Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England

Preface

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 Budé)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: xii Preface 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...