Used Books: Marking Renaissance Readers by William H. Sherman (review)

REVIEWS 320 (189). Throughout this section, Rubin continuously brings the reader back to Saint Augustine’s suggestion that the outer eye was meant to stimulate the inner eye of the soul. Anyone considering religious visual strategies in the Renaissance will find Rubin’s chapter of interest. The book’s final chapter, aptly titled “Happy Endings,” brings the book full circle, since Rubin both begins and ends her book with the notion that quattrocento Florentine visual culture promoted a constructed vision of social order, one which was fragile and often not as ideal as it was represented in the arts. She focuses in detail on four paintings created as a series by Sandro Botticelli (Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, 1483; three in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, one in a private collection). The paintings celebrated the union of two of Florence ’s most important families: the Bini and Pucci. Rubin attends to the images in great detail, laboring over small visual details and analyzing the images in light of a wealth of archival materials. She uses the four paintings as an entrance into a discussion of the political and social functions of marriage, as well as the illusion of social order. Besides the impressive wealth of information contained in Rubin’s book, the text is very readable. Moreover, the footnotes contain only direct citations of primary sources and documents. One of the gems of this book is the extensive annotated bibliography. It is divided into sections such as Expenditure, Vision, Devotion and Art, Dante, and Optics, to name a few. It is a wonderful starting place for anyone researching Florence, particularly undergraduate and graduate students, and it is written lucidly and eruditely. Finally, the detailed index is a nice component of this rich and detailed book. Rubin should be commended for her work because she truly makes fifteenth-century Florence come alive. LAUREN GRACE KILROY, Art History, UCLA William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Renaissance Readers (Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press 2008) xx + 259 pp., 36 b&w ill. Since the advent of new historicism and cultural materialism in the 1980s, there has been a marked trend in Renaissance studies to study the marginal aspects of history and texts. This book takes that trend to its logical extreme in that it is entirely concerned with the margins of texts, or rather, with marginalia—the annotations, doodles, notes, shopping lists, food stains and whatever other traces of use the readers of the past left on their books. Through an extensive survey of thousands of seventeenth-century books from public and private collections , William H. Sherman puts forward a strong and persuasive challenge to what he calls “the cult of the clean book” (157), the conventional wisdom of book collectors and librarians who prefer unmarked books to those that have plainly been used. Sherman suggests that by looking at the marks Renaissance readers made on their books, we can gain insights into the lives and reading habits of early modern readers, and perhaps even reflect on our own attitudes to books. Used Books comprises four parts subdivided into eight chapters, the first of which serves as an introduction. Chapter 2 is about the curious and widespread habit from the fourteenth century onwards of drawing hands with pointed fingers (Sherman coins the term “manicules”) in the margins of texts. Chapter 3 looks at the difficulty of locating female readers in library archives (because the REVIEWS 321 supposedly neutral methods of archiving are inherently patriarchal), which, Sherman suggests, poses a significant and ongoing challenge to feminist scholarship . Chapter 4 is about the surprising practice of annotating Bibles in the 1600s. Chapter 5 concerns itself with a peculiar and exceptional copy of the Book of Common Prayer that features custom-made ornamental initials and other embellishments, which were cut and pasted from older texts. Chapter 6 details the extensive notes that John Dee made on a copy of Ferdinand Columbus ’s Historie … della vita, & de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo . Chapter 7 is about the remarkable, obsessive and painstaking efforts of Sir Julius Caesar (not to be confused with the Roman emperor) to create an exhaustive and definitive compendium of up-to-date knowledge, complete with an index...