument for ‘‘the creation of an apocalyptic empire by magical means, particularly the philosopher’s stone.’’48 When I first argued for Dee’s importance to Elizabethan imperial scholarship and politics, Dee was in need of being pulled away from those who could

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not look beyond occult discourses, mentalities, and roles; and I no doubt tugged too hard. New work on Dee, by Parry and others, will go some way toward producing a more complete and balanced account of Dee’s motivations—particularly in recovering the role of eschatology in his imperial ideology. Having said that, in tracing the parallels between Dee’s and Columbus’s projects, there is a danger of collapsing the differences between the two explorers, as well as obscuring the particular circumstances of their own lives. Kadir suggests that ‘‘the prophetic impulse exhorts peregrination to the peripheries, to the thresholds or liminalities of timespace. . . . It obliges one to live beyond one’s present and . . . in an untenable terrain.’’49 This certainly applies to the exploration represented by Dee’s angelic conversations as much as to the voyages of Columbus. But it is not much help in placing Dee’s encounter with Columbus; and I would suggest that we need to attend to a different and more precise set of time-space coordinates. Like England’s interest in the New World in general, Dee’s Columbian encounter was belated and secondhand. His exploration, which took place in the margins of a book in a library, was that of the armchair traveller. And it took place at a moment of significant national and personal insecurity. In a discussion of Columbus’s prophetic writings published the same year as Kadir’s, Valerie Flint offered a very different reading of his prophetic posture: she suggested that ‘‘the great need he had for a ‘finem honestum’ [honest end], a justifying higher motive for his pursuit of gold for his sovereigns and rewards for his family . . . might bring us to look now with new eyes upon the nature of Columbus’s attachment to the [apocalyptic and messianic messages].’’50 Other work on prophecy in the early modern period has stressed that it was usually deployed by marginal figures, and while it was usually concerned with some form of national reformation it was also a means of personal legitimation.51 We may not think of figures like Dee or, especially, Columbus as marginal figures in need of legitimation; but they felt, and expressed, this need acutely. Despite the status that their explorations granted them, both Dee and Columbus—like Doctor Faustus—were ultimately bound by the constraints of service. There is, in fact, one significant moment of sympathy in Dee’s Columbian marginalia, where he wrote ‘‘True’’ rather than ‘‘Not true’’—and it concerned the Columbus who was a frustrated advocate of exploration rather than the Columbus who became the celebrated prophet of empire. In the early chapters of the work, Ferdinand recounted how his father made the rounds of the European courts seeking a patron for his voyages—including England’s own King Henry VII (whose counselors Dee faulted for losing this opportunity, observing that ‘‘Consaylors [are]

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not allwayes bent to syft matters to the nearest of reasons’’ [E2v]).52 The passage which evoked Dee’s sympathetic agreement concerns Queen Isabella’s reluctance to invest; and it reads, ‘‘As for the foolish argument that it would discredit the Queen to have contributed to the project in case the Admiral did not fulfil his promises, he was rather of the opinion that the Sovereigns would be regarded as generous and high-minded princes for having tried to penetrate the secrets of the universe.’’53 The work of Mary Helms throws some light on the position that Dee and Columbus found themselves in, which was at once powerful and precarious. In her anthropological study, Ulysses’ Sail, Helms traces an association, in pre-modern cultures, between esoteric knowledge, travel, and socio-professional status: ‘‘To the extent . . . that geographically distant places, peoples and experiences are perceived . . . within essentially supernatural or cosmological contexts, then knowledge of, or acquaintance with, geographically distant places, peoples and things rightfully falls within the domain of political-religious specialists whose job it is to deal with ‘mysteries.’ ’’54 Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton have recently applied Helms’s insights to the world of Renaissance ambassadors;55 but they may be even more applicable to less official, more mysterious emissaries like Dee. In justifying his own ‘‘desire to speak with the dead,’’ Stephen Greenblatt explains that ‘‘the dead [have] contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. Many of the traces have little resonance, though every one, even the most trivial or tedious, contains some fragment of lost life; others seem uncannily full of the will to be heard.’’56 It may well seem that the traces of Dee’s marginal conversations with Columbus are more trivial and tedious than uncannily full of the will to be heard. They are bound to strike us as less compelling than the dramatic stories of exploration, piracy, and colonization that give the Elizabethan age (along with the exploits of the Virgin Queen herself ) much of its popular appeal. It should be clear from the Historie that Dee’s annotations—like those of most of his contemporaries—lack, for the most part, the psychological and creative intensity that modern readers have come to look for in engagements with texts. But if they are seen in the context of a range of transactions—if they are set alongside not only the texts that they annotated but the global explorations and professional negotiations they informed—such marginal texts do afford an unexpected intimacy and vitality. They may also take us closer to the important ways in which annotated books mediated both personal lives and power politics in Renaissance Europe.57 And, finally, in what they do, if not always in what they say, they may be an unexpected key to the ‘‘secrets of the universe’’ that Dee and Columbus tried to master and offer both to their patrons and to posterity.

Chapter 7

Sir Julius Caesar’s Search Engine

Give me, I say, keenness of apprehension, capacity for retention, subtlety of interpretation, ease in learning, and copious eloquence in speech: instruct my ingress, direct my progress, and perfect my egress. . . . Amen. —St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘Prayer Before Study,’’ inscribed by Sir Julius Caesar on the first page of his commonplace book1

To study readers’ notes is to work at the fringe of the tapestries that weave together books, lives, and events. Most of the threads now come away as single strands, providing us with glimpses of color or texture and the agents who produced them but with little sense of the larger patterns and bigger pictures to which they once belonged. Some notes can be put back into the spaces they once occupied, as we have seen, and some back into the hands that wrote them, holding the volumes and turning the pages where they are now preserved. In some texts, as with Dee’s copy of the Life of . . . Columbus, we can reconnect marginalia with the contexts that gave them meaning and value—cross-cultural contact, international competition, diplomatic negotiation, and the scholarly deliberation that could be brought to bear on all of them. And in some truly exceptional books, a set of notes can present us not simply with compelling evidence of a reader’s active preparation for informed participation in the public and private spheres but with nothing less than a map of their entire world of knowledge. One such case is the commonplace book of Sir Julius Caesar (1558– 1636), a staggeringly comprehensive digest of reading notes assembled over the course of some six decades by one of England’s leading lawyers. Caesar was born Julius Adelmare, the eldest son of Cesare Adelmare, an Italian doctor who emigrated to England around 1550 and served as one of the royal physicians, first to Queen Mary and then to Elizabeth I. In a retrospective paragraph on the last page of the commonplace book— the content and placement of which give the impression, at once, of a

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signature, colophon, and epitaph—the nearly octogenarian Caesar pays tribute to his father and explains the origin of his own remarkable name: ‘‘Julius Adelmare son of Caesar Adelmare, who was always . . . known and called by the name of ‘[Doctor] Caesar’ by the most illustrious Queens Mary and Elizabeth, and who transmitted the same appellation and surname to his offspring. . . . Julius Adelmare alias Caesar—aged 77, 1634.’’2 In becoming Julius Caesar, then, he was inheriting a royal nickname rather than adopting an imperial namesake—but that did not stop his contemporaries from invoking the great Roman emperor, sometimes to comic effect.3 Caesar also inherited his father’s courtly connections and commitment to civil service. After his apprenticeship in the household of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his studies at Oxford, Clement’s Inn, the Inner Temple, and the University of Paris (earning his bachelor’s degree in 1575, his master’s in 1578, and doctorates in common and civil law in 1581 and 1584), Caesar served three successive monarchs as member of Parliament, justice of the peace, judge of the Court of Admiralty, master of the Court of Requests, master of the Court of Chancery, chancellor of the exchequer, master of the rolls, and Privy Councillor.4 In the course of his long and distinguished career he was also appointed legal counsel for the Corporation of London (1583), governor of the Mineral and Battery Works (1594), and master of St. Katharine’s hospital (1596); and he sat on committees considering piracy (1581), subsidy and recusancy bills (1593), the organization of merchants and seamen (1597), maritime insurance (1601), the notorious divorce between the third Earl of Essex and Frances Howard (1613), the colonial government in Virginia (1624), and the state of legal provision for the poor (1631). For someone with Caesar’s educational background and professional profile, the fact that he created a commonplace book is (in itself ) neither surprising nor necessarily interesting. Walter Ong may have been speaking loosely when he suggested that ‘‘everybody used them’’ in Tudor England,5 but they were part of the basic textual training prescribed for humanist scholars, aspiring lawyers, and Bible readers alike—and Caesar was all of these things in turn.6 The period’s readers, writers, and speakers were well-trained in textual recycling, and one of their most powerful and pervasive tools was the commonplace book, a collection of notes (gleaned from reading and other forms of research) that the compiler might want to use at a later date. These quotations, paraphrases, anecdotes, opinions and other forms of information were gathered under more or less systematic headings—the loci communes or ‘‘common places’’ that give such collections their name—that would allow their compilers to retrieve a wide range of relevant materials for

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informed and eloquent discourse on any number of subjects.7 In its scope, size, and time span, however, Caesar’s book is unusual and quite possibly unique: Caesar habitually turned to this volume for nearly sixty years, compiling more than 1,200 densely packed pages of notes under exactly 1,450 headings.8 In the only major study of Caesar’s career, Lamar Hill described the book as ‘‘a singular document preserving a lifetime of readings, thoughts, and observations.’’9 Despite the obvious significance of such a resource for historians of reading, and of its compiler for historians of England, devoting a chapter to them in a study that is mostly concerned with marginalia calls for a word of justification. The entries in commonplace books are not generally classified as marginalia (even though they often serve the same function as annotations and aide-me´moire, while marginal notes, for their part, often do no more than signal commonplaces); and they do not tend to occupy the margins of books (except in the looser, more figurative sense in which all writing fills the space around earlier texts). But, as I have already argued, any detailed picture of Renaissance readers and their marks needs to extend beyond the margins into the other kinds of texts and tools they had at their disposal. And, strictly speaking, Caesar’s notes do qualify as marginalia since they are written in immediate proximity, and in direct response, to the text in a printed book— albeit one that is almost completely blank. There is a printed title page, preface, and index, but in the body of the text the only printing to be found is the line of subject headings that runs along the top of every fourth page, waiting for the reader to fill in the space below with pertinent notes as they come to hand and mind. Finally, like most marginalia and unlike most commonplace books (which are usually freestanding collections of quotations), many of Caesar’s notes are useless without the texts they refer to or cite from; the notes are often no more than short summaries with abbreviated references to manuscripts and printed books (most of which have since disappeared), making the volume, in effect, an annotated subject index to a great lost library. If all or even most of the books cited in the commonplace book could be found in his library, it clearly would have been counted among the largest private collections of his day. There is no complete catalogue of Caesar’s library, though his annotated shelflist of the manuscripts survives among his working papers, as does an inventory of books in his family’s native tongue.10 Described as ‘‘The calendar of my italien bokes,’’ this latter list includes Italian editions of key classical authors (Aristotle, Cicero, and Terence); a selection of Italian literature, both old and new (poems by Petrarch, Sanazarro, and others, plays by Parabosco and Stordito, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Masuccio’s Novelle); histories of regions and rulers; collections of letters

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and maps; guides to herbs, fortification, architecture, and agriculture; and an Italian history of English politics after the death of King Edward VI. This list suggests precisely the kind of collection—‘‘eclectic,’’ ‘‘pragmatic,’’ and multilingual—that Warren Boutcher describes as characteristic of the ‘‘scholar-courtiers’’ of Caesar’s generation.11 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the strictly structured formats for note-taking prescribed by Erasmus and other humanist educators were giving way to looser compilations that served the functions of practical manuals, business ledgers, family archives, private diaries, or simple scrapbooks.12 But books like the one used by Caesar were still based on traditional methods, with organizing principles based on predetermined subject headings. This particular example had an intermediate status, between the different methods of commonplacing as well as the different media of script and print: this volume has been aptly described by Ong as ‘‘no more than an index to what is not yet on hand but may be,’’ and by John G. Rechtien as ‘‘an anthology without contents.’’13 Rechtien also refers to it as ‘‘a manuscript in printed form’’—a status reflected in the British Library’s decision to catalogue and store its copy among its manuscripts rather than its printed books (even though it was created by a printer and is accordingly listed in the ShortTitle Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 [or ‘‘STC’’]).14 The printed headings—along with the preface that explains their rationale (‘‘A Preface on the Whole System, Purpose, and Use of Commonplaces’’) and the extensive index that makes them easier to find (‘‘An Alphabetical Table of Topics’’)—were the work of John Foxe, the great martyrologist of the English Reformation. And the book was manufactured by the London printer John Daye, who also published the text for which Foxe is best known, the Actes and Monuments (or The Book of Martyrs), as well as books from the scholarly circles of both Matthew Parker and John Dee.15 It began its life in a different printing house in a different country, that of Johannes Oporinus in Basel, where Foxe worked as a proofreader while in exile during the reign of Queen Mary. Oporinus issued Foxe’s Locorum communium tituli et ordines quinquaginta, ad seriem praedicamentorum decem descripti (Fifty Headings and Divisions of Common Places, Arranged According to the Series of Ten Predicaments) as a thick quarto in 1557. As the title indicates, Foxe’s original headings followed the traditional order of the ten Aristotelian predicaments (or categories)—substance, quantity, quality, relation, activity, passivity, time, place, situation, and appearance. This scheme may now look unlikely for the organization of a commonplace book, but Ann Moss has explained that, of the various models available, this was the one best suited to ‘‘the ability to read analytically [and] to argue effectively

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on controversial issues,’’ skills prized by Renaissance humanists and Reformation polemicists alike: [It] is essentially an application of the dialectical places of definition and inferential procedure to material which is either gathered under heads proper to the different disciplines of intellectual enquiry treated separately or is assembled under ‘‘common places,’’ that is to say heads or tituli which can be employed across the disciplines and collected together in a single volume. Foxe’s book combines dialectical structure (in his arrangement by predicaments) with the universality of commonplaces in this most general sense. The actual fabrication of discourse within this kind of rhetoric will draw on quotations thus assembled, in order to authenticate definitions of the subject under discussion and the parts into which it must be divided for debate; it will adduce objections and contradictions on specific points from opinions collected in the commonplace-book, and then oppose them and refute them from the same source; and all through the body of the composition will run a lively vein of exempla, similitudes, fables, sententiae, proverbs, apophthegmata, and supporting testimony from approved authorities.16

It is easy to imagine how such a method might lie behind a text such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (first published in 1595), which opens with an anecdote comparing horsemanship to government, describes the place of poetry in antiquity and discusses the names used for its creators in Latin (vates, or ‘‘seer’’) and Greek (poiein, or ‘‘maker’’), breaks the genre down into its constituent parts, rehearses and refutes the primary objections to poetry, and finally diagnoses the shortcomings of contemporary English writers. It would almost be possible to work in reverse and reconstruct the entries in the commonplace book that Sidney no doubt created and used as preparation for his writing.17 Foxe’s own preface serves, in fact, as the most immediate example of the kind of discourse generated by the method it advocates: what Foxe inevitably offers is a series of commonplaces on the topic of commonplaces. He begins with brief accounts of the necessity and utility of commonplace books and of the structure of this particular collection (a1r–a3v), offering quotations from Cicero’s Letters to Atticus and Phillipics (along with references to Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plutarch) as ‘‘exempla’’ (a4r–v). He devotes considerable space to exploring the differences between commonplaces and indexes on the one hand (a4r–v) and dialectical topics on the other (a4v–a5r). He praises the poets as sources of ‘‘flowers and sententiae’’ and also of ‘‘epithets’’ and other honorific titles worthy of emulation (a7v). By way of illustration he offers a variety of figures representing ‘‘diversity of opinion’’ (a8r) and, in the revised version of 1572, ‘‘inconstancy’’ (B1v)—including the shape-shfting Proteus, the dream-spinning Morpheus, the fantastical Chimerae, the two-faced Janus, the three-bodied Geryon, the chameleon

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(that changes its color to suit its surroundings), the panther and leopard (whose skin is variegated), and so on. And he ends on a more harmonious note by listing a series of commonplaces on the topic of civil and ecclesiastical obedience, backing them up with quotations from the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the Jurists (B4r–C1v). In 1572, Daye issued a new edition of the commonplace book, stretching it into a more spacious (if less portable) folio format. Foxe added many headings, dropped the Aristotelian trappings, and gave it the simpler title Pandectae locorum communium, praecipua rerum capita & titulos (A Compendium of Common Places, with the Heads and Titles of the Principal Things). Although it was directed primarily at preachers and students of theology, Foxe’s book had a far wider (indeed, almost encyclopedic) ambit: in the second half of the preface Foxe explains the value of commonplaces not just for the study of rhetoric and dialectic but also of history, nature, government, and law. And by extending Foxe’s headings and adding new ones of his own, Caesar created a collection that spoke to all of his diverse interests and activities—including those related to his legal practice, a field that was usually handled (as we shall see) in separate and more specialized collections. Foxe’s printed index provides page references for all of the 768 topics that appear in the running heads, and the first item, ‘‘Absolution,’’ sets the tone (Figure 29). The overwhelming majority of the entries come from the fields of religion and moral philosophy: Abstinence . . . Adultery . . . Ambition . . . Apocrypha . . . Baptism . . . Blasphemy . . . Charity . . . Christ’s Cross . . . Contrition . . . Corruption . . . Damnation . . . Discipline . . . Discord . . . Doctrine . . . Error . . . Extreme Unction . . . Fortune . . . Fraud . . . Fury . . . Glory . . . Good Works . . . Grief . . . Hospitality . . . Hypocrisy . . . Imposture . . . Indulgence . . . Liberty . . . Libido . . . Malice . . . Martyrdom . . . Mutability . . . Necessity . . . Patience . . . Pope . . . Providence . . . Reformation . . . Ritual . . . Sacrifice . . . Scripture . . . Sermon . . . Temperance . . . Tribulation . . . Tyranny . . . Vanity . . . Vigilance . . . Vocation . . . War . . . Wealth.

Readers could also find many of the more general terms used to describe the physical and intellectual worlds: ‘‘Agriculture . . . Anatomy . . . Antiquity . . . Arithmetic . . . Astronomy . . . Color . . . Curiosity . . . Dialectic . . . Eloquence . . . Figures of Speech . . . Grammar . . . Herbs . . . Imitation . . . Liberal Arts . . . Music . . . Nutrition . . . Optics . . . Physiognomy . . . Reason . . . Speed . . . Travel . . . Voice . . . Water . . . Wind . . . Wine.’’ Caesar nearly doubled Foxe’s list with 682 hand-written additions to the alphabetical index, first as addenda alongside Foxe’s printed words and then in a separate table of his own. Some simply echo and amplify Foxe’s original terms: ‘‘Archbishop . . . Bible . . . Cardinal . . . Conversion

Figure 29. Sir Julius Caesar’s additions to the index in John Foxe’s Pandectae locorum communium (1572).  British Library Board. All rights reserved. MS Additional 6038.

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. . . Credulity . . . Deacon . . . Decretal . . . Fallacy . . . Mercy . . . Prebend . . . Syndic’’ and so on. But many of Caesar’s extra headings speak to his specific professional concerns with topics related to legal and political administration: Admirals . . . Ambassadors . . . Archives . . . Bastards . . . Codicils . . . Conspiracies . . . Counselors . . . Debts . . . Deportations . . . Depositions . . . Duels . . . Exchanges . . . Executions . . . Exonerations . . . Expenses . . . Favorites . . . Forestallments . . . Immunities . . . Incorporations . . . Jurisdictions . . . Libels . . . Mandates . . . Monopolies . . . Parasites . . . Petitions . . . Pirates . . . Privileges . . . Prohibitions . . . Rents . . . Restorations . . . Salaries . . . Shipwrecks . . . Sodomites . . . Stipulations . . . Surrogates . . . Tergiversators . . . Usufructs . . . Vagabonds . . . Victuals . . . Violated Tombs.

And some, finally, provide intriguing glimpses of more peculiar preoccupations: ‘‘Apparitions . . . Cabala . . . Castrati . . . Drugs . . . Enigmas . . . Giants . . . Iconomachy . . . Melancholy . . . Orthography . . . Ornaments . . . Perversity . . . Procrastination . . . Prognostication . . . Simulation . . . Tears . . . Visions.’’ If the whole Renaissance was in John Dee’s library, as Frances Yates once suggested, this extraordinary volume was its reader’s—or user’s—guide.18 And for a glimpse of how a particularly intrepid reader might use such a book to explore and map the Renaissance world, we can take our magnifying glass to the memoranda on one of the 1,200 pages in Caesar’s copy (Figure 30). Foxe devoted folio 124r (133r) to the area suggested by his printed heading, ‘‘Curiosity. The Curious Arts.’’ Caesar both extended and inflected Foxe’s general category by adding a few headings of his own: ‘‘Polypragmosyne’’ [Greek for ‘‘desire to do or discover things that go beyond one’s allotted role in life’’],19 ‘‘Alchemy,’’ ‘‘Alchemists,’’ and ‘‘The Cabbalistical Arts.’’ The range of issues he associated with this topic can be seen in the summary headings that run down the left margin of the notes he has entered: ‘‘What is the art of alchemy’’ (which cites a Latin definition from Ramon Lull’s Practica), ‘‘What is the art of cabala’’ (with a passage from the same author’s De auditu cabbalistico), ‘‘Curiosity in studies breeds curiosity in the commonwealth and in religion’’ (exemplified by an English passage from Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster admonishing students to tie themselves firmly to the established classics: ‘‘Hee that can neither like Aristotle in Logicke and philosophie, nor Tullie in rhethoricke and eloquence, will from theise steps likely enowgh presume by like pride to mount hier to the misliking of greater matters; that is, either in religion to haue a dissentious head, or els in the common wealth to haue a factious hart’’), ‘‘Against curiosity in the business of the prince’’ (with a portable warning from Lyly’s Euphues: ‘‘As the foolish Eagle that seing the sunne coveteth to build her

Figure 30. Caesar’s notes on ‘‘curiosity’’ in Foxe’s Pandectae locorum communium (1572).  British Library Board. All rights reserved. MS Additional 6038.

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neast in the sunne: so some youth, which viewing the glory and gorgiousnes of the court, longeth to know the secrets of the court’’), and ‘‘The curiosity of blasphemous papists’’ (with a passage in French from ‘‘Apol. Herod.,’’ that is, Henri Estienne’s Apologie pour Herodote´ [Paris, 1566]). Caesar was working at the very cusp of a new phase in the history of knowledge, where new disciplines and objects were turning curiosity into a virtue instead of (or as well as) a vice.20 But for Caesar—as for most writers from antiquity to the sixteenth century—the knowledge and behaviors it generated were generally to be avoided rather than admired. As his sequence of increasingly negative summaries indicates, Caesar associated curiositas with the sins of superstition, pride, meddling, and overreaching. He accordingly made a thorough search for places— ‘‘even in the Holy Scriptures’’—where ‘‘Curiosity is condemned.’’ He begins with some references derived from the Natural Theology of the Catalan theologian Raymond Sebond,21 and then compiles a long list of Biblical citations: Exod[us]. c[hapter].19. v[erses]12.21. [‘‘And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall surely be put to death . . . . And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.’’] . . . 1 Corinth[ians]. c.2 v.2 [‘‘For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’’] et 2 Corinth. c.12. v.2 et seq. [‘‘And I knew a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) . . . How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.’’] . . . Colos[sians]. c.2. v.18. [‘‘Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.’’] et 1 Thessal[onians]. c.5. v.1 [‘‘But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you.’’] et 2 Thessal[onians] . . . c.3. v.11. [‘‘For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.’’] et 1 Timoth[y]. c.1. v.4. [‘‘Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies . . . rather than godly edifying which is in faith.’’]22

These general quotations culminate in a list of Biblical figures who can serve as exempla, or cautionary tales: Heva [Eve]. Genes[is]. c.3. v.5.6. [‘‘For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’’] . . . Bethsamites. 1.Sam[uel]. c.6. v.19. [‘‘And he smote the men of Bethshamesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord.’’] . . . Herodes [Herod]. Luce. [Luke] c.23. v.8. [‘‘And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad . . . and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.’’] Apostoli [Apostles]. Acto [Acts] c.1. v.7. [‘‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons,

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which the Father hath put in his own power.’’] Epicuri et Stoici Philosophi [Epicureans and Stoic Philosopher; in Acts]. c.17. v.20. [‘‘For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.’’] Ephesi [Ephesians; in Acts]. c.19. v.19. [‘‘Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.’’]

And he concluded—as he did with almost every topic in the book—with a grab bag of ‘‘Materia, Sententiae, Regulae’’ (Materials, Aphorisms, and Rules) on the subject, with still more references to the Bible, along with the Church Fathers, the printed commonplace books of Peter Martyr and Juan Lopez, Plutarch’s Moralia, Bishop Joseph Hall’s satirical ‘‘character of a curious man or Polypragmon,’’ along with his ‘‘Ethics of Salomon,’’ treatises by William Perkins on incantation and vocation, and classic works by Vives and Bacon. And along the top of the page he lists the folios (17, 210, 243, 554, 555, 556, 83, and 528) where related materials can be found—a practice I will revisit toward the end of this chapter, and which leads us here to a further set of pejorative terms (including ‘‘Arrogance,’’ ‘‘Ambition,’’ ‘‘Pride,’’ ‘‘Cupidity,’’ ‘‘Vanity,’’ ‘‘Fantasy,’’ and ‘‘Stupidity’’). The combination of universal coverage and a narrower focus on legal matters found throughout Caesar’s notes was signaled in the first word of Foxe’s title, Pandectae. Foxe may well have been following the lead of the pioneering Swiss naturalist and bibliographer Conrad Gesner, who supplemented his Bibliotheca universalis (Europe’s first attempt at a comprehensive catalogue of authors and titles, first published in 1545) with an exhaustive subject index called the Pandects (first published in 1548)—subdivided into no less than 30,000 keyword headings based on the traditional disciplines studied at university.23 For a reader in the 1570s with Caesar’s training and aspirations, however, the word would have invoked two discrete textual traditions and two powerful sources of textual authority: classical anthologies of encyclopedic learning (some of which were known as Pandectae) and the Corpus iuris civilis (part of which was called the Pandectae), the authoritative compendium of Roman civil law made by order of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century.24 In selecting this volume as his personal master repository, Caesar might also have been drawn to the decorative border on the title page, where Daye reused the elaborate ornamental frame first used for William Cunningham’s 1559 textbook on cosmography, with its pantheon of classical authors (Ptolemy, Marinus, Aratus, Strabo, Hipparchus, and Polybius) and personified disciplines (Geometry, Astronomy, Arithmetic, and Music), all presided over by the god of eloquence, Mercury, and the father of time, Saturn.25 And Caesar may have been attracted, finally, to the strongly anti-Catholic affiliations signaled by the name of John Foxe; however moderate his own position might have

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been, a young man who was embarking on a career as the servant of a Protestant state but whose family had strong ties with Catholicism (Queen Mary had been one of his godparents and his brother had been imprisoned for recusancy under Elizabeth) would no doubt have been eager to advertise his commitment to the reformed religion. Despite Foxe’s fame as an author and the popularity of the commonplace book as a genre, it is surprising that this text made it into print at all. In 1570, when Daye printed the second edition of the Actes and Monuments, he badly underestimated the size of Foxe’s project—which ran to some 2,300 pages. He exhausted his paper stock before the end of the print run, and it was only by pasting together smaller sheets (and forcing Foxe to jettison his long section on Continental martyrs) that he was able to finish the job.26 And yet Foxe persuaded Daye to undertake another paper-intensive project just two years later. Given that paper accounted for the largest proportion of a printer’s costs in early printed books, a text that consisted of more than 1,200 folio pages, almost all of which were all but blank, could not have struck Day as a sensible investment of his capital—however much the minimal typesetting would save him on compositors’ labor. Significant sales figures would have allowed him to recoup his losses, as he clearly did with the officially sanctioned Actes and Monuments, but here he was disappointed: according to the STC, Daye recycled unsold sheets from the commonplace book in printing at least two later texts, and readers can still find the occasional heading from Foxe’s Pandectae peeking up from the bottom of pages now filled with the printed text of the Psalms (1574) or with Thomas Cranmer’s response to Stephen Gardiner (1580).27 Daye seems finally to have learned his lesson, but in 1585 Foxe found another printer willing to issue a second edition of his expanded and reconfigured commonplace book—Hugo Singleton. Only two copies of this text survive, and only one of them was evidently used: the British Library copy (again kept among the manuscripts) contains sporadic notes attributed to Foxe’s own son Samuel, who surely inherited rather than purchased the book.28 Ong concluded that, despite its universal appeal and almost inexhaustible potential, Foxe’s compendium of 1572 was one of history’s great un-used books: ‘‘it apparently elicited little interest: the Short-Title Catalogue lists only the Cambridge University Library copy, which has almost no handwritten entries at all.’’29 But neither Ong nor the original compilers of the STC knew about Caesar’s heavily used copy at the British Library—and its survival there is indeed a stroke of bibliographical good fortune. As Hill explains, Caesar made careful provisions for his books and papers when he died: The three houses noted in Caesar’s will contained books and personal effects that he left specifically to his sons Charles, John, and Robert. To Charles in par-

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ticular he bequeathed his ‘‘written booke in folio called Polyanthea Caesaris [Caesar’s Gathering of Flowers] . . . and my Enchiridion [Manual or Handbook] written by my own hand in 16o and the one moyety of all my written bookes being at the tyme of my death either in my study att Hackney, or in my twoe great presses att the Rolles or in my studie there and likewise my written booke of the Tenn Commandements, the Lordes Prayer and the Three Creedes in Six Languages, with divers Psalmes of David in Latten and verba verbi incarnati in Greeke written all with my owne hand in 16o.’’ To John, Caesar left ‘‘all of my bookes being either in the cupboard or in anie part of my Chaple of my house at Hackney to remaine to that Howse during the continuance of that House and Chapel in my name, or myne heirs forever.’’ Robert, the Six Clerk, received the most appropriate bequests of all. To him ‘‘I bequeath my written book called the Register of the Chauncery, my last Book of Informacions both written and in 4to . . . and the other moyety of the said written bookes.’’30

But surprisingly few of these precious items bequeathed by Caesar to his sons can be located today; and in the eighteenth century Caesar’s descendants sold off what was left of the collection—to a cheesemonger for use as wastepaper, according to one story, and to an upholsterer for a debt, according to another.31 The manuscripts were rescued by the enterprising young bookseller Samuel Paterson (d. 1802), whose auction of Caesar’s papers on 14–16 December 1757 was one of the great sales of the day—involving more than 300 volumes in 187 lots and bringing in just over £356. Paterson’s catalogue supplies the fullest tribute ever produced to Caesar’s achievements as a collector and user of books. As he explains in the preface, he postponed the sale by three weeks, in response to popular desire for ‘‘a greater insight into the valuable library of manuscripts, collected by Sir Julius Caesar’’ and in order to improve on the earlier inventory he had hastily issued. When he paused to ‘‘consider the character of the collector,’’ he found him to be ‘‘a man of great learning, sound judgment, and indefatigable industry . . . esteemed and honoured by the princes he served, beloved by their ministers, in confidence with both, and respected by all; in perfect friendship and correspondence with all the great personages of this island, and many distinguished foreigners, for almost half a century.’’ But what impressed Paterson most—and what immediately strikes anyone who examines Caesar’s manuscripts today— was the fact that his frequent ‘‘removes from one high office to another’’ never blunted ‘‘his purpose to collect, and minute down whatsoever he thought might best inform and benefit posterity; that they rather opened a wide field to his great mind, and enabled him, with fuller assurance, to search into the bottom of things.’’ Paterson concluded by claiming (with more than a hint of marketing hyperbole) that it was impossible for the expectations of potential buy-

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ers to exceed what they would actually find in the collection: ‘‘What may not the statesman, the civilian, the lawyer, the historian, the antiquary, and the man engaged in public business, expect to find in the innermost part of such a one’s study? Doubtless every thing that can recompense the most laudable curiosity.’’32 Paterson’s catalogue certainly satisfies our curiosity about the extent of Caesar’s collection and the role it played in the formation of later libraries (including the British Library, the eventual home of most of the items sold at the auction). But, like Caesar’s bequest to his children, the first few lots make us all the more curious about the volumes that have not survived: 1. Juvenile studies, in philosophy, divinity, poetry, & c. in English, Latin, Greek, & c.——Liber Jobi, Graece` [The Book of Job in Greek] ——— Translations from Cicero, Hierocles, and Marcus Antoninus——Excerpta ex Homero [Excerpts from Homer], &c. ——— Letters, accompts, & c. 27 vols 2. Common-place books in the civil law, and other studies, 2 vols33

As with the ‘‘Polyanthea Caesaris’’ and the ‘‘Enchiridion’’ mentioned in the will, these missing notebooks make it clear that Caesar’s Foxe was part of a larger note-taking project of which the Pandectae locorum communium is, literally and figuratively, only an index. Few contemporary figures could have carried out such a comprehensive program of collecting and ordering the world of texts. And nowhere was Caesar’s lifelong commitment to preserving, processing, and mobilizing information represented more beautifully than in lot 120, ‘‘A portable library; containing the Roman poets and historians, & c. in 44 pocket volumes, etc.’’34 This was one of four very similar traveling libraries, apparently commissioned by the legal antiquary William Hakewill around 1615 and presented to members of Caesar’s circle—including Thomas Egerton (Baron Ellesmere) and one of the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon (possibly but not necessarily Francis). Each collection was housed in what looked, from the outside, like a leather-bound folio volume, roughly the same shape and size as the Pandectae: only the word ‘‘Bibliotheca’’ (Library), painted in gold on the ‘‘fore edge,’’ hinted at the treasures within its covers. Opening the ‘‘book’’ revealed a wooden box with three shelves full of small-format classics, uniformly bound in goldtooled vellum and closed with colored ties; and on the front cover’s ‘‘pastedown’’ was painted an elaborate architectural frontispiece containing the owners’ coats of arms and the list of authors under the headings ‘‘Theology,’’ ‘‘History,’’ and ‘‘Poetry.’’35 Also in the Paterson sale were countless volumes of what would now be classified as State Papers, along with many records of a more personal nature. Each of these volumes has been digested and described in tables of contents of various sorts—with a consistency and clarity that are

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unusual in this method-obsessed (but not always systematic) age. British Library Manuscript Lansdowne 124 is Caesar’s catalogue of his entire manuscript archive, and its organization is very similar to that of his commonplace book: there are clusters of headings running along the tops of pages with short descriptions and folio numbers for items that fall into that category lined up below. On folio 2v, for instance, the headings are ‘‘Admiralty,’’ ‘‘Sea,’’ ‘‘Piracies,’’ ‘‘Ambassages,’’ ‘‘Treatises’’ [i.e., Treaties], and the contents include ‘‘Fol. 22. Touch[ing] Ireland & Scotland . . . . Fol. 41. Treatises. Hanse Townes etc. et 51. et 57. . . . Fol. 105. Th’Admirall Circuite & Admirall Charters, as of Boston, Weymouth, Lin, Yarmouth, Bristoll. . . . Fol. 110. The Kings Prerogative in Seashores. Landing places & safeconducts. . . . Fol. 201. A synopsis of the States, with whom England vseth commerce. Treatises betw[een] England etc.’’ The following page (3r) is headed ‘‘Seales. Priuate Counsell. Court of Requests. Starchamber.’’ Given Caesar’s position as master of the Court of Requests and member of the Privy Council, he had a personal interest in these institutions and was characteristically thorough in his search for records that could shed light on the history (as well as the present practices) of these institutions. As Alain Wijffels has explained, he was generally less interested in original thinking than in gathering documentary evidence that would ‘‘establish, largely through an antiquarian study of the records, the jurisdiction, benefits and liabilities of the offices he held,’’ and his research ‘‘sometimes resulted in a more or less systematic treatise’’ on the topic.36 To suggest that Caesar was not a particularly original thinker is not necessarily a negative judgment: as Ong reminds us, ‘‘The whole commonplace tradition’’ that provided his modus operandi was, after all, ‘‘an organized trafficking in what in one way or another is already known.’’37 And in Caesar’s work on the Court of Requests, it was more than his own position as its master that he set out to define and defend. In the early 1590s, the court itself came under sustained attack, and Caesar responded with the book The Ancient State, Authoritie, and Proceedings of the Court of Requests that provided ‘‘an army of weapons against its assailants among the ranks of the Common Lawyers. As a result, his book is little more than collections of precedents as to the jurisdiction and powers of the Court, many of which depended for their value and relevance upon the soundness of his theory that the Court is merely an aspect of the Privy Council’’ (and the conciliar court, the so-called Star Chamber).38 Written in two parts—dated 1593 and 1596—and published in 1597, Caesar’s text provided not just an argument about the jurisdiction of the court but a ‘‘brief table,’’ or topical guide, to the records that supported it.39 While Caesar worked primarily with the civil rather than common law, he was trained in both systems and understood

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the common lawyer’s emphasis on the power of precedents: his essay, which is little more than a list of statutes gathered from old legal documents, took on his enemies on their own ground. He proved to be as assiduous in reading his own texts as those of others: among Caesar’s papers at the British Library is an interleaved copy of The Ancient State with Caesar’s own annotations, revising the text and extending its lists of references—by way of preparation for a second edition, perhaps, or simply adding ammunition for a new round of debates (Figure 31). He painstakingly added the word ‘‘Whitehall’’ to every mention of the Court of Requests, renaming it ‘‘the Court of Whitehall or of Requests’’; and on the blank leaves facing the first two pages, he entered a long note about the history of the names used for the Privy Council and Star Chamber: ‘‘That Counsell, which since 33.H8. hath bene called commonly the Kings P[rivy] Counsell, in former times hath bene 1. Sometimes called the Kings Counsell without anie other title [followed by a list of statutes that stretches on for almost a page]. 2. Sometimes called the Kings Honorable Counsell [or] the Lords of the Kings Honorable Counsell in the Starchamber at Westminster’’ [followed by another long list of abbreviated statute references].40 The commonplace book offered one further piece of evidence for this matter, and since it is not included in Caesar’s marginalia it was most likely discovered after the marginalia on The Ancient State were finished. On a leaf headed ‘‘Crimes. Accusations. Star Chamber. Disobedience.’’ there is a summary note headed ‘‘Antiquitas Cam. Stellatae’’ [The Antiquity of the Star Chamber], in which Caesar adds another example taken from ‘‘40.E3. inter Clausa in the Tower’’ [40 Edward III, among the chambers in the Tower]: Isabella vxor Dni Walteri ffawconbridge Baronis comparuit coram Consilio, in the Counsell Chamber called the Starchamber, nere to the Receipt of the exchequere vppon a Wednesday: & acknowledged before the Chanseler & Tresorer & others of the Kings Counsell there of.’’41 It is no coincidence that what may well be the period’s fullest surviving commonplace book was produced by a lawyer. ‘‘No profession relied more broadly,’’ as Holger Schott has suggested, ‘‘on practices of abstracting and summarizing than the law.’’42 In a profession that required copious expression, comprehensive argumentation, and a full command of the precedents that might lend authority to current institutions or actions, legal readers were encouraged to use every available tool for digesting and retaining information, and a considerable amount of their training at the Inns of Court was devoted to these skills. The academic exercises known as ‘‘readings’’—formal analyses of (or lectures on) classic statutes, exemplary cases, and thorny issues—would have exposed them to masters of the art. One of the most famous was Francis

Figure 31. Caesar’s revisions of The Ancient State . . . of the Court of Requests (1597).  British Library Board. All rights reserved. MS Landsdowne 125.

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Bacon’s 1600 Gray’s Inn reading on the law of uses, printed in 1642 as The Learned Reading of Sir Francis Bacon . . . upon the Statute of Uses.43 Lawyers-in-the-making would also have learned to take notes of various sorts, first and foremost in the form of marginalia: Especially in books which were tools of everyday use, such as the yearbooks— collections of ‘‘official’’ reports from the thirteenth century up to 1535—and the Statutes, but also in treatises like Littleton’s Tenures or Staunford’s Plees del Coron, the margins are usually riddled with references to more recent statutes, cases reported in print or manuscript or at which the reader himself had been present, other treatises, as well as internal cross-references, queries, notes highlighting contradictions and surprising decisions, expository summaries, and critiques.44

Commonplace books, too, were seen as indispensable to young lawyers well into the seventeenth century. Indeed, as Earle Havens has explained, that tradition may have been dying out in the educational programs of other professions, but ‘‘During the systematic reformulation and consolidation of the English common law tradition under Edward Coke, Matthew Hale, and their seventeenth-century contemporaries, commonplace books soon became a major fixture of legal pedagogy.’’45 And the most accomplished lawyers of the day created and used a wide range of notebooks, both bound and loose-leaf. Bacon is known to have kept a commonplace book as an organized repository for the passages he had picked out in his marginalia (though he left its compilation to an amanuensis): ‘‘The principall use of this book is to receyve such parts and passages of Authors as I shall note and underline in the bookes themselves to be wrytten foorth by a servant and so collected into this book.’’46 While there is no evidence that any hands but Caesar’s touched his commonplace book, he must have followed a similar procedure: the appearance of his evenly spaced entries (which have remarkably little correction or revision) suggest that he must have gathered materials together before copying them into the commonplace book and may very well have used separate books or pages for one or more stages of intermediate drafting. Louis Knafla has given us a particularly detailed account of the textual methods of Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere (Caesar’s precursor as master of the rolls and Bacon’s as Lord Chancellor and also one of the recipients of Hakewill’s portable libraries), a student at Oxford in the 1550s and the Inns of Court in the 1560s. First, he entered copious annotations in the printed works in his collection. Borrowing his procedure from the marginal symbol system in John Perkins’s Ramist study of English land law, Egerton frequently used the word quere ‘‘to question either the applicability of a case to a particular incident, an interpreta-

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tion of a statute, or the decision of a judge,’’ the phrase note le diversitie ‘‘to signify the contradictions or ambiguities in a work,’’ and the terms objeccion and contra ‘‘to criticise faulty pleading, doubtful legal processes, and questionable interpretations of statutes.’’47 In studying the criminal law, he took a copy of the major textbook on the subject, William Staunford’s Prerogative (1567) and supplemented it with an edition of the statutes, a collection of cases on liveries and maintainers for justices of the peace, and a Book of Assizes. He then added chapter numbers at the top of every page, inserted subheadings, bracketed arguments, cross-referenced all supplementary material, and employed ‘‘a full methodological apparatus . . . for assessment of the text.’’48 Egerton also ‘‘abridged and indexed separately those texts which he used most extensively,’’ including Littleton, Plowden, and the Digest.49 Between 1570 and 1585, he compiled a massive commonplace book in which he digested his legal learning under more than five hundred alphabetical headings on nearly eight hundred pages.50 And from the 1570s forward, he filed away references to ‘‘the writings of prominent European jurists such as Jacobus Acontius, Joachim Hopper, Lambert Daneau, and, later, Jean Bodin’’ on loose-leaf pages, in the margins of his printed books, and among his manuscript case-notes.51 Recent work by Allen Boyer and others has painted a similarly detailed picture of the reading and writing practices of Sir Edward Coke, the leading common lawyer of the period and one of the great reformers in the history of English law. Like Caesar, Coke was a student at the Inns of Court during the 1570s and, also like Caesar, Coke used marginalia, commonplace books, and miscellaneous notebooks to record— and retrieve—information throughout his long career: Coke began to keep a commonplace book, his personal record of case reports . . . before he turned twenty, in the first winter weeks of 1572. Fifty-six years later, when his Commentary Upon Littleton discussed voucher and assignment, he cited a Common Pleas decision from Hilary term in the fourteenth year of the Virgin Queen’s reign, which he himself had ‘‘heard and observed.’’ In 1579 he began making longer case reports. He made marginal comments, abstracted cases from Serjeant Bendlowe’s reports, briefed Year Book cases, prepared materials on uses, and began keeping records of court decisions. He used blank octavo sheets, good quality paper, filling page after page with topic headings and collecting cases underneath.52

Unlike Caesar, he did not use a general commonplace book of the sort that served as his civilian counterpart’s faithful repository for miscellaneous materials. Rather, he worked from at least two manuscript compilations of a more or less legal nature: one was an interleaved copy of Littleton’s Tenures (the text that would be the subject of his magnum opus, the Commentary upon Littleton, published in 1626) and the other

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was a manuscript register of law reports (compiled, in the traditional fashion, by copying the reports of his predecessors and entering new cases, in chronological order, as they happened).53 As J. H. Baker has observed, these notebooks gradually became de facto commonplace books, ‘‘in which Coke would write personal memoranda, obituaries, notes on the royal prerogative and on administrative practices, historical notes from ancient records, notes on the meaning of statutes, particularly of recusants, and numerous notes of things [Chief Justice Sir John] Popham had told him.’’54 While Caesar, Egerton, and Coke were among the period’s most inventive and effective textual processors, some legal writers worried that their digests, abridgments, and notebooks were leading to fragmentation, disorder, and the general disintegration of the ‘‘methodicall coherence of the whole common law’’; speaking against the emerging tradition of alphabetical commonplace books in 1588, Abraham Fraunce complained, ‘‘I could heartily wish the whole body of our law to be rather logically ordered, than by alphabeticall breviaries [or ‘‘ABC abridgements’’] torne and dismembered.’’55 This was part of a more general concern about the decay of memory and mental powers: just as modern teachers now complain that spell-checkers, search engines, and online encyclopedias are stopping students from learning words or finding information for themselves, early modern writers wondered if textual tools like commonplace books would lead to passive readers and partial perspectives. Foxe himself had worried that the index to his Pandectae would ‘‘make it possible to recall the places whose heads they are without having memorized them,’’ particularly once he abandoned the traditional structure provided by the Aristotelian predicaments: ‘‘indexes are shortcuts whose tracks are too small to lead to the whole,’’ he warned his readers, concluding that ‘‘They bring together truths to men already learned; they do not educate the unlearned.’’56 The problem with the single-word index, as Ann Moss has explained, is that it ‘‘has only one, undeviating line of reference and misses [the mobility and versatility] the commonplace-book is designed to catch. . . . Furthermore, consulting an index gives you at best the answer to the question you have asked of it; the commonplace-book, properly ordered and filled, sets the agenda for further enquiry, suggests strategies of argument, and supplies collateral material.’’57 For Caesar, however, these problems were easily remedied—and the scope and power of his commonplace book greatly increased—through systematic and judicious use of the single word vide (see also). It was partly a matter, as we have already seen, of supplementing the alphabetical index at the back of the book. But on the pages of notes themselves Caesar also extends most of Foxe’s running headings by inserting additional terms that he (but not necessarily

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Foxe, or for that matter anyone else) associated with them, and adding a string of cross-references to related material entered elsewhere in the book. A typical example can be found on the folio Foxe devotes to the topic of water (30r [39r]). Where Foxe lists only the headings ‘‘Water,’’ ‘‘Aqueducts,’’ ‘‘Floods,’’ and ‘‘Inundations,’’ Caesar adds ‘‘Admiral. Admiralty. Rivers. Fountains. Baths. Watermills. Ships. Water-carriers. Shipwrecks. Pirates. Seas. Water rights. The Law of Aqueducts in England.’’ And above these headings he has also written ‘‘Vide fol[io] 353. 170. 444. 213. 323. 399. 354. 412.’’ If we follow the chain of crossreferences created by these numbers, we can easily see how Caesar has adapted Foxe’s ordering strategies and, in the process, given himself the ability to forge multiple links between the single topics in the index and to add—and then locate—materials on new pages once he had filled the space that Foxe had allocated for particular topics (and for a reader who would serve as the judge of the Court of Admiralty, four pages for this subject were never going to be enough). On folio 353r (362r), first, Foxe’s headings are ‘‘The Sea and its Saltiness. Waves. Reflux. Seashelves. The Description of Storms.’’ Caesar has added ‘‘Admiral. The Office of Admiral.’’ and ‘‘vide fol. 170. 444. 213. 30.’’ On folio 170r (179r), Caesar has crossed out Foxe’s printed headings completely and replaced them with ‘‘Admiral. Court of Admiralty. The Office of Admiral. Prerogative. Jurisdiction. Sailors. Ships. Shipwrecks. The Sea. The Main.’’ and ‘‘vide fol. 353. 323. 399. 400. 354. 30. 444.’’ Folio 444r (437r) has no printed headings, and Caesar has used it for his extra notes on ‘‘Words. Diction. Vocabulary.’’ (with cross-references to ‘‘fol. 353. 170. 40.’’): this may seem an unrelated topic, but the last entry on 444v (437v) is ‘‘Nomen et variae appellationes Admiralli Angliae’’ [The name and variety of appellations for the English Admirals]. On folio 213r (222r), Foxe’s headings are ‘‘Rivers and Fountains. Baths.’’ to which Caesar adds ‘‘The Sea. Waters. Woods. Mills. Royal Estates.’’ and ‘‘vide fol. 353. 30. 267. 170. 34.’’ Folio 323r (332r) has no printed headings, and Caesar has used it for his notes on ‘‘Pirates. Piracy. Depredation. Harborers.,’’ adding ‘‘vide fol. 170. 353.’’ Folio 399r (408r) has Foxe’s printed heads for ‘‘Ships. Sailors. Vessels. Nautical Arts. Navigation. Nautical Instruments.’’ Caesar adds ‘‘Shipwrecks.’’ and ‘‘vide fol. 306. 30. 170. 213. 323. 353.’’ Folio 354r (363r) is Foxe’s section devoted to ‘‘Materials. The Principles of Physics.’’ Caesar extends the subject to cover, yet again, ‘‘Materials pertaining to ships, the sea, and the Admiralty,’’ and adds ‘‘vide fol. 170. 353. 323. 399. 400.’’ Finally, on folio 412r (421r), an unused blank leaf in Foxe’s section on libel and defamation, Caesar added his remaining notes on ‘‘Admiral. Admiralty. The Sea. Ships. Sailors.’’ and ‘‘vide fol. 355.’’

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These nested cross-references create a vivid—if somewhat repetitive— picture of Caesar’s peculiar obsessions and associative patterns. But they also capture an important feature of Renaissance textual and intellectual culture that recent work on commonplace books and notebooks has sometimes threatened to lose sight of. Caesar took full advantage of the codex’s capacity as an instrument for discontinuous reading.58 And he had clearly followed Foxe some way down the road paved by leading practitioners of the so-called ars excerpendi (art of extracting), away from predetermined structures (inherited from the classical authors and refined by humanist pedagogical theorists) toward idiosyncratic miscellanies (of increasingly specialized and decontextualized fragments).59 But in the hands of a reader like Caesar, the commonplace book remained an organic object, the result (at once) of new techniques for textual disintegration and a thoroughgoing commitment to interconnection. By filling out Foxe’s commonplace book, with a patience and industry that are almost unimaginable today, Caesar equipped himself with a powerful tool that anticipated the kind of indexed archive now being delivered to anyone with a networked computer by Google and its associates.60 Starting with a simple word such as ‘‘water’’ leads us along a extensive chain (or web) of interconnecting links, which, together, build up a comprehensive guide to the subject: what Caesar has produced, in other words, is a universal relational database that works as (and can, in fact, be best reconstructed through) hypertext. But Caesar lived and died the product of his age, and when the time came to design a tomb for his mortal remains (in his local church, Great St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in London), he revealed his attachment to and mastery of the traditional instruments of the Renaissance lawyer. It took the form of a marble deed, carved to look like ruffled parchment and inscribed with Caesar’s last promissory note: To all Christian people to whom this present writing shall come; Know ye, that I Julius Dalmare, alias Caesar, Knight, Doctor of Laws; Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, and one of the Masters of Requests to Queen Elizabeth; Privy Counsellor to King James, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Master of the Rolls, have confirmed or granted by this my present writing, that I will, with Divine Assistance, willingly pay my debt to nature, whenever it shall please God. In witness whereof, I have set my hand and seal. Dated the 27th of February, 1635 [i.e., 1636].

God called in his debt on 18 April, and the slashed ‘‘ribbons’’ holding the pendant ‘‘seal’’ signified that Caesar had settled his accounts in full.61

Part IV

Renaissance Readers and Modern Collectors

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Chapter 8

Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks

Abusus non tollit usum. [Misuse does not preclude use.] —Latin axiom

This book has been concerned with the kinds of marks that Renaissance readers made in and around their books and with the kinds of things we can learn from them. This final section will consider the fate of those marks as they have come down to us today, passing through auction houses, rare book libraries, conservation labs, and exhibition halls— and, above all, the hands of later owners. The marked-up books of Renaissance readers have much to teach us not only about the uses of books in the past but also about attitudes toward books where the past meets the present. We can begin by considering two typical descriptions of sixteenth-century books from the middle of the twentieth century: • ‘‘[B]lack letter, each title within a woodcut border; the blank margin . . . skilfully renewed; each work rather soiled by use but sound copies’’ (Sale catalogue, Bernard Quaritch Ltd., January 1952). • ‘‘This volume, printed during the reign of Elizabeth I, has been well and piously used. Marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand— comments and scriptural quotation—bring to life an early and earnest owner’’ (Dorothy Bowen’s exhibition catalogue, The Book of Common Prayer [Huntington Library, 1953]). What makes these descriptions particularly useful, in the context of this book, is that they offer sharply contrasting views of—and vocabularies for—signs of use in rare books: one volume has been ‘‘rather soiled by use’’ while the other has been ‘‘well and piously used’’ by ‘‘an early and earnest owner.’’ And what makes them the perfect point of departure

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for the issues I will explore in this concluding chapter is the fact that they are both describing the same volume—the same copy, that is, of the same book. It is a small folio, now housed at the Huntington Library, containing the 1586 Book of Common Prayer and Psalter along with a second Psalter from 1583—a deluxe edition of the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, featuring musical notation ‘‘to sing them withall.’’1 This volume came to the Huntington as part of the James R. Page Collection, the source of the ‘‘uncommon Book of Common Prayer’’ and many of the other volumes discussed in Chapter 5. The first description above is the entry from the January 1952 catalogue of the antiquarian bookdealers Bernard Quaritch Ltd., from whom Page acquired the volume for $210, and the second text is the caption from the catalogue accompanying a 1953 exhibition at the Huntington, where Page’s prayer books were first displayed nine years before they joined its permanent collection.2 What the sale catalogue describes as dirt, then, is what the exhibition catalogue identifies as a thorough set of contemporary manuscript notes (Figure 32). The unidentified reader who produced them—in the first half of the seventeenth century, judging by the hand—left us with a detailed record of his reading habits and devotional practices. First, by binding in a second Psalter he was able to compare different translations for verses he considered particularly important;3 and the fact that it was what he called ‘‘the singing version’’ allows us to extend his reading from the apparently private context of the marginal annotations into the realm of public, oral, and musical performance. In the margins of all three texts he entered short summaries of important points and copied out phrases he found particularly resonant. In both Psalters he supplied verse numbers, supplemented the printed running titles with the numbers of the psalms found on each page, and compiled lists of cross-references to related lines (in other psalms and in various books of the Bible); and in the 1586 version he inserted marginal labels for the seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143), the seven consolatory psalms (15, 27, 34, 37, 43, 49, and 73), and the seven psalms of thanksgiving (8, 30, 34, 103, 111, 138, and 145), along with a tabular finding guide for them beneath the opening psalm.4 And he filled virtually all of the larger blank spaces in the volume with pious meditations and detailed notes on matters theological and liturgical. Beneath the table of contents for the Book of Common Prayer, for instance, he grimly acknowledged that ‘‘The whole life of a Christian is nothinge else but a Contynewall tryall of his constancy in his vncessant Spirituall Warfare’’; and at the end of the preface he wrote a full-page note on the relation between ‘‘parables’’ and ‘‘histories.’’ On the blank

Figure 32. ‘‘Rather soiled by use’’: contemporary marginalia in a 1583 Psalter (RB438000:87F). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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page facing the opening psalm in the 1586 version he wrote out a long list of reassuring lines from various books of the Bible under the heading, ‘‘Of the Infinite & Aboundant Cumfort that euery true beleuer ought to haue, out of the Sacred Truth.’’ On the blank page facing the title page for the 1586 Psalter he recorded the ‘‘5 similitudes’’ by which ‘‘Our vnion with Christ [is] exprest’’: Christ is a garment faith putes him on Christ is a foundation faith builds vpon him Christ is a vine, we the branches grafted into him by faith Christ is the husband . . . & consent makes the match; Christ is the food & we the body nourished by faith. And on the blank leaf facing the opening psalm in the same version he inscribed ‘‘A Prayer for the true use of the incomprehensible Tresure of the holy scriptures to b[e] often used,’’ followed by a long series of excerpts from specific psalms testifying to the efficacy of prayer. In using his prayer book in this way he was putting into practice the instructions of St. Athanasius the Great, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, whose famous ‘‘Letter to Marcellinus’’ suggested that the Psalter should serve as the personal handbook for the spiritual warfare of the faithful Christian—providing the right words, quite literally, for every occasion. The 1583 Psalter opens with a version of this text, retitled ‘‘A treatise made by Athanasius the great, concernyng the vse and vertue of the Psalmes,’’ and it lists the reader’s potential needs along with the specific psalms that can be used to serve them: 4. If thus in trouble thou hast called on God and hast taried vpon his helpe . . . sing the 4. 40. 116. Psalmes. 5. If that thou seest that euill men lay snares for thee . . . sing the 5. Psalme. . . . 7. If any take counsell agaynst thee, as Achitophell did agaynst David . . . sing the 7. Psalme. . . . 9. If so agayne: thou wilt sing in geuyng thankes to God for the prosperous gatheryng of thy fruites, vse the 8. Psalme. [etc.] (A2r).

But for Renaissance readers, as we have already seen, a complete suit of scriptural armor must be stitched from all the books of the Bible. Across from Athanasius’s assurance—in his opening sentence—that ‘‘All holy Scripture is the teacher of all vertue,’’ our reader has collected a full page of passages from the prophets and apostles, all offered as evidence that ‘‘The Charter of our heauenly Inheritance is the word of God.’’

Is Cleanliness Next to Godliness? The phrase ‘‘soiled by use’’ in the Quaritch catalogue reflects a preference for pristine copies that is so universal today it may hardly give us

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pause for thought. The desire for clean books is not, however, a historical or cultural universal: indeed, Stephen Orgel has gone so far as to describe it as ‘‘one of the strangest phenomena of modern bibliophilic and curatorial psychology.’’5 This preference for unmarked copies has a very long history, with significant implications for those who collect, preserve, and study the books that come down to us from the past. It has deep roots in the aesthetics and economics of both scribal culture and print culture, and it informs both the ethics of possession and the etiquette of use. The bias against writing in books is bound up with a variety of taboos and transgressions: Virginia Woolf described it as an almost sexual violation of both the text and its future readers, and other negative analogies compare annotations to sacrilege, noise, and parasites.6 A wide range of psychological and sociological theories can provide some purchase on the anxieties provoked by marginalia. They can be related to the ideology of passivity or ‘‘trance-formation’’ posited by recent theorists of reception and response; to the specters of ‘‘defacement’’ that (in Valentin Groebner’s terms) haunted the margins of words and images in premodern Europe; to the new protocols for ‘‘civilized’’ behavior traced back to the Renaissance by Norbert Elias; to the growing sensitivity to ‘‘filth’’ in urban modernity; to the artistic fear of clutter diagnosed by Adam Phillips; and to the general discourse of messiness and ‘‘matterout-of-place’’ that, as Mary Douglas has explained, governs a wide range of behaviors involving consumption.7 Books and food have often rubbed up against each other in the history of reading, and as Holbrook Jackson put it in The Anatomy of Bibliomania (an encyclopedic commonplace book on book behavior and misbehavior, written in the spirit and style of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy), ‘‘Scholars do not hesitate to mix books with eating apparatus.’’8 One of the least hesitant scholars was the critic and poet William Empson—best known as the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Some Versions of Pastoral, and The Structure of Complex Words but also one of his generation’s fiercest (and, apparently, messiest) readers of Renaissance drama. According to his former lodger, the translator and playwright John Henry Jones, Empson was once forced to buy the London Library a new copy of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: when he returned it they found it covered not only with his marginal notes but with the jam from his morning toast.9 When I cited this anecdote in a Times Literary Supplement review, Jones himself wrote in to elaborate on the nature of Empson’s marginalia: ‘‘The work in question was W. W. Greg’s parallel-text edition of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and the librarian . . . was hardly straining at a gnat in demanding a fresh copy—the book was virtually done to death in Empson’s zeal to demolish Greg’s argument in favour of the B-text, a process which . . . was maintained throughout all quotidian activities.’’

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Jones went on to express his disapproval of such practices, suggesting that Empson’s ‘‘failing was neither a consequence nor a cause of his greatness.’’10 Jones concluded by castigating ‘‘the arrogant twerps who deface public and university library books with their mindless graffiti,’’ observing (with just a little exaggeration) that ‘‘Users of the [University of London] library will know that a ‘clean’ book, unless it is a first-time issue, is a great rarity.’’ Some readers have made the same point, ironically, by adding a new layer of dismissive marginalia in the book—but few have ever done so as vociferously as the author of a damning note on the University of Maryland’s copy of David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe: ‘‘The persons who marked up this copy for their private use, especially the one using blue marker, are piggish assholes. They’ve made this book almost unreadable. May they burn in plagiarist’s hell.’’11 When books are communal property—as in public libraries or educational institutions, where volumes circulate from reader to reader— writing in their margins is considered antisocial behavior, at best a breach of decorum and at worst a breach of the law. When I first explored the marginalia of Renaissance readers, I did so in the reading rooms of the Cambridge University Library, where every desk features a sign reading ‘‘Marking of Books is Forbidden’’ (Figure 33); and in 2003 its Web site presented (as a further deterrent) a virtual exhibition enti-

Figure 33. Warning on readers’ tables from Cambridge University Library.

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tled ‘‘Marginalia and Other Crimes,’’ to ‘‘illustrate the destruction to the collections caused by some of its readers’’ and by ‘‘animals, small humans and birds.’’12 Every reader in the Bodleian Library at Oxford must swear an oath which not only famously forbids them to ‘‘kindle . . . any fire or flame’’ but also ‘‘to mark, deface or injure in any way, any volume [or] document.’’ And the Clark Library in Los Angeles warns readers against ‘‘removing or adding’’ any text. As these prohibitions suggest, the cult of the clean book is strongly associated with the growth of institutional libraries.13 The efforts of librarians to keep their books in good shape are understandable, and their desire to preserve our textual heritage for those who come after us is admirable. But the current obsession with cleanliness poses some difficult questions about the role of libraries in the empowerment of readers. Lending libraries undoubtedly helped to spread literacy and learning to new groups of readers, and in turning marginalia from a tool to a transgression they also deprived those readers of one of their most powerful methods for conversing with authors and other readers. In a polemical essay in the inaugural issue of the rare book librarians’ journal RBM, Daniel Traister asked what would be so bad about giving readers a freer hand in ‘‘special collections’’ and even wondered what might happen if those books were put back into general circulation: our students and faculty [would] take it as their God-given right to . . . take the books home, sneeze on them . . . drop spaghetti sauce on them, and do all the other horrible things people do to books all the time. And, by the bye, which they have done to books at all times since there were books, even going so far as to write on them. (I cannot be the only person in our field who thinks that the emphasis on pristine condition in collecting modern first editions is misplaced, indicative merely of the fact that the book has never been (yuck!) read. One of the things that excites me about older books is precisely marks, comments, marginalia, showing that they have had early readers and occasionally even indicative of those readers’ responses.)14

Traister is in good company—among famous writers if not professional librarians. Consider the comfort that the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb took from the signs of use he found in novels borrowed from the library: How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour . . . , if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old ‘‘Circulating Library’’ Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages with delight!—of the lone sempstress, whom they may have cheered . . . after her long day’s needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill-spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled?15

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The novelist Robertson Davies is one of those who would, as he explained in his 1995 essay ‘‘How to Be a Collector’’: ‘‘As a boy I sometimes made use of a library which was also used by uncommonly dirty people; many of the books were heavily thumbed, and others showed evidence of bread and butter—even peanut butter; I remember one volume in which a reader had used a dirty pipe-cleaner as a bookmark. . . . To be frank with you, I have never much liked public collections and of late years have avoided them totally. If I want a book, I buy it, and if it cannot be bought, I find a way of doing without.’’16 While few of us would go quite as far as that, Davies is giving voice to something deep within the bibliographical unconscious, and not so deep in class-consciousness. The desire for clean books now comes almost instinctively to modern owners—even those who hardly qualify as collectors. Heather Jackson tells the story of ‘‘a small boy taken against his will by his father to one of Maurice Sendak’s book signings. Pushed forward to get his book signed, the boy looked at Sendak imploringly and said, ‘Please don’t crap up my book!’’’17 And for the novelist John Updike, the tables are often turned. When he is asked to sign books at fairs or readings, he finds himself cringing at the sight of ‘‘battered copies of ‘Couples,’ rubbed and rain-damaged ‘Rabbit’s, and foxed, dog-eared ‘Witches of Eastwick’s’’: ‘‘They have travelled in the ill-mapped wilderness of the reading public,’’ he explains, ‘‘[and] their scars of use shame me.’’18 But for popular philosophy writer Tom Morris, there is nothing more depressing than an unused copy of one’s own book: ‘‘When I see one of my books in someone’s home, I want to open the dog-eared pages and see comments on nearly every page, and maybe some suntan oil and jelly smears as well. I want to know it was used!’’19 If the aversion to writing in books has been extended from publicly to privately owned books, it has also been projected by modern scholars back onto premodern readers. Archbishop Matthew Parker used his prominent position in the church to acquire countless manuscripts during the dissolution of the monasteries: he and his team of scholarly secretaries systematically collated and actively annotated these books, and their pioneering work led to the advancement of antiquarian studies in England and the production of the first printed books using AngloSaxon type. When describing Parker’s treatment of his extraordinary collection, however, scholars have tended to praise him and chastise him in the same breath. Sheila Strongman acknowledged that ‘‘Despite Parker’s somewhat dubious methods of editing he did stimulate interest in the study of Old English and he was the first person to publish a series of English historical works.’’20 May McKisack acknowledged that her book Medieval History in the Tudor Age would have been impossible without the

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materials that Parker preserved and the antiquarian interests that he helped to spark, but her description of his reading practices—‘‘Virtually all the historical manuscripts in the collection contain addenda in the hands of Parker or his scribes . . . tables of contents, sometimes a sketchy index, marginalia innumerable’’—culminates in the judgment, ‘‘Deplorable methods no doubt.’’21 Mark Pattison draws a similarly ambivalent picture of the ‘‘adversaria’’ preserved in Isaac Casaubon’s working library, which included the copy of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning that we encountered at the beginning of this book. He offers a vivid description of Casaubon’s heavily used books—‘‘[They were] scored under and marked anyhow. . . . The blank pages, the title page, or any page, serve to hold a reference’’—before concluding with the curiously dismissive comment, ‘‘a volume which has belonged to Casaubon is merely defaced by the owner’s marks and memoranda.’’22 Another case in point is Ethel M. Portal’s 1915 British Academy Lecture on the abortive plans for an academy at the court of King James I. She regretfully informs us that James ‘‘was said to have kept his books in a ragged and untidy condition, and to have scribbled in their margins.’’ By way of support for her condemnation Portal quotes the contemporary advice found in Henry Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman: ‘‘Have a care of keeping your bookes handsome and well bound.’’ But she ignores the fact that Peacham went on to say, ‘‘For your owne use spare them not for noting or enterlining.’’23 And she also ignores the fact that readers who paid more attention to the appearance than to the uses of books in their libraries were the very first of the fools singled out for scorn in Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools (under the heading ‘‘De inutilibus libris/Inutilitas librorum’’ [Unused books] [Figure 34]): . . . this one pleasoure haue I Of bokes[:] to haue grete plenty and aparayle[.] I take no wysdome by them. . . . But yet I haue them in great reuerence And honoure[,] sauynge them from fylth and ordure By often brusshynge, and moche dylygence[.] Full goodly bounde in pleasaunt couerture Of domas, satyn, or els of veluet pure[.] . . . Lo in lyke wyse of bokys I haue store[,] But fewe I rede, and fewer vnderstande[:] I folowe nat theyr doctryne nor theyr lore[.] It is ynoughe to bere a boke in hande[.]24 Parker’s, Casaubon’s, and King James’s active interventions in the texts in their collections look less deplorable if they are approached not

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Figure 34. ‘‘Unused Books’’: a foolish reader from The Ship of Fools (1509). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

by looking backward from late print culture but by moving forward from medieval scribal culture (in which readers were, to some extent, expected to customize their books) and from the ancient scriptural tradition (in which even the holiest words were surrounded by layers of later commentary). That said, there is no shortage of injunctions against marginalia—both institutional and personal—from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Marc Drogin’s study of the anathema (or ‘‘book

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curse’’) in medieval manuscripts suggests that the scribes who copied them were often haunted by visions of grubby hands besmirching the sacred products of their labors: a typical inscription read ‘‘Quisquis quem tetigerit / Sit illa lota manus’’ (Please wash your hands/ Before touching this book).25 And the custodians of the monastic collections in which many of these books were produced and preserved could be similarly squeamish. In Humbert of Romans’ thirteenth-century manual for officers in the Dominican Order, there is a chapter on the office of librarians urging them to adopt strict rules ‘‘Concerning the use of the books’’: ‘‘Truly, if any brothers have disfigured books, or have written or destroyed anything in them on their own authority, or have handled any of them with negligence or maltreatment, or have offended in any way so far as the librarian’s responsibilities are concerned, the librarian should identify these at a given time and suggest to the superior warnings to be given to the brothers in this matter at his discretion.’’26 Humbert’s attitude was echoed (and his fears amplified) by Bishop Richard de Bury, whose fourteenth-century book Philobiblon was one of the earliest and most influential manifestos for booklovers. In chapter 17, ‘‘Of showing due Propriety in the Custody of Books,’’ Richard suggests that ‘‘next to the vestments and vessels dedicated to the Lord’s body, holy books deserve to be rightly treated by the clergy, to which great injury is done so often as they are touched by unclean hands.’’ He describes the disrespectful treatment common among the novice reader: His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with which he marks any passage that pleases him. . . . He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. . . . Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he leans forward on the book . . . and then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no small injury of the book. . . . But the handling of books is especially to be forbidden to those shameless youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightaway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets . . . a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the most beautiful books.27

Most owners of private libraries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have been more tolerant of other readers’ marginalia, and there are conspicuously few complaints from lenders about the scribbles produced by borrowers. In 1592, however, the English traveler Fynes Moryson ran into an unexpectedly fastidious collector in Basel. He had been looking for some time for ‘‘the Booke of Semlerus de Repub. Helvetica’’ (Josias Simler’s guide to Switzerland), recommended to him by his friend John Ulmer. He wrote to Ulmer to report that he had found

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it at last ‘‘in a friends study’’; but since that friend ‘‘esteemed it as the apple of his eye’’ and because ‘‘I meant to blot the same with notes,’’ he would only lend it on the condition that Ulmer agreed to send a fresh copy to him.28 Not all Renaissance readers felt comfortable with ‘‘blotting’’ their books, and John Brinsley’s detailed instructions for marking books (cited at length at the very beginning of my introduction) also offered students several ways to avoid ‘‘marring’’ them. First, they could make their writing neat and inconspicuous, using ‘‘a fine small hand [which] will not hurt their bookes.’’ They could also choose to use pencil rather then pen for some of their notes, since they could later be erased: ‘‘For the manner of noting, it is best to note all schoole books with inke; & also all others . . . whereof we would haue daily or long practice, because inke will indure: neither wil such books be the worse for their noting, but the better, if they be noted with iudgement. But for all other bookes, which you would haue faire againe at your pleasure, note them with a pensil of black lead: for that you may rub out againe when you will, with the crums of new wheate bread.’’29 For very young readers, who were not yet capable of writing a fine small hand, Brinsley suggested that they ‘‘may make some secret markes . . . at euery hard word; though but with some little dint with their naile.’’ And finally, those who wanted to keep their books completely clean could use ‘‘a little paper book’’ to write their notes in.30 Such attitudes reflect not simply a sense of propriety but also an awareness of the fact that when books are made of decent materials, and are handled properly, they are likely to outlive their early owners and become available for future buyers and readers. We might therefore expect the preference for clean copies to be nothing less than common sense among those who trade in rare books where—as in the trade of used goods of any kind—those that are in better condition tend to fetch a higher price than those that are worn. In fact, for many collectors the ideal book is clearly an un-used book. Consider the position of readers (and their marks) in the standard terms used to describe the condition of used books: MINT: As new, unread. FINE: Close to new, showing slight signs of age but without any defects. VERY GOOD: Indicates a used book that shows some signs of wear but still has no defects. GOOD: Used for a book which shows normal wear and aging, still complete and with no major defects. FAIR: A worn and used copy, probably with cover tears and other defects. READING COPY [or WORKING COPY]: A poor copy with text complete but not much else going for it.31

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The ultimate mint copy might still have its pages uncut, which not only guarantees that it is an unread book but makes it a virtually unreadable one.

The Ethics of Restoration Not surprisingly, collectors and the booksellers who serve them have devised various methods to improve the condition of the books that come into their hands; and in some cases, this has clearly involved removing the handwriting of earlier owners. I have found countless examples of contemporary signatures and notes that have later been crossed out, washed or scraped away, and even cut out of the margin— usually trimming the entire page but sometimes excising only handwritten notes, leaving a jagged edge that reveals the extent and location, but not the content, of the annotations.32 Some of these ‘‘cleanings’’ were no doubt carried out by subsequent readers rather than by booksellers. But within the book trade, there has been a history of aggressive practices involving bleaching the pages and trimming their margins down to the very edge of the printed text—sometimes even remounting every page in a frame of new paper. This history is extremely difficult to reconstruct, since these practices have rarely been documented and still remain to be studied in their own right (by historians of the book, booksellers, and conservators—ideally by all of them together). Such operations seem to have been common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and they are by no means unknown in the twentieth.33 Roger Stoddard has recently offered a particularly visceral description of these trends among private and institutional collectors, with chilling ramifications for the history of reading: Rare is the binder who has deliberately preserved historical evidence. Old covers and endpapers are jettisoned along with their library marks, ownership marks, booksellers’ marks, index notes, annotations, documents, or verses. . . . Then stains, both finger marks and marginalia, are bathed away in bleach before the results are squeezed flat in a standing press, obliterating from paper the bite of type and ornament and the dents and scratches scribed or pressed blind without pigment. Washed or not, copies must endure the binder’s plough before being attached to their (new) covers. The blades leave edges neat and trim, ready for gilding, staining, or burnishing, but the original size and proportion of the page are lost forever, and inscriptions and printing in the margins are bled off or cut away.34

One example of the potentially meaningful marks that can be obliterated by such a process is ‘‘bearing type’’—the uninked blocks of text used to balance the printing surface in the handpress period. Randall McLeod has recently shown how the ghostly impressions it left behind

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can provide important clues about book production and printing house practices, including the sequence in which pages were printed and the range of books being produced by the same printer at the same time.35 What makes the decision of what to preserve, what to repair, and what to discard so difficult is that the value of particular types of physical evidence is not always clear and is subject to change through time. As Nicholas Hadgraft has argued in condemning the repairs favored by what he calls ‘‘tidy-minded’’ librarians, ‘‘Conservation . . . can . . . remove evidence which we are only just beginning to appreciate.’’36 The treatment received by the prayer book featured at the beginning of this chapter was apparently more benign than that described by Stoddard: turning back to the passage from the Quaritch catalogue, we are told that ‘‘the blank margin’’ has been ‘‘skilfully renewed.’’ This involved reinforcing the margins on frayed pages (by no means all of which were ‘‘blank’’) with patches of clean and strong paper, preventing further decay and making every page a uniform size. Both the practice and the language used to describe it suggest a desire to make the book new again, to take it back through time by undoing the signs of its subsequent use. The ideal copy becomes, in a paradox that is all too familiar to museum curators and art conservators, a historic object with most of the traces of its history removed. A more recent Quaritch catalogue offers what may be one of the most poignant cases of misguided ‘‘restoration’’ in the modern book trade. It describes a first edition of Milton’s Areopagitica with manuscript notes that are ‘‘very faint . . . all but washed out during some restoration in the past.’’ Comparison with other copies reveals that these notes were most likely corrections in the hand of Milton himself.37 In this extreme (but hardly unique) case, the desire to take a book back to its original state—to a bibliographical state of innocence, before it fell into the hands of mortal readers—has obliterated the very hand of the author who produced it. Aggressive restoration has not been universally endorsed by dealers, conservators, and collectors. Indeed, a book that has had no restoration is now known in the book trade as an ‘‘honest book,’’ and there have been famous cases where original defects have been prized as signs of authenticity—including the so-called Doves Press Bible of 1903 (one of the masterpieces of modern ‘‘fine press’’ printing), where the extensive foxing found in some copies is a sign that the faulty paper-stock has not been ‘‘corrected’’ by means of booksellers’ chemicals.38 Heather Jackson suggests that up to about 1820 marginalia were not only tolerated by booksellers but seen as a potential selling point: ‘‘In catalogues that I have examined dating from the 1740s to the 1820s, the presence of notes is recorded only as an asset.’’ After this date, Jackson observes that

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prohibitions against the marking of books get stronger, and suggests that ‘‘annotating readers went underground.’’39 Collectors’ tastes have changed accordingly, for the most part, but there have been some important exceptions. For James R. Page, readers’ marks still added to rather than detracted from the value of the book: as he put it in an interview with the Los Angeles Times during his 1953 exhibition, ‘‘Many of the books in my collection are enlivened by the marginal notes and comments made by the many people, from distinguished and well-known people to otherwise unknown persons, through whose hands they passed.’’40 And the rare book dealer Bernard M. Rosenthal—whose collection of annotated Renaissance books was acquired in the 1990s by the Beinecke Library at Yale—has explained that when he started buying books in the 1950s, ‘‘early printed books stained with the occasional fingerprints of a fifteenth century pressman, or filled with scribblings by a contemporary student . . . did not have the same appeal to the bibliophiles as the flawless, virginal copy—even now one sometimes finds dealers’ and auction catalogues in which the presence of manuscript annotations is mentioned in the same breath with the defects, e.g., ‘some waterstains, occasional manuscript notes, else fine.’ ’’41 For Rosenthal, buying annotated books turned out to make good economic sense: it was a way to compete with dealers and collectors who had more capital to work with. But, as with Page, it gradually gave him a different set of attitudes toward the annotations themselves: ‘‘I love to see a book with beautiful wide margins, uncut and untouched. But the grubby book that has been handled and that has thumb marks in it that somebody annotated or otherwise left evidence of reading is really much more attractive.’’42 Rosenthal became ‘‘obsessed, by the idea of some day . . . producing a catalogue of books in which the presence of annotations would not merely be mentioned, but . . . ranked on the same level as the printed text and dignified by proper descriptions,’’ and in 1997 Rosenthal published just such a catalogue of 242 annotated books, with remarkably detailed descriptions of the length, content, and appearance of the marginalia.43 There is evidence to suggest that Rosenthal’s attitudes are now becoming more common among collectors of rare books. In January 2005, a Philadelphia auction house took a soon-to-be-sold first edition of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus to Owen Gingerich, who had recently published the definitive consensus of surviving copies and a best-selling account of the story told by the early marginalia they contained.44 Gingerich was thrilled to discover that it was a hitherto unrecorded copy, but also ‘‘appalled to realize that the pages had been thoroughly washed and bleached, removing a priceless record of its study in the sixteenth century. Even under ultraviolet light most of the annotations remained

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entirely illegible.’’ He took pleasure, therefore, in reporting that when the book went to auction the unfortunate cleaning backfired: ‘‘At first glance the volume presented a handsome, clean appearance, but potential buyers quickly recognized that there was something odd about its appearance. The book failed to meet its reserve—the highest bid was only $250,000—so the misguided action of its owners had simply produced an irreparably damaged copy and an unsatisfactory icon, reducing its value by hundreds of thousands of dollars.’’45

Gilt by Association The Anglo-American collectors who created the great libraries in which scholars now search for signs of Renaissance readers assembled their collections toward the beginning of what has been called the ‘‘cult of collecting.’’46 While this cult was certainly concerned with turning newly acquired corporate cash into Old World cultural capital,47 Robert Alan Shaddy suggests that the movement was also marked by what he describes as the language of ‘‘sentimental attachment.’’ Within the field of book collecting, this attitude gave rise to a particularly intense fascination with books that had a documented connection to famous people from the past—so-called association copies. The associations were usually documented by a signature or dedication, but also by marginalia (if they were in a verifiable hand). Raymond Blathwayte explained the attraction of the association copy in a 1912 article on ‘‘The Romance of the Sale Room’’: ‘‘As the years roll on the value of a book is often gauged by its associations, by its own individual history, by some special fact of interest connected with its owners, and, most especially of all, by any autographic value which those owners may have attached to it. There are books to-day which, by reason of pencilled margins or autographed presentations, possess a hundred times their original value or the value they would otherwise have possessed, and your true book collector is well aware of this.’’48 It is not hard to see how the signatures and marginalia of famous writers such as William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon would be seen as a source of added autographic value, and how such an association could become a greater source of value than the physical condition of the book. William Harris Arnold, who created one of the period’s most impressive libraries of association copies, suggested that the collector of early editions should strive ‘‘to procure them in their pristine state . . . ; but, when a book bears evidence of a distinguished association, the material condition of the volume becomes a matter of secondary importance. . . . A volume of the very slightest consequence may be transformed into an object of precious regard just by a bit of writing on

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one of its leaves.’’49 Many collectors and dealers have learned this lesson the hard way, as did the rare book dealer Andrew Block back in the 1930s, when he sold a book that turned out to have been annotated by Gabriel Harvey: Some years ago, among a number of books purchased, was one with numerous manuscript notes. . . . A diligent search through about eighty pages gave no clue to the identity of the writer. . . . At last a certain well-known expert entered the shop and was shown the book. He glanced at it and handed it back saying that it was no use to him. Then something prompted him to have another look at it, and he glanced at the second half of the book and asked the price. He was told that it was ten shillings, at which price he purchased it. At this juncture the writer asked if he had been able to identify the author of the notes, and was shown the name in the middle of a page towards the end of the book. It was Gabriel Harvey, a fact which made the work worth £500.50

And in one extraordinary case, the evidence of association that re-valued a book was not a bit of writing but a bit of soil on one of its leaves. Blathwayte told this story of a volume made more valuable after a particularly important reader dropped it in the road: ‘‘Charles I borrowed a volume of tracts from Thomason, the stationer, and clumsily let them fall into the mud [while fleeing to the Isle of Wight in 1647], whereby their then value was considerably depreciated. To-day the British Museum regards those stains as out-weighing by far the intrinsic value of the quaint old verbosities they so sadly dim.’’51 In fact it was Thomason himself who valued the royal soil more than the pamphlet (although he had considered the text so rare that he could barely be persuaded to lend it to the king): after the restoration of the monarchy he noted that it ‘‘hath the marke of honor upon it, which no other in my Collection hath.’’52 One of the standard guides to book collecting captures the appeal of—and limits to—such association: ‘‘If the name is that of a well-known person, it adds to the value of the book, converting it into an ‘association copy.’ If the name is unknown, it is best that it should be unobtrusive, neat and not on the title-page.’’53 Some collectors, however, did not restrict their interest in a book’s associations to the signatures and notes of famous people, and extended it to any sign of life left behind by the hands of any past reader. Holbrook Jackson reminds us that ‘‘a book takes up and retains something of its past owners and becomes alive and memorable from its experiences’’: he singles out those that have been annotated by ‘‘great men’’ and is tempted ‘‘to put in a defense of those books which have been annotated by unknown hands, but there would be so many provisos that it would have small value.’’54 An early attempt at just such a defense—and one that anticipates the sentiments of Page and Rosenthal—can be found in the tribute paid in 1941 by Princeton English professor Charles Grosvenor Osgood to the library of A. Edward

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Newton (which was almost entirely devoted to association copies): ‘‘Who in all the centuries have touched this book as I am touching now? Or how many generations has it passed, quiet and undisturbed, on a darkened shelf, enclosing its own dateless life, while the life of men swirled and eddied, around it unconcerned? . . . To the rightful owner the value of an old book is not a mere matter of date and scarcity. From all its previous owners and readers, known or unknown, has accrued to it a certain potential of humanity which is more than a mere matter of sentiment.’’55 If it was relatively easy to obliterate the signs of former owners, it was even easier to create associations with them after the fact—or to invent them altogether. The most celebrated example of forced (or indeed forged) associations involving a Renaissance author is the so-called Ireland Shakespeare Forgeries, in which William Henry Ireland faked signatures, letters, and even works by Shakespeare.56 And Shakespeare is not the only writer whose bibliographical record is prone to falsification. In one of the reviews of his Copernican Census, Gingerich was taken to task for missing important evidence of ownership in a copy of the 1566 edition at Queen’s College Oxford; but when he took another look at it he realized that these phony provenances and the damage [including a torn leaf at sig. Gg5] were not present when I recorded this copy. This volume (and some 70 others, mostly from Christ Church) were stolen in the 1990s by an avaricious music tutor at Oxford, one Simon Heighes, who removed the original historic provenances, including the one I had recorded on sig. Gg5, and who added the fake ownership marks. Heighes was eventually caught, fined, and sent to jail.57

But the methods employed for engineering associations need not be as devious as outright forgery, and avarice is only the darkest of the many possible motives for doing so. One interesting book associated with Ben Jonson points to a more ambiguous practice. On the title page of the Huntington Library’s copy of George of Montemayor’s Diana (published in London in 1598), Ben Jonson clearly inscribed his signature (‘‘Sum Ben: Jonsonij’’) and his motto (‘‘tanquam explorator’’).58 This inscription is genuine, but its association with the rest of the pages in this volume is not: at some point in its history, the title page was detached from the copy Jonson originally owned and pasted into this one.59

Annotations and Attributions: Shakespeare & Co. On 9 July 1931, a British bookseller named N. M. Broadbent wrote to the newly appointed director of research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Dr. Joseph Quincy Adams, to describe some books he had sent

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to Folger containing annotations by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers.60 Among the books Broadbent had sold to Folger, he wanted to draw Adams’s attention to one of particular importance: it was the copy of Cicero’s De oratore from 1569, with the early reader’s key to the symbols used in his marginalia, that I described at the beginning of Chapter 2 above. Broadbent spotted the ‘‘trefoil’’—or three-leafed clover—that had also been found in some of Francis Bacon’s notes, and claimed that this table was nothing less than a guide to the annotational system devised by Bacon for digesting the material he read (though he also acknowledged that similar symbols were used by Ben Jonson). Broadbent boldly identified the notes in the Cicero volume as being in Bacon’s and/or Jonson’s own hand, and Adams duly endorsed the letter, ‘‘Key to Annotated Books by Bacon and Jonson.’’ Adams never followed up Broadbent’s suggestion, and scholars have since become far more skeptical about his attribution. Peter Beal concludes his discussion of Bacon in the Index of English Literary Manuscripts with some sobering caveats: ‘‘Many men besides Bacon were in the habit of marking their books, and also of using the marginal trefoil which is found in certain of Bacon’s MSS. Without clear evidence of provenance or positive paleographical identification it would be impossible to distinguish Bacon’s books from those of his contemporaries.’’61 Disappointingly, if not surprisingly, there is no compelling evidence to connect the 1569 Cicero with Bacon. While some of the marks found in the Folger’s 1569 Cicero are similar to those used by Bacon and Jonson (and many others), the hand used to inscribe them does not bear a close resemblance to the hand of either figure. In his letter to Adams, Broadbent noted in passing that ‘‘The subject of book annotations has, as far as I know, received no attention as yet from men of letters, but it is surely worthy of the deepest study’’; and as ‘‘a branch of book collection,’’ he believed it to be ‘‘peculiar to Mr. Folger—all other great collectors appearing to be unaware of the great importance of these books.’’ But Folger was hardly the only precursor to Page and Rosenthal, and Broadbent was by no means the only one to associate trefoils and other marginal symbols with Francis Bacon. Anthony Grafton has described the ‘‘genial habit, in the last years of the nineteenth century, of assigning every book annotated in Latin by a German to Melanchthon’’; and by the early years of the twentieth century, there was an equally marked (and, at times, less genial) habit of attributing English Renaissance annotations—in virtually any language and on virtually any subject—to Bacon.62 One of the British Library’s copies of Bacon’s own Advancement of Learning is accompanied by a letter, dated December 1916, in which the American bookdealer John Howell notified the librarian of the British

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Museum that he would soon be selling the volume at auction. He pointed out that Folger, Huntington, and Pierpont Morgan had already expressed an interest in bidding for it, and he attributed this special interest to the contemporary marginalia found in the volume: ‘‘the curious clover marks in the margins of a number of pages have been compared with other similar marks known to have been made by Bacon.’’63 The suggestion that the annotations were authorial probably reflected the opinion, and certainly served the interests, of the collector whose book Howell was selling: it was part of the library of Sir Edward DurningLawrence, whose extensive collection of rare books (numbering more than 5,500 volumes when it was donated to the University of London in 1931) was created, at least in part, to support his conviction that Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.64 The stakes of association become most sharply visible around the figure of Shakespeare—the most famous of writers and most elusive of readers. In the first half of the twentieth century, marginalia emerged as the central evidence both for and against the prosecution in the increasingly heated debate over the authorship of the plays published in his name and the ownership of books from the various candidates’ libraries. The most recent episodes in this story involve Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and in the last few years a debate has been raging on the Shakespeare authorship Web sites concerning a markedup copy of the Geneva Bible whose marginalia may or may not correlate with the biblical citations in Shakespeare’s plays.65 But as the letters from Broadbent and Howell suggest, the Baconians invested unprecedented money and effort in collecting and studying annotated books from the English Renaissance. They might even deserve to be credited with reviving the modern interest in English Renaissance marginalia; and insofar as they do, it is an all but forgotten collector named William T. Smedley rather than the celebrated Henry Clay Folger who deserves to be remembered as the movement’s founding figure. In 1943, G. R. Rose published an article in the journal Baconiana providing a detailed account of the marks supposedly used in annotations by Bacon and Jonson (Figure 35). Rose credited the discovery of Bacon’s system to Smedley and referred the reader to his valuable library of annotated books—‘‘now preserved in a famous American library [i.e., the Folger].’’66 But who was Smedley and how did his Baconian collection end up at the most Shakespearean of libraries? Smedley (1851–1934) was a chartered accountant from Birmingham who, by the end of the nineteenth century, had established himself as a trusted financial manager. He served as chairman of two companies with prominent positions in the commercial and cultural history of Britain, British Mutoscope and Biograph (from its creation in 1897 to its dissolu-

Figure 35. William Smedley’s table of Bacon’s marginal marks (1943).

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tion in 1919) and Neostyle/Roneo Ltd. (from circa 1900 to his retirement in the 1920s). The former was the pioneering film company responsible for the earliest surviving Shakespearean film, Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s King John of 1899—and indeed, it seems to have been Smedley himself who pushed the company toward Shakespeare, in part as a bid for cultural respectability.67 Its main product was the ‘‘mutoscope,’’ a rotating cylinder that displayed a series of photographs in quick succession, giving the impression of movement. With Biograph’s capital and technological expertise, Smedley helped to launch Neostyle—later renamed Roneo—around 1900.68 The company is still in business as a manufacturer of office furniture, but in Smedley’s day it became a household name (and an office verb) based on another mechanical device involving a rotating cylinder: its ‘‘roneograph,’’ a precursor to the mimeograph, could print off multiple copies of a single text. By the first years of the twentieth century Smedley had been converted to the Baconian cause and in 1902 became a council member of Baconiana, their official mouthpiece in Britain. In 1910–11 he published a series of essays in the journal on ‘‘The Mystery of Francis Bacon,’’ and in 1912 published a book-length study of that name. While many of his fellow Baconians were combing Shakespeare’s works for signatures and other messages concealed by cryptograms and numerological patterns, Smedley based his revelations on more conventional methods and on sources that had apparently been hiding in plain sight. He explained in his opening chapter that he had been working since 1909 with another Baconian book collector named W. M. Safford to gather together some two thousand ‘‘copiously annotated’’ volumes from Bacon’s library.69 Scholars had long wondered about the fate of the books Bacon left to Sir John Constable in his will, and by searching for marginalia in Bacon’s hand Safford and Smedley thought they could solve the mystery and reassemble one of the Renaissance period’s great lost libraries. Having done so, they would be in a position to broach a greater mystery— indeed, what their fellow Baconian James Phinney Baxter would famously call ‘‘the greatest of literary problems’’70 —by proving that the learning displayed in Shakespeare’s plays could only be found in the library (and marginalia) of Francis Bacon. Smedley’s faith in the strength of his argument, and in the value of Bacon’s marginalia, increased in the years following the publication of The Mystery of Francis Bacon. In the first of many letters to the Baconian bookdealer John Howell, in May 1917, Smedley confided that ‘‘I have unpublished evidence which I believe definitively settles the point at issue; but the time for its publication is not yet. [But] whenever the facts come to be recognized

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the world will experience a greater surprise than has ever been experienced.’’71 The daunting job of finding Bacon’s marginalia became easier once Smedley and Safford convinced themselves that ‘‘the annotation of books was not a common practice’’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that Bacon was, in fact, ‘‘the only scholar living at that time . . . who was persistently making marginal notes on the books he read.’’72 Smedley purchased all of the annotated books he could find, and his descriptive notes on one of them (a Latin Bible from 1517) offers a revealing glimpse not just of the interest in marginal minutiae that would have matched that of any contemporary scholar but also of the less scholarly process by which he persuaded himself that they were in Bacon’s hand: I have not been able to find in these notes anything distinctive of his handwriting, but the notes are certainly after his style, and on Folio LIII the numbers in the margin and their style are exactly his. The figures are all made as he made them. The brackets are not those which he usually made, but on the back of Folio XLII, the lower bracket is like his, and the upper bracket it will be observed is a drawing of some foliage. This is a peculiarity which was not likely to be at all common, and to my mind stamps the book as a Bacon book. The same style of bracket will be found on the back of XIII, and on the front of that page are dots and dashes exactly as he made them. The general character of the annotations in the book are certainly like his. The more I look at it the more I feel convinced that the brackets are his. There is a pointer [i.e., manicule] on the back of XXVII which is again fanciful, just as he used to draw them. . . . Every time I refer to this book I become more and more certain that the handwriting is Bacon’s.73

Smedley subjected dozens of books to similar scrutiny and gradually came to see Bacon’s hand everywhere—and when he began to conclude that many examples of marginalia previously attributed to Melanchthon were in fact the work of Bacon, even he should have sensed that his wishful thinking was getting the better of him. By September 1917 Smedley was able to report to Howell that he had assembled a considerable collection of manuscripts, printed books, and other artifacts: I have about 3000 books constituting what I call my Bacon-Shakespeare library./ . . . But the value lies in the Bacon manuscripts and annotated books. There are some of his youth’s scribblings—common place books—a Genealogy of Scottish Noblemen in 1602 nearly all in his handwriting—a sideboard which belonged to him and which never left the Gorhambury Estate until it came to my hands—a marvellous manuscript on Canon Law, a huge bulky volume, and other interesting manuscripts in his handwriting. Then there are some 300 or 400 books with his marginal notes.74

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As early as 1915—just as Folger was developing his idea for a Shakespeare Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.—Smedley imagined that this collection might form the foundation for a ‘‘Bacon Memorial Library.’’ He published his not-so-modest proposal on the 354th anniversary of Bacon’s birth: ‘‘The most fitting memorial to Francis Bacon would be a library, in which were gathered together a copy of every volume which was published in England from 1560, the year in which he was born to, say, 1640. . . . It should also contain a copy of every edition of his work published in every language to the present time. It should also contain copies of all books written upon that period. It should also contain copies of all books of which Bacon or his work form the subject. . . . What a reference library that would be!’’75 When he sent Howell a copy of this pamphlet in 1917, he expressed his desire to see the collection end up in ‘‘the Library of some College or Institution’’— though he could not, he claimed, afford to let it go for free. Since he was ‘‘utterly ashamed of the treatment that English literary men have extended to Bacon’’—or, more likely, to those who were arguing for his authorship of Shakespeare’s plays—he suggested that the most fitting home for such a memorial would be the United States. He felt certain that Bacon would approve, since he ‘‘was instrumental in the earliest attempts at English colonization . . . in the country, the greatness of which he foresaw.’’76 By 1921, his sense of outrage and his need for profit had evidently diminished. In May of that year a front-page article in the Times announced that a famous ‘‘Bacon library’’ was being presented to the University of London’s newly established Institute for Historical Research. The donor wished to keep his identity anonymous, but for anyone who had read or heard about Smedley’s 1915 proposal it would not have been difficult to guess: ‘‘He makes the formal offer of his collection of books on condition that it should be known as ‘The Francis Bacon Memorial Library’ ’’ and its most valuable feature would be a large set of ‘‘books (principally incunabula) having MSS. notes in the margin believed to be in the handwriting of Francis Bacon, and manuscripts of the period believed to be in Francis Bacon’s handwriting.’’77 But this too fell through: when Smedley was informed that he would also have to pay for a building to house the library he rescinded his gift. By September 1923 he had decided, again, to offer his ‘‘Francis Bacon Memorial Library’’ to potential buyers in America, and he approached Howell (who was based in San Francisco) to serve as his agent.78 ‘‘I want to sell and to sell to America,’’ he explained to Howell, but ‘‘As to the price I cannot fix that at present. Many of the books with annotations are priceless, far more valuable than any first Folio of Shakespeare although their market value has yet to be established.’’ Smedley sug-

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gested that the Elizabethan Club Library at Yale might be an appropriate home, but Howell was inspired by the idea ‘‘of adding the greatest Bacon collection to the greatest Shakespeare collection’’ and went straight to Folger.79 After several months of negotiations, on 16 September 1924, Howell sent an urgent cable to Smedley, presenting an offer from the great Shakespearean collector himself: ‘‘Would you accept 25 thousand pounds allowing me five thousand pounds commission. I have interested client guarantees keep library intact, installing it as separate unit under your name with his big Shakespeare collection when he builds new library at Washington as gift to nation. Cannot afford pay more as has duplicates nearly all but foreign books.’’ Within three days the deal was done, and Folger acquired the entire collection (including the sideboard from Gorhambury) for £25,000.80 Smedley was disappointed by the price fetched by his books, but he shared Howell’s excitement about their destination: ‘‘I am 73 next month,’’ he wrote to Folger after they had finalized their arrangements, ‘‘but young for my age and with all the enthusiasm of youth. I cannot let the mail go out tonight without telling you how overjoyed I am to know that my close companions will find their resting place with you.’’81 When Folger died unexpectedly in the summer of 1930, Smedley asked Howell to write to Folger’s widow to express his condolences and also to ask if he could borrow back one of his books—the manuscript of Barclay’s Argenis, which he had always considered to be in Bacon’s hand. He had become increasingly convinced that the extensive manuscript additions in the ‘‘Bordeaux Montaigne’’ were also in Bacon’s hand, and that careful comparison with the Argenis (and with the annotations in his other books) would confirm Bacon’s role in the production not just of his own Essays but also those of Montaigne. He went so far as to secure the services of a Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Mansfield, Scotland Yard’s leading handwriting analyst, who had recently analyzed an old Spanish manuscript thought to be in the hand of Christopher Columbus.82 Mansfield apparently agreed to prepare a report in support of his conclusions, and the book was borrowed and returned. The Folgers’ agent John Anderson Jr. wrote a tantalizing letter to Mrs. Folger on 10 October 1930, informing her that ‘‘the details of my findings re. the Barclay MS. can hardly be put in letter form—and will have to await our meeting. . . . After hearing my detailed report it will be for you to say what further you desire done.’’ But that is the last we hear of Mansfield’s report and Smedley’s case for Bacon’s hand in Barclay’s Argenis. The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library finally opened in 1932. A short tribute appeared in a journal called The Librarian and Book World reporting that Folger’s ‘‘most astounding achievement’’ as a collector consisted not in assembling one-third of the world’s copies of Shake-

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speare’s First Folio but ‘‘in the re-formation of considerable portions of the libraries of Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, including the acquisition of the famous collection en bloc of W. T. Smedley.’’83 This notice was signed ‘‘Immerito,’’ which is the same pseudonym used by Smedley in an earlier article in Baconiana, so it seems likely that this was Smedley’s own last word on the subject. Three years later, and one year after Smedley’s death, a more circumspect tribute appeared in the first volume of Seymour de Ricci’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada (1935). Within the long entry for the Folger Shakespeare Library there is a smaller section devoted to ‘‘The Smedley Collection’’: ‘‘About 1924, Mr. Folger added to his library an extensive collection of books and manuscripts formed by Mr. W. T. Smedley, of London, with the object of studying Bacon’s handwriting. The late owner believed that Bacon had annotated most of the following manuscripts, an assertion no prudent scholar would be prepared to endorse without considerable additional evidence. But, apart from their supposed Baconian interest, the Smedley manuscripts are of excellent quality and considerable value.’’84 As de Ricci anticipated, their Baconian interest has dwindled through the years: the hand in the ‘‘Barclay manuscript’’ has turned out, in fact, to be Barclay’s (and the hand in the ‘‘Bordeaux Montaigne’’ to be Montaigne’s), and none of the marginalia can be decisively associated with Bacon. But by any other measure Folger got extremely good value for his money: Smedley’s books added inestimable interest to Folger’s collection, particularly for historians of early printing and reading. Of the 239 annotated incunables in the Folger Library, almost half of them (112) contain Smedley’s bookplate. The passionate pursuit of Renaissance marginalia did not inevitably shake one’s faith in the identity of William Shakespeare, and another valuable collection by an amateur scholar of Renaissance marginalia— one who, by coincidence, also made his name and money in the film industry—now rests more comfortably within the walls of the Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library. In the 1930s, the successful Hollywood screenwriter Jules Furthman (whose credits included Mutiny on the Bounty, Nightmare Alley, and The Big Sleep) was struck by the similarity of passages in Montaigne’s Essays to certain lines in Shakespeare’s plays. He imagined that Shakespeare must have marked up a copy of Florio’s 1603 translation and, assuming that such an important book must have survived, he set out to find it: I had book dealers all over the world send me copies of the first edition in English. Quaritch sent me a beautiful copy, bound in the brown contemporary leather, bearing the arms of Queen Elizabeth, which I bought. I also looked at the one in the British Museum, which contains a disputed signature by Shakespeare. You have probably heard the old story about the man who searched all

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over the world for something only to return home and find it in his own backyard. Well . . . my wife actually purchased [Shakespeare’s copy] in the rare-book section of Robinson’s Department Store, here in Los Angeles. . . . [She] saw it was a first edition in the original leather binding and that the title-page was covered with marginal notes which appeared to be a partial index for hundreds of other such notes scattered throughout the remainder of the volume; so she brought the book home to me for a birthday present, and nobody in the world ever had a better one.85

He corresponded with leading Shakespeareans (including Hardin Craig, Madeleine Doran, and Joseph Quincy Adams), and when he failed to convince the scholarly establishment of Shakespeare’s association with the book he produced a fictional symposium, in the classical mold, in which Furthman’s fellow writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Dashiell Hammett debate the merits of his argument.86 He was still refining his case in his seventy-seventh year, and he described his latest thinking to a friend on 3 May 1965: ‘‘I told you there were about twenty of these marginal notes which contained not only the sense but some of the same words that Shakespeare used in the parallels in the plays. This proves to be a very fortunate conjunction when none of these words appear in the adjoining text, because such a tell-tale method of making literary change constitutes the legal proof of association and possession. In fact, we might easily say that Shakespeare, in abstracting a cookie from the jar, left his fingerprints on the lid.’’87 Furthman died just a few months later after suffering a stroke in the Bodleian Library, still in pursuit of Shakespeare’s fingerprints on the textual cookie jars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Use Values The practices and attitudes I have surveyed here point to two different economies of collecting and two opposing philosophies about how to treat the books we find valuable. They might be mapped against the terms offered by Karl Marx at the very beginning of Capital (1867), where he suggests that the value of any object will be split into two factors. The first is what he calls their ‘‘use value’’ (that is, their utility, or their ability to satisfy some function useful to humans). The second is their ‘‘exchange value’’ (their marketability, or the money they will fetch when sold). In Marx’s account, an object like a book can only become a valuable commodity through the emptying out of its objectness in the name of abstract exchange.88 And if this final chapter has suggested that rare books are vulnerable to this process of ‘‘fetishism,’’ which obscures and even effaces the world of work bound up with their creation and employment, I hope that this entire study has also revealed the ways in

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which used texts (when handled sensitively and observed closely) have the power to remind us of their social lives—lived, like secondhand clothes, at the intersection of ‘‘history, memory, and desire.’’89 Even those of us who are not in a position to approach old books as commodities have to choose between two opposing systems of value and a wide range of possible reading behaviors. Anne Fadiman has recently suggested that people who value books fall into two categories. Those she calls ‘‘courtly lovers’’ read a book with ‘‘Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller.’’ For those she calls ‘‘carnal lovers,’’ on the other hand, ‘‘a book’s words [are] holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them [are] a mere vessel, and . . . Hard use [is] a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.’’90 While most of this book has been spent in the company of carnal lovers, the courtly lovers demand to be heard—and they ask some difficult questions. Would you really be happy to see a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio dipped in spaghetti sauce? And while rare marginalia may be as interesting as rare books, what about newer ones? At some point, don’t they start to look too much like our own notes, becoming sources of embarrassment rather than enlightenment? On the other hand, we are closer in time to the First Folio than Archbishop Parker was to most of the manuscripts he annotated: as Rowan Watson put it, ‘‘it is as well to remember that even masterpieces were originally intended to be used. Carla Bozzolo and Ezio Ornato have shown that books from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were still being read intensively in the fifteenth, and this is borne out by annotations in a host of scholastic, biblical, and theological works of the period. All but the most lavish liturgical and choir books bear the traces of daily use, and the same can be said of Books of Hours.’’91 And finally, if we do not leave marks in our books, what kinds of evidence will future historians turn to, a question that is becoming more pressing as we move further into the digital age? Marginalia are too complex a phenomenon to be either endorsed wholesale or condemned outright, but I hope that this book will help us not just to look in new ways at old readers but also to think about what exactly gives old books their value in the present. Are annotated books ‘‘soiled by use’’ or are they ‘‘enlivened by association’’? Are books from the past precious relics, in which marginalia are dirt or desecration, or are they inanimate objects (like pots or arrowheads) that are only brought to life by traces of the human hands and minds that used them? You may, depending on your answer, wish to respond in the space below.

Afterword

The Future of Past Readers

In spring 2006 the National Library of Scotland launched its new magazine, Discover NLS. The photograph on its cover (Figure 36) caught my eye and the image of the young girl—I will call her Miranda—has stayed with me ever since. By now there is nothing particularly unusual about the image of someone (to quote the caption) ‘‘Browsing digital resources on an interactive kiosk,’’ and similar images have doubtless appeared in magazines, annual reports, and promotional brochures produced by any number of old libraries anxious to show that they remain sites of power and wonder in the brave new world of digital textuality.1 But Miranda’s pointing finger reminded me of the Renaissance students’ manicules discussed in Chapter 2—and of the long-standing links between pointing, reading, and learning—and prompted me to meditate on the future of the practices, terms, and traces described in this book. What kinds of marks will Miranda herself leave in or around the books that come (in one form or another) into her hands, and will they be more durable and interesting than the fingerprints that are wiped away each day from the screen on the interactive kiosk? And how will the digital medium help or hinder her potential interest in marking the readers who came before her? Our new digital tools promise to bring more readers into closer contact with rare books and manuscripts than ever before. At libraries such as the NLS, visitors who would never dream of entering the reading rooms can be found marveling at high quality digital facsimiles of some of the nation’s textual treasures. At the British Library’s successful ‘‘Turning the Pages’’ displays, for instance, they can use the touch-sensitive screens to flip forward and backward through three-dimensional replicas of some of the rarest and most beautiful volumes—allowing them to examine the entire book, including the binding, and not just the single page or opening selected by a curator and presented on a cradle behind glass, while the original object can still be consulted by scholars (or, if it is particularly fragile, kept safe in climate-controlled stacks). An affordable CD-ROM version of the program makes it possible for visitors to take away a dozen of the most priceless manuscripts

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Figure 36. ‘‘Finger on the future,’’ from the debut issue of Discover NLS (2006). The Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. Photographer: Peter Iain Campbell.

(including the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, and Jane Austen’s History of England) and turn their virtual pages with virtual fingers in the comfort of their own homes; and the entire interactive gallery has recently been made available for free to anyone with a networked computer.2 Researchers who do dream of visits to rare book reading rooms but have limited resources for travel to libraries can now, in many cases, summon up reliable images of most of the texts they want to study on their personal computers. And there is every indication that electronic catalogues will make bibliographical descriptions and archival finding guides both fuller and easier to access—where there is sufficient time, funding, and expertise to produce them. Indeed, these very tools made this book easier and cheaper to write: I used the National Archive’s ‘‘Documents Online’’ service to examine Sir Julius Caesar’s will without traveling to London, I used the ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue)

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to gather preliminary information about the location and condition of surviving copies of particular texts, and I used EEBO (Early English Books Online) to read countless rare books from collections all over the world—without moving from my office in York, I have been able to consult early printed texts held in New York and even to call them up alongside volumes from Oxford.3 I have also used Google to search for information on the Internet, Amazon to buy the occasional book, and e-mail to correspond with other scholars, with librarians, and with the various people responsible for producing and distributing this book. And yet I cannot be alone in finding something sad about Miranda’s picture and in feeling more pessimistic than optimistic about her prospects. It is not (I hasten to add) the same pessimism that Sven Birkerts voiced more than a decade ago in his antidigital diatribe The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. I do not share his despair about the inherent evils of technology, nor do I share his sense of the kinds of reading we are in danger of leaving behind. Birkerts was primarily concerned with the post-Romantic reader of prose fiction, and his nostalgic argument ‘‘ultimately originates in . . . the dreamy fellow with an open book in his lap.’’4 That form of reading shows surprisingly few signs of dying the death that dramatic pronouncements on the end of the book have either mourned or celebrated (depending upon who was doing the pronouncing).5 Almost everyone who still reads novels still prefers paper to screen for that kind of reading (though that may, of course, change as display technology, interface design, and Web-based fiction improve), and people are not yet being ‘‘electroencephalographically imprinted with the actual brain perception and erudition of Shakespeare or Erasmus, [allowing] the book [to] be bypassed’’ (as Marshall McLuhan predicted back in 1970).6 Furthermore, the ‘‘ecology of reading’’ privileged by Birkerts—in which our encounters with books are linear, slow, passive, and private—turns out to be far from universal: it has, in fact, very little in common with the scenes and modes of reading recovered in this book. And while Birkerts fears that contact with electronic texts will lead to both the erosion of language and the flattening of history, a long glance back at a premodern reader like Gabriel Harvey (with his ‘‘perpetual meditations, repetitions, recognitions, recapitulations, reiterations, and ostentations of most practicable points,’’ his ‘‘sounde and deepe imprinting as well in ye memory, as in the understanding . . . Every Rule of value, and euery poynt of vse’’) makes Birkerts himself look terminologically impoverished and historically shortsighted.7 It is not, then, the screen itself that bothers me—though I do worry that Miranda is less and less likely to experience firsthand the difference between a ‘‘digital surrogate’’ and the kind of original artifact it can

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stand in for but never fully replace. My concern is rather with what the screen allows Miranda to see and do: simply put, the digital tools being developed for her have, as yet, paid very little attention to readers. Databases and facsimiles of the sort described above are primarily concerned with giving us access to accurate and attractive informational content and with helping us to make our way around it (a goal generally known, in the computer and information sciences, as ‘‘usability’’). Their emphasis on ‘‘interactivity’’ notwithstanding, they have not yet imagined us doing much with or to books beyond turning their pages and have not yet found ways to preserve our marks—much less to improve them or to educate us about the markings of those who turned pages before us. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid suggested in The Social Life of Information, many of the ‘‘people driving us hard into the future on the back of new technologies’’ suffer from a sort of ‘‘tunnel vision’’ that leads them to ignore not just the ‘‘visual periphery of [the] physical objects’’ that transmit information but also their ‘‘social periphery, the communities, organizations, and institutions that frame human activities. . . . It is to help draw attention to these hard-to-see (and hard-to-describe) resources that we gave our book the title it has’’8 —and it is to help draw attention to similar signs of life in the margins of old books that has motivated me to write this book. If the trends I have outlined continue, scholars of used books will be able to turn to different kinds of data: the customer reviews on Amazon alone will give future scholars of reader response much to work with. But historians of reading and readers themselves are in danger of losing sight of and interest in the kinds of materials and questions addressed in this book. These are large and thorny problems that we have only begun to take in hand. They worried the Council on Library and Information Resources enough to commission a far-reaching report (published in 2001) called The Evidence in Hand: Report of the Task Force on the Artifact in Library Collections.9 That report was an exemplary collaboration between bibliographers, historians, librarians, and archivists, and I will end with a general call for conversations between scholars, curators, conservators, and digital designers that will produce the kinds of tools that serve the readers of the past as well the future.

Abbreviations

BL British Library, London CCCC Corpus Christi College, Cambridge DNB Dictionary of National Biography, 23 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1908–9) EEBO Early English Books Online ESTC English Short-Title Catalogue FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. HEH Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. Inc incunable KJV King James Version of the Bible MS(S) manuscript(s) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) OED Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) RB rare book STC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 2nd ed., ed. A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, and K. F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976–91) Wing Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Wing with John J. Morrison and Carolyn W. Nelson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992–98)

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Notes

Preface 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 Bude´ 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 Norrgre´n, ‘‘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 Andre´ Tournon, Montaigne: La glose et l’essai, and M. A. Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript,

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Notes and Pen-marks; and on Kepler and Bude´, 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 ShortTitle 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. 10. Rosenthal, The Rosenthal Collection, 77, 46. 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. 13. Cormack and Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500–1700. 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. 15. Stoddard, Marks in Books, 1. 16. Cited in Eugene R. Kintgen, Reading in Tudor England, 69. 17. Simon Goldhill, ‘‘Literary History Without Literature: Reading Practices in the Ancient World,’’ 84. 18. Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Reading as Poaching.’’ Cf. Jonathan Boyarin (ed.),

Notes to Pages xvi–4

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The Ethnography of Reading, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘‘Glossary: The Language of Middle English Literary Theory.’’ 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. 22. FSL MS K.b.1, fol. 1r. 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.’’ Chapter 1. Introduction 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.’’ 5. Ibid., 255–56: ‘‘In the highest fourmes, cause them to set downe all the

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Notes to Pages 5–7

Sermons. As Text, diuision, exposition, or meaning, doctrines, and how the seuerall doctrines were gathered, all the proofes, reasons, vses, applications. . . . And also for further directing them, and better helping their vnderstanding and memories, for the repetition thereof; cause them to leaue spaces betweene euery part, and where neede is to diuide them with lines. So also to distinguish the seuerall parts by letters or figures, and setting the sum of euery thing in the margent ouer against each matter in a word or two. . . . Direct them to leaue good margents for these purposes and so soone as euer the Preacher quotes any scripture, as he nameth it, to set it in the Margent against the place, lest it slip out of memorie. And presently after the sermon is done, to run ouer all againe, correcting it, and setting downe the sum of euerie chief head, faire and distinctly in the margent ouer against the place, if his leasure will suffer.’’ 6. HEH RB 29028. 7. Jardine and Grafton, ‘‘ ‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,’’ 30. 8. The precise figure is 1,531 out of 7,526 books, or 20.3 percent. 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. 15. Johannes Amos Comenius, Orbis sensualium pictus, 200–201. 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.

Notes to Pages 7–13

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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. 19. Marc Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. 20. HEH RB 30108. 21. HEH RB 46130. 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!’’ 29. HEH RB 271828: John Wells, Sciographia: or, The Art of Shadowes. 30. HEH RB 60330. 31. Stanley Fish, ‘‘Interpreting the Variorum’’; Roger Chartier, ‘‘Communities of Readers,’’ in The Order of Books. 32. HEH RB 433864. 33. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 158–59. 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. 37. On sig. Ddd3v, Bacon takes a jab at Machiavelli: ‘‘But it must be remem-

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Notes to Pages 13–18

bred al this while, that the precepts which we haue set down, are of that kind which may be counted & called Bonae Artes, as for euill arts, if a man would set down for himselfe that principle of Machiauel That a man seeke not to attaine virtue it selfe: But the appearance onely thereof, because the credite of vertue is a helpe, but the vse of it a cumber. . . .’’ In a long marginal note, however, the reader draws on Bacon’s other writings to accuse him of hypocrisy: ‘‘Surely some of yor rules bend to this Machiavellisme. For in yor sixt rule of Marshalling pursuits you say yt virtuous callings yt are laborious with assiduity must not be embraced. & many other Antichristian Machiavellian Rules of fond advantage you have touching Simulation & dissimulation.’’ 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). 45. HEH RB 99544: Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorous Fiammetta. 46. HEH RB 376333: Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum, et rerum. 47. Whitaker, ‘‘A Collaboration of Readers,’’ 235. 48. Grindley, ‘‘Reading Piers Plowman C-Text Annotations,’’ 77–91. 49. HEH RB 12924. 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. 52. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘‘Printing and the People,’’ 192. 53. Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift. 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.

Notes to Pages 18–24

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55. HEH RB 28118: James Ware, The History of Ireland, preface. 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. 59. OED, s.v. ‘‘marginalia’’ (draft revision, 2000). 60. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, 72. 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. 63. OED, s.v. ‘‘postil’’ (2nd ed., 1989). 64. OED, s.v. ‘‘scholium’’ (2nd ed., 1989). In Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Anthony Grafton explains how Guillaume Bude´ 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.’’ 66. OED, s.v. ‘‘gloss’’ (2nd ed., 1989). 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.’’ 70. Stephen A. Barney (ed.), Annotation and Its Texts, jacket copy. 71. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. 72. John Bodel (ed.), Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions. 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.’’ 77. Slights, Managing Readers, chapter 2; Elizabeth M. Richmond-Garza, For-

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Notes to Pages 25–29

gotten Cites/Sights: Interpretation and the Power of Classical Citation in Renaissance English Tragedy, 8–9; Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England; D. C. Greetham (ed.), The Margins of the Text; and Rayna Kalas, ‘‘Frames and the Technology of Figurative Language.’’

Chapter 2.  1. Steve Leveen, ‘‘How to Leave Masterly Marginalia’’ (http://www.levenger .com/levenger/helpfulhints/Marginaliahowto.asp). 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. 11. G. G. Meynell, ‘‘John Locke’s Method of Common-placing.’’

Notes to Pages 30–33

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12. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, trans. John Trevisa (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1495), sig. i3v. 13. William H. Sherman, John Dee. 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. 15. Hilde Norrgre´n, ‘‘Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad.’’ 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 *, †, ‡, §, 兩兩, , and . 21. Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, Encyclopedia of the Book, 2nd ed., 141. 22. The thread can be found at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/ mailing-lists/exlibris/1993/06/msg00160. html; Farren’s ‘‘last word’’ is at . . . / msg00195.html. 23. The thread can be found at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/ mailing-lists/exlibris/1998/04/msg00077. html. 24. The InfoD thread is archived at http://lists.webtic.nl/pipermail/infode sign/1998-June/000065.html; the SHARP-L thread is at https://listserv.indiana .edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A2ind0406&Lsharp-l&T0&F&S&P10387; and the Typophile thread is at http://typophile.com/node/7703. 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.

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Notes to Pages 34–37

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. 30. I owe this information to Linne Mooney. 31. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader. 32. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, MS 085, fol. 5v. There is a high resolution image of this page at the Digital Scriptorium Web site: http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/scriptorium/ds_search?ShelfImageUCB 085. 33. British Library, Additional MS 41068A. 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 Bude´’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. 39. FSL Inc A636 Copy 3, fol. 75v.

Notes to Pages 37–43

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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.’’ 47. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, sig. xx. 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). 50. STC 2091 and 2728. 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 ye English’’ (Thomas Hobbes, The Correspondence, 1:271 [thanks to Timothy Raylor for bringing this passage to my attention]). 52. Alfred W. Pollard (ed.), Records of the English Bible, 237. 53. The Bible in English, sig. *5v. 54. Evelyn B. Tribble, Margins and Marginality, 25. 55. Cf. Yann Sordet, ‘‘Repe´rages et navigation dans l’espace du livre ancien,’’ on the ‘‘Histoire du livre a` l’enssib’’ Web site (http://histoire.enssib.fr/5outils/ Sordet/sordet.html).

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Notes to Pages 43–49

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. 59. Richard Abrams, ‘‘Illicit Pleasures,’’ 23–28. 60. Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 48–49 and 241. 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. 65. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 172. 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.’’ 70. John Bulwer, Chirologia, book 1, p. 188, and book 2, p. 94. 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’’). 72. See Graham Richards’s entry on Bulwer in the ODNB. 73. Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern; Michael Neill, ‘‘ ‘Amphitheaters in the body’: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearean Stage.’’

Notes to Pages 50–53

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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 Re´e, 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). 78. Johannes Baptista Cantalycius, Summa grammatices. 79. Charles S. Pierce, ‘‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.’’ 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.

Chapter 3. Reading the Matriarchive 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. 1. The body of scholarship in this area is now far too large to fit into a single note. Given the focus of this chapter, it is worth singling out the establishment of several major publishing and cataloguing ventures devoted to making these materials available in print and online—including ‘‘The Other Voice in Early

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Modern Europe’’ (a series edited for the University of Chicago Press by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.), ‘‘The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works’’ (edited for Ashgate by Betty S. Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott), the Brown University Women Writers Project (http://www.wwp .brown.edu), and the Perdita Project (http://human.ntu.ac.uk/research/perdita/index.html). The ideas developed in this chapter were initially inspired by the work of the Perdita Project and were first presented at its ‘‘Renaissance MS’’ colloquium ‘‘Early Modern Women’s Reading Practices’’ (Oxford, 2001). 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 SeventeenthCentury 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.’’ 6. Archive Fever, 91. 7. Archive Fever, 2. 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.’’ 9. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2. 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). 14. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 214–15. 15. Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early

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Modern England; Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. 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. 20. HEH RB 39759. 21. HEH RB 15856. 22. HEH RB 87312. 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.’’ 25. HEH RB 214745. 26. Lamb, ‘‘The Sociality of Margaret Hoby’s Reading Practices,’’ 17. 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. 31. Spence’s entry on Clifford in the ODNB. 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.

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36. See Juliet Fleming’s discussion of this passage in Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, 48. 37. Orgel, ‘‘Marginal Maternity.’’ 38. Orgel, ‘‘Marginal Maternity,’’ 269–70, 275. 39. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 216–17. 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.’’ Chapter 4. ‘‘The Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’ 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-Franc¸ois 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. 5. I owe this information to Peter Stallybrass. 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.

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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.’’ 13. Cit. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 373. 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’’). 21. HEH RB 61457 (STC 2241). 22. BL C.110.g.18(1) (STC 2134). 23. HEH RB 32934 (STC 2078). 24. HEH RB 56880. 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). 27. HEH RB 96514 (STC 2882). 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.’’

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31. HEH RB 228144 (STC 4404). 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. 34. HEH RB 17666. 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. 36. HEH RB 438000:200 (STC 2661). 37. HEH RB 438000:70F (STC 2245). 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 Chapters Verses Words Letters

39 927 23,214 592,439 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.

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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. Chapter 5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer 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 Bibliothe`que 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. 6. HEH RB 438000:67 (STC 10039.3). 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). 10. Examples include HEH RB 438000:238 (a 1638 Book of Common Prayer, STC 16414.3), HEH RB 438000:249 (a 1637 Book of Common Prayer, STC 16406), and HEH RB 438000:73 (a 1628 Book of Common Prayer, STC 16373b). This last volume also featured a vertical line down the middle of the page, separating the two columns—and it regularly cuts through the text where it runs straight across the page in a single column. This volume was purchased in the year of publication by Ann Anguish of Norwich, as the two silver armorial

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plaques on the crimson velvet cover attest. She was no doubt related to the Edmund Anguish from the parish of St. Peter de Mancoft in Norwich whose 1617 bookplate is among the very earliest catalogued in the STC (see item 3368.5). 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. 13. HEH RB 438000:581F (STC 16292). 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 Bu¨hler, 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’e´criture manuscrite et l’imprimerie: rupture ou continuite`?’’ 511–15. 19. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830. 20. Thomas S. Freeman, ‘‘Publish and Perish: The Scribal Culture of the Mar-

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ian Martyrs’’; Arthur F. Marotti, ‘‘Manuscript Transmission and the Catholic Martyrdom Account in Early Modern England’’; Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England.’’ 21. HEH RB 438000:332. 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. 25. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 238. 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.’’ 34. Targoff, Common Prayer, 5. As Hooker put it: 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

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Notes to Pages 102–105

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. 36. Christopher de Hamel, Cutting Up Manuscripts for Pleasure and Profit, 6. 37. Henry Gee, The Elizabethan Prayer-Book and Ornaments, 191. 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. Be´atrice Hernad, Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel. I owe this reference to Karlfried Froelich. 40. Erler, ‘‘Pasted-in Embellishments.’’ 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). 48. Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe (eds.), Manuscript Illumination in the

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Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction, 77, 87. Cf. Linda L. Brownrigg and Peggy Smith (eds.), Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books. 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). 50. Christopher de Hamel, ‘‘The Leaf Book,’’ 7. 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. 54. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 214. 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.’’

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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.’’ Chapter 6. John Dee’s Columbian Encounter 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. 2. See the entry on Dee in the ODNB. 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. 7. William H. Sherman, John Dee, chap. 7. 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. 10. On Columbus’s reading see Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of

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Christopher Columbus. On early readers of Columbus’s texts, see Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus—esp. the chapter ‘‘In the Margins of Columbus.’’ 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. 13. See the details in Dee’s entry in the ODNB. 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 Bibliothe`que Royale: Quinze anne´es 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. 21. Roberts, ‘‘Additions and Corrections,’’ 334. 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.’’ 24. Sig. A1r in the original, p. lxxi in Keen’s translation. In all subsequent citations of Ferdinand’s text I will provide the page number on which the origi-

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nal Italian passage appears and the page number from Keen’s English translation. When citing Dee’s marginalia alone I will only refer to the original text. Dee’s marginalia are in Latin, Italian, and English: I have retained the original spelling and punctuation for those in English and have silently translated the rest. 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’’: Cata´logo Concordado de la Biblioteca de Hernando Colo´n, ed. by Toma´s Marı´n Martı´nez, Jose´ 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. 26. Historie, a3r; lxxiv. 27. Historie, E6r; 45. 28. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England. 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. 31. Sherman, John Dee, 187–89. 32. Gwyn Williams, Madoc: The Legend of the Welsh Discovery of America. 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 Corte´s 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). 34. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. 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 personalita` 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). 38. Historie, N3r; 118. 39. Historie, Y1v. 40. Historie, G8v; 67. 41. Historie, T5v; 173. 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.

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44. John M. Headley, Tomasso Campanella and the Transformation of the World, 338. 45. Kadir, Columbus, 2. 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, Colo´n y su mentalidad mesia´nica franciscanista espan˜ola. For an English edition and explication of the key text, see August Kling and Delno C. West (trans. and eds.), The Libro de las Profecı´as 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. 48. Parry, ‘‘John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire,’’ 643. 49. Kadir, Columbus, 20. 50. Flint, Imaginative Landscape, 208. 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). 53. Historie, E5r, 43. 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. 56. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1. 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. Chapter 7. Sir Julius Ceasar’s Search Engine 1. BL MS Additional 6038, folio ar (1r). The original foliation has been replaced by a later sequence: in all citations I provide both the original folio number and the later number in square brackets. Caesar’s original Latin text reads ‘‘Sancti Thomae de Aquinae oratio. . . . Da mihi, inquam, intelligendi acumen, retinendi capasitatem, interpretandi subtilitatem, addiscendi facilitatem, et

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loquendi gratiam copiosam: ingressum instruas, progressum dirigas, egressum compleas. . . . Amen.’’ It is inscribed below a short printed prayer headed ‘‘Pro studiis foeliciter prouehendis, ad Christum precatio’’ (A prayer to Christ for the fruitful pursuit of studies). 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.’’ 8. Caesar acquired the book on or before 9 December 1577: he inscribed this date at the top of its title page, along with the motto ‘‘Post Tempestatem Tranquillitas’’ (Calm after the Storm). On its last page he noted, ‘‘This booke finis-

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shed 12. of Sept: 1629’’ (609r [616r]), but he was still adding references to newly published books as late as 1635, the year before his death. 9. Hill, Bench and Bureaucracy, 6. 10. The shelflist is BL MS Lansdowne 124, and the inventory of Italian books is BL MS Lansdowne 161, fols. 47–48. 11. Warren Boutcher, ‘‘Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century,’’ 194. 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 Euge`ne Thionville, De la the´orie 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. Franc¸oise Waquet (ed.), Mapping the World of Learning: The ‘‘Polyhistor’’ of Daniel Georg Morhof. 19. Neil Kenny, Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories. 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. 22. I cite, for the sake of convenience, the English translations of the King James Version (edited by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett for the Oxford

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Notes to Pages 137–140

World’s Classics in 1997)—though Caesar was probably working directly with the Vulgate. 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. 24. OED, s.v. ‘‘pandect.’’ 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

Notes to Pages 140–145

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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?textjulius%20caesar&y0&x0&&idx1& startid1690. 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. 36. Alain Wijffels, entry in the ODNB, s.v. ‘‘Caesar, Sir Julius.’’ 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). 40. BL MS Lansdowne 125, fols. 8v-10r. 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. 44. Schott, ‘‘The Trials of Orality,’’ 129–30. 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. 46. Cited by Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 148–49. 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.’’ 48. Knafla, Law and Politics, 45. The Staunford compilation is HEH RB 69540.

216

Notes to Pages 145–152

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. 50. HEH Ellesmere MS 496. 51. Knafla, Law and Politics, 49. 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. 54. Baker, The Legal Profession and the Common Law, 185. 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). 57. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books, 194. 58. Peter Stallybrass, ‘‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.’’ 59. ‘‘Introduction: L’art de l’extrait,’’ in E´lisabeth De´cultot (ed.), Lire, copier, e´crire: Les bibliothe`ques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe sie`cle, 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.’’ Chapter 8. Dirty Books? 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.

Notes to Pages 152–159

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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). 5. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘Margins of Truth,’’ 92. 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. 8. Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 424. 9. John Henry Jones, ‘‘Diary,’’ 30–31. 10. John Henry Jones, letter to the editor, TLS 5125, 22 June 2001, p. 17. 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. 13. Jackson, Marginalia, 236. 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.’’ 15. Charles Lamb, ‘‘Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading’’ (1822). 16. Robertson Davies, Happy Alchemy: On the Pleasures of Music and the Theatre, 372–73. 17. Jackson, Marginalia, 235. 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.

218

Notes to Pages 159–165

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. 24. Sebastian Brant, Stultifera nauis, fol. 13r–14r. 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. 28. Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary, 1:52–53. 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). 30. Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 47, 124. 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. 34. Roger Stoddard, ‘‘Looking at Marks in Books,’’ 32–33. 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.’’ 37. Orgel, ‘‘Margins of Truth,’’ 92. 38. I owe these points to David McKitterick and Steven Tabor. 39. Jackson, Marginalia, 271 and 73. 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!’’ 42. Daniel J. Slive, ‘‘Interview with Bernard M. Rosenthal,’’ 59.

Notes to Pages 165–172

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43. The Rosenthal Collection, 9. 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). 48. Raymond Blathwayte, ‘‘The Romance of the Sale Room,’’ 939. 49. William Harris Arnold, Ventures in Book Collecting, 27–28. 50. Andrew Block, The Book Collector’s Vade Mecum, 209–10. 51. Blathwayte, ‘‘The Romance of the Sale Room,’’ 940. 52. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newbooks, 1641–1649, 257. 53. G. L. Brook, Books and Book-Collecting, 88. 54. Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania, 500, 503. 55. Rare Books, Original Drawings, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts Collected by the Late A. Edward Newton, unpaginated preliminaries to volume 1; my emphasis. 56. See, e.g., Bernard Grebanier, The Great Shakespeare Forgeries. 57. Gingerich, ‘‘Researching The Book Nobody Read,’’ 504. 58. HEH RB 62717. 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. 62. Grafton, Commerce with the Classics, 143. 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. 64. K. E. Attar, ‘‘Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence: A Baconian and His Books.’’ 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.shakespeare fellowship.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.’’ 67. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema; Richard Brown and Barry Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise: The History of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1897–1915. Brown and Anthony suggest

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Notes to Pages 172–175

that the film was made ‘‘to facilitate a private educational interest of the Chairman,’’ and also explain that Smedley’s daughter and nephew were involved in Beerbohm Tree’s production (63). I am grateful to my colleague Judith Buchanan for her guidance in this corner of early film history. 68. Brown and Anthony, A Victorian Film Enterprise, chap. 6. 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]. 72. Smedley, The Mystery of Francis Bacon, 156. 73. William Smedley, ‘‘Notes on My Books,’’ 7–8. 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. 75. William T. Smedley, Francis Bacon: A Tribute and a Proposal, 24–25. 76. Smedley to Howell, 30 May 1917. 77. The Times (London), 10 May 1921. 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

Notes to Pages 175–181

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one you describe, and the whole collection has not cost me as much as you are naming as the price for this one volume.’’ 81. Smedley to Folger, 7 October 1924. 82. Smedley to Howell, 20 August 1930. 83. ‘‘The Folger Library Shakespeare Collection,’’ 262–63. 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.’’ 88. Karl Marx, Capital, ‘‘Part I: Commodities and Money.’’ 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, Memo´ria, 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. Afterword 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.). 3. The ‘‘Documents Online’’ Web site (which charges a small fee for highquality digital images of records in the National Archives) is http://www.natio nalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/default.asp; the English Short Title Catalogue is now available for free through the Web site of the British Library at http://www.bl.uk/collections/early/estc1.html; and Early English Books Online (a subscription-only service) is at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. 4. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 7. 5. For an unusually measured assessment see Geoffrey Nunberg (ed.), The Future of the Book. 6. Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan, 297.

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Notes to Pages 181–182

7. Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 3, 128–29. 8. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, 1, 5. 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).

Bibliography

Primary Texts Manuscripts British Library, London MS Additional 6038. Sir Julius Caesar’s commonplace book, 1577–1635. MS Additional 41068A. Zibaldone of Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519). MS Egerton 2614. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605. MS Harley 783. Samuel Foxe’s copy of his father’s 1585 Pandectae. MS Harley 6686. Sir Edward Coke’s legal notebook. MS Harley 6687. Sir Edward Coke’s legal notebook. MS Lansdowne 123. Annotated copy of Samuel Paterson’s catalogue for the 1757 auction of Sir Julius Caesar’s manuscripts. MS Lansdowne 124. Sir Julius Caesar’s shelflist of his working papers. MS Lansdowne 125. Sir Julius Caesar’s annotated copy of his own Ancient State (1597). MS Lansdowne 161, fols. 47–48. Sir Julius Caesar’s inventory of his Italian books. MS Lansdowne 638. Interleaved copy of A Brief Method of the Law, Being an Exact Alphabetical Disposition of all the Heads Necessary for a Perfect Common-Place (London: Richard and Edward Atkins, 1680 [Wing B4435A]).

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Catalog Office Closet, Correspondence Files, ‘‘Special Collections and Subjects,’’ folder for ‘‘Broadbent.’’ Letter from N. M. Broadbent to John [sic for Joseph] Quincy Adams, 9 July 1931. MS E.a.1. Anna Denton’s commonplace book. MS K.b.1. The Examination of William Weston, alias William Edmonds, Superior of the Jesuit Mission in England in 1587, 22 June 1587. MS V.a.174. Manuscript Book of Common Prayer, ca. 1576. MS V.a.347. Notes by Dorothy Philips and others. MS V.a.468. Elizabeth Fowler’s cookery book with recipes and various notes. MS V.b.139. Mary Petway’s household records. MS V.b.327. Jules Furthman’s 1603 annotated Montaigne. MS X.d.177. Elizabeth Clarke’s commonplace book. MS Y.d.623. Jules Furthman’s working papers.

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Index

Adelmare, Cesare, 127–28 Adelmare, Julius. See Caesar, Sir Julius adversaria, 22–23. See also animadversions Allen, Cardinal William, xvii–xix, 187 n.21 almanacs and calendars, 15–16, 83, 95, 107–8, 201 n.26 anathema (book curse), 8, 90, 160–61 animadversions, 23 Appadurai, Arjun, 24 archaeology, xiv, 23–24, 191 n.74 archive, xii–xiii, 7, 15–16, 53–67, 198 n.8, 200 n.40 Aristotle, xii, 12, 29, 37, 43, 51, 129, 130, 132, 146 Arnold, William Harris, 166 Arrian, 115 Bacon, Francis, 10–15, 14, 140, 142–44, 166, 169–76, 189 nn.36–37 Baker, J. H., 146 Bale, John, 41 Ball, John, 59 Barclay’s Argenis, 65, 175–76 Barnes, Barnabe, 15, 190 nn.40–41 Barney, Thomas, 4–5 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 25, 30, 46–47 Bate, John, 9–10 Baxter, James Phinney, 172 Beal, Peter, 169 Bembo, Bernardo, 35–36, 44 Bentley, Thomas, 57–58 Bernard Quaritch Ltd., 151–52, 164 Bible: commentaries on, 20, 22, 42–43, 74–75; marks in, xii, 27, 59, 71–86, 170, 173; translations of, 41–43, 71–75, 100 Biel, Friedrich, 39 binding, 6, 9–10, 18, 80, 81, 82, 92, 163, 203 n.10, 204 nn.11–12, 214 n.27 Birkerts, Sven, 181 Blathwayte, Raymond, 166 Blount, William, xi, 185 n.5

Boccaccio, 16, 36 Book of Common Prayer, 60, 86, 87–109, 151–54 borders, 3, 24, 37, 100, 137, 182 Boyer, Allen, 145 Brant, Sebastian, 159–60 Brayman Hackel, Heidi, xi, 10, 53–54, 56– 57, 65–66, 185 n.3, 186 n.6, 208 n.63 Brinsley, John, 3–5, 65, 162, 187 nn.3–5 Broadbent, N. M., 168–69 Brotton, Jerry, 126 Brown, John Seely, 24, 182 Brown, Matthew, 75–76 Bude´, Guillaume, xi, 185 n.3, 191 n.64, 194 n.35 Bullock, William, 91 Bulwer, John, 48–51 Burton, Robert, 155 Butler, Charles, 44 Caesar, Sir Julius, 9, 127–48, 133, 135, 143, 180 Camden, William, 91 Camille, Michael, 36 Campanella, Tomasso, 124 Carroll, Lewis, 87 Carter, John, 90 Casaubon, Isaac, 13–15, 14, 159, 190 nn.38–39 cataloging, 8, 55–56, 189 n.23 Catholicism, xvii–xx, 10, 11, 41, 89, 94–96, 101, 138, 202 n.43 Cecil, William Lord Burghley, xvii, 128, 187 n.20 censorship, xvii, 92–93, 204 n.15 Charles I (king), 77, 104, 167 Chartier, Roger, xvi, 10, 187 n.19 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 33–35, 44, 196 n.62 children, 3–5, 10, 40–41, 50, 72, 84–85, 92, 105, 158, 162, 202 n.45

252

Index

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 5, 27–28, 35–36, 49, 129, 131, 169 Civil War, 9 Clanchy, Michael, 34, 45 cleaning of books, 6, 163–66 Clegge, Dorothy, 61–62 Clifford, Lady Anne, 56, 63–66 Clucas, Stephen, 124 Coke, Edward, 144–46 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20–21 Columbus, Christopher, 113–15, 117, 119–27 Columbus, Ferdinand, 113–15, 119–26 collectors, xii, 6, 20, 30, 57, 63–67, 89–94, 113–26, 127–48, 151–78, 188 n.12 Comenius, Johannes Amos, 7 commonplaces and commonplace books, 44–45, 58–59, 75, 127–48, 189 n.36, 192 n.6, 198 n.12 compilation, 9–10 Copernicus, Nicolaus, xi, 165–66 Corpus iuris civilis, 137 correction, 79, 83, 201 n.29 Cosin, John, 91 Cotton, Clement, 59 Cotton, Robert, 91 Cranmer, Thomas, 101 Cressy, David, 84, 108 Crewe, Mary, 59–60 Cromberger, Jacob, 39 Crook, Helkiah, 41 Cunningham, William, 137 curiosity, 134–37 cutting and pasting, 87–89, 94, 96–100, 102–6, 206 n.41 Dagenais, John, 7 Dalton, Michael, 42 Daniel, Samuel, 65 Dante, 44 Darnton, Robert, 71 Davies, Robertson, 158 Davis, John, 113 Daye, John, 101, 106, 130, 132, 137–38 de Certeau, Michel, xvi Dee, John, xi, 30, 31, 113–27, 130, 185 n.4, 193 n.14 de Hamel, Christopher, 102, 105 Denton, Anne, 58 de Ricci, Seymour, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 53–55, 61, 66–67

destruction, 6, 206 n.47. See also censorship; cleaning; survival and non-survival de Vere, Edward, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 170 digital age, 40, 58, 148, 178, 179–82 discipline, study of readers’ marks, xi–xx, 21. See also terminology ‘‘Documents Online,’’ 180 Douglas, Mary, 155 Downame, John, 76 Drake, Sir Francis, 77–78, 114, 123 Drake, Sir William, xi, 10, 185 n.5 Driver, Martha, 92 Dryden, John, 71, 83–84 Duffy, Eamon, 86, 96, 106 Duguid, Paul, 24, 182 Durning-Lawrence, Sir Edward, 170 Early English Books Online (EEBO), 181, 216 n.1 Eden, Richard, 117 education, use of marginalia in, 3–5 Egerton, Thomas Baron Ellesmere, xvii, 140, 144–46 Elias, Norbert, 155 Elizabeth I (queen), xvii, xviii, 77, 92, 119, 126, 127 Empson, William, 155–56 English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), 180 epigraphs/epigraphy, 23–24 Erasmus, Desiderius, 16, 27–29, 75, 181, 187 n.3 Erler, Mary, 103 estate management, 9, 58–59 Evidence in Hand, The, 182 extensive/intensive reading, 18, 79, 191 n.57 Fadiman, Anne, 178 family histories, 18, 58–60, 66, 76–77, 203 n.5 Ferrar, Nicholas, 103–4 Fish, Stanley, 10 fist, 32–34, 40, 194 nn.26–27, 196 n.62. See also manicules Fleming, Julier, 23 Flint, Valerie, 125 flowers, florilegium, 48, 196 n.68. See also trefoil Folger, Henry Clay, 170–76 Foxe, John, 9, 100, 130–38, 133, 135, 148 Fraunce, Abraham, 146

Index Frobisher, Martin, 114, 116–17, 121–22 Furthman, Jules, 176–77 Gardner, Howard, 41 gesture, 51–52 Gibson, Sir John, 104 Gingerich, Owen, xi, 165–166, 168 Ginzburg, Carlo, 109 Glaister, G. A., 32–34, 40–41 gloss, 5, 21–24, 74–75 Goldhill, Simon, xv Gouge, William, 61–62 graffiti, 23–24 Grafton, Anthony, 169, 185 nn.3–5, 188 n.7, 191 n.64 Green, Ian, 106 Greenblatt, Stephen, 121, 126 Greetham, David, 55 Grendi, Edoardo, 108–9 Griffin (or Griffith), Owen, 117 Grindley, Carl James, 15 Groebner, Valentin, 155 Grosseteste, Robert, 25–27 Guillemeau, James, 60 Hadgraft, Nicholas, 164 Hakewill, William, 140 Hale, Matthew, 144 Hall, Christopher, 117 Hall, Thomas, 91 Harriot, Thomas, 123 Harvey, Gabriel, xi, xv–xvi, 3, 5, 65, 113, 167, 185 n.5, 190 n.50 Hasler, Charles, 32, 39 Havens, Earle, 144 Heasse, Robert, 100 Heidegger, Martin, 25, 51, 197 n.81 Heinlen, Michael, 8–9, 84 Helms, Mary, 126 Heywood, Thomas, 57–58 Hill, Lamar, 129, 138–39 Hindman, Sandra, 92, 94, 105, 108 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 61–63 Hoccleve, Thomas, 35 Homer, 22, 45–46, 116, 191 n.64 Hooker, Richard, 101 Howard, Susanna, Countess of Suffolk, 53– 54, 65 Howell, John, 169, 172–75, 220 nn.78–79 Hulvey, Monique, 6 Humbert of Romans, 161 Hungerford, Giles, 90

253

Hunt, R. W., 27 Hunter, G. K. 44 Huntington, Henry, 6 illustration and illumination, 79–80, 84, 85, 87–108, 88, 89, 97, 98, 99, 202 n.38 incunables, 6 index: finger, 25, 30, 47, 49–50, 195 n.42; subject headings, 9, 27, 46–47, 192 n.3. See also manicules Ireland, William Henry, 168 Irving, Washington, 115 Jackson, H. J., xi, 20–21, 23, 158, 164–65, 186 nn. 6, 11, 12 Jackson, Holbrook, 155, 167 James, M. R., 55–56 James, Thomas, 42 James I (king), 71–72, 74, 79, 92, 159 Jardine, Lisa, 126, 188 n.7 Jefferson, Thomas, 104 Jewel, John, 27 Johns, Adrian, 8 Jones, Inigo, xi Jones, John Henry, 155–56 Jonson, Ben, xi, 45–46, 168–69, 176, 185 n.5 Kadir, Djelal, 124–25 Kastan, David Scott, 86 Kepler, Johannes, xi Kinney, Clare, 45 Lamb, Charles, 157 Laud, William, 77 law, 9, 128, 141–46 Levenger Company, 25–26 literacy, 3–4, 53–54, 72, 83–84, 187 n.2 Little Gidding, 103–4 Locke, John, 29 logic, 23, 27 Machiavelli, 13–15, 189 n.37 Madoc, 121, 210 n.33 manicules (pointing hands), xvii–xx, xix, 8, 25–52, 31, 37, 38, 39, 46, 64, 173, 193 n.18 Mansfield, Lieutenant Colonel W. R., 175 marginalia: definitions, xi, 20; taxonomies, xvi, 15–17; terminology, 20–24 marks and marking, 3, 73–76, 187 n.1 Marx, Karl, 177–78

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McKisack, May, 158–59 McLeod, Randall, 163–64, 188 n.17 McLuhan, Marshall, 181 medicine, 9, 18, 60–61 medieval reading and writing, 7, 25–27, 32–33, 45, 48, 103, 160–61, 187 n.18, 189 n.27 Melanchthon, Philip, 39, 75, 169, 173 memory, xiii, xv, 4, 23–24, 29, 47–48, 53, 57–58, 63, 65, 73, 76 Merbecke, John, 75 Mercator, Gerard, 118 Mierdman, Steven, 39, 41–42, 195 n.45 Mildmay, Lady Grace, 63–64 Milton, John, 164 Montaigne, Michel de, xi, 175–77, 185 n.5, 213 n.21 Morris, Tom, 158 Moryson, Fynes, 161 Moss, Ann, 130–31, 146

Perkins, John, 144 Perne, Andrew, xiii–xiv Petrarch, 36 Phillips, Adam, 155 Pierce, Charles S., 50–51 Piers Plowman, 15, 35, 42 pilcrow, 33, 193 n.25 Poni, Carlo, 109 Portal, Ethel M., 159 postil, 21–22, 74 Poynts, Anne, 77 prayers, 15, 58–59, 61–63, 73, 76–84, 87– 109, 127, 152–54, 211 n.1 print and script, 7–10, 21, 59, 71, 86–109 prints, 5–6 prophecy, 79, 124 Ptolemy, 118 Puttenham, George, 45–46

Neale, J. E., xviii–xx Needham, Paul, 105 Niclaes, Hendrik, 36 notes, notebooks, 4, 7, 59. See also commonplaces and commonplace books Nussbaum, Damian, 108

Rainbowe, Edward, 53–54, 65–66 Ramus, Peter, xv, 144 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 117–19 reading: Renaissance understanding of, xiii–xvi; versus use, xiii–xvi Rechtien, John G., 130 recipes, 16, 18, 55, 58–59, 199 n.24 recycling, 6 repetition, xv, 4, 76 rhetoric, 4–5, 27 Richard de Bury (bishop), 161 Roberts, Julian, 113, 117 Roesslin, Eucharius, 60–61 Rose, Jonathan, xi Rosenthal, Bernard M., xii, 21, 165, 185 n.3, 186 n.10 Rowe, Nina, 105 rubrication, 7, 79, 91 Ruskin, John, 105

Ong, Walter, 128, 130, 138, 141 Oporinus, Johannes, 130 Orgel, Stephen, 66, 155, 188 n.17 Ortelius, Abraham, 118 Osgood, Charles Grosvenor, 167 Oviedo, Gonzalo Ferna´ndez de, 117, 122 ownership: notes, xvii–xx, 16–18, 19, 54, 56–58, 90–91, 190 n.51, 200 n.7; statistics, 71 Page, James R., 89–94, 152, 165 Parker, Matthew (archbishop), xii, 20, 30, 31, 52, 74, 130, 158–59, 178 Parker, Patricia, 44 Parsons (or Persons), Robert, 10, 11 Parr, Catherine, 94 Parry, Glyn, 124–25 Paterson, Samuel, 139–40 Pattison, Mark, 159 Peacham, Henry, 9–10, 159 Percy, Henry, ninth earl of Northumberland, 29 Perdita Project, 58

Quintilian, 49

Saenger, Paul, 8–9, 84, 189 n.23 Safford, W. M., 172–73 Sanford, James, 47–48 Schedel, Hartmann, 103 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 51 scholia, 22 Schott, Holger, 142 sewing and stitching, xvii–xx, xix, 103 Shaddy, Robert Alan, 166 Shakespeare, William, 166, 168–77, 181

Index Sherman, Claire Richter, 47 Sidney, Sir Philip, xi, 10, 44, 131 Singleton, Hugo, 138 size and format, 18–20, 80, 95–96 Slights, William, 8, 22, 74 Smedley, William T., 170–76, 171 Smyth, Adam, 104 Sozomeno of Pistoia, 36 Speght, Thomas, 44–45 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 22, 195 n.49 Stallybrass, Peter, 25 Staunford, William, 145 Stoddard, Roger, xi, 6, 163, 185 nn.1–2, 186 n.15 Strabo, 115–17 Strongman, Sheila, 158 Summit, Jennifer, 66–67 survival and non-survival, 5–7, 188 n.10, 200 n.7. See also censorship; cleaning; destruction; recycling Sutton, John, 24 symbols, use of, 3–4, 7, 25–52, 26, 28, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 46, 63, 64, 76, 168–73, 192 nn.5–7 Tallis, Raymond, 51, 197 n.80 Targoff, Ramie, 101 terminology, xiii, xv–xvi, 20–24, 33–34, 194 nn.26–28 Thevet, Andre´, 121 Thomason, George, 167 Thule, 116

255

translation, 3–5, 208 n.1 travel, 113–26, 161–62, 208 n.1 trefoil, 27–28, 30, 48, 63, 169, 171 Topcliffe, Richard, xvii–xx, 77–78 Traister, Daniel, 157 Tribble, Evelyn, 22, 43, 74 ‘‘Turning the Pages,’’ 179–80 Tyndale, William, 41, 43 Udall, Nicholas, 75 Ulmer, John, 161–62 Updike, John, 158 use: and abuse, 83–86, 151–78; legal applications, 144; liturgical applications, 101–2; Marxist theory of, 177–78; Renaissance vocabulary for, xiii, xv, 4, 74–76, 104 Vaughan, Edward, 75 Walsham, Alexandra, xviii, 107 Watson, Rowan, 178 Webbe, George, 75–76 Weekes, Ursula, 103 Whitney, Geoffrey, xiii–xiv, 65, 186 n.14 Wijffels, Alain, 141 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 50 Wolfreston, Frances, 18, 190 n.54 women and reading, 53–67, 96–100, 103–4, 198 n.12 Woolf, Virginia, 155

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Acknowledgments

In 1599, when Martı´n Del Rio finally published the Six Books of Investigations into Magic he had started some twenty years earlier, he began with a ‘‘Prologue, explaining why this treatise has been difficult to write, but why it was necessary to do so’’—or, in the more elegant phrasing of the Latin original, ‘‘Proloquium de difficultate, et necessitate huius tractationis.’’ Every book that makes it into print has overcome some measure of difficultas in response to some form of necessitas; but it is especially appropriate to account for the process in this study of readers’ marks, which (like Del Rio’s book) has been more than a decade in the making and which concerns a slippery subject that (like magic) raises profound problems of definition, interpretation, and regulation. What has always returned me to the necessity of studying this material is direct contact with old books and the readers whose lives they (however fleetingly) preserve. The thrilling, and sometimes unnerving, sense that I am looking over the shoulder of a long-dead reader has never diminished, even when I cannot make out his or her face or hand; and the sense of responsibility that comes with these privileged glimpses is as deep as ever. My first and greatest debt, therefore, goes to the libraries that have granted me access to their rare book collections and the librarians, curators, cataloguers, and conservators who have helped me find my way around them. The initial project took shape during a fellowship at the Huntington Library in the summer of 1992, and it has been sustained ever since by the generous support of its staff (particularly Roy Ritchie, Alan Jutzi, Mary Robertson, Steven Tabor, Laura Stalker, and Susan Green). Much of my subsequent research and writing were carried out at the Folger Shakespeare Library (where I am especially grateful to Gail Kern Paster, Barbara Mowat, Richard Kuhta, Heather Wolfe, Betsy Walsh, Georgianna Ziegler, Frank Mowery, Deborah Leslie, Ron Bogdan, Jim Kuhn, Kathleen Lynch, and Carol Brobeck), at Corpus Christi College Cambridge (where Christopher de Hamel and Gill Cannell were gracious hosts), and at the British Library. It is a pleasure, too, to acknowledge the support of the institutions that have funded my forays into the archives: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington and Folger Libraries, the General Research Board of the

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Acknowledgments

University of Maryland, the F. R. Leavis Fund at the University of York, and the Bibliographical Society (UK). And what has always pushed me through the difficulty involved in making sense of these materials is the scholarly conversation that reminds me of the ways in which they matter to others. My deepest debts go to Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton, Heidi Brayman Hackel, Steven Zwicker, Kevin Sharpe, Stephen Orgel, and Heather Jackson: if the margins now feel far less lonely than when I started this project, it is not simply because they have kept me company there but also because their own writings on the subject have helped to put marginalia at the very center of literary and historical studies. I am also indebted to many other scholars who have discussed the project with me through the years, providing information and encouragement when I most needed them: Sharon Achinstein, Jennifer Andersen, Christy Anderson, Nicolas Barker, Sabrina Baron, Julie Biggs, Ann Blair, Anston Bosman, Warren Boutcher, Judith Buchanan, Shane Butler, James Carley, Andrew Cambers, Kent Cartwright, Stephen Clucas, Anne Coldiron, John Considine, Bradin Cormack, Brian Cummings, Paul Duguid, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Mary Erler, Lori Anne Ferrell, Juliet Fleming, Alex Gillespie, Robert Harding, Elinor Jansz, Stephen Johnston, Craig and Hilaire Kallendorf, David Scott Kastan, Sean Keilen, Seth Lerer, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Linne Mooney, David Norbrook, Tim Raylor, Joad Raymond, Julian Roberts, Bernard S. Rosenthal, David Rundle, Elizabeth Sauer, Fred Schurink, Jim Shapiro, Bill Slights, Adam Smyth, Alan Stewart, Naomi Tadmor, Daniel Traister, Alex Walsham, and Alison Wiggins. I must single out Peter Stallybrass, with whom I have compared notes on notes at every turn. Thanks to Peter and his colleagues (particularly Rebecca Bushnell, Roger Chartier, and Margreta de Grazia), many of the ideas in this book were first tried out on audiences at the University of Pennsylvania. And for inviting me to speak at conferences and seminars elsewhere I would like to thank Elizabeth Clarke, Stephen Clucas, David Colclough, Holly Crocker, Paula Findlen, Andrew Hadfield, Michael Harris, Peter Hulme, John Kerrigan, Paulina Kewes, John King, Giles Mandelbrote, Molly Murray, Robin Myers, Jason Scott-Warren, Garrett Sullivan, and Jennifer Summit. I am grateful to Jerry Singerman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania Press (particularly Mariana Martinez, Erica Ginsburg, John Hubbard, and Jennifer Shenk) for their exemplary care in turning my words and images into a Material Text. And thanks are due, finally, to the editors and publishers who have allowed me to rework material first published in the following books and journals: Paul Saenger and Kimberly van Kampen, eds., The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions (British Library/Oak Knoll); Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Books

Acknowledgments

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and Readers in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press); Sabrina Baron, ed., The Reader Revealed (Folger Shakespeare Library); Shakespeare Studies; The Book Collector; Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (British Library/Oak Knoll); and Stephen Clucas, ed., John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought (Springer).