Early Modern English Marginalia

Early Modern English Marginalia
Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit-

ten, drawn, scratched, colored, and pasted in – offer a glimpse of how
people, as individuals and in groups, interacted with books and manu-
scripts over often lengthy periods of time. The chapters in this volume
build on earlier scholarship that established marginalia as an intellec-
tual method (Grafton and Jardine), as records of reading motivated
by cultural, social, theological, and personal inclinations (Brayman
[Hackel] and Orgel), and as practices inspired by material affordances
particular to the book and the pen (Fleming and Sherman). They fur-
ther the study of the practices of marginalia as a mode – a set of ways
in which material opportunities and practices overlap with intellectual,
social, and personal motivations to make meaning in the world. They
introduce us to a set of idiosyncratic examples such as the trace marks
of objects left in books, deliberately or by accident; cut-and-pasted ad-
ditions to printed volumes; a marriage depicted through shared book
ownership. They reveal to us in case studies the unique value of mar-
ginalia as evidence of phenomena as important and diverse as religious
change, authorial self-invention, and the history of the literary canon.
The chapters of this book go beyond the case study, however, and raise
broad historical, cultural, and theoretical questions about the strange,
marvelous, metamorphic thing we call the book, and the equally mul-
tiplicitous, eccentric, and inscrutable beings who accompany them
through history: readers and writers.
Katherine Acheson is Professor of English Language and Literature and

a senior administrator at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Her
work includes Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature,
also published in this series. Her recent scholarship is about the ways in
which the visual features of early modern printed literature constructed
reading experience, generic categories, and literary value.
Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
Series editors: James Daybell, Plymouth University, UK, and Adam
Smyth, Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK
The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms
of texts as part of an investigation into the culture of early modern
England. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary na-
ture, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research
with an attention to theoretical models that might illuminate the read-
ing, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative
approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of
primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies.
What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its
various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that
are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content?
In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read,
interpreted and situated?
Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England

Politics, Religion, and News Culture
Gary Schneider
Singing the News

Ballads in Mid-Tudor England
Jenni Hyde
Text, Food And The Early Modern Reader

Eating Words
Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher
Reading Drama in Tudor England

Tamara Atkin
Early Modern English Marginalia

Edited by Katherine Acheson
For more information on this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/literature/series/ASHSER2222
Early Modern English
Marginalia
Edited by
Katherine Acheson
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Katherine Acheson to be identified as the author
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Acheson, Katherine O., 1963- editor.
Title: Early modern English marginalia / edited by Katherine
Acheson.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series: Material
readings in early modern culture | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018043545 (print) |
LCCN 2018054250 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marginalia—England—History—16th century. |
Marginalia—England—History—17th century. | Books and
reading—England—History—16th century. | Books and
reading—England—History—17th century. | Early printed
books—England—16th century. | Early printed books—
England—17th century. | English literature—Early modern,
1500–1700—Criticism, Textual. | Manuscripts,
English—Editing.
Classification: LCC Z1003.5.G7 (ebook) | LCC Z1003.5.G7
E27 2018 (print) | DDC 028/.90942—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043545
ISBN: 978-0-415-41885-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-22881-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents
List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Marginalia, Reading, and Writing 1

K atherine Acheson
Section 1
Materialities 13
1 Reading Habits and Reading Habitats; or, toward an

Ecobibliography of Marginalia 15
J oshua C alhoun
2 Cut-and-Paste Bookmaking: The Private/Public Agency

of Robert Nicolson 35
J ason S cott-Warren
3 Book Marks: Object Traces in Early Modern Books 51

A dam S myth
4 The Occupation of the Margins: Writing, Space, and

Early Modern Women 70
K atherine Acheson
Section 2
Selves 91
5 Praying in the Margins across the Reformation: Readers’

Marks in Early Tudor Books of Hours 93
E lizabeth Patton
vi Contents
6 Articles of Assent: Clergymen’s Subscribed Copies of the
Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England 115
Austen S aunders
7 Lady Anne Clifford Reads John Selden 134

G eorgianna Z iegler
8 Marital Marginalia: The Seventeenth-Century Library of

Thomas and Isabella Hervey 155
E mma S mith
Section 3
Modes 173
9 Studied for Redaction? Reading and Writing in the

Works of John Higgins 175
H arriet A rcher
10 Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as

Play-Reading in the First Folio 195
C laire M . L . B ourne
11 Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter 234

Sjoerd L evelt
Afterword 257
A lan S tewart
Bibliography 267
Index 291
List of Figures
1.1 Depiction of the sizing room, a crucial space in

early hand papermaking operations. Plate XI from
“Papeterie,” in d’Alembert and Diderot’s Encylopédie,
vol. 5 (Plates), Paris, 1767 25
1.2 The Bible (1580), Folger STC 2129, Ii3r 29
2.1 Nicolson’s marginal marks in Christof Wirsung,
Praxis medicinae universalis (1598), Folger STC
25863, cs1292, T3v (p. 294) 41
2.2 Nicolson’s pasted and manuscript additions to Christof
Wirsung, Praxis medicinae universalis (1598), Folger
STC 25863, cs1292, fols 2D2v (p. 420), 2S1v (p. 642),
and rear pastedown 42
2.3 Title-page of Nicolson’s manuscript addition to
Lodowick Lloyd, The First Part of the Diall of Daies
(London: Roger Ward, 1590), Bodleian Library 4°
Rawl. 140 (1) 45
3.1 Shakespeare’s Works (1623), Thomas Fisher Rare
Book Library.S52 A1 1623f, 395 53
3.2 Les Oeuvres de Charles Loyseau (Paris, 1640), 133.
Hendrik Conscience Library EHC 714330 56
3.3 William Shakespeare, Works (1623), Folger First Folio
63, Tragedies, 298 62
3.4 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1596), Ohio State
University, BR1600.F6 1596, copy 1, 366–7 63
4.1 Henoch Clapham, Briefe of the Bibles history (1639),
Folger STC 5335, front endpaper 75
4.2 The Bible: That is, the Holy Scriptures Contained in
the Old and New Testament (1580), Folger STC 2190,
blank verso at the end of the New Testament 77
4.3 Theodore Beze, Iob Expounded (1589?), Folger STC
2764 copy 1, n.s.4v 78
4.4 John Mayer, The English Catechisme Explained
(1623), Folger STC 17734; rear flyleaf 78
4.5 Book of Common Prayer (1632), Folger STC 16386
copy 2, sig. B4r 79
viii List of Figures
4.6 The Bible: That is, the Holy Scriptures Contained in
the Old and New Testament (1603), Folger STC 2190,
p. 43 of the New Testament 79
4.7 The Bible (1580), Folger STC 2129, p. 75 of the
New Testament 81
5.1 Hore presentes ad vsum Sarum (Paris, 1502), Folger
STC 15897, fol. Q8r 95
5.2 Officium Beate Marie Virginis ad vsum Sarum
(Vostre, 1512), Folger STC 15913, sig. C3r 96
5.3 Officium Beate Marie Virginis ad vsum Sarum
(Vostre, 1512), Folger STC 15913, sig. F8r 97
5.4 Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum
Sarisburiensis Ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1530), Folger STC
15968, fol. 54r 99
5.5 Hore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum
Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1534), Folger STC
15984, fol. 54r 100
5.6 Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum
Sarisburiensis Ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1530), Folger STC
15968, n.p. (endpage with printer’s mark) 102
Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1594) British
Library. Shelfmark C.35.e.11, n.p 103
Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1594) British
Library. Shelfmark C.35.e.11, n.p 104
5.9 A goodly prymer in englyshe (London, 1538), Folger
STC 15998, Sig. Q1r 107
5.10 A goodly prymer in englyshe (London, 1538), Folger
STC 15998, sig. X1r 108
5.11 John Bydell for William Marshall. A goodly prymer in
englyshe (London, 1535). British Library. Shelfmark
C.25.gc, sig. A8v 110
6.1 Thirty-Nine Articles (1633) Bodleian 4o 277(4), sig. A1r 124
6.2 Thirty-Nine Articles (1640) Bodleian 4o 277(6), sig. A1v 128
7.1 Detail of Lady Anne Clifford’s inscription on the title
page of John Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 1631),
Folger Folio STC 22178 copy 3 135
7.2 Detail of annotated page 594 from Selden, Titles of
Honor, Folger STC 22178 copy 3 137
7.3 Detail of p. 878 mentioning Anne Rochford (Boleyn)
from Selden, Titles of Honor, Folger STC 22178 copy 3 145
7.4 Detail of p. 539 with added reference to Montaigne’s
Essays from Selden, Titles of Honor, Folger STC
22178 copy 3 149
List of Figures ix
7.5 Details of p. 412 with mention of Ben Jonson and
p. 413 showing bayleaf and bookmark from Selden,
Titles of Honor, Folger STC 22178 copy 3 150
8.1 Thomas Hervey’s inscription marking Isabella’s death,
on a copy of Henry Hammond’s The Power of the
Keyes (1647) 160
8.2 A previously owned copy of Calvin’s Institutes (1561),
reinscribed for Tho:& Isabella Hervey 161
10.1 A note to the reader to see the “supple,” (or,
“supplement”) for missing lines (sig. Oo1r) 196
10.2 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. G6v 199
10.3 Examples of marginal brackets in the Free Library of
Philadelphia’s First Folio: The Tempest (sig. A2v) and
Romeo & Juliet (sig. ff1r) 200
10.4 Changes made to the text of the Folio by the earlier of
two hands in light-brown ink 201
10.5 Prologue to Romeo & Juliet, transcribed on the last
page of Titus Andronicus 202
10.6 Images of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio
binding 204
10.7 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. pp5r 204
10.8 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. A5r 205
10.9 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff3r 209
10.15 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff4v 215
10.16 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ee6v 216
10.18 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sigs.
nn5r and nn6r 221
10.21 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. F5r 223
11.1 A small doodle of a bird, in the margin between
woodcuts of an early printed book, tweeted with the
hashtag #MarginaliaMonday 235
11.2 Tweets, one from a rare books librarian (top), and one
from a researcher involved in coding of digitized early
modern marginalia, using the hashtag #marginaliamonday 236
11.3 Tweet of an image of pen trials on a pastedown in a
binding, including a series of manicules, tweeted with
hashtag #manicule 238
x List of Figures
11.4 Tweet with a request for help transcribing a word in an
eighteenth-century document 239
11.5 (a): Tweet about a burn mark in Higden’s
Polychronicon, London: Peter Treveris, 1527 (Oxford,
Bodleian Library, S.Seld. d.35, fol. 298); (b): Similar
burn mark reproduced on modern paper, in response
to the tweet 241
11.6 (a): Tweets appearing above each other in a timeline.
Report of an archaeological find in a potato field
juxtaposed with a Thompson folk-literature motif
classification randomly tweeted by @MythologyBot.
(b): Tweets appearing above each other in a timeline.
Short humorous exchange about a blurred picture
presented as “what I look like right now”, juxtaposed
with a tweet from @GettyMuseum about self-portraiture 242
11.7 Tweet showing repeated deletions of the word ‘pope’
in an English printed chronicle from 1510 (Oxford,
Bodleian Library, Antiq.d.E.19) 244
11.8 A tweet from Desiderius Erasmus (@DesideriErasmus),
selected from his Education of a Prince, tweeted on
the day of the inauguration of President Donald Trump 246
11.9 Tweets from @samuelpepys, with responses from followers 247
11.10 Tweets from @EnglishPlymUni, using hashtag
#miltonwoolfparadisewaves, juxtaposing fragments
from Milton’s Paradise Lost and Woolf’s The Waves 248
11.11 (a): Tweets from Holger Syme’s live tweeted reading of
Brian Vickers’ The One King Lear. (b): Tweet showing
an early modern manuscript response to a printed
Dutch medieval chronicle (Oxford, Bodleian Library,
H 1.8 Art.Seld.): ‘Oh God, how can the world have
been so blinded?’ 249
11.12 (a): Tweet about bilingual annotation, showing
Emmanuel van Meteren’s English annotations to Jan
van Naaldwijk’s Dutch chronicle of Holland (London,
British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius C IV); (b): Tweet
asking “why does it all have to be in English again.” 251
11.13 Tweet showing an early modern medical student’s
annotation to a printed text 252
11.14 Marginal note to the table of contents of Poly-Olbion
(1613). Stanford Libraries, David Rumsey Historical
Map Collection, 12180. Published under a CC BY-
NC-SA 3.0 license 254
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the contributors to the volume for their brilliant essays

and for their unceasing good humour at the many requests for revisions,
illustrations, captions, biographies, and proofing through the process of
bringing this volume together. I also thank the series editors, James Day-
bell and Adam Smyth, who proposed this volume to me and have helped
all along the way; Tyler Black for exemplary editorial and research assis-
tance; Andrew Gordon, William Poole, and an anonymous reader who
read the proposal for Ashgate; and the editorial team at Routledge who
took over the series from Ashgate. I would like to thank the Folger In-
stitute for a short-term fellowship that led to the research represented
in my chapter in the volume, and my teachers over the years, especially
Heather Jackson, Stephen Orgel, and Germaine Warkentin. During the
composition of this volume, I underwent treatment for cancer; I have no
end of gratitude for my family, friends, colleagues, and medical team
who supported me during that experience. Work on this volume during
that time was a welcome, even delightful, diversion.
Notes on Contributors
Katherine Acheson is Professor of English and Associate Dean for

Undergraduate Programs in the Faculty of Arts at the University
of Waterloo. She is the author of Visual Rhetoric and Early Mod-
ern English Literature and Writing Essays about Literature, the
editor of Anne Clifford’s The Memoir of 1603 and the Diary of
1616–1619, and the author of numerous articles and chapters,
most recently in the Oxford Companion to Marvell and the pres-
ent volume.
Harriet Archer is Lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Her research focuses on historiography and metatextuality in early
modern English poetry and drama. She is the author of Unperfect
Histories: the Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017) and the coeditor of Andrew Hadfield’s A Mir-
ror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in
Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2016); with Paul Frazer, she is preparing a new edition of Thomas
Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc for the Manchester Revels
Plays Series.
Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania
State University, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, early
modern drama, and book history. She is completing a monograph
entitled Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England. Her
work has appeared or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance,
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Shakespeare,
and several edited collections, and her research has been supported
by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington
Library, and the Bibliographical Society of America.
Joshua Calhoun is Assistant Professor of English and a Faculty Affiliate
with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison. He specializes in Shakespeare, sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century poetry, environmental humanities, and the
history of media. Calhoun’s work has been published in PMLA,
xiv Notes on Contributors
Shakespeare Studies, and Environmental Philosophy. His first book,
The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and Ecology in Re-
naissance England, is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania
Press in 2019.
Sjoerd Levelt was until recently Assistant Professor of the Program
for Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas of Bilkent University, Ankara,
having previously taught at the Universities of Exeter and Sussex.
He studied Dutch and English Medieval Studies in Amsterdam,
Berkeley, and Oxford; received his PhD in Combined Historical
Studies at the Warburg Institute (2010); and in 2012 was elected
to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. He won the Soci-
ety for Renaissance Studies Book Prize 2012 for his book Jan van
Naaldwijk’s Chronicles of Holland: Continuity and Transforma-
tion in the Historical Tradition of Holland during the Early Six-
teenth Century. Levelt’s areas of interest include the medieval and
early modern historiographical traditions of the Netherlands and
Britain, book history, and manuscript culture in the first centuries
of printing. His new position is Senior Research Associate at Bris-
tol University’s The Literary Heritage of Anglo-Dutch Relations,
c.1050 –1600 project. He tweets as @slevelt.
Elizabeth Patton is Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Institute at Johns
Hopkins University, where she directs the Master of Liberal Arts
program. Her research interests include the history and literature of
post-reformation Catholicism, with a focus on recovering the lives
and writings of early modern women. She is currently completing a
collaborative scholarly edition of the seventeenth-century biographies
of Anne and Philip Howard, Earle and Countess of Arundel, and has
published several preliminary studies for her next project: the recov-
ery, from multiple contemporary sources in translation, of the lost
Life of Father John Cornelius, SJ, by the late sixteenth-century En-
glish woman, Dorothy Arundell, who was herself an active partici-
pant in the English Mission.
Austen Saunders is Director of the Printed Books Census for the
Oxford Traherne. He wrote a PhD on early modern marked books at
Cambridge and has published articles on subjects including the auto-
biographical functions of seventeenth-century libraries and the use of
marked books as a form of petition.
Jason Scott-Warren is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture
at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius Col-
lege, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts (www.
english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/). He is the author of Sir John Harington and
the Book as Gift (2001) and Early Modern English Literature (2005).
He has just completed a book based on the life records of Richard
Notes on Contributors xv
Stonley, Shakespeare’s first documented reader, and is initiating a
project entitled The Exuvial Renaissance, exploring the literary im-
plications of Alfred Gell’s notion of distributed personhood.
Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College,
University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the reception of Shake-
speare in print, in criticism, and on stage. Her most recent book is
Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016).
She is currently working on the ideological history of provenance and
bibliography.
Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the
Book at Balliol College, Oxford University, where his research con-
centrates on the intersections between literary and material forms.
His books include Material Texts in Early Modern England (2018),
Autobiography in Early Modern England (2010), and Book De-
struction from the Medieval to the Contemporary (edited with Gill
Partington, 2014). He writes regularly for the London Review of
Books.
Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University. His publications include Close Readers: Hu-
manism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (1997); Hostage to
Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561–1626 (with Lisa
Jardine, 1998); Philip Sidney: A Double Life (2000); The Cradle
King: A Life of James VI and I (2003); Letterwriting in Renaissance
England (with Heather Wolfe, 2004); Shakespeare’s Letters (2008);
and The Oxford History of Life-Writing, vol. 2, Early Modern
(2018). With Garrett Sullivan, he is co-general editor of the three-
volume Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of English Renaissance
Literature (2012). He is co-Director of the Oxford Francis Bacon, for
which he has edited volume I, Early Writings 1584-1596 (2012), and
International Director of the Centre for Editing Libes and Letters in
London. His current projects include editing volume II of the Oxford
Francis Bacon, and a classroom anthology of Tudor drama for Broad-
view Press.
Georgianna Ziegler is Associate Librarian and Head of Reference
Emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she continues to
serve as a consultant. She has published and given talks on Elizabeth
I, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Esther Inglis, and about discovering writings
by early modern women in the archives. A long-term project involves
editing the dedications to the manuscripts of Esther Inglis. Lady Anne
Clifford’s copy of Selden featured in her Folger exhibition, Shake-
speare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers,
1500–1700.
Introduction
Marginalia, Reading, and Writing
Katherine Acheson
In the ramshackle family cottage, the floor may be sinking but the books
are in order. In my grandmother’s room, her favorites are shelved by
author. The collection includes at least a dozen books by each of John
Le Carré, Nicholas Freeling, Colin Dexter, and P.D. James; she prefers
the well-crafted mystery story to any other. If you flip through any of
these books, you will find one of the many examples of corrective mar-
ginalia that quilt my reading grandmother’s attention to the pages of
her books. There’s a good one in Not as Far as Velma, one of Freeling’s
novels featuring Henri Castang. This is the passage that provoked the
marginalia:
Monsieur Metz comes into the office around once a week for in-
structions or discussion, and generally manages to fart. I have some-
times said ‘You overeat’. Makes no difference. The window is open
anyhow. I get up and open it further and he doesn’t even notice. The
man is older than I am and does a lot he isn’t paid for. I can’t read
him off like a girl of Varennes’ age. I could tell him, and do, that he
is gross and revolting personage. He gets called much worse every
day, and doesn’t pay a blind bit of heed.1
This passage is full of Freeling’s dry, concise, but rich characterization,

not only of the individuals depicted, but of their relationship. What
my grandmother has honed in on in the passage, however, is the word
“overeat,” which she has underlined firmly. In the bottom margin she
has written “NOT ‘OVEREATING’! →‘DIGESTING HIS FIBRES.’”
This is a fine display of her character (rather more than most she is con-
cerned with both verbal precision and gastrointestinal matters), and her
relationship to the book itself, which is both an object to criticize and
a framework within which she imagines her subjective self, providing
a better comment on the alimentary function of her colleague as she
sits in Henri Castang’s chair in the police headquarters in Strasbourg in
the 1980s.
My grandmother’s books are full of marginalia which are vividly
expressive of herself and her interaction with the books in which they
2 Katherine Acheson
appear. Her marginalia are about writing and reading and about the
opportunities to do both provided by the material qualities of the book
and the ballpoint pen. As almost any bookshelf in any home or library
will reveal, where there are books there are marginalia. It is almost as
if writing marginalia – even marginalia which do not engage with the
text, which simply use the affordances of blank paper bound and en-
closed within boards – was a special provision of the thing we call a
book, an opportunity for each user to express his or her experience of
the moment, to become integrated with the object, the narrative, and
the characters, to relate not only to the text and book themselves, but to
future readers, including themselves in the future. Marginalia of all sorts
are a record of our complex material, intellectual, emotional, and psy-
chological interactions with the book, and therefore presents a special
kind of history of those marvelous things and their readers.
As a graduate student, I worked as a research assistant on the Coleridge
project when Heather Jackson was co-editing one or another of three of
the six volumes of Coleridge’s marginalia published by Princeton Uni-
versity Press between 1992 and 2001. Proofreading Professor Jackson’s
edition of Coleridge’s marginalia was the closest I had come by that
point in my life to real, active, research in the humanities, and it was
duly exciting. The late Rhea Wilmshurst and I traded roles back and
forth, one of us reading out loud from the typescript and the other fol-
lowing along silently in the galleys. We read – or rather sounded out – in
several of Coleridge’s seven languages; this is the source of my knowl-
edge of the Greek alphabet. For me, then, marginalia were the gateway
to the world of scholarship and the pure delight of discovery it affords.
For the rest of the world, Coleridge defined the importance of mar-
ginalia to our understanding of reading. The six volumes of marginalia
published in the Princeton edition contain more than eight thousand
notes by Coleridge. Coleridge brought the Latin word, marginalia, into
English when his notes on Thomas Browne were published in Black-
wood’s Magazine in 1819. Coleridge was known as an annotator, and
“His friends knew about and encouraged his habit of writing comments
in the margins of books. They lent him books of their own to comment
on.”2 Like his notebooks, Coleridge’s marginalia reinforced his reputa-
tion as a paradigmatic reader. The publication of the Princeton volumes
coincided with growing interest in the experience of reading; as Jackson
noted in her study of marginalia from 1700 to 2000, “Given the recent
shift of attention from the writer to the reader and to the production,
dissemination, and reception of texts, marginalia of all periods would
appear to be potentially a goldmine for scholars.”3
For early modernists, the first scholars to mine marginalia for gold
were Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, in their essay “‘Studied for
Action:’ How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy.” They too sought evidence
of reading, but the early modern context, and the intellectual circle to
which their examples belonged, painted a picture of a different kind of
Marginalia, Reading, and Writing 3
reading than was imagined for Coleridge. From marginalia and letters
written by Gabriel Harvey and his employers and associates, Jardine and
Grafton identified reading that was “intended to give rise to something
else,”4 collaborative, action-oriented, and context-driven.
Harvey and others made their books into records of the social
circles they inhabited, using title pages, margins, and blank leaves to
give detailed accounts of remarkable experiences and conversations.
Annotated books regularly turned into something between diaries
and historical records, efforts to freeze and preserve for posterity the
talk and buzz of a particular intellectual world.
(Grafton in Baron 32)
Jardine and Grafton used marginalia as unique and privileged evidence of

humanist reading practices and therefore of the history of reading as a so-
cial and intellectual collaboration, rather than an individual, private, ac-
tivity. Jardine and Grafton’s essay was (and remains) very influential, and
the use of marginalia as evidence of reading practices has been furthered
by scholars such as Stephen Orgel in his work on Anne Clifford,5 Heidi
Brayman in her book Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print,
Gender, and Literacy, Fred Schurink in articles on marginalia in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, and Edith Snook in
Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England.
William H. Sherman’s 1995 book, John Dee: The Politics of Reading
and Writing in the English Renaissance was a case study along the lines
established by Jardine and Grafton; it used marginalia as evidence of the
reading practice of an exceptional reader in interaction with key cultural
and literary texts and in the context of an intellectual and ideological
community. Sherman’s second book, Used Books: Marking Readers in
Renaissance England (2008) – alongside Bradin Cormack and Carla
Mazzio’s Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700, published in 2005 to
accompany an exhibition at the University of Chicago – shifted the con-
versation to the material features of the book which provided early mod-
ern readers with opportunities for producing marginalia and other signs
of book use. In addition to marginalia which offered evidence of readerly
engagement, such signs of “use” include signatures claiming ownership;
pen-trial, doodles, and practice in writing and arithmetic; accounts;
family events, such as births, journeys, illnesses, and marriages; and
sundry other acts unrelated to the matter of the text made by pen, pen-
cil, and other marking materials. Juliet Fleming and Jason Scott-Warren
characterized this kind of marking as graffiti – opportunistic inscrip-
tion which foregrounds the availability and visibility of the ground of
writing, whether a wall visible in public or the flyleaf of a commonly
used book. This categorization helped scholars attend to the “endless
dry runs of people learning to write their names,” “the practice al-
phabets,” and the reams of paper space used to practice sums.6 These
4 Katherine Acheson
readings were part of growing commitment to discovering the partic-
ular affordances – what a material design allows or encourages – and
constraints – what a material design prevents or discourages – of the
material book and the processes by which it was produced, circulated,
stored, and even – literally – consumed7 in early modern culture. This
scholarship turned what Steven Zwicker describes, in the following pas-
sage, as signs of reading, into what they more obviously were, writing:
To read with pen in hand underscoring or otherwise marking mem-

orable passages; to correct errors or emend the text and cite variant
readings; to gloss or interline with technical or rhetorical terms or with
translations and citations; to summarize and cross-refer; to outline and
paraphrase; to make synopses and provide interpretations; to extract
maxims from Scripture and sermons, from plays and poems, from
prayers and devotions; to move themes, arguments, and topics, indeed
whole poems, elegies, and epitaphs, recipes and remedies, speeches and
letters from one transcript to another, from printed book or manuscript
text to commonplace compilation, notebook, or miscellany – these were
indeed among the most commonplace acts of the early modern reader.8
All of the emphasized terms in this passage (emphasis I added) describe

writing directly, and reading only indirectly: as Adam Smyth writes in this
volume, “a defining paradox of studies of reading that draw on margina-
lia is that they are in fact, and necessarily, studies of writing, reflecting on
those moments not when readers read, but when readers wrote in books.”9
This turn in marginalia studies towards writing and away from read-
ing allows us to see marginalia as an integrated part of the early modern
environment. The early modern world was textured with writing on all
its surfaces: on walls and on prints pasted or tacked on walls, on trees,
floors, banners, embroidered objects, plaster decorations, paintings, in
jewelry, sugar work, and tableware. As writing, marginalia could be
affiliated with genres, such as autobiography, biography, or writing
in calendars and almanacs,10 or methods, such as those for writing
exemplified in Edward Cocker’s manuals, or Robert Record’s account-
ing texts, or commonplacing.11 For modern critics, marginalia as writ-
ing might evoke a host of theoretical precepts that reading does not;
hence, for example, the place of marginalia in Fleming’s Cultural
Graphology, which reads features of the early modern book – including
its inscribability – alongside Jacques Derrida’s theories about writing.
The essays in this collection develop from this background. They con-
sider marginalia, first and foremost, as writing which is material, which
has the power to invent things (including selves), and which exists at the
intersection of generic norms and technological affordances.
The first section of the volume is titled “Materialities,” and follows
up on the promise provided by the intersection between the material
history of the book, and the turn to writing in marginalia studies. Joshua
Calhoun’s chapter, “Reading Habits and Reading Habitats; Or, Toward
an Ecobibliography of Marginalia,” opens by foregrounding the techno-
logical shift – from books made of paper and boards to books made of
electrons and screens – that corresponded to our rising interest in read-
ing as a historically-grounded phenomenon, and stimulated materialist
inquiries into the early modern book. A notable feature of electronic
books is the difficulty we have annotating them; they only grudgingly
accept deliberate marginalia, often in the form of publicly-shared notes,
and refuse unintended marks of use (such as those tracked by Adam
Smyth in his chapter in the volume). For Calhoun, the unannotatability
of e-books raises technical questions about early modern print: “whether
or not,” writes Calhoun, “the average book in England c. 1600 was an-
notatable in the first place.”12 The chapter goes on to tell us about the
history of the use of animal gelatin, or sizing, in the production, mar-
keting, and use of early modern books, and comes to a remarkable con-
clusion: as paper was sized to receive water-based (manuscript) ink, and
thereby became resistant to oil-based (printing) ink, most early mod-
ern printed books (the majority of which were printed on sized paper)
were enabled for writing at least to the degree they were for reading.
Jason Scott-Warren’s chapter, “Cut-and-Paste Bookmaking: The Private/
Public Agency of Robert Nicolson” also invites us to turn the tables on
our usual way of thinking, and see marginalia not only as a fundamen-
tal affordance of the early modern book, but as a fitting supplement
to it. The books that Scott-Warren brings to our attention, “refuse to
treat print as final” and “sprout handwritten marginalia.”13 The addi-
tions and interventions of Robert Nicolson, the subject of Scott-Warren’s
chapter, include page numbers and running headlines; pasted-in heral-
dic shields and lozenges; marginalia drawing attention to his presence
within the printed part of the book; captions for narrative elements in
poetry “so that his interventions look less like reading and more like
finishing”14; blank and manuscript leaves bound with printed matter;
new, hand-drawn, title pages; and instructions to the printer. Playing
with a metaphor exploited by Juliet Fleming in her discussion of graffiti
within books, Scott-Warren shows that this eccentric impresario, Robert
Nicolson, succeeds in making the works he cut, embellished, supple-
mented, pasted in, and inscribed into distinctive, “authored,” works:
“Nicolson opens his books up and inserts materials into them so as to
establish his own status as a new scion growing on the old stock.”15
Adam Smyth’s chapter, “Book Marks: Object Traces in Early Modern
Books,” makes clear the degree to which the questions raised in this set of
essays are methodological by drawing our attention to a limit-case for mar-
ginalia studies: incidents of books marked by objects left in them, whether
deliberately or accidentally. Just as Calhoun complicates our neglect of the
substrate of marginalia, and Scott-Warren adumbrates our understanding
6 Katherine Acheson
of reading versus writing by interjecting cutting between them, this chap-
ter asks us whether object marks can be considered marginalia, inasmuch
as they lack the scrutability, the deliberation or intentionality, and the sym-
bolic currency of conventional marginalia. Even without words, however,
object marks are legible: we understand, for instance, that a reader’s flower
marking a notable passage is different from an actual flower pressed in a
volume, which is different again from a row of printers’ flowers that sepa-
rate sections of text or areas of the page. Object “traces” of the type Smyth
takes up – flowers, spectacles, and scissors – “which seem to languish out
of time, which mark something that was there but is no longer, and which
signal potentially very long periods of non-reading” – raise rewarding
questions about “the rich and strange social lives of books.”16 “The trou-
bling status of object marks,” as Smyth writes, helps clarify “some of the
assumptions that have underpinned work on marginalia more generally.”17
My chapter, “The Occupation of the Margins: Writing, Space, and
Early Modern Women,” argues that women writers used writing, includ-
ing marginalia, to create space for themselves. Anne Clifford provides
several outlying and exceptionally literal examples of this: sententiae
written on papers adorned her four-poster bedclothes, her castles were
imprinted with her initials and motto, the Great Picture features her sur-
rounded by printed and written words, and her marginalia created gene-
alogical space in which to build fortresses of entitlement and moats and
buttresses of inheritance. The excised dedication to Anthony Stafford’s
1611 Niobe is a negative example in which Clifford (or her husband,
Richard Sackville) refused to allow her verbal image to circulate in the
spaces of the city, private homes, and other readers’ hands. The chapter
focuses on examples drawn from women’s marginalia in Bibles and bib-
lical paratexts in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and
discusses three forms of space they open up for their writers:
one, the space of ownership, a complex field in which genealogy

intersects with gender, inheritance, and the proper name; two, the
space of education, in which writing, reading, speech, work together
to compose subjectivity and undergird entitlement; and three, the
space of the city, or perambulatory, architectural, urban, geographic
and chorographic space.18
Books gave women access to spaces within which to write, within which
to enlarge their senses of themselves and to enjoy the power of words.
Writing in books allowed women to mark out their space and define
their participation in the media-rich environment in which they lived.
The second section of the volume is entitled “Selves.” As Jason
Scott-Warren has written, “books as vehicles for many kinds of life-
writing,”19 and margins, flyleaves, blank pages, and endpapers were quite
literally a site of biography and autobiography. As Femke Molecamp
reports of family bibles in the British Library, “Taking over from books
of hours, the bible also commonly served as a place to log family histo-
ries of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms.”20 In a more sophisticated
sense, writing in the empty spaces of books might chart the evolution of
an individual identity in relation to the content of books, the circulation
of ideas and of books themselves, the other users of the books, and the
culture of wordiness these support. Kate Narveson comments on the
ways in which the printed book in Protestant England stimulated a
new mastery of modes of analysis – of text, self, and world – that

engagement with Scripture opened to ordinary folk. These modes
of analysis granted these writers a new control over their identities.
They took to Scripture their preoccupations, their consciousness of
immediate circumstances, their broader literacy, and their need to
map the larger significance of their lives. The culture of devotion
in turn called them to apply what they found to their lives, shaping
how they read and what they wrote. Application to the self, along
with the ability to write, functioned as a mode of self-authorization
that had never before been available to people like them. 21
The life-writing that we find in the margins of early modern books is

distinctly eccentric, in that it reaches out from the self and seeks attach-
ment to institutions, values, and communities through inscription. It is
dialogic, in that the marginalia always speak to or after something else.
It is often performative or illocutionary, inasmuch as it makes what it
describes happen: a statement of ownership, of approval, or of relationship
is often sufficient to substantiate those things. The essays in this section
explore the role of marginal inscription in the development of distinctive
identities, whether those are spiritual, institutional, or interpersonal.
Elizabeth Patton’s chapter, “Praying in the Margins across the Refor-
mation: Readers’ Marks in Early Modern Books of Hours” uses mar-
ginalia as evidence of “wide-ranging religious beliefs and practices”
during the “confessional conflict” of the English Reformation. 22 During
the Reformation, Catholic books still circulated after proclamations
had declared some or all of their content illegal or sacrilegious. In these
books, the removal of images by cutting, the obscuring of proper names,
the sequence of crossings-out and re-inscriptions, and the manuscript
addition of particular prayers and Biblical references are meaningful
signs produced by readers at precise moments of their experience. We
have long understood how important reading was in the emergence of
Protestant subjectivity, but seldom have been afforded such glimpses
of the interaction between reading and writing in books that span the
pre- and post-Reformation eras that these marginalia represent.
Austen Saunders’ chapter, “Articles of Assent: Clergymen’s Subscribed
Copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England” takes as
its basis copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles sworn to and subscribed by
Church of England clergymen inducted into new parishes, beginning in
8 Katherine Acheson
1571 and continuing through the seventeenth century. The clergyman’s
memorandum and signature attested to their having read through the
Articles in front of their parish and sworn assent to them; after 1662,
the ceremony included the morning and evening services from the Book
of Common Prayer as well. Saunders explores “the implications of this
practice for participants’ subjective understanding of themselves as
political subjects, religious believers, and members of communities.”23
Through these attestations the government used “the printed book as
a technology for implementing policy” with regard to adoption of doc-
trine and liturgy in the Church of England. These memoranda served
to prove loyalty to Church authorities, but they also required the agree-
ment of parishioners who also signed them; in this way, the practices of
the Church were promulgated and validated at several levels of Church
hierarchy. According to Saunders, copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles
“may have been manufactured to facilitate this practice;” they were
often printed with a single blank leaf with signature A1, showing “these
were not blank leaves added by binders, but integral parts of the printed
book.”24 In these examples, then, we see “the printed book as a technol-
ogy for implementing [and disseminating] policy”25 and for cultivating
the political and theological subject of early modern England.
Georgianna Ziegler’s chapter, “Anne Clifford Reads John Selden,”
takes up marginalia by Clifford in a book of particular importance to
her, John Selden’s Titles of Honor (1631).26 Clifford left an exceptional
and complex record of her reading and writing habits: she read and re-
read on her own, she was read to by her secretaries and other servants, she
and they wrote marginalia and other forms for later reference. Both her
reading and writing were, as Ziegler describes them, “transactional,”27 in
that they were interpersonal and asynchronic, and trace complex social,
legal and intellectual relationships between the material, the readers, and
the writers. Selden’s work was itself a compilation from multiple sources
in several languages, printed with copious marginalia, and Clifford’s ap-
proach to her own textual work – intended to substantiate her legal claim
to the estates bequeathed by her father to her uncle – was similar and
bent towards similar ends. “The collecting, transcribing, and organiz-
ing necessary for the creation of the autobiographical projects on paper,
canvas and stone which assert and prove her inherited rights, mark Lady
Anne Clifford as a true historian,” writes Ziegler, “and a worthy reader of
Selden.”28 Clifford was, as both Ziegler and Sherman argue, the supreme
example of a “matriarchivist” who constructed at the meeting point of
her reading and her writing an aristocratic female lineage and entitlement.
The last chapter in this section is by Emma Smith, and is entitled “Marital
Marginalia: The Seventeenth-Century Library of Thomas and Isabella
Hervey.” Books in the Hervey collection, a “modest provincial library,”29
are marked and re-marked with ownership claims as they changed hands
and as the relationships between the people whose hands they passed
through changed. In some books Isabella’s maiden name, Isabella May, is
inscribed in her hand; in some it is inscribed in Thomas’s hand; in most the
mark reads “Tho: & Isabella Hervey,” a mark which has what Smith calls
indelible “sentimental force.”30 These signatures reveal the movement of
books, and of people around them, through time and space. They show that
Contrary to its popular associations of permanence and fixity, any

library is always in motion across numerous axes: place, persons,
extent…. Marginalia, particularly in the form of the personal names
and inscriptions…interrupts this movement by inscribing books
with a particular moment, and by witnessing and authenticating a
specific material encounter.31
The Hervey’s library, then, gives us an example of how the autobiogra-

phies of people and the life-stories of their books are mutually consti-
tutive and speak together of the times that have passed, the places they
have been, and the lives they have led.
The third and last section of the volume is devoted to “Modes.” By
mode, we mean the product of the intersection of a genre of writing with
a technology of representation. The first brings with it ideas of function,
audience, register and style; the second imposes limits or constraints, and
offers opportunities or affordances. Marginalia are especially interest-
ing in this frame, as they always present at least two genres (the printed
work and the annotation) and two technologies of representation (print
and handwriting). In many examples of marginalia multiple genres in-
tersect with multiple affordances and constraints. Jardine and Grafton’s
reconstruction of the annotating Gabriel Harvey, for instance, brings
into play the genres of the source text, of commentary, of letter-writing,
of dialogue, and of annotation, which intersect with the technologies
of representation enjoined by “critical reading, skillful annotation and
active appropriation.”32 These include the narrowness of the margins of
printed books, the quality of the sizing on the paper, the availability of
quill and ink for both annotation and correspondence, the technology
of the book wheel, and the possibility of conversation. When we look at
marginalia in terms of mode, we see more clearly how – in its hybridity,
its situatedness, and its supplemental character – it offers stimulus for
innovation in both writing and reading. Far from being derivative and
dependent, then, marginalia – as we see in these chapters – are innova-
tive and opportunistic, opening up the possibility of further transforma-
tion of the materials of writing and reading into acts of communication,
works of literature, and interventions in the world of learning.
Harriet Archer’s chapter, “Studied for Redaction? Reading and Writing
in the Works of John Higgins,” introduces us to John Higgins, author of
a prequel to William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates, reviser of an
English-Latin lexicon, expander of Nicholas Udall’s book of sententiae
10 Katherine Acheson
gathered from Terence, translator of Hadrianus Junius’s 1567 text The
Nomenclator, and editor of a compilation of his own and Baldwin’s
Mirror complaints. Higgins was inspired by his reading to extend,
translate, edit, and embellish the work of others. In Higgins’s work,
marginalia offer a model for understanding the method of his copious
and diverse oeuvre: as Archer writes, “conceiving of his oeuvre as a
series of marginal notes may help to make sense of the complexities of
its engagement with its sources.”33 The tension Higgins’s work exempli-
fies “between the capacity the printed text has to stabilize knowledge…
and the portrayal and recognition of instability”34 upon which his own
work depends draws our attention to the ways in which marginalia, as
a method, can serve to exemplify early modern authorship. As authorial
method, marginalia help us to see Higgins – and countless other extend-
ers, embellishers, translators, and compilers – as collaborative authors.
Claire Bourne’s chapter, “Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation
as Play-Reading in the First Folio” compares the annotations by two
writers in a copy of the Shakespeare First Folio with quartos of H amlet
and Romeo & Juliet printed in 1637 by John Smethwick. Focusing
on key speeches (such as Horatio’s about the Ghost at the beginning
of Hamlet, Juliet’s soliloquy on the eve of her marriage to R omeo, and
Romeo and Juliet’s dialogue at parting on that night) one of the two
Folio marginalists “implemented and proposed textual emendations that
illustrate a sustained engagement with textual variants found in quarto
playbooks published more than a decade after F1 itself.” Bourne finds
that both marginalists were responsive to the title-page claims (that we
tend to dismiss as publishers’ puffery) and emended speeches to reflect
the changes in “newly corrected, augmented, and amended” quar-
tos available at London’s bookstalls in the mid-seventeenth century.35
She characterizes these marginalists as modern editors avant la lettre,
carefully measuring the benefits of changes to the Folio text proposed by
the later quartos. Reading as an editor – with pen in hand, and multiple
copies open – is another example of how marginalists can be understood as
collaborators, working as writers within the genres with which they were
familiar, and the affordances and constraints provided by the printed book.
The last chapter in this section is Sjoerd Levelt’s “Early Modern
Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter,” which surveys approaches to
early modern marginalia articulated on Twitter and Twitter as a location
of the annotation of early modern texts. Twitter is an excellent example
of a mode, given that it forces the adaptation of various genres (from
the journalistic lede to the short story) into a contracted space limited
by character count. Since its advent, Twitter has been a favorite social
media genre of academics and rare book librarians. Twitter exists within
an inter-operative or linked set of social media forms (blogs, published
material, news stories, Instagram, Facebook, memes, letter-writing,
crowd-sharing research projects), just as early modern marginalia were
linked to sites of reading, writing, conversation, gift exchange, and other
social networking modes. Both early modern marginalia and twitter
threads can move from being commentary to being texts in their own
right. Like early modern marginalia in the cases outlined by Archer and
Bourne, tweets have the potential to become authored material which
can exist independently from the original text about which, or around
which, they were written. Importantly, Twitter builds alliances which
are used to promote ideas and values, just as early modern margina-
lia could be used to build communities of intellectuals. The differences
between postmodern Twitter and early modern marginalia are useful
to us as well, inasmuch as Twitter’s corporate centre, its instantaneity
and ubiquity, its capacity to cultivate violence and hatred, and its vul-
nerability to invasion by automated agents help us see more clearly that
the constraints faced by early modern marginal writers may also have
been forms of protection that enabled them to use their opportunities to
become writers.
This volume begins with an account of early modern paper produc-
tion, and ends with a survey of the use of Twitter as marginalia. There
are many more topics and sites of evidence between those two poles,
however, as the complexity of the interaction between words – our most
powerful tools – and the technologies of communication we use is lit-
erally inestimable. Marginalia prove, in a sense, what Juliet Fleming
asserts, “The book is a thing that differs from itself, at all the moments
of its production, and at all the moments of its consumption.”36 We hope
that these essays will stimulate more research in to marginalia within
and without the early modern period. We will be grateful to read them
and to write in their margins, should the material form allow for it.
Notes
1 Freeling, Not as Far as Velma, 182. My aunt, Jean Uçar, found this item of
marginalia.
2 Jackson, Marginalia, 7.
3 Ibid., 6.
4 Jardine and Grafton, “Gabriel Harvey,” 30.
5 See Orgel, The Reader in the Book, Chapter 6, and “Margins of Truth.”
6 Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti,” 368.
7 Helen Smith gives many examples of consumption (eating, drinking,
breathing) used to describe reading in “More swete.”
8 Zwicker, “The Reader Revealed,” in The Reader Revealed, edited by Baron,
12. The conversion I am proposing (that evidence of reading is writing, and
therefore evidence of writing) can be contrasted with Michel de Certeau’s
insistence on the opposition between the two modes:
Far from being writers–founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants
of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells
and builders of houses — readers are travelers; they move across lands
belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields
they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.
Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a
place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of repro-
duction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one
forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it
does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repe-
tition of the lost paradise.
The Practice of Everyday Life, 174. Quoted in
Chartier, Order of Books, 1
9 Smyth, this volume, 59.
10 With regard to commonplacing, see Smyth, “Almanacs.” With regard to
generic affiliations more generally, see Grafton, “John Dee Reads Books of
Magic,” in The Reader Revealed, edited by Baron, 32:
[Gabriel] Harvey and others made their books into records of the
social circles they inhabited, using title pages, margins, and blank leaves
to give detailed accounts of remarkable experiences and conversations.
Annotated books regularly turned into something between diaries and
historical records, efforts to freeze and preserve for posterity the talk and
buzz of a particular intellectual world.
11 See Smyth, “Rend and Teare,” and “Little Clippings.” For more about cutting-
and-pasting, see the essays (in addition to “Little Clippings”) collected in the
special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45, no. 3
(2015), especially essays by Juliet Fleming, Jeffrey Todd Knight, and William
Sherman and Heather Wolfe.
12 Calhoun, this volume, 17.
13 Scott-Warren, this volume, 39.
14 Ibid., 37.
15 Ibid., 48.
17 Ibid., 52.
18 Acheson, this volume, 73.
20 Molekamp, “Using a Collection,” 12.
21 Narveson, Bible Readers, 99.
22 Patton, this volume, 93 and 100.
23 Saunders, this volume, 116.
24 Ibid., 121.
25 Ibid., 118.
26 See Sherman, “Reading the Matriarchive” (Chapter 3) in Used Books; Orgel,
“Margins of Truth;” Brayman, Reading Material; and Ziegler and Acheson’s
chapters in this volume for other discussions of Clifford’s marginalia.
27 Ziegler, this volume, 127.
28 Ibid., 151.
29 Smith, this volume, 155.
30 Ibid., 171.
31 Ibid., 168.
33 Archer, this volume, 191.
34 Ibid., 177.
35 Bourne, this volume, 197.
36 Fleming “Afterword,” 552.
Section 1
Materialities
1 Reading Habits and
Reading Habitats; or,
toward an Ecobibliography
of Marginalia
Joshua Calhoun
It may have simply been the next logical step for book historians,
especially those thinking about the sociology of texts in the 1990s and
early 2000s, but the rise of e-books so strikingly correlates, chronolog-
ically, to a scholarly interest in readerly annotation practices that one is
tempted to assert causation. In 1989, the year before Lisa Jardine and
Anthony Grafton’s “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read
His Livy,” Project Gutenberg added its tenth book—The King James
Bible—to its digital corpus.1 The Sony Bookman appeared in 1992, as did
Roger Chartier’s L’ordre des livres (1992). 2 In 1994, Lydia G. Cochrane’s
English translation of that work, The Order of Books, was published,
and Project Gutenberg added its 100th book (The Complete Works of
William Shakespeare). In 1995 when William H. Sherman’s John Dee:
The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance appeared,
Project Gutenberg was adding sixteen books per month; the next year
that number doubled to thirty-two per month and David M. Bergeron’s
essay collection Reading and Writing in Shakespeare was published. In
1998, the SoftBook Reader, the Rocket eBook Reader, and Adrian John’s
The Nature of the Book were released. If my goal really were to argue
for causation, I might go on tracking, year by year, the coincidental rise
of e-readers and scholarly studies of Renaissance readers. Right in the
midst of the timeline, just before a series of breakthrough devices such
as Sony Reader (2006), Amazon Kindle (2007), Apple iPhone (2007),
Barnes & Noble Nook (2009), and Apple iPad (2010), we would find
Heidi Brayman’s Reading Material in Early Modern England (2005), a
defining work in the history of early modern reading that shifted focus
from professional scholars (such as Harvey and Dee) to “less extraordi-
nary readers.”3 In the opening sentence, Brayman reflects on the book
historical context of her own work: “This book was written over a de-
cade that brought electronic communication and literacy into the offices
and homes of a great variety of readers.”4 She goes on to suggest that
the “proliferation of electronic media and its displacement of print have
prompted a range of questions” such as “What practices does the codex
16 Joshua Calhoun
encourage and allow?” “What should be preserved of this medium?”
and “What might an electronic book look like?” From Brayman’s first
sentence, we begin to learn about a period of new and exciting variety of
readers of all kinds of printed books, and we learn all this in a study that
was conceived during a period of new and exciting variety of readers of
all kinds of e-books.
I can now read Brayman’s opening sentence in my printed copy or I
can read the opening sentence in an electronic copy on Google Books,
but things would get tricky if I tried to do the same kind of reading with
both printed book and e-book. 5 In my printed copy, next to the passage
quoted above, I have scribbled the words “great variety of e-readers” in
black ink in the outer margin.6 The writing is small and fits snugly in the
2 cm margin as a two-line annotation. It is evidence of a simple textual
interaction, but one that would be impossible in an e-book version of
Reading Material. Even if the annotation had no ts to cross, an action
that can send an electronic page into spasms, I could never write sharply
enough with a stylus to make an identical e-annotation. Or I would need
to pinch, spread, scale, enlarge, or otherwise manipulate page or writing
space or both. Or I would have to type the note instead of writing it.
Or try to do one of the above and find I had “flipped” back to the Table
of Contents. “Marginalia are supposed to be spontaneous and fluent,”
writes Mark O’Connell in a 2012 New Yorker essay on marginalia.7
Instead, “‘[n]oting’ something on a Kindle feels like e-mailing yourself
a throwaway remark.” In short, makers of e-readers have failed spec-
tacularly when it comes to designing an e-book experience that allows
an active reader to easily annotate its margins.8 With e-books in the
twenty-fi rst century, the problem is a feeling of being manually divorced
from the text. The interface is clunky and unintuitive, and readers ap-
parently feel they cannot get at the thing itself with their hands. It leaves
one wanting the relative simplicity of pen and paper.
Brayman’s experience writing about margin-marking readers against
the backdrop of an e-reader revolution has a mirroring counter-
experience: Erik Schmitt was helping to design the first Kindle in 2007
when he inherited some of his grandfather’s books—books “filled with
notations, comments, tick marks and translations,” with, as Schmitt
puts it, “the thought process and interests of someone long gone.”9
He eventually created a visually rich online archive, the Pages Project,
which explores material acts of reading and “the nature of the book as
a transitory physical object in a digital age.” On the site and in inter-
views, Schmitt talks about his design work on the Kindle being part of
a “disruptive revolution of communication” that would not only “trans-
form” certain book models and features but also “eradicate” others.10
Whether handwritten marginal notes in e-books will be transformed
or eradicated remains to be seen. A 2011 article in The Atlantic claims
that “[a]t present, annotating an e-book with a stylus is about as handy
Reading Habits and Reading Habitats 17
as marking up a Norton anthology with a Crayola.”11 The simile is apt,
even painful. All the more so because, more than half a decade and
dozens of hardware and software updates after the Atlantic article ap-
peared, the same issues remain. The active book users I imagine reading
this essay might, like me, prefer the fate of Tantalus to the prospect
of spending an eternity alternately trying to annotate the margins of a
printed book with a crayon and the margins of an e-book with a stylus.
The e-book context outlined above sets up the following simple
thought experiment—a thought experiment that can help us see some
common but erroneous assumptions that we tend to make about hand-
written annotations in early printed books. Suppose three things:
1 By the year 2030, makers of e-readers have used haptic feedback

and/or some other innovation to clear the design hurdle that has
tripped them up so far.
2 E-annotation, in this brave new world, becomes not only possible
but pleasurable, and readers take up the new technology with zeal.
3 Four hundred years later, in 2430, scholars studying annotation
archives dating back to the earliest e-readers observe a gap in the
marginal record. Instead of dwelling on this gap, they might surmise
that readers of the earliest e-technologies were simply less interested
in annotation.
To assume a lack of readerly interest in annotation in the early days

of e-readers would, of course, be a scholarly oversight. Those twenty-
fifth-century scholars would be missing some crucial bits of infor-
mation. Lack of annotation in the early years of e-books is merely a
symptom; lack of “annotatability” is the underlying condition. Just as
scholars of the future might mistake a lack of annotatability for a lack
of interest in annotation, scholars of early modern books tend to speak
of books as either annotated or not annotated without considering
whether or not the average book in England c. 1600 was annotatable
in the first place.12
Studies of the history of reading have generally taken for granted
the fact that readers could write in their books. In the traditional view,
a volume either is or is not annotated with manuscript notes, but its
“annotatability” is not questioned. For instance, in an expansive, major
contribution to the history of reading, William H. Sherman draws from
an impressive data sample in order to better comprehend and analyze
Renaissance readers’ “patterns of use.”13 Sherman’s data sample is the
entire Short Title Catalog (STC) at the Henry E. Huntington Library;
he found that 1,531 of the 7,526 STC books, or 20.3 percent, “con-
tain manuscript notes by early readers (not just signatures, underlining,
and nonverbal symbols but more or less substantial writing).”14 From
these scattered notes, a picture of Renaissance readers begins to emerge.
18 Joshua Calhoun
These examples, Sherman observes, “can reveal…large-scale patterns of
use and . . . can correct some of our most deep-seated assumptions about
reading and readers.”15 But historical records suggest that early printed
books, like early e-readers, were not always annotation-friendly reading
objects. Sherman’s investigation of available evidence reveals a great deal
about how historical readers used the books that have survived to the
present day; however, making an argument about “large-scale patterns
of use” based on percentages is trickier. Percentages assume that we
are looking at a representative sample, a point Sherman raises when he
claims that “the practice [of marking books with manuscript notes] must
have been much more widespread” than his findings indicate, in part
because “the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was
to decay.”16 And yet the data suggest the direct opposite was true in
some cases; some books, especially large books, that were meant to
be heavily used were less vulnerable to decay. Their pages were gener-
ously coated with an animal gelatin that allowed readers to write with
water-based ink, and this coating, in turn, has tended to preserve his-
torical papers over time.17 Andrew Pettegree has convincingly argued
that “diversification of format” was the strategy of “pragmatic,” profit-
oriented early printers, who developed “new types of book[s] for new
types of reader[s].” As I will argue here, the practice of coating the pages
of a printed book with gelatin sizing was an added cost, one that savvy
printers with an eye toward diverse book options for diverse book buy-
ers had ways of reducing or even eliminating.18 And yet the important
role that gelatin sizing plays in early printed books, from production to
consumption, has been largely overlooked or misunderstood in book
history scholarship.
Anyone who has turned the pages of an expensive, well-made
sixteenth-century folio can probably recall the thickness and crispness
of its paper and the crackling sound of turning a page. Sizing is respon-
sible for that texture and sound. To connect our tactile and aural expe-
rience of well-sized paper with the logistics of its production requires a
technical description of Renaissance papermaking at the outset. Once
through the gory details of boiled-down animal parts smeared across the
pages of printed books, I shift from the language of book production to
the language of book use. I focus, especially, on historical language of
book use that helps us begin to see the archive as a more dynamic and
perhaps less-representative sample of early books. Early printed books
were less annotatable than we imagine. If margin-marking readers of
e-books find themselves distanced from the text and are unable to easily
record their reactions on resistant surfaces, Renaissance readers had the
opposite problem. The interface, paper made from recycled rags, was
fibrous and spongy, and putting quill to paper could create so much
interaction between writing implement and book surface that handwrit-
ten remarks became a series of illegible blots.
Handwriting on Hybrid Media
Gelatin sizing (hereafter, I use the terms “sizing,” “animal sizing,” and
“gelatin sizing” interchangeably), the most obscure ingredient in early
books and one that is rarely considered despite scholarly interest in the
annotation practices of readers, is the viscous gelatin solution in which
handmade paper was dipped to render it suitable for writing. The British
Library Guide to Printing notes that paper’s “greatest drawback is that
it is hygroscopic, which means that it is sensitive to moisture and there-
fore dimensionally unstable.”19 Paper made from recycled linen will
soak up moisture in much the same way that linen clothing does. It will
also, of course, soak up water-based writing ink—unless it is coated in
a substance that yields a “harder surface to minimize its absorbency.”20
But what some call a drawback, others call an advantage. Jonathan M.
Bloom cites paper’s hydrophilic nature as a feature that would have been
a selling point to bureaucrats: “[b]ecause paper absorbs ink, writing on
it could not be erased easily. Paper documents were therefore far more
secure from forgery than those written on papyrus and parchment.”21
Absorption, then, is an essential characteristic of paper, one that has to
be managed depending on the paper’s intended use.
In Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil. Hormani Caesariburgensis (1519),
we find descriptions of the various kinds of paper, including “cours
papyr/that wolde serue for no wryttynge: but for marchandis/and ped-
lars to wrappe thyr stouffe in” and “Blottynge papyr [that] serueth to
drye weete wryttynge.”22 The Latin text beneath the English refers
to “Blottynge papyr” as “Charta bibula”—bibulous paper, paper that
imbibes moisture. (Unsized paper is often referred to now as “waterleaf,”
a word that was not in usage until the end of the eighteenth century.)23
So paper, pulled from a vat of fibers suspended in water, was pressed in
order to expel excess water and then hung to dry. The dry sheets were,
by every definition, paper; they were useful as such for various purposes
such as blotting, wrapping, and, as I argue here, printing—but not for
writing.
Coating paper with sizing required a series of separate, additional
steps in the papermaking process. We might think of gelatin sizing as
an upgrade, an added or premium feature (a feature that contributed to
the diversification of formats highlighted by Pettegree). The dried sheets
of unsized paper hanging in the drying loft were gathered into small
stacks or spurs and soaked in a warm gelatin solution rendered from
animal bones and hides. The paper was then pressed a second time, this
time to expel excess sizing, and then hung to dry a second time. These
additional steps meant additional effort and drying time, of course, but
they also required additional equipment and space. A detailed inven-
tory of a Southampton paper mill in 1696 reveals that the mill had a
separate “Sizing Roome” with “2 Great Copper furnashes,” “2 Great
20 Joshua Calhoun
Sizing Tables,” “1 Sizing press,” and “1 washing Tubb,” among other
furniture. 24 According to Dard Hunter, the sizing phase of papermaking
“was extremely wasteful, as many sheets were torn and bruised beyond
repair.”25 Hunter claims that the sizing process was so wasteful that the
sizing room of early paper mills was known as the “slaughter house.”26
Such terminology is provocative: the slaughtered animals’ body parts
make sizing, which in turn “bruise[s]” and “slaughter[s]” the sheets of
paper in the process of coating. 27 ABC for Book Collectors defines size
as “a thin glutinous or viscid decoction of bones or animal substances.”28
Philip Gaskell refers to sizing as “a solution of animal gelatine made from
vellum or leather shavings boiled in water.”29 One also finds historical
reference to parchment-scrap glue in John Florio’s Italian-English dictio-
nary (1598) under the entry “Carnizzo, sinewes or threds of parchment
to make size or glew.”30 However, Hunter defines early European sizing
as a “gelatine rendered from the hoofs, hides, and horns of animals”—
that is, from butcher scraps instead of tanner scraps. 31 In his 486-line
Latin poem Papyrus sive ars conficiendae papyri (Papyrus, or The Craft
of Paper) (1693), Jean Imberdis suggests another animal ingredient for
the sizing pot—ears: “A store of ears from Oxen and from Sheep/For just
this very purpose men do keep;” Imberdis also claims that “Some choose
the Guts and leave the Ears aside.”32 Hunter cites Papyrus as the “earli-
est European book to mention the actual sizing of paper,” but he seems
not to have known about an account of sizing that predates Imberdis’s
by 200 years: Francesco Maria Grapaldo’s De partibus aedium, printed
in Parma, Italy, in 1494.33 Grapaldo, like Florio and Gaskell, mentions
leather and parchment parings as the raw material for sizing:
Later [the dried pages] are steeped in glue made from waste scraps
which tanners and parchmenters save for this purpose; they are hot-
dipped, dried, and glazed, rendering them apt to take the pen and
not to soak up the ink.34
John Bidwell, writing about seventeenth-century English paper makers,

claims that one of their challenges was “to learn how to brew a gelatin
size solution, and how to apply it evenly, so that each sheet would absorb
the right amount to bear ink properly and attain the desired printing and
handling properties.”35
The lack of standard sizing recipes may well indicate that paper-
makers knew they could throw into the sizing pot whatever animal
parts were handy—hooves, hides, ears, horns, heads, parchment and
leather scraps, and bones. And yet it is clear that, over time, sizing
practices grew more sophisticated and demanding. The kind of animal
used to render sizing was also a means of diversification and there-
fore a factor in determining paper quality and cost. Joseph Jérôme de
Lalande’s Art de faire le papier, published in 1761 and acknowledged as
the first technical account of the process of papermaking, claims that
by the mid-eighteenth century, papermakers were perfecting the craft
of sizing—or at least using the various animal scraps more discretely.
For instance, one sizing ingredient is valued for strength (tan-leather
scraps), another is valued for whiteness (sheep skin), and even isinglass,
rendered from sturgeon fish, can be used in rare instances. 36 To the
extent that sizing practices and recipes can seem tedious, it is worth
remembering that, as Imberdis writes in 1693, “Without it [size] you
could not one Letter make/Nor any Mark upon the paper’s Back.”37 In
addition to making paper that meets the basic requirements of writers,
there would have been an added financial incentive to develop advanced
techniques for those who could afford higher qualities of paper. Bidwell
notes that “[w]riting grades [of paper] cost twice as much as printing
grades because they required greater skill, better rags, a brighter color,
a smoother finish, and a harder surface” (586). What has been largely
overlooked in the history we tell of books and book-marking readers,
however, is that what is good for the writer is not necessarily good for
the printer.
Animal sizing, which required more work of the papermaker and
added the risk of waste, could also make the printer’s job more dif-
ficult. 38 Like the papermaker, who had to add a series of steps to the
process of papermaking in order to produce a sheet that could accept
handwriting (dipping in gelatin, re-pressing, and re-drying), the printer
using sized paper had to add the extra step of moistening or misting
the paper—of “melting” the sizing—in advance of printing so that the
paper would accept oil-based printing ink. James Mosley calls atten-
tion to the fact that paper’s fibers had to be softened by dampening
“[i]n order to make a satisfactory print on the hard-surfaced paper that
was designed for use with the pen.”39 According to Lotte Hellinga,
“Because oil-based ink was used, it did not penetrate the paper to any
great extent; the paper had to be dampened to melt the size if the ink
was to make any mark at all.”40 Sizing transformed a hygroscopic,
bibulous sheet of paper into a writing substrate that could record ideas
scrawled in water-based ink; however, to be impressed with oil-based
printing ink, the once-absorbent, now impervious sheet needed to be
made more absorbent again. The question naturally arises: Why not
just print on unsized paper?
Hunter claims to have observed early books printed on unsized paper:
In an examination of more than a hundred different volumes of

incunabula (books printed in Europe before 1501) I have found
that…many of the sheets are heavily sized, others contain a limited
amount of sizing, and a small number no sizing at all.41
22 Joshua Calhoun
Describing “The Tools of Early Printers,” Theodore De Vinne backs up
Hunter’s claim, adding to it the assertion that not only could one print
on unsized paper, it was cheaper as well:
The paper made for the Bibles of Gutenberg and for the earlier books
was the ordinary writing paper of the period. . . . But the qualities
which commended the paper to the copyist were objectionable to
the printer. The hard surface caused a harsh impression, and strong
sizing made the damp sheets stick together. It was soon discovered
that unsized paper, which, according to Madden, was about half the
price of sized, was easier to print. It would take a clearer impression,
and more thoroughly imbibe the oily ink.42
De Vinne’s late-nineteenth-century scholarship and Hunter’s mid-

twentieth-century scholarship on animal sizing and unsized books seem
to be ignored by many modern book historians and conservators. One
reason may be that, because Hunter does not identify his data sample,
we are left with an anecdotal claim but no hard evidence. In 2007, I
came across Hunter’s claim about unsized books and began asking the
question “Why not print on unsized paper?” of dozens of scholars in
various disciplines in the humanities and of numerous conservation sci-
entists at the various archives in which I conducted the research for this
project. Invariably, I was told that one cannot print on unsized paper.
And the answer was often emphatic—that is, Hunter’s claim was taken
to be erroneous out of hand. However, both historical scholarship and
modern hand papermaking practices contradict commonly held beliefs
about sizing and printing, and they bear out the argument that printers
could print—and even sometimes preferred to print—on unsized paper,
and that varying degrees of sizing from various kinds of animals yield
differently useful and annotatable paper. How then do we account for
the invisibility of sizing in more recent scholarly studies of marginalia?
And how do we find evidence of sizing in early printed books that might
help us recover an understanding of sizing’s integral role in bookmaking
and book use?
Sinking Substrates
One way to answer the question “What evidence do we have that one
could print on unsized paper?” is to turn from production to consump-
tion, from papermakers and printers to readers. Crucially, sizing affects
book functionality and, one could argue, helps to define what is indi-
cated by the word “reading.” If we imagine that most books can accept
writing ink, then we might say that a book that cannot be annotated
by hand is dysfunctional. Regardless of the percentage of books that
were annotatable, it is clear that sizing was not a skeuomorphic, formal
decoration, but a functional feature that allowed—or disallowed or
complicated, depending on its relative presence—readerly interaction
with the text.43 No wonder readers thought about and discussed sizing
in ways that are analogous to our own present-day discussions about the
challenges of annotating e-books. Imberdis refers to sizing as an “Art”
in Papyrus, and he claims, “So, if you seek a surface fit for Pen/First see
if Size sufficient it has ta’en;” According to Imberdis, licking the paper
was one way, among others, of testing its fitness for the pen:
Shaken by hand, it does not limply sag,

As is the fashion of a piece of Rag,
But crackles parchment-like, resisting still
The holder’s Touch, and loth to do his Will.
If you seek further proof, then take a Sheet,
And, licking it, with Spittle make it wet;
If on the back no moisture-trace is found,
Be sure, with ample Glue the Paper’s bound;
If it show through, the lack of Size is plain,
On porous Paper you will write in vain.44
Those readers who had to make do with “porous paper” literally came
up with solutions. In The iewell house of art and nature (1594), for
instance, Hugh Plat offers this recipe for coating the margins of printed
books so that the paper will take the marginalia:
Rvb your paper wel ouer with the fine powder or dust of Rosen and
Sandrach [red arsenic sulphide] in equall parts before you write ther-
with… This is a necessarie secret for students, whereby they may
note in the margentes of their bookes if the paper should happen to
sinke, which is an especiall fault in many of our late yeere bookes
of the Law.45
As Plat’s advice reveals, “Sink” or “sinking” was a contemporary term

used of paper that could not hold its ink. The problem with poorly sized
books, from the perspective of an end user, is that they frustrate rea-
derly interaction: oil-based printing ink does not blot into the paper’s
fibers, but water-based writing ink does. Anticipating the problem and
taking the time to coat the margins of books printed on spongy paper,
a reader might then add marginal notes. The homogeneity we expect of
machine-made paper contrasts starkly with the heterogeneity of hand-
made, hand-sized paper, whose quality was affected by everything from
weather patterns to the quality of plant fibers and available animal body
parts. The variations in gelatin content observed by Barrett only serve to
reinforce the point that writing on paper in Renaissance England was a
constant negotiation. Plat’s condemnation of bad paper comes only after
24 Joshua Calhoun
an exhortation, aimed particularly at students, to consider a book pa-
per’s absorbency before writing in it. Plat’s language is part of the “rich
esthetic vocabulary” that readers used to describe paper,46 and his use of
the word “sinke” recalls the reading terminology that registered the ex-
perience of writing in books whose pages had varying degrees of sizing.
In fact, Plat’s observation about the absorbency of late sixteenth-century
law books is the earliest recorded usage of the now obsolete definition
of “sink”: “Of paper: To cause ink to spread or ‘run’ on being applied to
it; to absorb ink.”47
Sizing, and the attendant problem of sinking, seems to be as invis-
ible in scholarly studies of historical readers and writers as it is on
the surfaces of historical paper. For instance, despite their essential
role in preparing the surface of paper to accept handwriting, neither
“sizing” nor “gelatin” merits an entry among the “1,500 terms, includ-
ing types of manuscript, their physical features, writing implements,
writing surfaces…” in Peter Beal’s A Dictionary of English Manuscript
Terminology: 1450 to 2000.48 In manuals meant to train scholars in
the techniques of book history, sizing also tends to get short shrift.
Although G. Thomas Tanselle’s Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical
Introduction devotes significant space to the value of searching for bib-
liographical evidence in paper (particularly via examination of water-
marks), the introduction never acknowledges the presence of sizing.49
Joseph A. Dane’s What Is a Book? The Study of Early Printed Books
devotes seventeen pages to the topic of paper without mentioning sizing
or gelatin. 50 Online, the Rochester Institute of Technology hosts an
impressive image database that illustrates the history of graphic com-
munication, and yet even this resource elides the history of sizing: digi-
tized illustrations from Lalande’s Art de Faire le Papier depict the water
wheel, the mould and deckle, and the rooms (1) where rags are sorted,
(2) where rags are stamped or macerated, (3) where sheets formed from
the vat and couched in stacks, (4) where the sheets are hung to dry,
and (5) where the sheets are burnished and inspected. But in Lalande,
a detailed illustration of the room where sheets of paper are sized
appears between numbers 3 and 4; this illustration of the sizing room
is not included on the Rochester Institute of Technology site. 51 An im-
age of the sizing room that is similar to (and quite possibly based on)
Lalande’s also appears as a full-page plate in d’Alembert and Diderot’s
Encyclopédie (Figure 1.1) In both sources, the details, dimensions, and
placement of the sizing room illustration suggests the important role it
played in early hand papermaking.
My point is not to pick nits with resources I have learned from and
taught with; rather, I wish to point out that scholars tend to assume
that the presence of pen and paper equals the potential for written ex-
pression. In fact, animal sizing is an influential, messy, time-consuming
part of the equation. The problem of sinking raises some provocative
Figure 1.1 D
epiction of the sizing room, a crucial space in early hand paper-
making operations. Plate XI from “Papeterie,” in d’Alembert and
Diderot’s Encylopédie, vol. 5 (Plates), Paris, 1767. Image used
by courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial
Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
26 Joshua Calhoun
questions about the bibliographical method. For example, unless there
is direct proof to suggest that the pen is the primary object being tested,
could the scribbles we term “pen trials” in bibliographic description be
just as accurately called “paper trials”?52
The problem of sinking also raises intriguing questions about liter-
ary expression, about ineffability, and about the legibility of historical
readers (i.e., how a bookmarking reader from the past is readable by a
present-day scholar). Numerous Renaissance texts register the frustra-
tion of encountering poorly sized or unsized paper—paper that “sinks.”
Some references to sinking paper are technical. In Mathurin Cordier’s
translated Latin dialogues, which served as a crib sheet of sorts to
accompany Cordier’s Latin textbook, the scholarly interlocutors discuss
everything from problematic ink and how to temper it so that it won’t
sink into writing paper, to the various uses of paper, including its use in
the privy. In one dialogue, a scholar complains that he writes in earnest,
but his writing is poor because he lacks “the helpes of faire writing”:
“Good paper, good inke, a good penne: for this my paper (as thou seest)
doth sinke miserably, my inke is waterish and whitish, my pen soft and ill
made.” A printed marginal note glosses “sinke” as “flowe thorowe.”53 In
another dialogue, a distinction is made between sinking paper and leaky
ink: “Thereupon the paper* would leake.” Two printed marginal notes
keyed to the asterisk clarify: “perflueret, would sinke, or run thorow.”
and “proflueret, would run abroad, or the ink would.”54
We also find simple analogies between sin and sinking. In the sec-
ond sermon in a printed series titled The Saints Submission and
Sathans Overthrow (1638), a series based on the command in James 4.7 to
“resist the Devil and he will flee from you,” John Preston likens the
believer’s heart to paper whose sizing has been compromised by moisture:
For as inke sinkes into wet paper, and runnes abroad upon it… so
when the divell offers his snares to any empty heart, they enter in
and foile him, but when the heart is fortified with the fulnesse of
grace, Satans baites cannot take hold, nor enter in.55
And in Davids hainous sinne (1631), Thomas Fuller imagines King

David writing the letter that condemns Uriah to death on bad paper. In
Fuller’s poetic account, David’s soul is likened to dysfunctional “spongy
paper” that sinks and is easily stained. 56
Other more complex metaphors about sinking are harder to puzzle
out. In Richard Harvey’s Plaine Perceuall (1590), a pamphlet against the
pamphleteers on both sides of the Martin Marprelate Controversy, a six-
line commendatory verse at the end of the tract creates a fairly complex
metaphor in a short amount of space. Claiming that Perceval’s praises
will “florish in [his] dary,” he says that his paper will be curds and his
pen a spoon. He then claims that, if his paper sinks, he will write his
praises upon “a cheese,/That as the same increaseth, so may these.”57 I
understand him to be likening sinking paper to cheese cloth, while also
referring to the curdling of his paper/curds into cheese. But my point in
citing this example is that the metaphor is convoluted and relies upon
an understanding of not only the natural properties of cheese but also
the natural properties of writing on paper. A less complex, but similarly
abstract metaphor occurs in the play The Mariage Night (1664) by
Henry Falkland. The Duke claims,
A Fair young Lady and Widow, is

A rich piece of Stuff Rumpled: An Old one’s
A blotting Paper: A Man shall never
write any thing on, she sinks so. 58
In the Duke’s opinion, a young widow may be pre-creased and pre-

folded, so to speak, but unlike an old widow, she is still able to a ccept
the metaphoric writing ink of a new husband. (Here, too, the language
of blotting as it relates to women and chastity is complicated by the
metaphor, which relies on the play between antonymic connotations of
“blotting.”) The chronological range of these two abstract references to
animal sizing (1590 and 1664) only serves to highlight the ubiquity of
bad, sinking paper.
Shakespeare’s Falstaff also makes a subtle reference to the relation-
ship between sizing and sinking. In The Merry Wives of Windsor,
having been hidden in a laundry basket, covered with Mistress Page’s
“foul linen” (3.3.122), and subsequently tossed into the River Thames,
Falstaff returns complaining about his supposed near-drowning expe-
rience. Lucky for him he landed in a shallow part of the river because,
he says, “you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in
sinking” (3.5.11–12). 59 The pun reverses material expectations: while a
lack of size makes paper sink, Falstaff’s ample size makes him sink. It
is a subtle pun, but one that picks up on the play’s repeated references
to paper (Mistress Page, paper letters as physical properties on stage,
Falstaff’s page boy as an intermediary, identical love letters that might
as well have been printed with blanks left for the wives’ names) and
calls attention to Falstaff’s spongy, sexually incontinent nature as a de-
fining quality.
These varied references to the failure of animal sizing employed
across a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts make visi-
ble an invisible substance with which Renaissance readers interacted
on both a material and a metaphorical level. When annotating, they
recognized the absence of sizing as a moment of sinking. When read-
ing with their quills at rest or without pen and ink, they understood
28 Joshua Calhoun
the ways in which sinking paper is likened to the sinking feeling of
unrequited love, to the staining of a sinner’s soul, to the impregnating
of a woman’s womb, or even to the technical difficulty of writing on
“a cheese.”
Even good, ink-worthy paper might “sink” where sizing is lacking. An
example can be found in “The Newby Bible,” a 1580 Geneva Bible at
the Folger Shakespeare Library which contains more than two centuries
of manuscript marginalia.60 In one handwritten marginal note dated
November 27, 1791, next to Psalm 119, Elizabeth Boggis, the annotator,
ran into a weak spot, a blemish in the paper where the sizing was inad-
equate. (A number of factors related to immersing small stacks of paper
in a warm gelatin bath, separating those sheets by hand, and hanging
them to dry could cause some areas of a sheet to absorb less sizing than
others.) The annotation, written vertically along the outer margin of
the page, explains that the regular minister was “at Bath on account of
ill Health.” A substitute preacher, Boggis writes, took “his text from
Psalms 119 verse 75.” However, the note is not quite that clear (see
Figure 1.2). A diplomatic transcription is, “his text […]. […]om from
Psalms 119 verse 75,” but replacing some blot-like emoji for the brack-
eted periods in my transcription would yield a more accurate represen-
tation, for it seems that when the annotator first attempted “from,” the
word sank into a rough section of the paper. Boggis tried the word again,
but half of it sank, so she crosses out what is left (“om”) and, back on
a well-sized portion of paper, the end of the “from” is finally legible.61
The Newby Bible offers an opportunity to see sizing by seeing the
effects of its absence. In this way, it makes visible both a substance
that is invisible to the naked eye and a practice that has become all
but invisible in book history scholarship.62 I have argued that what we
know about sizing should lead us to question the annotatability of early
printed books. Assuming that all books are equally annotatable, we
base our understanding of reading and especially annotation practices
on a skewed sample. Paying attention to sizing—considering its absence
and considering its concentration when present—we are likely to no-
tice nuances in the archives that we have been missing. Typically, when
we speak of researching the provenance of historical, handmade paper,
we mean watermark research that attempts to narrow in on a mill, a
maker, a date. And yet “provenance” gestures even further back toward
origin and place, past the mill and toward where something originated
or derived from before it was pulp in a vat or a sheaf of papers in the
sizing tub.63
In a very simple narrative we sometimes retell about the history of the
book, plant gives way to animal gives way to plant medium as records
move from papyrus to parchment to paper. In reality, at least in West-
ern paper, plant gives way to animal gives way to plant-animal hybrid.
Figure 1.2 The Bible (1580), Folger STC 2129, Ii3r. Photograph by Joshua Calhoun
from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
When Hamlet recites lines that describe Pyrrhus as “o’ersizèd with co-
agulate gore” (2.2.400), he uses a phrase that could also aptly describe
early handmade paper—or, at least the sort of paper that Hamlet would
need in order to “set down” a speech of “some dozen or sixteen lines”
(2.2.477–8). Recognizing—reseeing—animal presence in the plant-
based pages of early printed books may lead us to think more carefully
about Renaissance ecology or ecocriticism or categorical hybridity or
media consumption, but it also prompts material discoveries about
books we explore in the archives. Seeing animal sizing, we also see a way
to attend not only to the sociology of texts but also to the vital social
ecology of texts, to the biomes from which books are made and in which
books are read, marked, used, reused, torn, and preserved.64 Reading
habits and reading habitats are always systemically entwined.
30 Joshua Calhoun
Notes
For sharing work and/or commenting on various versions of this research, I am
grateful to Katherine Acheson, Tim Barrett, Heidi Brayman, Karen Britland,
Ginny Garnett, Peter Stallybrass, Alan Stewart, Mark Vareschi, Jonathan
Walker, and Heather Wolfe. I am also grateful to the Folger Shakespeare
L ibrary for a short-term fellowship and to the University of Wisconsin-
Madison for summer funding that allowed me to complete parts of this
research. The librarians and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s
Special Collections generously assisted me throughout this research. Finally,
Robyn Adams and Matthew Symonds organized a symposium on sizing at the
Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at which I received invaluable feedback
from attendees.
1 Lebert, “2. A Bet Since 1971.” All subsequent references to Project Guten-
berg figures and milestones are from this section of the e-book. My struggle
to clearly specify where a reader might refind this citation, given the multi-
ple options (Generated HTML EPUB, Kindle, Plain Text UTF-8) available
on Project Gutenberg, only begins to illustrate the sorts of bibliographic
quandaries one encounters when trying to use new substrates, from paper to
touch screens, based on reading practices that predate those technologies.
2 Dates given in this paragraph for e-readers, except for Apple’s iPad and
iPhone, are from Manley and Holley, “History of the Ebook: The Changing
Face of Books,” 292–311.
3 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 3. For the history of the iPhone and
iPad, see “Apple—Press Info—Apple Reinvents the Phone with iPhone” and
“Apple—Press Info—Apple Launches iPad.”
4 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 1.
5 I have found no extant e-book version of Reading Material, although the
book is searchable in Google books and the printer’s imprint and copyright
page of the paperback reprint claims “First published 2005/This digitally
printed version 2009.” Here, I imagine how I would interact with an e-book
version of Reading Material, were it available in the same e-book formats as
Brayman’s more recent works.
6 Here I find a personal history of my reading practices. The book is heavily
annotated in a mixture of pen and pencil, a practice that indicates which an-
notations I added while inside an archival library and which I added outside.
7 O’Connell, “The Marginal Obsession with Marginalia.” O’Connell also
makes the claim that “an escalation of interest in marginalia” is due, in part,
to “a preemptive nostalgia for the book as a tangible (scrawlable) object at a
time of increasing e-reader ubiquity.”
8 In a 2011 New Republic article, Ruth Franklin critiques and largely
dismisses “doomsday musings” about the fate of annotation in the digital
age as well as G. Thomas Tanselle’s concerns about the challenges of pre-
serving digital annotation. Further down in the article, six links suppos-
edly lead to examples of digital annotations of Pride and Prejudice, The
New Oxford American Dictionary, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a New York Times article, and The Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo. Less than a decade after their creation, three of
those six links were dead links. See Franklin, “In the Margins.”
9 Schmitt, “About the Pages Project.”
10 Schmitt maintains that e-books are eradicating, not transforming, hand-
written marginal notes. Schmitt writes of handwritten marginalia as a
“powerful feature that was unique to a technology and mode of commu-
nication in eclipse.” See also Schmitt’s interviews with Sarah Kessler in “A
Kindle Designer’s Touching Online Memorial” and Hannah Keyser in “Dig-
itizing the Unique Marginalia of Old Books.”
11 Redmon, “As Kindles Take Over, What Happens to Margin Notes?”
12 This sort of thought experiment—of imagining future scholars studying
early e-book annotations in much the way we study annotations in early
printed books—is not merely fanciful, especially if we consider annotatabil-
ity not as a mere feature of a book or e-book but as an integral component of
the document in the sense that Lisa Gitelman describes when she claims that
“documents are epistemic objects; they are recognizable sites and subjects
of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in
the long human history of clues” (Paper Knowledge, 1). One of Gitelman’s
stated goals for Paper Knowledge, which is built upon her epistemic account
of books, is that “documents in the past will without question facilitate more
nuanced accounts of documents in and for the future” (6–7).
13 Sherman, Used Books, 5. I am grateful to the author for sharing conversa-
tion and insights, as well as for sharing work from Used Books in advance
of publication.
14 Ibid., 5 and 188, footnote 8.
15 Ibid., xvi.
16 Ibid., 5.
17 See Barrett et al., Paper Through Time. In my forthcoming monograph,
where I consider sizing more fully, I devote more time to the relationship
between sizing and book survival. As Barrett and his collaborators have
demonstrated, gelatin sizing is largely responsible for the exceptional du-
rability and stability of early handmade papers. On the project website,
Barrett also offers a particularly extensive description of sizing practices in
his article “European Papermaking Techniques 1300–1800.”
18 Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, xiv. I am grateful to Peter Stally-
brass for first suggesting, in response to an early draft of these ideas, that
I further question the economics of sizing.
19 Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing, 13.
20 Nickell writes “[t]o be used for writing . . . paper required a harder surface to
minimize its absorbency; otherwise the ink would spread among the fibers.”
See Pen, Ink, & Evidence, 88.
21 Bloom, Paper Before Print, 49.
22 Horman, 80v (N8v).
23 “water-leaf, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press: online edn., Decem-
ber 2016, accessed 20 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/226227.
24 Cited in Thomas, The Company of White Paper Makers in Hampshire, 32.
25 Hunter, 194.
26 Ibid.
27 Hunter’s use of the word “bruised” to describe less-than-perfect sheets also
recalls paper’s animal counterpart. A fascinating example of bruised parch-
ment can be found in Plimpton MS263 at Columbia University’s Rare Books
and Manuscript Library. The manuscript served as Wynkyn de Worde’s
printer’s copy for De Proprietatibus Rerum ([1495]). Robert W. Mitchner
claims there is a “smudge” on fol. 186r of the MS “which looks suspiciously
like a printer’s thumb-print,” in “Wynkyn de Worde’s Use of the Plimpton
Manuscript of De Proprietatibus Rerum,” 9. Closer inspection, with the
generous assistance of Conseulo Dutschke and Alexis Hagadorn at Colum-
bia, revealed that the dark spots on the MS are actually the result of blood
32 Joshua Calhoun
that was trapped in the skin at the time of slaughter, likely the result of
a bruise. Of particular interest to me is the mistaken identity and how I
am conditioned to read (or ignore) the mark based on identity: what was
thought to be the physical imprint of a significant printer turns out to be
“merely” a beastly physical defect. On bruises and MS stains due to blood
trapped in the skin, see Clarkson, “Rediscovering Parchment,” The Paper
Conservator 16 (1992), 5–26.
28 Carter and Barker, 206.
29 Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 59.
30 Florio, A vvorlde of wordes, 61 (F1r). Florio’s dictionary also has entries for
“Sisa, a kind of syse or glew that painters vse” and “Sisare, to syse, to glew,
to stiffen”, 373 (Ii1r).
31 Hunter, 62. Hunter does recognize that sizing could also be made from
“parings of hides”; cf. 194.
32 Imberdis, Papyrus sive ars conficiendae papyri (Papyrus, or The Craft of
Paper), trans. Eric Laughton, 31–2. The text used is from a limited run
printed on a hand press and is in the University of Delaware’s Special
Collections.
33 Hunter, 194.
34 Dabrowski and Simmons call attention to this account in “Permanence
of Early European Hand-made Papers,” 9. The quotation in the original
appears on 115v; the English translation, from Latin, is from Dabrowski
and Simmons. On the use of parchment scraps for sizing, see also Garlick,
“A Brief Review.”
35 Bidwell, French Paper in English Books, 586.
36 LaLande, The Art of Making Paper, 23. I cite from the English translation
of Lalande’s work, first published in the Universal Magazine (March 1762 to
April 1763) and reissued in 1978 with an introduction by Colin Cohen and
Geoffrey Wakeman.
37 Imberdis, 33. Here, again, the language, albeit in translation, is suggestive of
the animal nature of the page.
38 Bidwell’s distinction between writing and printing grades of paper suggests
that, when it comes to sizing, these two grades were different in degree and in
kind: writing paper required “more sophisticated sizing techniques.” Barrett
visually represents the variations of gelatin content as well as of concentra-
tions of iron, calcium carbonate, chlorine, potassium aluminum sulfate, and
aluminum sulfate in historical papers. See, especially, the “Plot Library.”
On the dichotomy between writing paper and printing paper, see also Krill,
who writes that “the major difference between writing paper and printing
paper was sizing” (English Artists’ Paper: Renaissance to Regency, 52). I am
immensely grateful to both Barrett and Krill for taking my ideas seriously
and encouraging my curiosity about sizing when I began this line of inquiry
as a graduate student.
39 Mosley, Technologies of Print, 133.
40 Hellinga, Printing, 92.
41 Hunter, 194.
42 De Vinne, The Invention of Printing, 537–8.
43 According to Hayles, a skeuomorph “once had a functional purpose but in a
successor artifact loses its functionality and is retained as a design motif or
decorative element” (“Complexities of Seriation,” 119).
4 4 Imberdis, 33–4.
45 Plat, The iewell house of art and nature, 46 (H3v). Stewart quotes this
passage and adds the helpful insertion “red arsenic sulphide” in Shake-
speare’s Letters, 44. I am grateful to Alan for sharing his work in advance of
publication and for discussing the ideas at length. I also agree wholeheart-
edly that, as Stewart writes, “[t]he raw materials of writing possessed vivid
associations for their early modern users, in part no doubt because they
often prepared them themselves” (41).
46 Darnton, “Revisited,” 498.
47 “sink, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press: online edn., December
2016, accessed 20 March 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/180225.
48 Beal, A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology. The quotation is taken
from Oxford University Press’ “Overview” section for the book at https://
global.oup.com/academic/product/a-dictionary-ofenglish-manuscript-
terminology-9780199265442?cc=us&lang=en&.
49 Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis. Here I cite my Kindle version of Tanselle’s
study which is impossible to annotate with handwriting on my iPad, but
easy to use for searching keywords. The words “gelatin” and “sizing”
never appear in the volume, and the word “size” is used exclusively to indi-
cate dimensions, not paper coating; “watermark” or “watermarks” occur
twenty-seven times in the volume.
50 Dane, What Is a Book, 49–65. According to Dane, the book was written to
introduce students to questions such as “What are the methods scholars of
books use in studying material books, and what are the implications of these
methods on our understanding of what books are and do?” (2). For Dane, as
for many bibliographers, that means about half of the space devoted to paper
research is devoted to watermarks.
51 See “Joseph Jerome de la Lande, Art de Faire le Papier (Paris, France, 1761)”
Cary Graphic Arts Collection Image Database, http://library.rit.edu/cary/
joseph-jerome-de-la-lande-art-de-faire-le-papier [accessed January 16, 2017.
Based on a communication with a staff at the Wallace Center, future visitors
to the site should soon find that the sizing image has been added to image
database.
52 In the age of Google Books, one also learns that the term “pen trials” is used
of scientific research on sheep, a not altogether irrelevant coincidence. See
Lacey and Kaya, Field Manual of Techniques in Invertebrate Pathology,
717.
53 Cordier, Corderius Dialogues, 154–5 (L5v–L6r). Cordier’s 1614 text was
reprinted four more times by 1653.
54 Ibid., 245 (R3r).
55 Preston, The Saints Submission and Sathans Overthrow, 177–8 (I5r–v).
56 Fuller, Davids hainous sinne, B2v. On “spungy” paper, see Moxon,
Mechanick Exercises, 304 (Ss2v).
7
5 Harvey, Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England, 24 (D4v).
58 Falkland, The Marriage Night, act 2, scene 1, 11 (C2r).
59 Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 232. The first folio has “you
may know by my size, that I haue a kind of alacrity in sinking” (52; E2v in
act 3, scene 4); the first quarto version (1602) puts a bit more direct blame
on those who tossed him in: “they might know by my sise I haue a kind of
alicritie in sinking” (E2v). Note: surprisingly, this quotation appears on E2v
in both the F and Q.
60 For a fuller description of this Bible, see Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,”
51ff. I am also grateful to Katherine Acheson, who informed me of the fact
that Elizabeth Boggis is the annotator; see her chapter in this volume.
61 The [Geneva] Bible, Ii3r.
62 For two more recent instances in which scholars suggest ways we might find
evidence of sizing in archival books, see McLeod, writing as (R. MacGeddon),
“Hammered,” 152 and Chamberlain, “Paper,” 124–5.
34 Joshua Calhoun
63 See “provenance, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press: online edn.,
December 2016, accessed 20 March 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/153408,
especially the etymology and definitions 2 and 4. In my forthcoming mono-
graph, I devote significant attention to our obsession with watermarks in
both research and bibliographic training, and to the concerning cost-to-
benefit ratio of watermark research relative to more modern and more socio-
logical and ecological approaches to paper research.
64 My reference here is to McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts
a work that prodded my interest in seeing not only the “human presence in
any recorded text” (29) but also the animal, plant, and mineral p resences—
which is to say, the biome or social ecology of a recorded text. On the lan-
guage of entwining in the final sentence, see McKenzie’s discussion of the
word “text” (13–14).
2 Cut-and-Paste Bookmaking
The Private/Public Agency of
Robert Nicolson
Jason Scott-Warren
In recent years, as the history of the book has become more and more
interested in physical stuff, it has become less and less invested in the
book, the codex as privileged container of text. The focus of atten-
tion has been the non-book, whether in the form of pamphlets, broad-
sides, manuscript separates, or printed ephemera such as blank forms
or trade-cards. Where there is still a book in view, it is what we might
call ‘the book unbound,’ with critics exploring the interplay between
books and their environments, the permeability of compilations, and
the reshapings created by consumption.1 One of the most visible forms
of bibliographic unbinding is cutting. As the contributors to a recent
special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
entitled “The Renaissance Collage” have shown, a lot of reading was
undertaken in this period with scissors and knives, through the cut-
ting of the page and associated processes of sewing, stitching, gluing,
and filing. These processes command attention partly because of their
obvious kinship with commonplacing. But as Juliet Fleming (introduc-
ing “The Renaissance Collage”) suggests, the picking out of details is
also a description of “what we all do when we read (from Latin lego,
legere, ‘to gather or pluck’):” “cutting,” she says, “is not the exception
but the rule” of reading, as of writing. 2 For Fleming, cutting means
not destruction, but pruning, grafting, tree surgery. Cutting makes for
growth.
In this chapter I want to bring some of these perspectives to bear on
a set of materials now scattered across Britain and the United States,
relating to an early modern reader named Robert Nicolson. I first came
across Nicolson when I was following up a reference in the journals of
the Exchequer clerk Richard Stonley, three volumes of which survive at
the Folger Shakespeare Library. 3 Stonley is known to literary historians
as the first recorded purchaser of Shakespeare’s first published work,
Venus and Adonis, which he bought hot off the presses in June 1593.4
But almost a year after he made that purchase, on 8 May 1594, he paid
a single penny for a less well-known title: “a Booke in commendacion
of the Ladye Branche.”5 What he was buying here was an elegy for his
36 Jason Scott-Warren
brother-in-law’s wife. Stonley seems to have been close to his brother-
in-law Sir John Branche, a Draper and one-time Lord Mayor of Lon-
don. So it is not surprising that he would have wanted to read a book in
praise of Branche’s wife when she died five years after her husband. But
which book did he buy? For, remarkably, the Lady Branche’s death was
lamented in no fewer than four printed elegies.6
The elegies are written in a ragbag of poetic styles: the shortest, An
Epitaph, by ‘S.P.,’ is in clunking fourteeners, as is A Commemora-
tion, which was penned by the London clothworker and jobbing writer
John Phillips.7 But the Epicedium, by one William Hervey, is written
in pentameters and makes ultrafashionable references to Shakespeare’s
Lucrece and Kyd’s Cornelia.8 Meanwhile the Monodia, written by
Josuah Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas, is not just in pentameters
but is positively elegant, with a distinct sense of cadence.9 Yet for all of
their stylistic variety, the elegies overlap considerably in their rhetorical
strategies. In particular, it is hard for them to resist a pun on Helen
Branche’s name. Here is S.P.:
Compare our selves unto a tree, which springeth up with with sap
And brings forth branches goodly ones, which taste of Adams hap.
And as this tree doth grow to strength, the owner of the wood,
May lop away the branches faire, as them which are not good.
So hath [God] lopt away from us, a Ladie Branch of price,
That lived here right worshipfull, disdaining every vice.10
Hervey offers the following account of her marriage to John Branche:
Then was she grafted in a worthie stemme,

And of a green-leav’d Branch the blossom prov’d
To him more deare, then was the richest gemme
And so togither they both liv’d and lov’d.
And still her Orphanes care the mother mov’d.
For though nor Branch, nor blossome frute did beare,
Yet both in good workes alwaies fruitfull were.11
Here is Sylvester, doing something similar, but with the aforementioned

sense of cadence:
But boughes & Branches, shrubs, & Cedars tall

Wither and die and into ashes fall,
So fel this Branch, for what draws lively breth
But old or yong must yeeld at last to death?12
The conceit of Dame Helen as a branch might be thought rather in

felicitous, given the failure of any of her children to survive beyond
Cut-&-Paste Bookmaking: Robert Nicolson 37
childhood. However, the elegies make it clear that, despite this misfor-
tune, all is not lost. Here is Hervey:
And though the stocke, the Branch, the blossom sweete

Wants sap, is withered, and is falne away,
Yet doth a yoong plant, spring up at their feete,
Which shall their greene leaves up in safetie laie.13
Sylvester instructs:
when you have drawn all your tear-springs drie;

For her decease, heer let your comfort lie,
That of this Phænix ashes there revives
Another, where her vertue still survives.14
This unnamed ‘other,’ this phoenix that is going to rise from the ashes
of the burnt bough, the young plant that is going to spring from the
old stock, turns out to be Robert Nicolson. This much becomes clear
when you look at the original copies of the elegies at the Huntington
and the British Library, three of which are embellished with annotations
in Nicolson’s distinctive hand.15 Nicolson was Helen Branche’s nephew
and the sole executor of her will, from which he benefited to the tune of
£100.16 He was also the orchestrator of this flurry of mourning verses
for his aunt.17
Nicolson’s annotations in these flimsy pamphlets are quite elaborate.
He outlines the ‘narrative’ of the elegies: “her virgin life,” “maried to
m r Jno Minors,” “issue by m r Jno Minors.”18 But he also adds page
numbers and running headlines (“A Commemoration, of / Helen
Nicolson, Ladie Branch”), so that his interventions look less like read-
ing and more like finishing.19 Here Nicolson is doing by hand some of
the work that we might expect compositors to have done typographi-
cally, articulating the printed book for the reader. Sometimes, though,
the printerly is also personal. At several points, where a pressman
might have added a xylographic ornament, Nicolson pastes in a heral-
dic shield or lozenge. It would be easy for the casual browser on EEBO
to mistake these for original printed matter, but in fact they are all
pasted-in additions. And several of the handwritten annotations are
also all about him. When the Epicedium mentions “a yoong plant,”
Nicolson adds “R.N.” proudly in the margin. 20 Then, at the end of the
same volume, he transcribes the text on the monument that he erected
to Dame Helen’s memory in St Mary Abchurch. 21 The annotations
offer an unstable blend of public and private cues, a kind of semi-se-
crecy. The poets hide Nicolson’s identity only so that he can himself
reveal himself in his annotations; he is less a phoenix rising from the
ashes than a rabbit pulled out of a hat.
So who was this rabbit? Nicolson was born in 1561 at Bramley in
Surrey and was baptized at Holy Trinity, Guildford. 22 In 1594 (the
year of the elegies) he married Martha Carrell, from Tangley, a nearby
village; the first of their twelve children was born in 1598. 23 He seems
to have been a servant of Cuthbert Buckle, a prominent Vintner, orig-
inally from Westmoreland, who rose to the office of Lord Mayor in
1594 and died in office in the same year, leaving a mourning cloak “to
my Late servante Robert Nicolson.”24 In 1600, Robert inherited his
father’s property, but his father apologized in his will for his paltry
estates. 25 Lack of cash may explain why Nicolson had already headed
for London, setting himself up as merchant adventurer, bibliophile
and patron. He supported the cartographer John Norden, financing
the earliest engraved map of Surrey (also in 1594); Norden repaid the
favor by dedicating the second part of his Pensive Man’s Practice to
him. 26 But Nicolson’s most serious patronage entanglement was with
Sylvester. Among the shorter poems in the massive Sylvester folios of
1621 and 1633 one finds a feast of Nicolsoniana, including six verse
epistles addressed directly to him, along with epitaphs to his father
and his aunt Helen and several acrostic sonnets on his name. The most
exorbitant of these (labeled “Sonnet Acrostiteliostichon”) is a pair of
sonnets built on acrostics of Sylvester’s name (once) and Nicolson’s
name (three times)—a crazy tour de force. 27 There’s also a gift-poem
for Nicolson’s wife Martha, based on an anagram of her name (she is
the “Soon calm in heart”). Sylvester offers Martha his heart in a poem
that seems to have been written on the back of a playing card, a two
of hearts. 28
These poems remind us that Sylvester was one of the most materially
playful of early modern writers: his books abound with shape-poems
(pillars, pyramids, castles), poems that are also pairs of spectacles, and
fold-out posters on the mysteries of the Trinity. 29 Sylvester was also a
lover of the anagram, which we need to see as something other than a
debased and trivial form of wit. Frederick Ahl, attempting to undo our
ideas about classical purity by arguing that canonical texts are in fact
full of puns and anagrams, insists that for ancient writers the alphabet
was an “element of language which could be rearranged, just as the nat-
ural elements which make up substance could be rearranged, to form a
new being.”30 Sylvester delights in such textual recombinations. Here
it may be relevant that Sylvester was not just a man of letters; he was
also a merchant, who interpolated praises of English mercantilism into
his Du Bartas, and whose translation was praised by Samuel Daniel as
bringing “the best of treasures from a forraine Coast.”31 Transpositions
of substance were his stock-in-trade. Returning to the tiny Branche
elegies from the giant Sylvester folios, we might want to take their
material transfers more seriously, starting with the master-pun on Helen
Branche’s name:
And as this tree doth grow to strength, the owner of the wood,
May lop away the branches faire, as them which are not good. 32
Nobody would want to claim that this is great writing. But it does
something significant all the same, as it turns the terminal cut of death
into something generative, part of a process rather than a conclusion.
Hence its appeal to Nicolson, as he tried to capitalize on Helen Branche’s
death, to rise by her fall. But the excerpt may also be helpful in think-
ing about the kind of hybrids that Nicolson created in commissioning
the elegies. These are printed texts that refuse to treat print as final,
and which accordingly begin to sprout handwritten marginalia. The cut,
as Juliet Fleming’s account predicts, is the prelude to the graft, which
diverts death towards new life.
Just such a process of revivification turns out to characterize
Nicolson’s reading more generally. Around twenty books survive from
Nicolson’s library, and many of these are thickly annotated. 33 As in the
elegies for Helen Branche, there is a certain ambiguity to the interven-
tions that Nicolson made in his books. On the one hand, there are what
we might call public-service marginalia, added as though Nicolson were
a pressman in the printing house, marking up the book for a general
readership by making its material resources more visible. Such imper-
sonality is, as William H. Sherman has taught us, a standard feature of
early modern annotations, which usually provide technical analyses of
the text rather than personal responses. 34 Thus on a typical page early in
his copy of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), Nicolson adds three
notes on the narrative (“By what means one shippe, & men were sau’d,”
“The prince of Joppas trecherie,” “Prince Edward wounded.”) and he
bulks out a printed marginal note (“The arrivall of Prince E dward at
Acra”) with a helpful date: “Ao. Do. 1271.”35 Similarly, when in N icolas
de Nicolay’s Navigations … into Turkie (1585) the author and his
companions sail into a cave full of “straunge myce,” and are forced to
cover their heads with their cloaks “for feare they should pisse on our
heades (their pisse being venimous),” Nicolson supplements a printed
marginal note:
Strange myce.
whose piss is
venemous/. 36
Such information as this, which might (just conceivably) be useful to the

traveler, and which reveals something about the world’s bewildering var-
iousness, was rendered more conspicuous by annotation, as well as by
handwritten additions to the volume’s printed index. In the same spirit,
Nicolson inserted numerous cross-references into his books (“Reade
more of the Moores: folio: 8. 9: before”). 37 The sense that these are
‘public’ annotations is reinforced by their visual appearance: penned in
a tiny and formidably neat italic, they seem to be trying to emulate the
scale and clarity of letterpress.
On the other hand, we often find Nicolson engaging in curiously pri-
vate practices. One of his trademark habits is to annotate a passage with
a barrage of tiny marks, delivered with pinpoint accuracy to particu-
lar lines of text: a period here, two periods there, elsewhere a comma
or double- or triple-commas, with or without flanking periods, with
crosses for points of high excitement (Figure 2.1).
At least one of these kinds of mark is merely mechanical: Nicolson
adds ‘=’ signs to indicate words broken across the line-end by the printer
(here again we see the annotator working as the equivalent of a type-
setter). What I have called his commas are more sophisticated: these
are diples or gnomic markers, usually used to signal commonplaces that
float free of the text around them thanks to their sententiousness and
broad applicability. Such symbols have recently been explored in some
detail by critics exploring the rising status of literature in English in
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 38 But while many of
Nicolson’s markings do single out commonplace material, and seem to
be following standard practice in making that material more ‘common,’
the variegation of his markings suggests that he is using public sym-
bols to speak a more private language. He becomes, in effect, a literary
seismograph, offering what looks like a highly personal, line-by-line re-
sponse to the rising and falling interest-levels of the text.
Inevitably, there are some annotations that cut across any tidy dis-
tinction between public and private. In his copy of Nicolay’s Naviga-
tions, for example, Nicolson slips into Latin for a horrified note on what
Turkish women get up to at the baths: “Frons ficta, / obscœni mores, /
petulansque / libido / Certàque / fœmineus / viscera tor= / =ret amor”
(“dissembling appearances, repulsive practices and freakish lust: truly,
feminine love burns the innards”). 39 This sounds like a visceral response
to visceral burning. More personal still are the notes in his Hakluyt,
which cast Nicolson as archivist to the Branche family; here he quotes
fragments of family letters, describes the experiences of a relative caught
up in the Great Fire of Moscow in 1571, and reveals that both he and his
uncle John Branche were members of the Muscovy Company.40 We need
some category more subtle than private or public for such annotations.
I have always liked Sherman’s term ‘privy’—denoting the selectively pri-
vate, the privileged space that you enter when stepping into someone’s
closet or when reading their marginalia.41 This also fits with the rabbit-
out-of-a-hat Nicolson we saw earlier, his identity a printed secret to be
disclosed in manuscript.
The pasted-in armorials that we found in Nicolson’s elegies feature in
all of his surviving books, usually imitating printed ornaments. Blazing
or blazoning your arms seems like an ostentatious public statement, but
Nicolson also plays private games with his arms. It is predictable that he
Figure 2.1 N
icolson’s marginal marks in Christof Wirsung, Praxis medicinae uni-
versalis (1598), Folger STC 25863, cs1292, T3v (p. 294). P
hotograph
by Jason Scott-Warren. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Inter-
national Licence.
should want to filch them in at the bottom of a page in his copy of the
Civitates orbis terrarum that depicts the shields of the “Nobilis Hanno-
niae,” the Dukes of Hainaut.42 But in this volume he also does something
rather stranger, pasting armorials into decorated initial letters seemingly
without rhyme or reason. This kind of decoration becomes something of
an art form in his copy of the Praxis medicinae universalis (1598), a vast
medical encyclopedia, in which bits of heraldry are hidden all over the
place; take, for example, this ounce (a argent, sable-spotted ounce, to be
precise, thrust through the neck with a broken spear, or, headed gules),
the Nicolson crest, hidden in a decorated letter ‘L’.43 Such paste-ins are
often tiny: invisible until you start looking for them, and a bewildering
presence when you find them. The strangeness continues in several dec-
orated letters in the Praxis in which Nicolson writes names—“Thomas
Holcroft miles” inside a letter ‘T’, “Isabella Rutlandiae” inside an ‘I’.44
And then, to cap it all off, there is a minute manuscript index stuck onto
the rear pastedown, and on closer inspection this turns out to be a find-
ing aid to the various armorials and names that are scattered through
the book (Figure 2.2).
Let us postpone the question of what on earth might be going on here
while we look at some of Nicolson’s other book-makings. For he turns
out to be a committed cutter-and-paster, sometimes merely customiz-
ing his books by adding annotations, manuscript indexes, and the like,
sometimes exploding them, and radically transforming their signifi-
cance. A copy of Abraham Fleming’s translation of Aelian, A Registre
of Hystories, now at Illinois, offers an example of the former; it boasts a
twelve-page manuscript index, signed “Ex industria Roberti Nicholsoni
Londinensis 1590.”45 A book at Harvard better fits the latter category.
This is a copy of the Latin and English versions of A Dialogue Betwene
Figure 2.2 Nicolson’s pasted and manuscript additions to Christof Wirsung,

Praxis medicinae universalis (1598), Folger STC 25863, cs1292,
fols. 2D2v (p. 420), 2S1v (p. 642), and rear pastedown. Photographs
by Jason Scott-Warren. Used by permission of the Folger Shake-
speare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
4.0 International Licence.
a Knyght and a Clerke, probably printed around 1533.46 The Dialogue
was originally written in the 1290s to defend the French crown against
Papal authority. Condemned as heretical by Pope Boniface VIII, it later
became a popular Wycliffite text, and in the 1530s it was republished
for an entirely new anti-papal context at the instigation of Thomas
Cromwell.47 Sixteenth-century commentators ascribed the Dialogue to
the scholastic philosopher William of Ockham, presumably because it
was felt to fit with his writings on papal power. Nicolson’s volume is a
Sammelband that combines copies of the English and the Latin texts of
the work, with nine manuscript leaves as filling in the sandwich. Those
leaves are devoted to the celebration of William of Ockham as one of the
most illustrious sons of Surrey (the village of Ockham is north-east of
Guildford). The interpolated encomium begins in prose, citing the judg-
ments of Camden, Scaliger, Bale, Trithemius and Foxe in praise of a great
philosopher, “Subtilissimus omnium mortalium,” “Nominalium paren-
tem,” “a worthy Divine, & of a right sincere judgment, as the times then
would ether give or suffer”—and, inevitably therefore, a proto-Protestant.
Nicolson then goes on to restate these commendations in what he calls
“A breife Idilion of English epick verses,” where an “Idilion” is presum-
ably an Idyll, “A short poem, descriptive of some picturesque scene or
incident, chiefly in rustic life” (OED). The writing here is anything but
idyllic; indeed, it could do with a sharp slash from Ockham’s razor:
O! would in Surrey mor such men were found;

O! would mens vice, & sinn were sett a side;
O! would that Ockams workes might be their guide;
And to his good example them incline;
who was a worthy & severe divine.
But for all the flat-footedness of the writing, Nicolson’s manuscript

interventions in the volume succeed in completely realigning the
Dialogue, turning it from a piece of Protestant propaganda into a
celebration of the intensely local. Pseudo-Ockham has been cut and
regrafted onto a new stock. We might also want to see the badness of the
poem as partly an effect of processes of material transfer. First Nicolson
cites the prose sources in praise of Ockham; then he translates those
prose sources into verse, which feels flatly prosaic as a result. This is an
act of textual reconstitution akin to the shifting of letters in an anagram,
or the play on the phoneme in a pun. This textual traffic goes hand in
hand with the material reconstitution of the book.
Nicolson’s most significant exploded book was also his magnum opus.
This is a copy of The First Part of the Diall of Days, by Lodowick Lloyd,
published and purchased in 1590.48 The Diall promised its readers a
feast of ethnographic information:
320. Romane triumphes, besides the triumphant Obelisks and Pyra-
mydes of the Aegyptians, the Pillers, Arches, and Trophies trium-
phant, of the Græcians, and the Persians, with their Pompe and
Magnificence: of feastes and Sacrifices both of the Jewes and of the
Gentils, with the stately games and plaies belonging to these Feastes
and Sacrifices, with the birthes and funeral Pomps of Kinges and
Emperours, as you shall finde more at large in the 2. part, wherein
all kind of triumphes are enlarged
This is a comparative history focused on the powerful and on rituals

of power. The book is arranged calendrically: Lloyd’s “dial” (perhaps a
sundial or a watch) gives us a page for every day of the year—although
since this is The First Part of the Diall of Days Lloyd only makes it from
January to June (the second part seems never to have been published).
Each day we are treated to a ragbag of information: dates of battles
or portents, scraps of astrology, and exercises in chronology, including
notes on the precise dating of Biblical events. For all its miscellaneity,
the book would have helped its readers to ponder serious questions such
as the relationship between Christian and pagan history, or the ways in
which the stars influenced human affairs.
Lloyd’s compilation as printed left no blank space for the addition
of handwritten materials, unlike other day-by-day volumes published
in the period, such as the Ephemeris historica of Michael Beuther.49
Nicolson opened up Lloyd’s text by having his copy of the Diall thickly
interleaved. In the space thus created, he added vast amounts of new ma-
terial, including entries for the missing half of the year, July to Decem-
ber. On Lloyd’s title page he noted that the book has “divers Additions /
By Robert Nicolsons industrie.” He also created a new title page (placed
at the beginning of July) in he worried away at the question of what to
call his creation (Figure 2.3): should it be “DIARIVM;” “DIVRNVM
HISTORICVM;” “An historicall Journall/or daybooke;” “EPHEM-
ERIS HISTORICA,” or perhaps “Heroica historia;” “Horologium his-
toricum;” “The Compendious Historie;” “Polychronicon diarium;” or
“Synopsis historiarum”?50
What exactly was this thing that he was creating? The lengthy subtitle
that Nicolson gave his work echoed Lloyd’s, but promised in addition
to cover the deeds of “Constant martyrs,” “Reverend Bishops,” and
“valliant captaines,” “with many other strange, rare, or admirable acci-
dentes: by Lightening, thunder, earthquakes, extraordinarie fires; Inun-
dations; prodigious births; Navigations; Blasing starrs, Earth moveing.
or removed,” “from the creation of the world to this day.” “This day”
might be 1608 or it might be 1617—Nicolson was at work on the text
for a long period. The title page also has a note for a printer: “Memo-
randum to place the histories of the Bible, & other theologicall histo-
ries: in the first place of every severall Day./” So the final organization
Figure 2.3 T
itle page of Nicolson’s manuscript addition to Lodowick Lloyd,
The First Part of the Diall of Daies (London: Roger Ward, 1590),
Bodleian Library 4° Rawl. 140 (1). Reproduced by permission of the
Bodleian Library.
of the material was to be made, not within the precincts of Nicolson’s
interleaved book, but on the bed of the press—a bed that the book never
came to rest on.
Eventually it seems that Nicolson settled for a single title, “DODECA-
MERON: A Book in 12 parts.”51 Had it been printed, the book would
have absorbed Lloyd’s text, presenting it in corrected form with new
marginal notes. But it would also have contained lengthy additions,
gathered from upwards of 140 books—among them the 1589 and 1600
editions of Hakluyt, manuscripts such as Richard Robinson’s account of
the Armada victory, and a copy of Caxton’s translation of the R ecuyell
of the Histories of Troye, the first book printed in English, which
Nicolson dated to 1464. 52 Nicolson also drew on a variety of almanacs
and pamphlets in what was a highly eclectic mix of sources. He docu-
ments those sources with characteristic precision, giving dates, formats
and page numbers for each citation; sometimes he specifies a printer
and place of publication. This chimes with the strongly locative focus
of the excerpts themselves, which are almost always focused around the
particular times and places of this or that birth or death or marriage, or
blazing star, or exploit of Sir Francis Drake. The project is underwritten
by the desire to place the past, fixing it in time and space.
The Dodecameron certainly allows us to place Nicolson, since as well
as being a would-be printed book, for general consumption, it is also
a private journal, albeit a journal that has been shredded and collaged
across the days of the year. A host of manuscript entries in the text are
singled out as not to be printed, or “for my remembrance,” or are just
marked with Nicolson’s initials in order to privatize them. From these
entries we can reconstruct the course of Nicolson’s early life, and in
particular his extensive travels as a merchant in the mid-1580s, which
had taken him to Elsinore in Denmark, Konigsburg in Prussia, and west
along the Baltic through Heiligenbeil (modern Mamonovo), Braunsberg
(Braniewo), Frauenberg (Frombork) and so on to Elbing, at the time
“the sole Baltic entrepot for English goods,” where he stayed for several
months. 53 He made several visits to Gdansk, was present for the great
fair at Torun, and made a 500-mile detour to Emden, a centre of trade for
the Merchant Adventurers of London. 54 It was presumably during these
travels that Nicolson met Sylvester, who was stationed in East Friesland
on behalf of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company in the mid-1580s. 55
But the highlight of the trip seems to have occurred on Friday 22 Sep-
tember 1587, on the Vistula river about a little way from Danzig, where
he “plainly veiwed, & stedfastly beheld, Sigismundus .3. King of Poland,
together with the Ladie Anna his Sister; and Prince Edward Fortunatus:
aborde his royall Shipp, lying then at anker.” A manicule points out the
crucial fact of the encounter: “His majestie also then, & there, firmly
fixed his royall eies on me.”56 This intertwining of eye-beams of the
English merchant with the Polish monarch, with its emphasis on stasis,
steadfastness and fixity—and the precisely located “then and there”—
perhaps defined Nicolson’s relationship with adhesion ever after. He had
been cut and pasted into the European aristocracy.
Much the same thing happens on a more local level. The Dodecam-
eron is full of the patronage and friendship connections we have already
seen in this chapter: thus we find, on 29 April 1594, the death of “Helen
Nicolson Ladie Branch,” and on 24 July 1588 the death of her husband,
“at which time, the vainly termed the invincible Spanish fleet, was on
the coast of England.”57 Here is the knighting of “the right honorable
Cuthbert Buckle, Lord Maior of London, (late my only Maister)” at
Greenwich in May 1594, and his death just over a month later. 58 But the
volume also allows us to understand Nicolson’s relationships with the
Thomas Holcrofts and Isabella Rutlands whose names are filched into
the Folger Praxis Medicinae. These people are, he believes, his relatives:
The noble Ladie ELIZABETH Mannors (Baroness Ross) sole daugh-

ter & heire of the right honorable Lord Edward Mannors Earle of
Rutland, Lord Ross of Hamlake, Belvoire, & Trusbut, Knight of the
renowmed order of the Garter etc: By his honorable wife, ISABEL
(daughter of Sir Thomas Holcroft, & his wife Julian Jennins:) was
borne about the 14th of December. Ao. Do. 1575./. Which said Count-
ess Isabell & my Mother: were Cosen Germans once removed; (By
their mothers side.) For so the Ladie Julian Holcroft (mother of the
said Countess & grandmother of the said Ladie Ross.) told to me,
her selfe at her house in Tower streete, in London. Ao. Do. 1588./.
Before the 10. october./. 59
It was on 30 March 1592, Nicolson reports, that “I first sawe, kist, talkd &
dyned with the right honorable Ladie Isabell Countess Dowager of R utland
at her house in Stepney; … which honorable Countess, & my mother, were
Cosen Germans, once removed (by their mothers side).”60 Elsewhere we
learn of Isabel’s death at Stepney on 21 January 1605, and of the death of
Baroness Ross, on 12 April 1591, and her burial at Westminster, “wherof
I was an eie-witness; to my great greife, for the sayd Ladie Ross, her
Mothers mother, & my mothers mother were cosen germans, vizt brother
and sisters children” so that “The said Baroness Ross, & I: were cosen
Germans twice removed.”61 (The said Baroness Ross had been married to
William Cecil the younger, “nowe Lord Burghley,” so this was no mean
connection).
There is a kind of manic precision to Nicolson’s reiterated documen-
tation of these relationships. The concern with genealogy seems to be
shading into horary astrology, for which it might matter precisely where
and when somebody told you that they were related to you. But these
references help us to register the force of all those pasted-in armorials.
Cutting—which splices together the art of the herald with technology of
the woodcut, and with the physical workings of knives or scissors and
glue—is here part of a larger project of grafting: the grafting of an indi-
vidual onto a family tree. Nicolson opens his books up and inserts mate-
rials into them so as to establish his own status as a new scion growing
on the old stock. If reading is always a form of cutting, then we ought
also to think of Nicolson’s marginalia as another kind of cut—an open-
ing out of the book to new purposes—or perhaps as a kind of budding.
The distinctive style of his italic hand, which sprouts ornamental hair-
line strokes at every opportunity, contributes to this impression. And if
we recall that the Latin words for book—liber and codex—both derive
from bark, while the English word ‘book’ derives from ‘beech’ (as in the
tree), then we may be some way nearer to locating the life in seemingly
dead wood.62
Notes
1 See, for example, Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author; Knight,
Bound to Read; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; Stallybrass,
“Little Jobs.”
2 Fleming, “The Renaissance Collage.”
3 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.459–61. For my preliminary study of
Stonley’s journals and library, see Scott-Warren, “Books in the Bedchamber.”
4 Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 176.
5 Folger MS V.a.460, fol. 82v. I have modernized u/v and i/j in all direct
quotations from early modern English-language sources.
6 On early modern elegy, see Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth
Century and Kay, The English Funeral Elegy.
7 P., An Epitaph of the Vertuous Life and Death of the Right Worshipfull L adie;
Phillips, A Commemoration of the Life and Death of the Right Worship-
full and Vertuous Ladie; Walsham, Phillips [Phillip], John (d. 1594x1617),
author.
8 Hervey, “Epicedium, A Funerall Song.”
9 Sylvester, Monodia.
10 P., An Epitaph, A3r.
11 Hervey, Epicedium, A3v.
12 Sylvester, Monodia, A3v.
14 Sylvester, Monodia, A4v.
15 Huntington Library (#81089–81090); British Library (C.40.e.67).
16 London, National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/83/291.
17 It is possible that other memorial volumes are now lost. Cambridge Uni-
versity Library MS Dd.5.77 contains an anonymous poem entitled ‘Mne-
mosynon’ addressed “To his Master maister ROBERT NICHOLSON
Marchant a Commemoration vpon the Death of his deceased Aunt the right
worshipfull Dame Hellen Branch my verie good Ladie and Mistress who
departed this life the 10th of Aprill: 1594 and Lieth enterred in Saint Mary
Abchurch LONDON.”
18 Phillips, Commemoration, Huntington Library (#81089), A2v–3r.
19 Ibid.
21 Ibid., A4v.
22 IGI (accessed via www.familysearch.org). The fullest account of Nicolson to
date is Williams, Robert Nicholson, “A Minor Maecenas.” In what follows
I adopt Nicolson’s preferred spelling of his name (without an “h”).
23 The date of the marriage is established by Williams, “The Bear Facts about
Josuah Sylvester.” For earlier generations of this substantial family, see HoP,
“Caryll (Carrell), John (c.1505-66), of Warnham, Suss.”
24 TNA, PROB 11/84/123; Buckle also left “forty shillinges and a Cloke”
to George Nicolson, presumably Robert’s brother. He received prominent
notice on Nicolson’s funeral monument for Helen Branche, who left Buckle
“one white silver playghted cupp which was Master doctor Cromers” in her
will; TNA, PROB 11/83/291.
25 TNA, PROB 11/95/103.
26 Norden, The Pensive Mans Practise, A2r, A3r.
27 Sylvester, Du Bartas his Divine Weekes, 3H4v–5r.
28 Ibid., 3K3r–4v.
29 For the castle, see Sylvester, Du Bartas his Divine Weekes, 2Q6r; for the
spectacles, 3F4v–6v.
30 Ahl, “Ars Est Caelare Artem (Art in Puns and Anagrams Engraved).”
31 Du Bartas, Bartas, 2A8v–2B1r, B6r.
32 P., An Epitaph, A3r.
33 Besides the books listed elsewhere in this article, the surviving books are:
Danse macabre (Paris: Jean Tréperel, 1500), British Library IA 40884; Pom-
ponius Mela, De totius orbis descriptione (Paris: Gilles de Gourmont, 1507),
John Carter Brown Library, A507.M517P; Quintus Curtius Rufus, De
gestis alexandri magni (Paris: Ponset le Preux, 1508), sold at S otheby’s,
C atalogue of Valuable Printed Books from the Broxbourne Library (second
portion, 8–9 May 1978); Giovanni Nanni, Berosus Babilonicus De his
quae praecesserunt inundationem terrarum (Paris: Apud Collegium Plessi-
acum, 1510), Princeton University Library, shelfmark 2613.1510; Ranulph
Higden, Polycronycon (Southwark: Peter Treveris, 1527), currently unlo-
cated; Guillaume Rouillé, Le premiere partie du promptuaire des medalles
des plus renommees personnes (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1553), Oxford,
Merton College, 17.A.9; The. Holie. Bible. (London: Richard Iugge, 1568),
Chetham’s Library, Manchester, A.7.18; The Gospels of the Fower Evange-
listes Translated in the Olde Saxons Tyme (London: John Day, 1571); copy
sold by Sokol books in 2010; Antoine du Verdier, La prosopographie, ou,
description des personnes insignes (Lyon: Antoine Gryphius, 1573), Fitzwil-
liam Museum, Cambridge (no shelfmark).
34 Sherman, chap. 4 in John Dee.
35 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, B5r.
36 Nicolay, Navigations, B8v.
37 Ibid., X7v.
38 Stallybrass and Lesser, “The First Literary Hamlet.”
39 Nicolay, Navigations, H8r.
40 Hakluyt, Principall Navigations, *4r, 2E6v, 2Q4v; see also the annotations
to 2O3r, 3B2v, 3F3v, 3G6r, 3P2r.
41 Sherman, John Dee, 50.
42 Braun, Civitates, New York Public Library, *KB+1581, 3/23.
43 Christof Wirsung, Praxis medicinae universalis, or, A Generall Practise of
Physicke (London: George Bishop, 1598), Folger Shakespeare Library (STC
25863, cs1292), 2D2v (p. 420).
4 4 Ibid., 2S1v (p. 642), 2Q5v (p. 618).
45 Claudius Aelianus¸ A Registre of Hystories (London: Thomas Woodcock,
1576), University of Illinois (IUA00084).
46 A dialogue betwene a Knyght and a Clerke (London: Thomas Berthelet,
1533[?]), Houghton Library, STC 12511; bound with Disputatio inter cler-
icum et miletem (London: Thomas Berthelet 1531); Hougton Library (STC
12511). The Houghton catalogue entry explains that the English edition rep-
resented here is not a perfect fit with either STC 12511 or STC 12511a.
47 Warner, Henry VIII’s Divorce, 36.
48 Lodowick Lloyd, The First Part of the Diall of Daies (London: Roger Ward,
1590), Bodleian (4° Rawl. 140 (1)). My references are to the signatures of the
printed work and the pagination of the interleaved manuscript sections, as
appropriate. The copy is bound with another work by Lloyd, The Triplicitie
of Triumphes (London: R. Ihones, 1591).
49 Beuther, Ephemeris historica. For the Montaigne family copy (CUL Mon-
taigne 1.7.6), annotated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, see
Marchand, Le livre de raison de Montaigne sur l'Ephemeris historica de
Beuther; compare the Lambarde family copy, annotated from the sixteenth
through to the twentieth century, Drapers’ Hall (H./Add.14).
50 Lloyd, Diall, 199.
51 Ibid., B1r.
52 Ibid., 40.m.; 198.g., 205; 40.t., 140.y., 140.a.a.
53 Zins, England and the Baltic in the Elizabethan Era, 67.
54 Baumann, Merchant Adventurers, 13–15. For the travels of Nicolson’s uncle
Henry Parvish to the Frankfurt fair in the 1570s, see ibid., 172.
55 These travels are recalled in Sylvester, Wood-mans Bear.
56 Ibid., 164–5, 171.
57 Ibid., Q3r, 207.
58 Ibid., 166.h.
59 Ibid., 369.
60 Ibid., 140.e.
61 Ibid., 40.f., 140.o. Along with the elegy for Lady Branche mentioned above
(note 17), Cambridge University Library (MS Dd.5.77) also contains a poem
by Nicolson entitled ‘THRENOS / A funerall song or Elegie of the right hon-
norable Ladie, the / Ladie ISABEL late Countess Dowager of RUTLAND’.
62 Peter Stallybrass and Joe Farrell, Book-Tree-Leaf-Body (unpublished
conversation).
3 Book Marks
Object Traces in Early
Modern Books
Adam Smyth
Over the past three decades, work on early modern literature has been
animated by a number of influential studies of handwritten annotations
in books, works that take as their subject the manicules, the underlin-
ings, the trefoils, the disputatious hecklings that light up many early
modern pages.1 Indeed, such has been the influence of this area of study
that questions about the reception of texts via the category of the histor-
ical reader have become one of the dominant ways of responding to early
modern texts, enacted at all levels of study, from undergraduate essays
to scholarly monographs. But like all active fields of enquiry, work in
this field is also characterized by a number of unresolved questions and
problems, and I hope in this chapter to bring some of these to the criti-
cal surface. The subject of this chapter is not handwritten annotations
but the marks or remnants of objects left in books, the subject of little
sustained scholarly discussion, except for a suggestive but brief exhibi-
tion catalogue by Roger Stoddard in 1985. 2 As I hope to show, thinking
about these beguiling but also unyielding traces can help us approach the
larger field of book annotations afresh. The troubling status of object
marks can help clarify some of the assumptions that have underpinned
work on marginalia more generally.
In order to help with this meta-critical reflection on the present field
of book use, I will turn to the marks of objects left to lie in books.
What do we call these things? They are not properly annotations, if we
accept the OED’s definition, current in the early modern period, of a
“note added to anything written, by way of explanation or comment.”3
Marginalia seems more helpful, if by that we mean marks added in the
margins, until we realize that the marks of objects follow the space of
the page with little sense of duty. I will call them “object marks,” or
“object traces,” the copy-specific stains left by objects that once rested
on the pages of early modern books. I exclude the many accidental
marks left in the process of book production, such as loose or fallen
type. The failure to lock up a forme tightly results in wobbly type and,
usually in the process of inking, type can be pulled out and if left lying
52 Adam Smyth
flat results in a printed text carrying a horizontal mark. Thus, for in-
stance, the pulled type resting sideways on a page of a 1474 Biblical
concordance, across entries for “Splendide” (brightly) and “Spoliare”
(despoil).4 Like other instances of accidental production marks – the
pressman’s fingerprints; the holes on the top and bottom of leaves
from points attaching the paper to the tympan; the blind impression
of bearing type; the hair inked and printed in a 1478 book printed by
Johann Zainer of Ulm, Germany – fallen type vividly conjures up the
process of production, and conveys normally concealed truths about
printing (that type has depth, for example, and not just surface). 5 But
such marks are manufacturing artifacts and are not properly signs of
book use. My focus here will be on marks imprinted on books by three
kinds of object with relative frequency (by which I mean they are not
spectacular one-off finds): flowers, spectacles, and scissors. What can
we say about these forms?
Flowers
I need first to clarity what kind of flower marks I am studying. It is not
unusual to find plants left between the pages of a book. A Folger Library
copy of Anglicus Bartholomaeus’s Incipit Prohemium De proprietati-
b[us] rerum Fratris Bartholomei Anglici de ordine Fratrum Mino[rum]
(Lyon, 1480) – a book heavily marked with signs of use, including hand-
written corrections and an ownership note – has a dried plant between
leaves y6 and y7.6 John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater
of Plants (1640) sets out to provide “a more ample and exact history and
declaration of the physicall herbs and plants that are in other authours,”
and, in keeping with its taxonomic ambition, one copy has twenty-one
plant samples, added by a reader but now removed by cataloguers and
kept in two separate boxes.7
These and the other pressed leaves, cuttings and grasses found in
books in Cardiff University Special Collections, at the Beinecke in Yale,8
and elsewhere, are really part of a distinct category of augmented book:
the book as collecting space, as box, as cabinet of natural history, the
plants carefully assembled by amateur botanists and laid out on the
pages. They don’t quite fall under the heading of marks in books, partly
because they are objects, not traces of objects, and also because they are
the product of a sustained and purposeful process of curation. A more
apt botanical instance is the stain in a copy of Shakespeare’s Works
(1623), now held in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the Univer-
sity of Toronto (Figure 3.1). Here, the tracks of a rose bud cross a page
of Cymbeline. Tracing the form, we reach the tip of the bud at the place
where Cymbeline says, “O most delicate Fiend! / Who is’t can reade a
Woman?”9
Object Traces in Early Modern Books 53
Figure 3.1 Shakespeare’s Works (1623), by permission of the Thomas Fisher

Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, Fisher.S52 A1 1623f, 395.
I write the “place” where Cymbeline speaks quite deliberately: one

effect of this mark is to make us aware of the page as a surface, and
of each word as a sign existing in a spatial, rather than a temporal
relation with other words. Cymbeline, we see, is an arrangement of
type, or rather is a collection of inked impressions left by an arrange-
ment of type, and we read now not for literary meaning but in terms
of mise-en-page. In this sense the conspicuous rose stain denaturalizes
54 Adam Smyth
the page, and so helps us to perceive it anew. As Bill Brown notes, we
see an object afresh, and more clearly, when it breaks down: the mobile
phone becomes stranger, and more thing-like, when it refuses to work –
no longer a magical source of conversation but an inert slab of metal
and glass.10 Here, in Cymbeline, we become aware of Shakespeare’s
text not as a living artistic creation that transcends its bookish form,
but rather as a series of inked forms pressed on to paper: the mate-
riality of the rose bud, as it unfurls across the page marking words
irrespective of meaning, making more prominent the materiality of the
text in general.
We meet quite frequently the inked flowers added by readers to their
books, but these are normally flowers in the form of marginal annota-
tions, flowers sketched by hand, evidenced, most canonically, in books
owned by Ben Jonson,11 but widespread in general. Such instances of
flowers-as-annotations exhibit a twin pull between the functional and
the aesthetic. That is, the role of the drawn flower, like the manicule or
asterisk, is primarily to mark out a passage of text; but readers seem of-
ten to have felt a competing aesthetic impulse to make the flower (or the
pointing finger) a vivid, humorous or spectacular intervention. Thus, for
example, as William Slights has noted, a young reader named Jonathan,
practicing penning flowers on the front endpapers of a copy of Christian
Religion Substantially Treatised (1611), turned those flowers into draw-
ings of decorations on a shirt.12
The rose in Cymbeline may have once had a practical function in the
sense that the original flower marked an opening, like a bookmark. But
does the stain have any aesthetic significance? Might the rose, poetry’s
iconic flower, contribute to, or engage with, the play’s symbolic effects?
Early modern readers of a certain disposition might have been suscep-
tible to finding a connection between the rose mark and Cymbeline’s
exclamation. The tradition of the sortes Virginilianae, or “Virgilian
lots,” saw readers insert a pin at a random spot between the pages of
the Aeneid, and the located verse was read as significant. John Aubrey
describes how King Charles, on the urging of Abraham Cowley, per-
formed such a reading during a visit to London in 1648 and “prick’t his
pinne in the fourth booke of the Aeneids (IV 615–20).” That passage of
Virgil was grimly prophetic – “let him die before his day, the sand his
grave,/And with my bond this last request I crave” – and Cowley (who
“always had a Virgil in his pocket”) was certainly typical of many in
regarding the selected passages as meaningful.13 Located within such
a culture of bibliomancy, or placed more generally within the long tra-
dition of aleatoricism in art, running at least from the I Ching to the
Dadaists of the 1920s, the random mark of a decayed rose might be seen
as significant, but for the kind of critical interpretation this volume of
essays represents, such interpretative promise is misleading, a hermeneu-
tical dead-end, a sentimental allure. Since there is no literary intention
behind the staining of page by rose, no dramatic or aesthetic reason why
the bud marks those particular words, there is no meaningful relation
in terms of the play’s content. Two hundred and fifty years later, George
Eliot played with this interpretative pull and push (the pull to read all
marks symbolically, the push that recognizes there is no intent) in The
Mill on the Floss:
If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their bibles opened
more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried tulip
petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without prefer-
ence for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal.14
But there remains something unnerving about the rose stain, some-
thing that has to do with the impression of an object that languishes
outside of time. The rose has been abandoned, or lost, or forgotten,
but its decay is frozen: it no longer has duration. In his sonnets, Shake-
speare considers the prospect of removing flowers from time through
the conceit of distillation: in sonnet 5, while “never-resting Time leads
Summer on / To hideous Winter,” extracting the scent from petals
means “their substance still lives sweet.” The form fades, but the es-
sence (“[a] liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass”) is made to endure.
In sonnet 54, the beauty of a rose becomes legible as a result of the
flowers’ scent: “canker-blooms” may “have full as deep a dye,” but
lacking “that sweet odour … They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade;
/ Die to themselves.” The process of distillation removes the scent from
dying external matter, like the soul separated from the body, a process
that is analogous to the work of poetry in keeping a memory of beauty
alive while the body turns to dust: “my verse distills your truth.” But
if distillation, like poetry, can preserve a flower’s essence, the rose-bud
stain in the Toronto Works presents the opposite: what remains is the
mark of a now decayed and lost external shape. The stain is eerie be-
cause it preserves what should not be preserved: the form or “show”
(“Sonnet 54”), the materiality that should, in Shakespeare’s imagina-
tion, be jettisoned for the scent to live in, and the mark functions as a
ghostly converse to the Sonnets’ distillations. The mark of the rose bud
creates the curious effect of both dominating the page, and seeming
only fitfully present.
Spectacles
The marks left by spectacles can be found in a number of early modern
books: in Shakespeare’s Works (1623) held at the Folger Shakespeare
Library15; in a copy of Les Oeuvres de Charles Loyseau (Paris, 1640)
at the Hendrik Conscience Library, Antwerp (Figure 3.2)16; in a Folger
copy of Jeremiah Burroughs, The Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Books
es Oeuvres de Charles Loyseau (Paris, 1640), p. 133. By permis-
Figure 3.2 L
sion of the Hendrik Conscience Library collection, Antwerp, EHC
714330.
of Mr Jeremiah Burroughs…Being the Last Sermons That the Author
Preached at Stepney (1655)17; and in a circa 1526 edition of Le Roman
de la rose in Oxford.18 Spectacle marks have also been found on medi-
eval pages, including marks on the recycled medieval parchment waste
that serves as endpapers in a copy of the Opera of Fr. Luigi di G ranata
(Venice, 1568–1569).19 There will certainly be more instances in ar-
chives, but cases of object-marked books are hard to find: in this sense
they exemplify, in a heightened form, a problem infecting all work on
annotations. While some library catalogues record some traces in some
books, there is little consistency. In the words of one of the leading rare
book curators, “that kind of thing [that is, object marks] has gone com-
pletely under the cataloguing radar;” in the words of another, “I have a
vague recollection of something to do with a slice of bacon (an anecdote
passed on by one of our now deceased former colleagues), but I’m afraid
I don’t remember the details!”20 And while it is true that studies in an-
notations have encouraged a change in the kind of metadata that cata-
loguers routinely record, the best methodology, as so often, is to speak
directly with librarians, cataloguers, and conservators: and this present
chapter is indebted to them. Another methodology is to survey as many
copies as possible of a single book, as has been done for Shakespeare’s
Works (1623), and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, gathering a unique level of
bibliographical detail. 21 (That several of my examples come from this
kind of survey of Shakespeare’s Works is indicative of the benefits of
such single-text-centric research.) Perhaps the most common method is
hardly a method at all, but rather the governing mood of most book use
research, which is to say, alert serendipity. In an age where full-text dig-
ital transcriptions enable near-instantaneous word and phrase searches
(a kind of reading that doesn’t always produce good work), object marks
present instances of resistance. They demand time in order to be found –
and in thus encouraging slow, digressive, wide reading, object traces re-
mind us of certain reading methods we would be foolish to abandon.
Spectacles were a thirteenth-century Italian invention, and were pop-
ular across Europe from the fifteenth. Originally they took the form of
two convex glass disks held in bone or metal rims with a rivet and han-
dle that could be placed over the nose or held before the eyes (“rivet spec-
tacles,” of the sort represented in Conrad von Soest’s Glasses Apostle
(1403)). Later models had leather or wire rims and could be held in place
via frames over the ears. Spectacles were associated from the outset not
with vision in general but more particularly with reading: known as vit-
reos ab oculis ad legendum (eyeglasses for eyes for reading), 22 they were
a crucial prop for book use, as seen in visual depictions such as Domen-
ico Ghirlandaio’s Saint Jerome in His Study (1480). An expectation that
spectacles and books should travel together is also evidenced in books
which have hollowed out spaces for glasses in the binding waste, like
the copy of Imitatio Christi: Liber de Imitatione Christi cum tractatu
58 Adam Smyth
de Cordis Meditatione (Cologne, 1503), at the Catholic University of
America Library. 23 Bibliophile and antiquarian Anthony Wood noticed
the practice, too: in September 1659, Wood and the Bodleian’s librarian
Thomas Barlow “labour’d several week[s]” on “the library of the learned
[John] Selden,” newly arrived at the Bodleian. In the process of “carry-
ing them up stairs and placing them,” Wood noticed “[i]n opening some
of the books … several pairs of spectacles which Mr Selden had put in,
and forgotten to take out.” Wood was as prone to sentimentality as he
was to vicious gossip, and the glasses became a means for him to recall
a lost reader: “Mr Thommas Barlow gave AW a pair, which he kept in
memorie of Selden to his last day.”24
The possibility of glasses being left in books was not only the antiquar-
ian’s delight. Dramatists also saw some wit in the prospect. In Thomas
Tomkis’s Lingua: or, The combate of the tongue (1607), Memoria, in-
vited to read, remembers
that I forgot my spectacles, I left them in the 349. page of Halls

Chronicles, where hee tells a great wonder of a multitude of Mise
which had almost destroyed the Country, but that there resorted a
great mighty flight of Owls, that destroyed them. 25
Memoria not only remembers he has forgotten his spectacles; he also

remembers the passage where his spectacles lie (even if there is in reality
no page number 349 in copies of Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble
and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548)), meaning that these
spectacles function as a kind of marker, like the underlining or manicule
that marks out a passage of text. It is not clear how much intention lies
behind Memoria’s “I left them,” but it is the case that the spectacles,
in this moment of remembering, become a means to recall and excise a
particular passage from a much larger text.
One way to respond to such marks is to place stains of spectacles
alongside other non-textual traces to produce a kind of documentary
snap shot of reading-in-process: a record of the cloud of things that sur-
rounded the book, and through which reading took place. Thus specta-
cle marks can be grouped with what Alberto Manguel calls “the spoor
of previous readers:”26 the pieces of candle wax and nutshells found in
some surviving copies of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments; the seal-
ing wax dripped in one of William Drummond’s manuscript miscella-
nies; the crumbs found in a number of copies of Shakespeare’s Works
(1623). 27 Such a corpus can contribute towards a social history of read-
ing props. Rather like a study of Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait
of the Businessman Georg Giesze (1532) that notices the seal, goose-
feather quills, scissors, pewter writing-stand, ink, wax disks and sealing
wax, such reconstructions can vividly itemize a range of props. But they
can only describe reading as an exteriorized set of actions: it is hard to
imagine the material traces of readerly inwardness, hard to think of an
interiority that, perceived in moments of exteriority, does not thus undo
itself. One of the problems of histories of reading is always that the ar-
chive of reading-as-inwardness is elusive: and so a defining paradox of
studies of reading that draw on marginalia is that they are in fact, and
necessarily, studies of writing, reflecting on those moments not when
readers read, but when readers wrote in books. Of course such moments
are often intimately related to reading, but they are not the same, sepa-
rated as they must be by at the very least a temporal lag: to make a note
is to read and then, some time later, to write. It is thus not surprising that
recent work on early modern reading has argued that ideas of use and
application are central, and has warned of the perils of conceiving read-
ing as romantic interiority: the nature of the marks being studied frames
reading as not an internal but an external pursuit. The unyielding rust
stains of a spectacle thus draw attention to a gap between reading and
marking that must always be there, whether that mark is a handwritten
manicule or a fulsome interpretative note.
But object traces may be able to help us here. If annotations like Ben
Jonson’s “emphatic” markings of Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy
(1589)28 are held to be indicative of readerly engagement, then spectacle
stains suggest the very opposite: they conjure the moment when reading
stops, when glasses are taken off, when the book is shut. And since rust
requires duration to form – these metal objects must have been left in
books long enough to corrode29 – the stains suggest not just a moment,
but a sustained period of non-reading. Spectacle marks thus point to
what might be considered the obverse of the history of reading, or at
least its shadow: namely, the history of books as objects that for most
of their lives are closed or on shelves; of the life of even the most ardent
bibliophile as a life spent more often not reading than reading; of non-
reading as a mode of responding to books that is going on all the time.
The spectacles can thus be grouped within a wider collection of ob-
jects that served as early modern bookmarks: some carefully made, like
the hand-made cut-out parchment bookmark in a copy of Leon Alberti’s
fifteen treatises, but most of them acts of bibliographical improvisation –
a loose woodcut of Saint Elizabeth in a 1538 book on the epistles of St
Paul; a fragment of a letter signed “Bartlett” placed between pages 64
and 65 of a copy of Petri Gassendi Diniensis Ecclesiæ præpositi et in
academia Parisiensi Matheseos Regii Professoris Opera omnia in sex
tomos diuisa (1658); a piece of parchment covered in fourteenth-century
Gothic script used in a 1590 historical text.30
If the spectacles signify non-reading, they recall a crucial moment of
non-reading within perhaps the most iconic scene of reading in Western
culture: the conversion episode in Book 8 of Augustine’s C onfessions,
the paradigmatic “epiphany of the book,” according to Theodore
Ziolkowski, a sudden moment of light-bringing revelation caused by a
60 Adam Smyth
passage of text, when Augustine’s book-induced conversion to Christi-
anity symbolically marks the broader transition from the classicism of
late antiquity to the early Middle Ages and Christianity. 31 Augustine,
thirty-two-year-old philosopher and rhetorician, plagued by fears and
doubts, hears in a garden a childlike voice: “Take it and read, take it and
read” (tolle lege, tolle lege). Turning to his copy of the Pauline E
pistles
and, in an instance of bibliomancy, reading the first passage he finds
at random (Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where Paul shows how the
Gospel transforms believers), Augustine feels that “the light of confi-
dence flooded my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”
Augustine then stops reading: “I marked the place with my finger or
by some other sign,” he writes, and “closed the book.”32 The Latin
“signo,” translated here as “sign,” is often understood as “mark” or
“means” or, in the translation of Tobie Mathew from 1620, as “thing.”33
The description of this marking is both careful and curiously evasive:
“I marked the place with my finger or by some other sign.”34 There
were no spectacles in late fourth-century Milan, but “some other sign
[or mark or means or thing]” suggests the improvised use of an object,
and more broadly the manner in which a reader of a codex (rather than
a reader of a scroll) might intervene in the book to signal the moment
when reading stops.
But this needs nuancing. The moment of closing the book and mark-
ing the leaves is not only a moment when reading stops, but it is also
more importantly the moment when interpretation begins. This is what
happens to Augustine immediately after the book has closed:
My looks now were quite calm as I told Alypius what had happened
to me. He too told me what he had been feeling, which of course I
did not know. He asked to see what I had read. I showed it to him
and he read on beyond the text which I had read. I did not know
what followed, but it was this: Find room among you for a man
of over-delicate conscience [Romans 14:1]. Alypius applied this to
himself and told me so. This admonition was enough to give him
strength, and without suffering the distress of hesitation he made
his resolution and took this good purpose to himself. And it very
well suited his moral character, which had long been far, far better
than my own.35
We can cautiously revise, then, my earlier note that histories of read-

ing, reliant on external marks, don’t possess an archive of readerly in-
wardness. Object marks like the spectacles don’t quite constitute that
archive but they do signal the process of reflection. The marking of the
book for non-reading is a sign of that process that the history of read-
ing has struggled to locate: of reflection, of discussion, of thought, of
application.
Scissors
Figure 3.3 shows the rust marks left behind by a pair of scissors in a
copy of Shakespeare’s Works (1623).36 The blade bisects Act 3, Scene 4
of King Lear; the S of the bow is at the start of scene 5, when Cornwall
says, “I will have my revenge ere I depart his house.” There is an irony in
blades appearing on the pages of English literary culture’s most valued
book, but such ghostly marks turn up in other copies of this same book:
in one, at Henry IV Part I; in another, at The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Because both volumes were closed, each single pair of scissors has left
a double impression.37 Perhaps the scissors served also as bookmarks;
perhaps they were nearby to be used by the reader to trim the candles;
perhaps they were a binder’s, forgotten in the process of book-binding;
or perhaps the scissor marks suggest readers about to cut out sections of
the page to transfer it to a miscellany or commonplace book. 38
Such marks can be found in a surprisingly large number of other
early modern books. A copy of the fifth edition of John Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs (1596), now at Ohio State, is marked just below the marginal
heading “The law of Christ standeth on two parts” (Figure 3.4), 39 and
two copies of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia show scissor rust.40 There are rust
marks of scissors in the gutter of a copy of The Nuremberg Chronicle
(Liber Chronicarum) (1493),41 and scissor rust marks have been found
on manuscripts, too: in two Greek texts at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
in Milan, for example, both pre-1500 but the signs of the rust might
well have been left in the sixteenth century, when the manuscripts were
heavily used.42
Marks such as those in Figures 3.3 and 3.4 generate pathos because
they signify not just absence but a double loss: they are the stains left
behind by objects left behind by readers. If Anthony Wood cherished
Selden’s spectacles as a proxy for the man – rather as Coleridge, respond-
ing to friends’ requests that he annotate books, said he would “spoil”
a book “to leave a Relic”43 – then we are confronting another stage of
remove: the traces of objects that belonged to a reader.
And what, exactly, are we looking at? It takes some time to realize
these marks are in fact the marks of scissors. The process of staining
and, by closing the book, doubling amounts to a mediation that appears
aestheticized, except that there is no aesthetic intention behind it. But
certainly the scissors seem to have transformed into some other thing: in
the case of Figure 3.3 (Shakespeare’s Works), into a swinging pendulum;
in the case of Figure 3.4 (Foxe’s Acts and Monuments), into what looks
like a fragment of a dynastic genealogical table, the blades on the left
gesturing at some broken blood line.
If we are used to thinking of objects as things possessing a sturdy fac-
ticity, particularly in contrast to text that requires interpretation, then
these marks eerily confound those assumptions. That realization might
Figure 3.3 William Shakespeare, Works (1623), Folger First Folio 63, Trage-
dies, 298. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Interna-
tional Licence.
Figure 3.4 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1596), by permission of Ohio
State University, BR1600.F6 1596, copy 1, 366–67.
serve to encourage in critics an interpretative humility: if such a stable

thing as an object can become obscure, what hope do we have of prop-
erly understanding the more baroque and clouded marginal annotations
that litter the pages of early modern books?
I began this chapter by suggesting that recent work on marginal anno-
tations has been characterized by a number of questions, paradoxes or
gaps that I hoped to bring to the surface. By way of conclusion, I offer
a list of five of these traits-as-problems, as both an assessment of where
the history of marginalia stands now and an illustration of the value of
attending to object traces.
1 The dominance of the case study as the structure (of writing, and of
thought) for organizing investigations of marginalia. The case study
tends to produce a certain kind of work: by their nature particular,
case studies are effective at disrupting existing narratives, at wor-
rying away at orthodoxies and assumptions, but they are much less
effective at supporting the construction of new lines of argument. This
is one of the reasons why histories of reading have often a prefatory
tone. The close analysis of, typically, a particular reader – Jardine
64 Adam Smyth
and Grafton on Gabriel Harvey; Sherman on Sir Julius Caesar;
Orgel on Lady Anne Clifford – has meant that the history of read-
ing, as a field, has often been organized around biography precisely
at a time when early modern studies more generally has been moving
away from the individual as the unit of cultural analysis, with a shift
in the 1990s and 2000s to the coterie, and, in more recent years, to
the network.44 The dominance of biography and of the individual
for histories of book use has meant that studies of marginal anno-
tations have tended to link book annotations back to the marking
individual at the expense of other ways of organizing marginalia,
such as genre (see below), either by reading the marks as expressions
of selfhood (“even the most routine marking of a text allows us to
hear the voice of the reader”45), or by connecting the markings to
the social or political interests of the reader.46 Studies of objects can
be useful because they suspend these biographical assumptions – the
mark of an object is less obviously expressive of a reader, and less
suited to biographical interpretation – and so encourage other ways
of thinking about book use.
2 The question of genre. If any act of writing necessarily borrows
from conventions, precedents and models, what generic patterns
and scripts does the annotator follow? The use of biography as the
frame for reading marked books has meant critics, preoccupied
with readers’ marks in terms of the reader’s identity or life, have
spent less time in establishing where the conventions for marking
books come from. Until we have a sense of convention, it is hard
to identify moments of departure, and thus hard to navigate the
poles of the dutiful reader and the maverick. Heather Jackson has
argued that what makes eighteenth-century marginal annotations
distinctive is their newly critical engagement with their host text,
and Jackson tracks this change to the influence of printed notes
and commentaries by scholar-critics, imitated by annotating read-
ers who sought to improve the work and to display their learning.
Jackson also notes the significance of Coleridge’s Literary Remains
(the first volume of which was published in 1836) as a stimulus and
model for other annotators: “[i]f ever there was a naïve annotator,
just irresistibly taken with the impulse to get down a note, the
creature is gone the way of the dodo.”47 It would be profitable to
place early modern annotations in relation to particular generic
precedents, such as humanist dialogues, pedagogical works, devo-
tional forms like the catechism, and autobiographical texts: such
placements would helpfully connect the specific marginalia to
writing other than the host text. Object marks raise this question
of genre and influence in an extreme form: what category of mark
or intervention are they? What is the larger group in which they
belong?
3 The “active” reader. One of the most common arguments in studies
of marginal annotations in the early modern period and beyond,
is that readers were “active” (or sometimes “radical”), rather than
“passive,” by which is meant generally that readers marked books
in pursuit of their own agenda, that readers read with an idea of
practical application in the world, that readers were concerned with
future uses of the text rather than with authorial intention or orig-
inal significance (with “reading as intended to give rise to some-
thing else”),48 that readers were quick to depart from prescribed
interpretations. In the words of one important study, “[t]hese “active
readers” … intervene[d] in a text to make it meaningful and in some
cases … they then appropriated that text for their own purposes.”49
This notion of “goal-orientated” reading was formatively described
by Jardine and Grafton in relation to a particular context – highly
educated, prominent Elizabethan courtiers and scholars reading
classical Roman history for political application – but this model has
become the default model for most accounts of early modern read-
ing. Such models are the product of a blending of archival work with
patterns of consumption proposed by Michel de Certeau (on read-
ing as poaching) and Roger Chartier (on appropriation). 50 There is
certainly much that is vital in these assessments, and I don’t wish
to dismiss them – indeed, I have advanced many of these reading
models in my own, earlier work, although some of my own conten-
tions now seem, on reflection, questionable.51 But there is a prob-
lem: namely, that the pool of evidence that scholars turn to in order
to determine reading habits inevitably prescribes such conclusions.
If we are seeking a reading mode by examining moments when read-
ers marked books, have intervened in the printed codex, then the
sense of that reader as “active” is difficult to resist. Furthermore, the
term “marginalia” implies not only the margins of pages but also a
social, political or religious marginality, a liminal identity. But such
a conception of notes on books as dissenting may not be justified:
hence William Sherman’s searching around for other terms (postil-
lati, scholia, glosses, annotations, graffiti). 52 More generally, what,
exactly, do underlinings in a book mean? Is a scribbled cross a signal
of assent or dissent, of radicalism or dutifulness, or is interpretation
based around those binaries precisely the problem? Is a scratch in
the margin an affirmation or is it the case, as Robert Herrick imag-
ines, that a “long-black-Thumb-nail marks ‘em out for ill”?53 And
what exactly would an inactive reader look like? What is the archive
for the conservative reader, the entirely orthodox consumer of print?
An unmarked page? How can the history of book use respond to the
overwhelming majority of early modern pages that are unmarked
by readers, and the moments of reading that such texts imply? The
marks of objects are useful here because they can help change the
66 Adam Smyth
terms of the critical conversation: object marks suspend the search
for intention (it is hard to talk of the intent behind the rust mark of
a pair of spectacles); they map less easily on to the active or radical
reader; and so they suggest other ways of framing discussions of
book use.
4 Marginalia and reading. The study of marginal annotations has be-
come virtually synonymous with the history of reading: and while
the history of reading is not the history of marginalia, the history of
marginalia is overwhelmingly framed as one aspect of the history
of reading, as seen in work cited in this chapter by Grafton and
Jardine, Brayman and Schurink. 54 But this need not be the case.
Marks in books might serve other functions, and one of the roles
of object traces is to trouble the connection between marking and
reading.
5 Marginalia and time. When is an annotation’s moment? How might
we, in reading marks in books, think about duration? On reading
marginalia it is easy to fall into a trap of treating the annotations
as all-present-at-once, or all-composed-at-once: as existing in a syn-
chronic instant. But a single reader (let alone multiple readers) might
add marks to a book over a long period of time, even a lifetime:
and in such instances the reader’s earlier marks might seem as un-
knowable to that reader’s later self as they often do to us. Heather
Jackson has suggested that annotations are often cumulative in
their nature: that each mark exists in relation to earlier passages
in the text, and not only its juxtaposed passage. A note that seems
hooked to a particular passage of print might in reality be address-
ing a developing narrative or thesis, and the mark thus signals a
sustained period of reading time, rather than a single moment. “It’s
like the domestic quarrel,” Jackson writes: “it wasn’t really the way
you squeezed the toothpaste that drove him mad.”55 Object traces,
which seem to languish outside of time, which mark something that
was there but is no longer, and which signal potentially very long
periods of non-reading, raise urgently these questions of annotation
and temporality.
Like so many notes scrawled by readers across books, object traces carry
both tremendous promise and a sense of the unyielding, and we respond
to them, probably, “with mingled fascination and exasperation.”56 But
their recalcitrance is also their value: they force us to pause, to think,
to reflect, to consider the assumptions we are making about reading, to
revise our ways of working. There are many other kinds of object and
object marks in early modern books: this chapter might have reflected
on the pins commonly found inserted in pages, or the knives or quill
pens, or the rust stains of keys, 57 or, more dramatically, the series of
encounters fellow scholars remembered, or half remembered, and kindly
conveyed to me, but were not quite able to identify exactly: the traces of
mice in sixteenth-century copies of Suetonius and Cicero; the quill pen
shavings in a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary; the squirrel’s tail in
an eighteenth-century folio, glimpsed “forty years ago;” the page full of
squashed flies at an archbishop’s library; the pieces of fishing bait in some
early copies of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler, “but I cannot find the
reference to it now I’m afraid.”58 The baffling promise of such vignettes
reminds us of the rich and strange social lives of books, and of our texts’
meanings as both right before us, and also eternally beyond our grasp.
Notes
1 Grafton and Jardine, “Gabriel Harvey;” Sherman, Used Books; Orgel, The
Reader in the Book.
2 Stoddard, Marks in Books.
3 “annotation, n.3a.” OED Online, Oxford University Press; online edn,
December 2016, accessed 1 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/7922.
4 Conradus de Alemania, Concordantiae bibliorum (Strasbourg: Johann
Mentelin, [Prior to 1474]), Bod-Inc C-428(1), sig. [4 d5r]. See also Angelus
Politianus, Opera, Bod-Inc copy P-422(1), sig. b2v; Publius Ovidius Naso,
Opera (Venice: Hermannus Liechtenstein, 1484.), Bod-Inc O-043, sig. gg5r.
My thanks to Alan Coates for help with these.
5 For fingerprints, see Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Phancies (London:
William Wilson, 1664), Bod. Douce C subst.17. For point marks and bearing
type, see Stoddard, Marks, 6; for inked hair, Bolton, The Fifteenth-Century
Printing Practices of Johann Zainer, 41.
6 Folger cs1505.
7 John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum (London: Tho. Cotes, 1640), F olger
Folio STC 19302 Copy 1. George Swayne, Gramina Pascua: or, A C ollection
of Specimens of the Common Pasture Grasses, with Descriptions (Bristol,
1790), Bod. Vet. A5 b.96, contains grass samples. My thanks to Sarah
Wheale for this reference.
8 Leonard Plukenet, Leonardi Plukenetii Amaltheum botanicum (1705),
Cardiff University Special Collections QK41.P5; Rembert Dodoens, A
Nievve Herball, or, Historie of Plantes (1578), BEIN 2012 +286. My thanks
to Ken Gibb and Kathryn James for these references.
9 Shakespeare, Works (1623), Fisher.S52 A1 1623f, 395. The Toronto ‘rose-
bud copy’ is reproduced in Richard Landon, Bibliophilia Scholastica
Floreat: Fifty Years of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University
of Toronto (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2005), 34. My thanks to
the late Richard Landon for help with this. A pressed flower survives in a
copy of Sidney’s Arcadia now at Harvard University Library, as noted by
Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 159 n.76.
10 Brown, “Thing Theory.”
11 McPherson, “Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia.”
12 Slights, Managing Readers, image used for section heads.
13 Usher, “‘Pricking in Virgil’,” 557, 562.
14 Quoted in Price, Things to Do With Books, 46.
15 Folger 46, sig. Bb6v.
16 My thanks to Steven Van Impe for details of Les Oeuvres de Charles
Loyseau.
68 Adam Smyth
17 Jeremiah Burroughs, The Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Books of Mr Jeremiah
Burroughs: Containing Three Treatises: I. Of Precious Faith. II. Of Hope.
III. The Saints Walk by Faith on Earth; by Sight in Heaven. Being the Last
Sermons that the Author Preached at Stepney, neer London (1655), Folger
165–858q, sig. T2r.
18 Cy est le Roma[n]t de la roze (ca. 1526), Bodleian Lawn d.49, sigs. P3v–P4r.
19 Erwin, “Medieval spectacles.” For another medieval example, see Wat-
kinson Library MS 9 ff. 6v–7r, Trinity College, Hartford, noted by Kidd,
“Evidence of Medieval(?) Reading-Glasses.”
20 Stephen Tabor, Huntington Library, email correspondence; anonymized
curator, email correspondence.
21 Most recently, Rasmussen and West, The Shakespeare First Folios; Brayman
Hackel, Reading Material. For this method, see Sherman, Used Books, 10.
22 Erwin, “Medieval spectacles.”
23 Baron, The Reader Revealed, 110.
24 Clark, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, I, 282.
25 Tomkis, Lingua, sig. F3. My thanks to Carla Mazzio for putting me on to
this scene.
26 Manguel, The Library at Night, 17. Quoted in Marcus, How To Do Things, 90.
27 John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009), xxxix; NLS MS 2059, f. 345; Sidney Lee, Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 10. My thanks to Laura Estill for the
Drummond reference.
28 British Library G.11548, discussed in Sherman, Used Books, 45.
29 Blayney, The First Folio of Shakespeare, 33.
30 Leon Alberti, Opuscoli morali (1568), Corpus Christi, Oxford, LF.6.d.13,
bookmark inserted at sig. A3; Archangelus Favorinus, Adunatio materi-
arum sparsim contentarum in diuersis locis epistolarum sancti Pauli apos-
toli (1538), Bod. Vet. F1 f.393 (2); Pierre Gassendi, Petri Gassendi Diniensis
Ecclesiæ præpositi et in academia Parisiensi Matheseos Regii Professoris
Opera omnia in sex tomos diuisa (1658), St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Old
Library Fol. E 3(2) t.1; John Twyne, Joannis Twini Bolingdunensis, Angli,
De rebus Albionicis, Britannicis atque Anglicis, commentariorum libri duo
(1590), Bod. Lawn f.83.
31 Ziolkowski, “‘Tolle Lege’,” 5, 7.
32 Augustine, Confessions, Book 8, Chapter 12, 178.
33 Augustine, The Confession of the Incomparable Doctour S. Augustine, tr.
By Tobie Matthew (St Omer: 1620), sig. Bb7. Noted by Helen Smith, “‘Wilt
Thou Not Read Me, Atheist?’,” 351.
34 My thanks to Molly Murray for discussing this moment in the Confessions
with me.
35 Confessions, 178.
36 These images are reproduced in Blayney, The First Folio, 32–33.
37 William Shakespeare, Works (1623), Folger copies 58 and 67.
38 For the practice of cutting printed books, and the relationship of this to
reading, see Smyth, Material Texts, Chapter 1.
39 OSU BR1600.F6 1596, copy 1, 366–67, noted in King, Foxe’s Book of Mar-
tyrs, 285. My thanks to Rebecca Jewett, Assistant Curator of Rare Books &
Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Library, for sending me images for
the Foxe text.
40 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 159 n.76.
41 Art Institute of Chicago, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, marks at ff.
144v–145r. Schmidt, Altered and Adorned, 38, 41.
42 Ambr. O 144 sup. (gr. 602), ff. 35v–36r, and Ambr. C 154 inf. (gr. 864), ff. 28v–29r.
My thanks to Anna Gialdini for these references.
43 Jackson, “Editing and Auditing Marginalia,” 76.
4 4 Crawford, “Reconsidering Early Modern Women’s Reading;” Harbus, “A
Renaissance Reader’s English Annotations to Thynne’s Chaucer;” Schurink,
“‘Like a Hand in the Margine of a Booke’.” The Ur-text for marginalia
studies in the modern era is the Coleridge marginalia project; Coleridge pre-
sented himself as an exemplary and exceptional case study: see Jackson,
Marginalia.
45 Kallendorf, “Marginalia and the Rise of Early Modern Subjectivity,” 113.
46 For productive recent exceptions which emphasize the social, networked
function of reading rather than the single solitary reader, see Schellenberg,
Literary Coteries, and Bullard, “What Swift did in libraries.”
47 Jackson, “Editing and Auditing Marginalia,” 77–79.
49 Dobranski, 22.
50 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Chartier, “Culture as Appropria-
tion.” These influences are helpful mapped out in Cambers, Godly Reading,
30–31.
51 For example, Profit and Delight, 70.
52 Sherman, Used Books, 20–24. Discussed in Scott-Warren, “Reading
Graffiti,” 364–65.
53 Herrick, “To the Detracter.” Hesperides, sig. F4v.
54 Grafton and Jardine, “Gabriel Harvey;” Brayman Hackel, Reading
Material; Schurink, “William Blount.”
55 Jackson, “Editing and Auditing Marginalia,” 79.
56 Scott-Warren, “Graffiti,” 365.
57 For a brass pin in a copy of Johann Herolt, Sermones de Tempore (Nurem-
berg, 1481), see Library of Congress BX1756.H4485 S4 1481. For a
bone-handled knife, found in a file of Common Pleas writs from the 1650s,
see National Archives SC 16/28. For a quill found in the spine of a list of the
Justices of the Peace, NA SC 16/27. For the stain of a key in a medieval Greek
manuscript, see Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 76, fol.1r, discussed
by Peter Kidd, https://mssprovenance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-greek-
manuscript-used-as-hiding-place.html.
58 My thanks to the users of the SHARP-L listserv, cited and quoted anony-
mously here, who responded generously to my enquiries.
4 The Occupation of the
Margins
Writing, Space, and Early
Modern Women
Katherine Acheson
When John Donne writes, in the magician’s prop chest that is “The
Canonization,” that “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” he’s using a
metaphor we understand well – that imaginative writing creates alterna-
tive worlds, rich with scent, sound, texture, joy, and passion, and short on
hunger, gravity, death, and debt-collectors. But as we know, early modern
words – and poems – were also literally part of the built environment.
Rooms really were built of sonnets, or if not sonnets, at least of words:
printed, written, painted, stitched, carved words. Visit any early modern
building still standing, as Juliet Fleming points out, and you will find
some words integrated into its surfaces – graffiti, citations from the Bible,
family mottos, and genealogies: words were semantic (usually), but they
were also architectural and decorative.1 Prints, ballads, painted cloths,
and book illustrations were posted on walls. 2 Embroidery, ubiquitous
in interior decoration for the more affluent, often included words, 3 as
did metalwork, plasterwork, and ceramics. Walls were written on with
candle smudge, paint, charcoal and chalk, and stone surfaces were in-
scribed with sharp implements or marked with other stones. Lady Anne
Bacon Drury had her entire closet painted with sententious sayings and
mottos and accompanying illustrations, as Heather Meakin has docu-
mented. Leah Knight has uncovered numerous example of the fashion
for writing on trees, or dendography. A triplet attributed to Elizabeth I is
called, in modern editions, “Written with a Diamond on Her Window at
Woodstock;” according to Fleming, diamond rings were specially “de-
signed to mark glass,” being “set in high bevels with one point outward.”4
So yes, early modern pretty rooms were built of sonnets, more or less, as
words were an integral part of the built and decorative environment.
For his memorial sermon on Anne Clifford, Bishop Edward Rainbow
re-gendered a passage from the Psalms: “Every wise woman,” he says,
“buildeth her house.”5 By this he means that she prepared herself, “with
Symetry, with Strength, Beauty and Order” metaphorically for death.
Bishop Rainbow finds metaphors irresistible, but Clifford was stronger
than that. When she heard you could build a room out of sonnets, she
thought heck yes. Let’s do it. As Rainbow wrote:
Writing, Space, and Early Modern Women 71
She was not ignorant of knowledge in any kind, which might make
her Conversation not only useful and grave, but also pleasant and
delightful; which that she might better do, 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 up, that she,
or they, in the time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might
remember, and make their descants on them. So that, though she
had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with
the flowers of a Library.
These words are assets, part of her wealth, which buttressed the built
space in which she lived and the basis of her authority and identity: “The
Sayings of Wisdom,” writes Rainbow,
which he determines to be more precious than Rubies, these were

strewed about her Chambers, these were instead of those rare
Trinkets so much in use…So that you may safely tell, that her Furni-
ture and Chambers were adorned with many precious Jewels.
We might say that Clifford lived within a world built of words, a verbal
universe in which writing was performative, in the sense that J. L. Austin
uses the word: statements that act upon the world and create the condi-
tions for their own plausibility and functionality. But Austin is writing
about spoken words: in Clifford’s world, it is the written word that per-
forms, as it can move through time and define space and identity in ways
that speech acts never can.
In the Great Picture of the Clifford Family, the books are the roof over
Anne’s head. The painting is rich with words, both within the tableaus
it displays, and surrounding them. They are semantic, but they are also
both decorative, adorning what is present, and architectural, framing
for us the separation of the built space from that which is outside it. We
might also say that Clifford built her castles out of words: “Spending
the enormous sum of 40,000 pounds on these projects,” writes Mihoko
Suzuki,
she prominently marked these buildings with her initials, plaques,

and heraldic crests, along with the date of the restoration, calling
attention to her authorship as well as its historical s ignificance…. In
particular, she proudly signaled her taking possession of her estates
as a momentous event by prominently emblazoning Desormais, or
“henceforth,” the Clifford family motto, on these buildings.6
Clifford’s autobiographical and biographical writings were one of the
forms in which her entitlement to her estates was established – not just
articulated, but made real. Documentation of her claim constituted the
claim, much as presence in one of the family castles (for example, when
her mother Margaret died in her jointure castle7) was both the assertion
and exercise of the right of tenure. These words were material things out
of which her more abstract claims would emerge: they created for her,
as Megan Matchinske writes of Clifford’s diary writing, “an embodied,
temporally responsible, and spatially attentive identity.”8 With regard to
Clifford’s marginalia Jason Scott-Warren “locative; blank spaces offered
a means not just to assert the self but also to place it;”9 we might say the
same of the blank spaces outside of books in which she inserted words
that extended her reach and being. Clifford, of course, is an exception
to almost every rule, but her work illustrates the collapse of the gap
between the figurative and the literal that the “ostentatious material-
ity”10 of the early modern word precipitates.
Books themselves are spatial forms. They have spatial parts: leaves,
covers, bindings, spines, margins. But early modern books are especially
self-conscious about their spatial aspirations. Tables of contents are of-
ten figured as tree diagrams (see examples as diverse as The Bishop’s
Bible of 1602, Tarlton’s Iests of 1613, and Henry Peacham’s Complete
Gentleman of 1634), powerful spatial forms that recast time and family
or conceptual relationships in two dimensions.11 Architectural frontis-
pieces and title-pages, such as that of Jonson’s Workes (1616), Christopher
Saxton’s Atlas of the counties of England and Wales (1590?), and The
vvhole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes, three wor-
thy martyrs, and principall teachers of this Churche of England (1573),
among dozens of other early modern examples, announce the analogy
between the book and the (imaginary) built environment. Herbert’s The
Temple – as a book, rather than as a concept – builds a church or rather
a home for a religion; opening the volume, we step through the prefatory
matter to “The Church-Porch,” and from there approach “The Altar,”
itself a shape-poem creating architectural, spiritual space out of printed
letters. Title-pages that depict enthroned monarchs, such as the Saxton
mentioned above or the 1573 Holie Byble printed by Richard Jugge,
surrounded by admiring throngs, inviting us to join a community of
like-minded neighbours by entering the book. Books are treated as stor-
age chests for generations of treasures – sometimes real, as in the case of
the laurel leaf pressed between the pages of Clifford’s copy of Selden’s
Titles of Honor (1631),12 at the point in the text at which J onson’s lau-
reateship is mentioned (as I say, she had no time for metaphors), or in
the examples that Adam Smyth and Sjoerd Levelt mention in their chap-
ters in this volume. Marginalia – both printed and manuscript – are
also spatial phenomena: they “are wayward in their very nature; they
spring up spontaneously around a text unaware of their presence.”13
Marginalia, or manuscript additions to printed books, are renovations,
in spatial terms, and they can be used to create specific kinds of space
for their authors, including women. In most of the remainder of this
chapter, I will survey the spatial effects of marginalia written by women
in selected early modern books. I have divided my examples and discus-
sion into three categories: first, the space of ownership, a complex field
in which genealogy intersects with gender, inheritance, and the proper
name; second, the space of education, in which writing, reading, speech,
work together to compose subjectivity and undergird entitlement; and
third, the space of the city, or perambulatory, architectural, urban,
geographic and chorographic space.
The Space of Ownership

Many early modern books have proper names written in them. Proper
names were powerful tokens in early modern culture. The proper
name was the mark of ownership and occupied its own particular
space, within which inhabited the residual structures of feudalism
and the transactional economy, the emergent structures of mercan-
tilism and capitalism, the apparatus of discipline by class, age, and
gender, and the systems governing the disposition of objects in the
world. The proper name was a cipher for self-ownership: as Jonathan
Goldberg elaborates in Writing Matter, the signature is a kind of “self-
authentication”14 that is foundational to other forms of self-ownership
in the early modern world, and emblematic of the often-tragic drama
of subjectivity in the era: what’s in a name (or word), indeed. The idea
of the signature concentrates Jacques Derrida’s thinking about lan-
guage, the proper name, and the signature itself: the signature is the
contingent, relative, impermanent mark of our (false) authenticity, our
(untenable) consistency, our (imaginary) coherence; it gains its status
as a unique and individual marker (ironically) only through repeti-
tion.15 Proper names written (repeatedly) in books vividly display how
integrated identity was with the technologies of writing and print (the
technologies of repetition), and how books themselves were containers
for identity and experimentation with the same. One kind of space
that women can create for themselves in books is the space of owner-
ship.16 Generally speaking, early modern women did not own things
(possibly including themselves): this is a constant throughout the long
early modern period. As Pamela Hammons writes, however, “practical
realities dictated that women had some control over property, real and
moveable.”17 Moveables might include books and writing parapherna-
lia: quills, pen-knives, ink, blotting matter, and paper, and whatever
else might be carried on the person, in a pocket, or stored in a per-
sonal space, such as a closet. Marks of ownership that include women’s
names are far less common in early modern books than are those that
include men’s names, but the number is significant nonetheless; any
collection of early modern books of any size will feature a handful
of women’s names, at the very least.18 The form of these claims often
point to the book itself, as in “Susanna Wilde her book” found in A
briefe of the bibles history published in 1608,19 itself a verbal spatial
construct which deictically connects the subject – Susanna Wilde –
with the object, her book. The distance between them is manifest in
the formulation, as is the relationship they have. Susanna, like other
women, understands how relationships to objects, especially relation-
ships of ownership and control, can constitute or bolster subjectivity:
the grammar of human identity means that a subject is completed by
linkage to an object. These claims are not inviolable or immutable,
however, and declarations of ownership can be pre-empted: in The
Doctrine of the Bible (1621; Folger STC 3029, front flyleaf), as in so
many other examples, “Susanna Wheeler her Book” is supplanted by
“Samuelle Tonge his Book” in a different, but similar, hand. In a Book
of Common Prayer published in 1682 (Folger B3668.2, back flyleaf)
we find this insertion: “Jane Clare her Book and was baptized the first
day of August 1672.” Jane here is inserting herself in a social space that
is not normally hers, space in which a people own things. Ownership
was also a way of insinuating oneself into genealogy, as one of the
principle functions of genealogy is to ensure the predictable delivery
of wealth and objects signaling status through time; with this claim,
Jane asserts her right to choose the recipient of this book, either during
her life by her choice, or after her death as governed by her wishes and
carried out by others. Jane fittingly aligns the ownership of property
with the rite of baptism, both of which confer upon her the power of a
name. Husbands and wives could own books together, as the inscrip-
tion in The Holy Bible (1621; Folger STC 2258a copy 1, rear flyleaf),
“Thomas ffrost and Margrate ffrost his Wiff oweth this Book” sug-
gesting not only their shared investment in the content of the book,
but a quality of their relationship which enables them to share posses-
sions within the marriage. Their joint ownership of the Bible points
to the household, centered as it presumably is on godly precepts, and
presided over jointly by husband and wife. 20
Ownership inscriptions in books often also record gifts and therefore
mark positions within familial and community networks. A 1576 Bible
(Folger STC 2117 copy 1) is inscribed on the title-page “Ann Bacon ye
Gift of her father Edmund Bacon of Brerton-lattymer in Northampton-
shire.” This inscription gestures toward the space of exchange, at once a
physical and material space, and an area of reciprocal and accrued social
obligation. 21 The inscription in the Folger’s copy of Henoch Clapham’s
Briefe of the Bibles history (1608) (Figure 4.1) represents more than one
such transaction on the front pastedown. The first layer of inscription
Figure 4.1 H
enoch Clapham, Briefe of the Bibles History (1639), Folger STC
5335, front endpaper. Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the
collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
records the name “John Plumb” and the place of his residence. “John”
is then overwritten with “Mary,” which is subsequently crossed out and
superscribed “Phoebe,” both of whom are represented as sharing Plumb
as surname with John. One of Mary or Phoebe has added “Widow” af-
ter the shared surname, and one of them is also – I presume – responsible
for “given to me” under the place name. This sequence of inscriptions
and emendations marks a complex set of transactions and social posi-
tions: we can imagine that John Plumb married Mary, who inherited
his books upon his death, and that Phoebe (daughter? Niece? Sister-in-
law?) was given it by Mary. On the flyleaf facing we see “John Moore
his Book pr. 1d” with another name x-ed out below it; it is not clear at
what point in this series of proper names John or the other inscriber
inserted their claims. All of these inscriptions are tokens of an eccentric,
outward-looking, autobiography which traces relationships with other
people and with objects, through time and in specific places (and even
for particular prices). As Jason Scott-Warren writes, printed books were
“vehicles for many kinds of life-writing,”22 and inscriptions in them pro-
vide a basis for the kind of autobiography Adam Smyth describes when
he writes that
Early modern life-writers, while certainly sometimes sketching what

might plausibly be called interiority or inwardness, also constructed
selfhood through a process of identifying, even overlapping, with
other figures, narratives, and events, and by looking out into the
world, rather than within. 23
This book traces the relationships between the Plumbs, and stands in the
middle of a web of obligation, entitlements, deferrals, and possibly even
love defined by the succession of ownership marks within it. Marginalia,
or more generally manuscript additions to printed books, create supple-
mentary space within which identities are grafted to sites of entitlement,
obligation, pleasure, and even risk (of loss, supplantation, or erasure).
The Pedagogical Space

Another kind of space that we see women writing themselves into within
the margins and flyleaves of books is the educational world. Entering the
pedagogical space can be as simple as imposing an ownership inscription
on a book. Take, for example, Anne Cooke Bacon’s handwritten name
on the title-page of Erasmus’s Paraphrasis. 24 Bacon (c. 1528–1610) was,
as Lynne Magnusson writes, the
second of the five Cooke sisters whose education by their father

in the classical languages and the early church fathers made them,
according to Thomas Fuller, ‘all most eminent scholars, (the honour
of their own and the shame of our sex)’;
she was fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian and French;25 she supervised
the education of her sons Anthony and Francis. 26 Anne Cooke Bacon’s
name, in her own hand, written in this particular book, inserts her in the
middle of the educational and religious revolutions of her era; Erasmus’s
paraphrases of the Pauline books of the new testament were popular
in the humanist schoolroom, and the work was ordered by Edward VI
to be placed in all parish churches in 1547. Her inscription signals not
only her relationship to the content of the book, but her presence in the
space of learning. Magnusson cites Anne’s inscription in another book
(Moschopulus) which makes my point even more clearly: “My father
delivered this book to me and my brother Anthony, who was mine elder
brother and schoolfellow with me, to follow for writing of Greek.”27
Books were central to humanist and later pedagogy, and the claim of
ownership – or even the entitlement to write in a book – signaled the
presence within the pedagogical space of the person writing.
In addition to inscriptions of female names in books we know were
used as educational texts and which might be found in schoolrooms,
many books were actively pedagogical spaces in the sense that they
provided room for children and other students to practice their writ-
ing. Books are full of handwritten sums, examples of pen trial (lines,
scribbles, loops), alphabets, doodles, writing in imitation of the style
of writing masters such as Edward Cocker, crossings out of previous
ownership claims, and the commonplaces through which both hand-
writing and moral values were taught. Most of these are not accom-
panied by names, and so we cannot tell if they were written by girls
or women, or boys or men. But commonplaces often allowed for the
integration of the individual’s name. Some were designed as book own-
ership claims, and thereby bridge the space of ownership and the peda-
gogical space. Sometime in the second half of the seventeenth-century,
for example, Michael Trepass wrote this personalized commonplace in
a 1580 Geneva Bible: “michaell treppas his book god give him grace
therein to look and when the bell begins to toll Lord jesus Christ re-
ceive his soule wit goy.”28 There are several examples featuring three
names in the Trepass Bible of a version of this commonplace, which
Henry Bourne, in Antiquitates Vulgares (1725), calls a “National Say-
ing;”29 an incomplete but decorated version is visible in Figure 4.2, and
the saying appears in other books as well. In 1699 Elizabeth Raper,
for example, wrote: “Elizabeth Raper hir Booke Amen God give hir
Grace on it to look and when [the] bell for hir doth towel ye Lord have
Mercy on hir soul” in the foreleaves of a copy of Theodore Beze, Iob
Expounded (1589?) (Figure 4.3). 30
Female writers customize commonplaces as well, although neither of
the two named female writers (of the six named writers in total) in the
Trepass Bible used that particular commonplace. In another book, we
find two sisters’ names embedded within one commonplace, which also
expresses their warm and teasing relationship: “Anne Grosvenor is my
name but my sister Elizabeth rite the same and if her pene it had been
better be sure she would have mended her leter” (Figure 4.4). 31 Mary
Bradshaw’s commonplace in a 1632 Book of common prayer (Figure
4.5) endows the proper name with the magical power to make its owner
present: “Mary Bradshaw is my name Praye thinke on me when you
read the same: let not the ould saing be true in you, out of sight out
of mind.”32 These examples insert women’s names into the doubled
Figure 4.2 The Bible: That Is, the Holy Scriptures Contained in the Old and
New Testament (1580), Folger STC 2190, blank verso at the end
of the New Testament. Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the
Figure 4.3 T heodore Beze, Iob Expounded (1589?), Folger STC 2764 copy 1,
n.s.4v. Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the collection of the
Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 4.4 J ohn Mayer, The English Catechisme Explained (1623), Folger STC
17734; rear flyleaf. Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the
Figure 4.5 Book of Common Prayer (1632), Folger STC 16386 copy 2, sig. B4r.
Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the collection of the Folger
Shakespeare Library.
Figure 4.6 The Bible: That is, the Holy Scriptures Contained in the Old and
New Testament (1603), Folger STC 2190, p. 43 of the New Testa-
ment. Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the collection of the
discursive space of learning and of ownership; they knock on the door

of male privilege to see who’s home.
These inscriptions also evoke the space in which media forms –
especially print, manuscript, and oral media – intersect. In the Trepass
Bible, for example, Mary Trepass has written, “Mary Trepass can say
this”33 (Figure 4.6) at the bottom of the page on which we find the story
of the resurrection of Lazarus in John. This simple statement puts Mary
within the triangular relationship between the oral, printed, and man-
uscript circulation of the English Bible, its language, its values, and its
theology, within which is compounded much of the social realm outside
of her schoolroom. As Femke Molekamp writes,
Female devotion took place along the boundary between oral and
print culture: texts that were often heard, like the psalms and ser-
mons, were also read, and these, together with the scriptures, could be
read out to other, less literate women by the mistress of the house.34
Mary Trepass’s inscription signals her bridging of the modes of commu-

nication that defined the pedagogical space; it also signals her capacity
to breach the boundary between the schoolroom and the world beyond
it, where women’s speech – even in the latter half of the seventeenth-
century, when the Trepass family inscriptions were made in this Bible –
was severely constrained and hotly contested. Handwritten additions to
printed texts allowed women to assert their presence within the peda-
gogical space of early modern England and enter the dialogic classroom
of the book.
The Space of the City

My last example is a set of annotations in a late sixteenth-century
Geneva Bible known as the Newby Bible because of the ownership
markers repeated throughout it, beginning and ending with the tooled
leather covers. 35 In addition to the ownership marks from the seven-
teenth century, the Newby Bible has over 600 marginal notes in a single
hand. Peter Stallybrass has drawn our attention to these annotations,
which he identifies as notes reflecting the religious practice of dissenters
in the late eighteenth century, and an example of what he calls the “dis-
continuous reading” required by the overlay of the liturgical calendar
on the canonical texts of the Christian faith. 36 Concealed under the
front paste-down of the volume is an ownership inscription, “Elizth.
Boggis, bought by her on the 22 April 1787, being the day preceding this
His Majesty Geo. returned publick thanks at St. Paul’s to God for his
recovery from the [heavy?] malady of insanity,” a detail discovered
by the conservation team at the Folger. 37 The annotations are all in
Elizabeth Boggis’s hand and they record her experience of the world of
Methodism in late eighteenth-century London. Each of the 633 anno-
tations records a date, a speaker and a text, and most of which record
a place. Some of them also record the attendance at a meeting by peo-
ple of the scribe’s family or most familiar circle (especially her “dear
Joey”). The marginalia at the bottom of the first page of I Corinthi-
ans in the New Testament is fairly typical: “16 June 1793,” it reads,
“Mr Knight text at Tabernacle the 1 Ch 30 and 31 verses – 27 August
1794 at Margate ch 1 verse 30 – Mr Dunking text – Dock Head”
(Figure 4.7). 38
Figure 4.7 The Bible (1580), Folger STC 2129, p. 75 of the New Testament.
Photograph by Katherine Acheson from the collection of the Folger
Shakespeare Library.
The attendees at the services – who apparently did not include

lizabeth Boggis herself – are also usually noted, as in the margins of
E
Psalms 20 and 21: “11 March 1792 Mr Swain text at Devonshire Square
Miss Savages and Mr Cole heard 19 Psalme 14 verce 28 October 1792
Mr Deurant text at Tabernacle 19 Psalme 7 verce.”39 Other frequent
“hearers” include “my dear Joey,” Reverend Cole, Emily and Nancy
Bick. These annotations were made over the course of more than seven
years, during which time passages on individual pages of the Bible were
used several times by speakers in the Methodist meeting houses that the
annotator documents, so that some pages bristle with numerous annota-
tions in all margins; there are ten separate annotations, for example, on
the page on which is printed Isaiah, Chapters 24–26, in which the final
judgment and the salvation and resurrection of the righteous are prophe-
sied (“Thy dead men shall live: even with my body they shall rise” Isaiah
26: 19), attesting to the popularity of this prophecy and the frequency
with which it was subject to Methodist preaching.
Elizabeth Boggis’s marginalia create a spatial and temporal struc-
ture for the experience of her religion within the space and the tempo-
rality of the book, and this particular text. There are at least twenty
different places mentioned in these annotations; the annotations over-
lay the book on to the space of the city. The most frequently noted
place is “Tabernacle,” which may be John Wesley’s second chapel at
49 City Road in London, built in 1778. But also mentioned are cha-
pels or meetings at Tottenham Court Road, Jewry Street, St. Catharine
Church the Tower, Mulberry Gardens, Haberdasher’s Hall, “Mundin in
Essex,” St Mary Woolnoth, Monkwell Street, Little Ale Street, A ldgate,
Bethesda Pool Society, Margate, Mr Thomas’s Mill Yard, Mr Brooks-
banks, Mr A ldridge, Mr Clayton, and Rowland Hill. The annota-
tions frame the same circuit of media that Mary Trepass’s does: oral,
print, and manuscript are all pointed to in the notes – but this space is
also social, political, geographical and historical. In her annotations,
Elizabeth Boggis created something more than a pretty room: the world
she invented was dynamic, rich, ambiguous, new, and incomplete. Her
annotations are also performative – they make Methodism what it was
then, the intimate attachment to scripture, the peripatetic service, the lay
interpreter who leads the meeting, the frequency and intensity of the reli-
gious experience, and the social network that maintained the faith. Her
annotations create a space in which to move around, thrive, experiment,
speak and listen; they turn the text of the Geneva Bible into a map of the
city of London. As Elizabeth Boggis refers to others, but never herself,
“hearing” the sermon, we see that with her marginalia she has created a
virtual map of Methodism through which she can experience that which
those able to circulate in the actual city have enjoyed.
In an essay which was the basis of a lecture in 1967, translated as “Of
Other Spaces” and published in Diacritics in 1986, Michel Foucault dis-
tinguishes between utopias – no places, not spaces – and heterotopias.
A heterotopia “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several
spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.”40 Foucault cites
the examples of the theatre, the cinema, the garden, the cemetery, and
the fair ground; the cinema, for instance, “is a very odd rectangular
room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the
projection of a three-dimensional space.”41 A heterotopia mixes modes
of perception and insists on the simultaneous significance of incommen-
surate points-of-view. We can add books to Foucault’s list of heterotopic
forms: they contain multiple, contradictory worlds as products of the
imagination, but they are also materially heterotopic, offering as they
do multiple functional affordances and modes of meaning that register
diversely across realms. As an example of what I mean by the latter,
many people have commented to me that they are surprised by Folger
STC 2190, the Trepass Bible – why were children in the 1650s allowed
to scribble in a sacred and valuable book? The answer lies in the fact
that from the children’s point-of-view, what they see is what is – at least
momentarily – invisible to the reader of the sacred text – they see paper,
blank paper: they see space instead of vacancy; they see an opportunity
rather than an elegance; the figure and the ground reverses for them.
Marginalia draw attention to the heterotopic and heterochronic qual-
ities of the material form of the book. We know this from the work
of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton on the networks of correspon-
dence, conversation, and commitment traced by Gabriel Harvey’s mar-
ginalia, and by the work of scholars who have followed the pathway
they established. But for women this capacity of books, I am arguing,
had particular significance, given their relationships both to everything
represented in the book, and everything represented by spatiality in the
early modern world.
It’s probably true that we should understand all human bodies in all
times as heterotopic – as occupying, traversing, expressing, and creat-
ing multiple and incommensurate forms of space – but we can certainly
say that the bodies of early modern women were heterotopic and were
known to be heterotopic. Natalie Zemon Davis describes both the spa-
tiality and the incommensurability of the ideas of the female body as
follows:
Her womb was like a hungry animal; when not amply fed by sexual
intercourse or reproduction, it was likely to wander about her body,
overpowering her speech and senses. If the Virgin Mary was free
of such a weakness, it was because she was the blessed vessel of
the Lord.42
Women’s circulation in the spaces of the church, the city, the theatre, and
even the home was deeply overdetermined and profoundly overburdened
with moral, economic, and social significance. The elision of women’s
family name upon marriage, or married name upon remarriage, meant
that every woman’s documentary record is a palimpsestic account of
movement through ideology, of travel from one of what Foucault calls
“a cluster of relations”43 to another.
Heidi Brayman’s important work on early modern reading and its
traces in the margins of printed books helped establish the common-
place that “the act of reading is … rooted in the material facts and cir-
cumstances of a specific culture and historical moment.”44 We have had
trouble, however, in aligning the history of women’s writing with early
modern marginalia and other kinds of manuscript additions to printed
texts: in Brayman’s view, for instance, “very few early modern margi-
nalia can be definitively attributed to women readers.”45 This is prob-
ably true in a literal sense – attribution is very difficult, and how do I
know that Mary Trepass wrote about herself in the margins of Folger
STC 2190, rather than a tutor, sibling, or parent? But the problem may
more certainly lie in the kind of marginalia that we consider meaningful,
and what we consider it to mean. According to Molekamp, “the British
Library collection has twelve Geneva Bibles in which alphabet or writ-
ing practice is present;” she notes that Vives’ Instrucion of a Christen
Woman recommended that women learn to write by copying from the
Bible, and only the Bible.46 William H. Sherman says that
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.
Our bias, therefore, has been towards books that women did not so
often read, and equally towards the kind of writing that women, it
seems, were less likely to add to printed books. So looking at the right
kind of books will help.
In a culture where words are instrumental and architectural, and where
books and bodies are spatial entities, perhaps we also need to think of writ-
ing and reading as heterotopic practices where spatial forms interact and
re-shape each other.47 If we think of women’s writing as a form of spatial
manipulation, renovation, extension, even re-decoration, we are rewarded.
In Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament,” a marvelous, witty, rich mag-
pie nest of a poem, the speaker claims ownership through perambulation
of the city, economy, and people of London. Lanyer’s “To Cookeham”
inspires a series of spatial metaphors in Katherine Larson’s description of
the poem: “Exemplifying the realm of ‘entire love’,”48 writes Larson,
Cookeham becomes a protected sphere that gives her privileged ac-

cess to the Cliffords and their textual activities and enables all three
women to enjoy intimacy with Christ. The poem maps out, in min-
iature, the coterie community that Lanyer tries so hard to create
throughout Salve Deus. In so doing, it underscores Lanyer’s quest
for exclusive space sequestered from male interference and enables
her further to advance her claim for authorial recognition and social
access. Once deprived of the sheltered world of Cookeham, Lanyer
turns to the writing of Salve Deus to construct her own exclusive
textual space.49
The incredible opening of Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World is a great

example of the paraphrastic, peripatetic sentence – a sentence form that
imposes spatiality on its readers as it wanders towards its grammatical
destination:
A Merchant travelling into a foreign Country, fell extreamly in Love

with a young Lady; but being a stranger in that Nation, and beneath
her both in Birth and Wealth, he could have but little hopes of ob-
taining his desire; however his Love growing more and more vehe-
ment upon him, even to the slighting of all difficulties, he resolved
at last to steal her away; which he had the better opportunity to do,
because her Fathers house was not far from the Sea, and she often
using to gather shells upon the shore accompanied not with above
two to three of her servants, it encouraged him the more to execute
his design.50
Before she gets to the story of her “feigned hero” in Oroonoko, Aphra
Behn digresses in the mode of travel literature, the literature of real,
imaginary space and its inhabitants:
But before I give you the Story of this Gallant Slave, ‘tis fit I tell
you the manner of bringing them to these new Colonies; those they
make use of there not being natives of the place: for those we live
with in perfect amity, without daring to command ‘em; but, on the
contrary, caress ‘em with all the brotherly and friendly affection
in the world; trading with them for their fish, venison, buffalo’s
skins, and little rarities; as Marmosets, a sort of Monkey as big
as a Rat or a Weesel, but of a marvelous and delicate shape, and
has Face and Hands like an Humane Creature: and Cousheries, a
little beast in the form and fashion of a Lion, as big as a kitten;
but so exactly made in all parts like that noble Beast, that it is it
in Miniature. 51
These spaces are bigger than a pretty room, and quite a bit more inter-
esting to explore.
Conclusion
The early modern spaces built of words by Whitney, Lanyer, Cavendish,
and Behn are predicated by the incursions into the spaces of owner-
ship, of education, and of the city itself that the marginalia cited in this
chapter represent. Hundreds of years later another argument claiming
intellectual and physical space for women writers would be published.
It begins:
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction –
what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to
explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat
down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words
meant.52
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is much concerned with space –

the room of one’s own is an antidote to the many spaces from which
women are excluded, by virtue of being women, but the essay itself in-
vents a rich, dynamic, new, and incomplete space as well, beginning at
the river of deixis: “This was the turf; there was the path,”53 and so on.
It’s perambulatory, chorographical:
Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls the rough-
ness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed con-
tained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could
penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless
one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon
whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. 54
Helen Smith has argued that early modern reading “was understood
to be both a bodily and an embodied practice: an act of consumption
that was productive and reproductive in physical as well as intellectual
terms;”55 so too, it follows, should we understand writing, as productive
and reproductive in physical and intellectual terms. Books gave women
access to spaces within which to write, within which to enlarge their
senses of themselves and the power of words.
In 1611, Anthony Stafford’s book Stafford’s Niobe: or His age of teares
was published. Described by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski as a “contemptus
mundi treatise,” and by me as “an invective against the perceived sins
of the times, as well as a call to discipline lust and desire,”56 the work
included a “wildly effusive dedication”57 to Anne Clifford, then Count-
ess of Dorset. “I am astonished Madam, I am astonished,” it reads,
and could fine in my heart to pray you…to desist from doing well,
for I am afraid that (ere long) you will disable my sex, falsify the
Scriptures, and make woman the stronger vessel. But it is not I alone,
whom you have troubled and amazed: you grow cruel, and disquiet
the first of your own sex, Eve whose grieved ghost methinks I see
rising out of her low-built bed, looking upon you with an envious
blush…For whereas she was created in perfection, and made her
self imperfect, you being created in imperfection, have almost made
your self perfect.58
According to George C. Williamson, Clifford’s early twentieth-century

biographer, the dedication survives in full in only one copy of the printed
book; the fact that two other copies have torn pages where the dedica-
tion was positioned suggests that it was torn from the printed copies be-
fore binding.59 This rending was presumably at the behest of either Anne
or her husband, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and their objections
were presumably on theological and social grounds, as Stafford was a
known Catholic sympathizer. Stafford goes to considerable lengths to
embody Clifford: for example, he writes “I will try if I can limne your
soul, as curiously with the pen as the limner doth your body with the
pencil;”60 he (somewhat confusedly) builds her a palace of herself, assert-
ing that “virtue wanted a beautiful lodgings, and therefore commanded
nature to build you, and that nature was content to fulfill her command,
with this condition: that virtue should make you her principal palace.”61
The effect of the censorship, then, is to remove Anne’s body – whether a
human likeness, or a palatial building – from the spaces in which it
might be seen, touched, inhabited – the places where books go – into
booksellers’ shops and private libraries, into the hands, minds, and hearts
of others. Smaller acts of erasure – such as the x-ing out in printed books
of handwritten proper names, or the elision of women’s birth names un-
der the cover of their married names – have the same effect: they remove
women from spaces they have, or might have, entered. In direct contrast
to censorship such as this, marginalia – as writing, rather than as a func-
tion of reading – allowed women to enter forbidden spaces and extend
their selves within those worlds. In this context, “Mary Trepass can read
this” should be read as a cry of triumph, of one girl’s success in gaining
access to the spaces, the language, and the modes of public discourse in
her world. Allow me to add, Katherine Acheson can write this.
Notes
1 Fleming, Graffiti, 29.
2 Watt, Cheap Print, 196–98 et passim; Fumerton, “Not Home,” 497–99.
3 See Hackenbroch, Needlework Tapestries, and Hamling, Decorating the
Godly Household.
5 Clifford, Memoir, 237.
6 Suzuki, “Anne Clifford,” 78.
8 Matchinske, “Serial Identity,” 66.
11 See Acheson, Visual Rhetoric, Ch. 2.
12 Selden, Titles, Folger STC 22178 copy 3; see Georgianna Ziegler’s chapter in
this volume for an image and discussion of this item.
13 Slights (Managing Readers, 714) citing Lawrence Lipking.
14 Goldberg, Writing Matter, 234.
15 Derrida, “The Battle of Proper Names.”
16 My examples in this chapter are from Bibles and Biblical paratexts in the Fol-
ger Shakespeare Library’s collection reviewed in 2013. People wrote all sorts
of things in Bibles, just as they did in other kinds of books—commentaries,
cross-references and mnemonics, but also doodles, pen-trials, attestations
of ownership, family history, commonplaces, and accounts. When Femke
Molekamp surveyed the Geneva Bibles in the British Library, she found that
more than half of them had been marked by readers (Molekamp, “Using a
Collection,” 9). William H. Sherman says that the same proportion of Bibles
are written in as other early modern books at the Huntington, about 1 in 5
(Used Books, xii and Chapter 4). What sets writing in Bibles apart from
writing in other books? The cultural, legal, social, theological, verbal, epis-
temological, and material centrality of the text, for one. The Bible was the
most likely book to be owned by early modern families, and it was used by
the family. Bibles were also the motive and method of literacy. As Sherman
says, “literacy didn’t just mean reading; it meant reading the Bible” (Used
Books, 72). The Bible was also more likely than most books to continue in
the family, so it was the place to put biographical information, and a forum
in which to read and write the continuity of the line, to imagine one’s rela-
tionships to the very local past and future. Finally, modern collections are
more likely to contain multiple copies of early modern Bibles that were used
in domestic settings than other popular works such as almanacs, so Bibles
that are written in are more readily available to us in larger numbers; they
give us a basis on which to make observations about reading and writing in
general.
17 Hammons, “Gendered Imagination,” 396.
18 For instance, Georgianna Ziegler’s survey of the STC titles in the Folger
collection identified 358 volumes bearing female names as ownership marks
(personal correspondence).
19 Henoch Clapham, A Briefe of the Bibles History. London, 1608. Folger STC
5334, front pastedown.
20 See Emma Smith’s chapter in this volume for an extended example of spou-
sal coupling in the flyleaves.
21 Zemon Davis, Gift, 380.
23 Smyth, Autobiography, 11.
24 Erasmus, Desiderius. D. Erasmi Roterodami Paraphrasis in Euangelium
secundum Ioannem. Basel, 1523. Folger PA8517.P3 J4 1523a Cage.
25 Magnusson, “Bacon.”
26 Peltonen, “Bacon.”
27 Magnusson, “Bacon.”
28 Folger STC 2190 is a Geneva Bible printed in 1603, the last one printed in
Elizabeth’s reign, bound in contemporary calfskin, with arms of James I on
both covers, ruled in red throughout. It is bound with a Psalter published
the same year (Sternhold and Hopkins; printed by Iohn Windet for Richard
Daye, STC 2502) and the two works are treated by their inscribers as one
volume. This volume has many signs of what Bradin Cormack and Carla
Mazzio call “use” —rather than reading, of which it actually shows very few
signs. There is only one annotation that is related to the Bible as a text, and
that one is not interpretive or mnemonic; there is only one entry that seems
to refer to the work as work rather than as paper. There are no family re-
cords per se, no lists of births, marriages, illnesses, travels, deaths, but there
are dozens of inscriptions. Heidi Brayman Hackel says of the marginalia—
by at least sixteen different writers—in a 1627 Arcadia that it reads “like
a family copy book: lines of poetry, resolutions of debts, school exercises,
mottos, aphorisms, accounts, drawings, even a legal summons and a laundry
list” (162), and the inscriptions in this Bible-Psalter combination are simi-
larly diverse and exuberant. This Bible is scrawled in by a number of people,
most of them apparently children, several of whom are surnamed “Trepass;”
for this reason, I refer to it as the Trepass Bible. There are two writers with
female names, Mary Trepass and Sarah Trepass.
29 Bourne, Antiquitates, 9.
30 Theodore Beze, Iob Expounded (London: 1589?), Folger STC 2764 copy 1,
n.s.4v.
31 John Mayer, The English Catechisme Explained (London: 1623), Folger
STC 17734; rear flyleaf.
32 Book of Common Prayer (London: 1632), Folger STC 16386 copy 2, sig.
B4r.
33 The Bible: That is, the Holy Scriptures Contained in the Old and New
Testament (London: 1580), Folger STC 2190, New Testament, 43.
34 Molekamp, “Funeral Sermons,” 52.
35 This book is also referred to in Joshua Calhoun’s chapter in this volume.
36 Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls,” 47.
37 Georgianna Ziegler, private correspondence.
38 The Bible (London: 1580) Folger STC 2129, New Testament, p. 75.
39 Ibid., Old Testament, 229.
40 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.
41 Ibid., 24.
42 Zemon Davis, Society and Culture, 125.
43 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24.
4 4 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 2.
45 Ibid., 203–4.
46 Molekamp, “Using a Collection” 12.
47 Critics writing about women’s reading often use spatiality and embodiment to
describe their subjects. Wendy Wall, for instance, in an essay about the shared
modalities of reading and housewifery constructed in early modern works on
the subject, writes that publishers “cued readers about how to move physi-
cally through a book” and “instilled a ‘literacy’ that entangled conceptions of
household labor with methods for reading” (Wall, “Literacy,” 386).
48 Larson, Conversation, 57 (quoting Lanyer, “Of Cookeham,” line 135).
49 Larson, Conversation, 57.
50 Cavendish, Blazing World, 1.
51 Behn, Oroonoko, 3–4.
52 Woolf, Room, 5.
53 Ibid., 9.
54 Ibid., 10.
55 Helen Smith, “’More swete’,” 414.
57 Lewalski, 139.
59 Williamson, Anne Clifford, 329–32.
61 Ibid., 208.
Section 2
Selves
5 Praying in the Margins
across the Reformation
Readers’ Marks in Early
Tudor Books of Hours
Elizabeth Patton
Religious uniformity of the kind aspired to in the Thirty-Nine Articles

of 1571, subsequently reinforced by the “reading in” ceremony for all
Church of England clergymen discussed by Austen Saunders in this
volume, was not immediately forthcoming in the wake of Henry VIII’s
Statement of Supremacy in 1534.1 As this study of marginalia in early
Tudor prayer books argues, although the English laity may have been
remarkably compliant in eliminating references to Thomas Becket and
to all papal indulgences, as mandated in the Henrician proclamations
of 1535 and 1538, that compliance was also remarkably nuanced. 2 As
Eamon Duffy and others have argued, superficial conformity on the
level of prayer book usage during the years of reform often masked, and
at times very lightly, more wide-ranging religious beliefs and practices.3
This essay examines marginalia and associated evidence of personal pi-
ety in two categories of prayer books: first, unreformed Latin Books of
Hours or Horae produced on the continent for the English market un-
til 1538, as exemplified here by those produced in the Paris workshops
of Simon Vostre and François Regnault; secondly, reformed English
primers, specifically the first state-sanctioned prayer books published in
England by William Marshall, beginning in 1534.
For the most part, this essay considers familiar categories of readers’
marks, such as repeating words or phrases in the margins, highlighting
sections of the page with marginal checks or manicules, lightly underlin-
ing specific passages, and adding marginal or interlinear prayers or com-
mentary; in at least two instances, however, marginalia is also defined
more broadly to include the kind of “cutting” and “grafting” of images
discussed by Jason Scott-Warren in this volume.4 When such marks occur
in prayer books, however, they often take on additional significance as
evidence of readers’ devotional practice, and it is from this perspective
that readers’ marks in early Tudor prayer books are discussed throughout
this essay. Largely excluded from consideration here are state-mandated
readers’ marks—expurgations, cancellations and erasures made in re-
sponse to Henrician proclamations—unless they can be shown to provide
contextual evidence for marks of personal piety. Section one considers
marginalia indicative of pious readerly practice, including added prayers,
94 Elizabeth Patton
in the largely quiet margins of pre-Reformation Horae produced by one
of Regnault’s continental predecessors, Simon Vostre, in collaboration
with his associate and illustrator Philippe Pigouchet. Section two extends
this consideration of demonstrably pious readers’ marks into the turbulent
years of the break with Rome, examining a series of Horae produced by
Regnault in the 1530s. Section three focuses tightly on marginalia in the
stringently reformed Marshall primers (his 1534 Prymer in Englyshe, and
his somewhat revised 1535 Goodly Prymer in Englyshe), examining evi-
dence of newly reformed readers’ attempts to pray directly to God.
In terms of its physical presence in the Book of Hours, the Little Office
of the Virgin in its “sparest form,” as described by Mary Erler, might oc-
cupy as little as a quarter of the text, “preceded by a calendar and by set
passages from the four Gospels” and followed “by the seven penitential
psalms, the litany of the saints, and the office of the dead” (495–96).5
Given this sacralized context, flanked by the Gospels and the saints, in-
formed by the psalms, continuously inflected by recursive patterns of
prayer at three-hour intervals and equally accessible to all (since even
those who understood little Latin or had no access to a text could par-
ticipate by reciting the rosary), the Little Office of the Virgin sank deep
roots into the culture of English lay piety, providing a constant reinforce-
ment of the rhythms of daily life in tandem with its continuous focus on
the soul’s progression towards salvation.6 For most of the non-monastic
population, the day began with a combined service for Matins, Lauds
and Prime at about six a.m., followed three hours later by Terce at nine,
Sexte at noon, Nones in the ninth hour or mid-afternoon, Vespers at
about six p.m. and Compline at days end (over time the latter two ser-
vices were combined and also referred to as Evensong). Earlier manu-
script Books of Hours had translated seamlessly into print by the end of
the fifteenth century.7 By 1527, the primary production of Latin Books of
Hours for England had nearly completed its shift from English printers
to the Paris workshop of François Regnault, who thereafter dominated
the English market with prayer books that followed the usage of Sarum
(or Salisbury), until all importation of such imprints from the continent
was banned in 1538.8 Psalms and all liturgical materials remained in
Latin in accordance with the 1408 Constitutions of Clarendon, but the
practice begun in England of including non-liturgical materials in English
increased, along with indulgences, in the products of continental presses.9
One: The Pre-reformation Years in England

The primary focus of the first section of this essay concerns evidence left
by readers who are drawn to the central feature of the Book of Hours—
the Little Office of the Virgin—for reasons of piety, concern for doctri-
nal fidelity, or religiously-motivated philological accuracy.
The margins of a beautifully hand-illuminated Latin Book of Hours
printed by Simon Vostre on vellum in 1502 are largely silent spaces,
Praying in the Margins: the Reformation 95
illustrated with metal-cut block prints and accented with illuminated
capitals in red, blue, and gold throughout (Folger STC 15987).10
Proof that a copy of this book, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library,
remained in use during the years of the break with Rome is evident in
a number of mandated erasures, such as the partial scraping away of
several lines of text referring to Thomas Becket and the cancellation of
two indulgences in the “Suffrages” or Prayers for the Dead following
Lauds.11 Other than these prescribed emendations, however, and perhaps
out of respect for the value and beauty of this early printed primer, which
retains the red-ruled lines of the incunabular period, successive readers
have left few traces of their progress through its pages. On the very last
page, as shown in Figure 5.1, two sets of double quotes in the left margin
point, first, to “the viii. versis of saint Bernard” and “thre short prayers
taught by our lady to seynt Brigitte” while the second set points to the
“Psalmes of the passion.” In the same color ink, a relatively contempo-
rary italic hand, presumably that of the reader who has marked these
two entries, has also demonstrated an impulse towards bibliographical
precision by adding, at the end of the table of contents, the title of the
last prayer in the book, “Officium de Sancto Spiritu” (Office of the Holy
Spirit) which had escaped the attention of compositors.12
Some of the same metal-cut prints appear in a 1512 Vostre Book of
Hours, printed on vellum but no longer ruled in red to resemble a man-
uscript (Folger STC 15913); in this volume, a contemporary reader using
secretary hand has added a seven-part prayer sequence for the Hours of
Figure 5.1 Hore presentes ad vsum Sarum (Paris, 1502), Folger STC 15897,
fol. Q8r. Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from the collection of the
96 Elizabeth Patton
the Cross in an empty space at the end of each service. The first of these
is inserted into a blank space between illustrated borders at the end of
Matins, as shown in Figure 5.2.13
The other six prayers in the sequence appear at the end of each ser-
vice in turn until Compline, which in this printed text is combined with
Vespers.14 Although the inserted prayer shown in Figure 5.2 is not sepa-
rately labeled as a prayer for Matins, that title does appear in what may be
an early printed source for this sequence, in which the first prayer is enti-
tled “Ad Matutinum Precatio” and the other six prayers are correspond-
ingly titled for each of the canonical hours, culminating in “Ad Horam
Completorii” (“[Prayers] for the Hour of Compline”).15 This printed se-
quence was published in 1535 in the collected works the humanist and
anti-Lutheran polemicist Johannes Faber (1478–1541), future Bishop of
Vienna, whose work also circulated earlier in more ephemeral formats.
In both the Faber text and in the manuscript insertions, the prayer for
Matins invokes Christ as the image of God—“O Domine Jesu Christe,
Deus invisibilis imago”—whereas each subsequent prayer begins with the
more traditional invocation of Christ as the Son of God: “O Domine Iesu
Christe Fili Dei Vivi.”16 The reader who has added this prayer sequence
to the 1512 Vostre imprint may have shared with Faber an appreciation
of the non-Lutheran focus on Christ’s human form, although it is equally
possible that both Faber and this anonymous reader were drawn to “the
underlying tonal quality … of Erasmian humanism favored by both con-
servatives and reformers in the Henrician court.”17 Additions to this 1512
Vostre Hore are not limited to Christocentric materials, however; in an
Officium Beate Marie Virginis ad vsum Sarum (Vostre, 1512),

Figure 5.2
Folger STC 15913, sig. C3r. Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from
the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
fficium Beate Marie Virginis ad vsum Sarum (Vostre, 1512),

Figure 5.3 O
Folger STC 15913, sig. F8r. Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from the
instance of textual correction similar to that shown in Figure 5.1, but em-
ploying a much more skillful italic hand, this reader has erased and cor-
rected a compositor’s error in the first line of the Marian antiphon, “Salve
Regina,” in which separate abbreviations for “mater” and “miserecordia”
had become conflated18 (see Figure 5.3).
Close resemblances between the formal italic shapes of the inserted let-
ter forms in this corrected line and the shapes of the letters in the printed
text indicate that this reader alternated easily between this italic script
and the secretary hand used for the inserted marginal prayer sequence,
thus quite literally enacting the fluid relationship between manuscript and
print that persisted into the early decades of the sixteenth century.19 By
the end of the 1520s, in fact, printed Horae contained so many intermixed
offices for Christ, the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit, as well as short prayer
sequences for individual saints, that the Paris printer François Regnault,
to be discussed in more detail in the next section, provided concordances
for these intermixed offices in his Table of Contents.
Two: The Years of the Break with Rome

The volumes discussed in this section, all produced in the Paris workshop
of François Regnault in the 1530s and in circulation during the years of
schism, often bear evidence of ownership by a series of readers who left a
variety of religiously-motivated marks. In general, however, these marks
cannot easily be associated with specific confessional beliefs: some
owners canceled indulgences and other passages in compliance with
98 Elizabeth Patton
mandates, at times aggressively, while other owners (at times possibly
the same owners) marked these texts for more directly pious purposes
as well. The process of sorting through these marks is assisted to some
extent in this study by the circumstance that almost all of the Regnault
Horae discussed here, most of them quarto format imprints from either
1530 or 1534, share identical pagination: in addition to their shared title
page woodcut showing the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, all
subsequent folios in these volumes are virtually indistinguishable, vary-
ing only at the level of incremental differences in spacing between words
and border woodcuts. 20 The juxtaposed pages of separate imprints can
therefore serve as a common background against which to collate margi-
nalia rather than text. For example, corresponding pages in the Prayers
for the Dead following Compline in two versions of Regnault’s quarto
Horae, published in 1530 and 1534 (Folger STC 15968 and STC 15984),
are identically filled with rubricated text, but the sixteenth-century own-
ers of copies of these imprints have treated these rubricated pages very
differently. One of several readers of the 1530 edition, for example, has
firmly crossed out the page-long indulgence on STC 15968, fol. 54r, in
the process also canceling out the name of the former queen mother,
Elizabeth of York, the “excellent princesse elizabeth late qwene of en-
glond”21 (see Figure 5.4).
In contrast, a reader of the later 1534 edition seems to have reached
a diplomatic compromise, drawing nearly invisible lines through only
small areas of the rubricated text of this indulgence on STC 15968, fol.
54r without in the least affecting its readability, and in some instances
even appearing to underline the text 22 (see Figure 5.5).
The contrast between marks made by these two readers of separate
editions is even more evident in a comparison of another identical folio,
also part of the Prayers for the Dead in the Suffrages following Lauds. In
this case, a reference to Thomas Becket is at issue: a firm and unambigu-
ous cancellation on fol. 51v of the earlier 1530 text, STC 15968, fol. 51v,
of a prayer to this English saint, deposed by Henry VIII because of his
support for the papacy, contrasts strongly with the more diplomatic and
apparently thoughtful markings made in the same passage by the reader
of the 1534 text, STC 15984, who used a moderately dark line to cancel
the name of the deposed saint on fol. 51v, while lightly underscoring a
brief portion of the accompanying Latin prayer.
Such contrasts persist throughout these two imprints: the earlier is
heavily expurgated throughout, while the later is more selectively marked
in a consistently lighter hand. The visual impact of the more assertive
cancelations in the earlier 1530 volume is so pervasive, in fact, that it
nearly serves to obscure evidence of a markedly consistent devotional fo-
cus common to all readers of Folger STC 15968 and STC 15984: neither
text possesses any cancellations or corrections in the pages or margins
of its central feature, the Little Office of the Virgin (with the exception,
Figure 5.4 H
ore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis Ecclesie
ritum (Paris, 1530), Folger STC 15968, fol. 54r. Photograph by Eliz-
abeth Patton from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
100 Elizabeth Patton
Figure 5.5 H
ore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie
ritum (Paris, 1534), Folger STC 15984, fol. 54r. Photograph by Eliz-
abeth Patton from the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
as discussed, of indulgences in the Suffrages following Lauds). That cen-

tral office thus remains a quiet devotional space—so quiet, in fact, that it
would also be easy to miss a repetitive pattern of very light check marks,
quite possibly the work of an earlier reader, in the margins of that earlier
and more heavily marked text. Too faint to reproduce effectively in the
present format, these feather-light check marks in the margins of Folger
STC 15968 can in fact be collated with the habitual light underlinings
made by the reader of Folger STC 15984, just as the more visible markings
in the juxtaposed folios shown in Figures 5.4 and 5.5 have been collated.23
The very light marginal check marks present in the Office of the Virgin
in the earlier imprint also appear on each page of the final “Tabula” or
Table of Contents of Folger STC 15968: nine of these can be seen in the
left margin of the final page, where adjacent entries have also been lightly
underlined. Indicative of pious attention to the prayers in the Hours of
the Virgin, these marks bear witness to the continuing use of this prayer
book for its intended purpose—prayer—even in the midst of confessional
conflict. Additional examples from other contemporary Horae could be
adduced, all suggestive of readers’ efforts to comply with mandates while
also ensuring that their books continued to serve a devotional purpose.24
What may be a third hand has left an annotation or caption on the fi-
nal page of the more heavily marked of these two Regnault Hore, Folger
STC 15968. The phrase, “The arms of the high and mighty prince Jesus
of Nazareth” appears in secretary hand immediately below the printer’s
mark, an elaborate device displaying a cross with a crown of thorns
surrounded by the instruments of Christ’s passion, all of these enclosed
within the shape of a military shield, which in its turn is surmounted by
a battle helmet (see Figure 5.6).
Although a signed inscription follows this inserted caption, it has
been made unreadable by cross-hatchings which leave only a final trun-
cated symbol or set of initials, as if the writer had perhaps had second
thoughts about revealing his or her identity, or ownership had changed.
As discussed in the first section, Christocentric prayers were increasingly
prominent in pre-Reformation Horae, and while there is nothing inher-
ently illegal in the inscription, this reader might well have found it nec-
essary, perhaps following Henry VIII’s 1534 Statement of Supremacy,
to rethink the wisdom of being associated with any reference, however
correct, to an alternative “high and myghty prince.”
Similar evidence of readers who appear to second guess the wisdom of
their own marginal comments can be found in a British Library associa-
tion copy of Regnault’s 1530 Hore (STC 15968), on the title page of which
the name “Lucie Savage” has been written in a contemporary secretary
hand. This owner also seems to have had second thoughts about an in-
scription she added at the conclusion of an English translation of the “Fif-
teen Oes” of St. Bridget.25 Although her inscription has been scratched
through in a manner similar to the example shown in Figure 5.6, enough
remains to suggest that Lucie Savage recorded the pardons she hoped to
obtain by saying this repetitive prayer, but then questioned the wisdom
of allowing her record to stand.26 In 1594, a later owner of this vol-
ume employed secretary hand to record a deed or financial arrangement
whose date is still partially visible in the cropped margin of the October
page of the Index.27 It is worth speculating that this 1594 transaction
also marks the period when another intervention was made in this book:
several small metal-cut images of the Virgin were neatly cut out, possibly
by a Catholic reader seeking portable objects of devotion less potentially
incriminating that this now illicit quarto Book of Hours.28
Another series of readers’ marks in a single volume that might seem to
represent opposing confessional perspectives on the part of a succession
of owners appears in the margins of a British Library multiple association
copy of Regnault’s 1534 quarto Book of Hours (STC 15984).29 Two of
this book’s four or more owners have identified themselves: the first, James
Braybrooke, has signed his name in full once, at the top of the title page, and
three additional times using just his surname: the first of these appears on
the same title page next to the date of publication, the second at the end of
the calendar, and the third at the top of the final page, which bears the same
militarized image of crucifix and crown of thorns shown in the printer’s
mark in Figure 5.6. The book’s apparent second owner, “Robert Kistow,”
signed his name just once, beneath that same printer’s mark30 (Figure 5.7).
Both signatures are followed by inscriptions which appear to signify
mutual recognition of the book’s transfer of ownership. Just barely
Figure 5.6 H
ore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis Ecclesie
ritum (Paris, 1530), Folger STC 15968, n.p. (Endpage with printer’s
mark). Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from the collection of the
Figure 5.7 H
ore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie
ritum (Paris, 1534). ©British Library Board. Shelfmark c.35.e.11,
n.p. (Endpaper with printer’s mark).
legible in Braybrooke’s largely inscrutable inscription at the top of the

page are the words “thys … boke,” whereas Robert Kistow’s more clearly
written subscription seems to point unambiguously upwards towards
Braybrooke’s testimony, identifying that former owner as a witness to
the book’s transfer of ownership: “Casc[us] possessor meus est possessor
testis Roberto Kistow” (“The old owner [is] witness [that] my owner is
Robert Kistow”). Although Kistow then concludes his inscription with a
minatory “Cave” (“Beware!”), the tone of this transaction appears to be
friendly enough, with a possible pun on the Latin word “cascus” (“old”),
used to describe both the “former” and (possibly) “aged” owner. 31 The
distinctive colors of the two readers’ marks as shown in the December
Calendar entry (see Figure 5.8), make it possible to theorize the following
sequence of events: before transferring ownership of the book, the first
owner, Braybrooke, obediently canceled the entry for Thomas Becket
by drawing two horizontal lines through it in his customary dark grey
ink, and then reinforcing these with a series of short cross-hatchings (see
Figure 5.8).
In the calendar entry for December, the second owner, Robert Kistow,
used his distinctive sepia ink to re-enter Becket’s name and title above
the canceled line; he then underscored a four-line rubricated English
rhyme on the timor mortis theme that follows shortly after the Becket
entry on the same page. While Kistow’s purpose in highlighting this
short poem on the inevitability of death may have been to extend the
apparent pun on Braybrooke’s greater age, he may also have been call-
ing attention to the divine justice that would, in the end, void all civil
mandates, including those deposing saints such as Thomas Becket. In
addition to this apparent display of friendly toleration across confes-
sional lines (the coordinated inscriptions above and below the printer’s
mark may well have been made at the same time), Kistow used his new
book for devotional purposes as well: a series of crosses made with sepia
ink mark several sub-headings in the “Commendationes Animarum,” a
traditional component of the Book of Hours that follows the central Of-
fice of the Virgin and consists entirely of Psalm 119, a lengthy psalm of
eighty verses divided in the printed text into ten sections of eight verses
each; Robert Kistow’s crosses mark eight of these ten sections. 32
A third hand also appears in this book’s margins, perhaps that of an
owner who came into possession following the 1538 proclamation ban-
ning indulgences. Using thick black ink, this hand has moved quickly
through the pages of British Library STC 15984, canceling all papal
Figure 5.8 Hore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie

ritum (Paris, 1594). ©British Library Board. Shelfmark c.35.e.11, n.p.
indulgences with slash-like cross-hatchings made so forcefully that on
more than one occasion the quill tip has torn the paper. 33 This owner
clearly did not pause to read the text, however, but turned each page so
quickly that the heavy ink remained wet and the facing pages served as
blotters, thus canceling not only papal indulgences but prayers as well,
such as one to “The Holy Image of God” (“De sancta facie domine”) on
fol. 74r; similar instances are to be found throughout. 34 Although the
vehement and occasionally destructive nature of these marks would seem
to suggest that the reader’s opposition to papal indulgences extended to
the physical book as well, the untouched pages of the central Office of
the Virgin again argue against this assumption; as in the case of all Reg-
nault Horae consulted for this study, the pages of the central office in
British Library STC 15984 have no negative markings. Much later, when
this book, with its multi-faceted marginalia, was cropped and rebound,
a nineteenth-century lithograph of the Annunciation bearing a “New-
man” stamp was tipped in next to the Regnault title page, identifying
this owner as a late nineteenth-or early twentieth-century Catholic who
appears to have preserved this mutilated survival of the years of schism
with reverence.35 Prior to this rebinding process, a page containing “a
prayer for them that entende to be married, or be newe married” was
removed; whether this was an expression of opposition to the views on
marriage in this section, or, alternatively, the act of someone who wished
to have frequent access to this prayer (and who saw little use for the rest
of this heavily defaced book), remains an open question. 36
In summary, then, the apparently irenic markings that can dominate the
visual field when these identically foliated Books of Hours are juxtaposed
do not necessarily represent evidence of opposed doctrinal leanings, since
in all cases (other than in the Suffrages for Lauds and Compline which
contain indulgences) readers of the Hours of the Virgin in these Regnault
Horae have either made pious interventions in the margins of the central
office, or have allowed those margins to remain unmarked, giving them a
kindred relationship to the margins of the early sixteenth-century Vostre
Horae discussed in section one—largely silent spaces where even the faint-
est traces left by readers using their texts for the purpose of prayer can be
discerned. Nevertheless, all of these accumulated marks, positive or nega-
tive, doctrinal or polemical, remained part of, and changed, the devotional
setting in which owners of these books attempted to engage in prayer.
Three: The First Reformed Primers in English

The evidence gathered in the previous section, pointing to a shared respect
for the central Hours of the Virgin among readers who, at least at times, ap-
pear to hold conflicting views, recalls Ethan Shagan’s caution against trying
to identify firm confessional affiliations during a period in which many of
the English “never wholly accepted nor wholly opposed the reformation.”37
Even that active agent of reform, Thomas Cromwell, for example, was seen
weeping and “saying of Our Lady Mattins” just prior to Cardinal Wolsey’s
demise in 1530, yet not much later he was busy providing William Marshall
with translations of Luther’s works for the first English primer to exclude
not only “Our Lady Mattins,” but the entire Little Office of the Virgin.38
Early in 1534, English and continental printers had received the “tacit ap-
proval of both Cranmer and Cromwell” to include English translations of
portions of the Bible, psalms, and other liturgical material in their publica-
tions.39 In large part informed by these translations, A Prymer in Englyshe,
published by John Bydell for William Marshall in 1534 “cum privilegio
regali,” was the first state-sanctioned reformed primer to be printed in
England entirely in the vernacular (STC 15986).40 Only in the introduc-
tory “Salutation of the Angel” and in the accompanying “instruction howe
and in what maner we aughte to pray” is the Blessed Virgin Mary men-
tioned.41 Marshall published a revised version of the Prymer in Englyshe
in 1535: A goodly prymer in englyshe, newly corrected and printed (STC
15988).42 Although the Goodly Prymer restored the Litany of the Saints
and Prayer for the Dead, or “Dirge,” which had been eliminated from the
Prymer in English, neither the 1534 Prymer in Englyshe nor the revised
1535 Goodly Prymer provided readers with any intercessory figures or im-
ages; more pertinent, perhaps, for this study, they contained no indulgences
or other material requiring cancellation, making confessionally-inflected
marginal interventions in these reformed primers considerably less preva-
lent than in the continental Horae discussed in sections one and two. These
early reformed primers invited textual correction of another kind, however:
readers seemed to feel a need to correct perceived errors in these largely
unattributed English translations of Lutheran sources.43 Examples of such
textual corrections are to be found in an association copy of the 1538 edi-
tion of the Goodly Prymer, Folger Library STC 15998, signed on the ti-
tle page by an early seventeenth century bibliophile, Humphrey Dyson.44
In two instances, Dyson’s marginal notations supply passages elided from
Lutheran sources, focusing, as did several readers of the Regnault Horae
already discussed, on the nature of Christ as God, while also drawing par-
ticular attention to the nature of the relationship between Christ and the
Virgin Mary.45 Even more interesting from the perspective of this study,
in the lower margins of two pages in this text an earlier hand appears,
possibly that of a young student, or perhaps that of a woman not formally
trained; in either case, the awkwardly sprawling secretary hand has copied
verses from two psalms into the lower margins of the respective pages: “Oh
Lorde, my heart is not proud, neither look I alofte …”46 (Figure 5.9) and
“Caste me not away from thy face”47 (Figure 5.10).
If these separate verses are considered as evidence of a reformed read-
er’s attempts to engage in unmediated communication with God, how-
ever, this reader appears not to be finding such communication easy. As
Alec Ryrie has documented, it was not uncommon for what he terms an
Figure 5.9 A goodly prymer in englyshe (London, 1538), Folger STC 15998,
Sig. Q1r. Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from the collection of the
“inability to pray” to overtake early Protestants attempting to address

the deity directly, without mediation:
At the core of both ease and difficulty was an alarming simplicity: to

pray meant merely to strip your heart bare before God and to hear
his voice speaking through you. No wonder some people found them-
selves unable to do it. That daunting, bare simplicity—meeting God,
unmediated—was the ideal. In practice, of course, complexity crept in.
(207–8)48
By directing attention to what people did “in practice,” Ryrie identifies

a key dividing line. In a purely intellectual sense, the Goodly Prymer
provides numerous points of entry for a penitent seeking contact with the
deity. Many of the psalms, now available to be read and recited in E
nglish
without fear of retribution, offer positive ways of “looking up” and pray-
ing directly to God, such as the upward-looking optimism of Psalm 123
goodly prymer in englyshe (London, 1538), Folger STC 15998,

Figure 5.10 A
sig. X1r. Photograph by Elizabeth Patton from the collection of the
in the Goodly Prymer’s service for Sexte, which models direct eye con-
tact with God on analogy with the homely familiarity of interactions
between servant and master or mistress: “unto the[e] lyft I myn iyes…. as
the servaunts ieys are ever upon theyr maysters, & the maydens waytyng
upon theyr maystres.”49 In practice, however, the contemporary reader of
this 1538 Goodly Prymer (Folger 15998) has either chosen not to echo
such upward-looking psalms, or has yet to achieve a mental vantage point
from which to make the kind of spiritual contact that came so easily to
the laity of England in pre-Reformation years, when they addressed the
divinity daily in repetitive prayer rituals, continuously assisted by inter-
cessory figures such as Christ incarnate, the Virgin, and the saints. Why
has this reader chosen, instead, to contemplate verses from psalms that
model not looking up, and that seem to express a fear that God might
turn his face away? The first of the two inscribed verses, containing the
phrase, “I look not up above my station,” is written in the margin di-
rectly below Psalm 131, one of the gradual psalms indicative of progres-
sion and hope, in the service for Compline. The second of these inscribed
verses, however, from the universally familiar fourth penitential psalm,
the Miserere mei, was not inscribed by the reader below the psalm where
it appears in the sequence of seven penitential psalms (fols. 37r–37v).50
Instead, this anonymous reader was attracted to the verse in its consid-
erably amplified form in Girolamo Savonarola’s “Exposition on the 51st
Psalm,” an extended meditation on penitence by the late fifteenth-century
Florentine Dominican and charismatic preacher.51 His “Exposition” (al-
most certainly translated by William Marshall), had cross-confessional
appeal and was incorporated into the Goodly Prymer immediately fol-
lowing the restored Litany and the seven penitential psalms.52 Savonaro-
la’s “Exposition” not only provided words with which a petitioner might
speak to God directly, it also provided one of the intercessory figures
otherwise absent from this stringently reformed and largely Lutheran
prayer book. In Savonarola’s verse by verse amplification of psalm 51,
King David’s anguished expression of penitence before God in verse 13,
which caught the reader’s attention, is further amplified: “Beholde lorde,
I stande before thy face, that I may fynde mercy … Caste me not confused
from thy face.” This plea now modulates into a conversation between the
reader and Christ, as Savonarola creates one of the ekphrastic images that
distinguished his sermons, importing the story of the Canaanite woman
from the synoptic gospels and shifting the focus of the entreaty in verse
13 from God the Father to God the Son. Savanarola ventriloquizes the
Canaanite woman’s conversation with Christ, who eventually praises her
persistence and complies with her request that he free her daughter from
a demon.53 “I ask no bread” she says, addressing a very human Christ
surrounded by his apostles, and using the first person singular as King
David had done when addressing God: “I ask not that fauour that thy
children shulde haue,” she continues, but only “the crummes which fall
from thy chyldren’s table … let not me be destitute of this crumme of
grace.”54 A reader of the Goodly Prymer, especially a woman reader,
who is attempting to pray to God “unmediated,” might well find herself
drawn (as Savonarola intends) into the mode of prayer modeled by the
Canaanite woman, a woman like herself, whose “herte is not proude,”
and who does not look “alofte,” yet a woman who persists.55 If the reader
who found the verse, “cast me not away from thy face,” worthy of being
copied into the lower margin continued reading Savonarola’s three page
amplification of those words, he or she would indeed remain in conver-
sation with God—not with “God” writ large, however, but rather with
the second person of the Trinity in his manifestly human persona. The
presence of the intercessory figure of Christ in this reformed primer is
vividly reminiscent of the prayers inserted into the margins of the 1512
Vostre Book of Hours discussed in section one, which present a double
formulation of Christ, not only as the “image of the invisible God” (“dei
invisibilis imago”) but also as the human son of God (“fili dei vivi”).
Unlike this reader of Folger Library STC 15998, who “look[s] not up,”
another contemporary reader of a British Library copy of the Goodly Pry-
mer (British Library STC 15988) does not hesitate to draw attention to the
act of looking up towards God. In an association copy of the 1535 edition
of the Goodly Prymer signed by “Elizabeth Manners” (British Library
C.25.gc) it may have been Manners herself, or perhaps a family member,
who placed a check mark in the margin next to this passage: “the iyes of all
thynges loke up, and wayte upon the[e] (O lorde)” (Figure 5.11).
Figure 5.11 John Bydell for William Marshall. A goodly prymer in englyshe
(London, 1535). ©British Library Board. Shelfmark C.25.gc, sig.
A8v.
Part of the opening passage of “A Christen Instruction,” which ap-

pears towards the end of the Goodly Prymer, this uplifting sentiment
in “The grace or blessynge of the table” initiates a series of suggested
prayers for each of the daily meals, meant to be said with the entire
family gathered at the table, the children “standynge before it, theyr
handes elevated & ioyned together.”56 The first sentence of the opening
prayer in this section, highlighted by the marginal check mark shown in
Figure 5.11, reads in full: “the iyes of all thynges loke up, and wayte upon
the[e] (O lorde) and thou gyuest them meate in due tyme.” Elizabeth
Manners, however—if indeed these are her own marginal notations—is
evidently not pleased with the formula used to address God in this trans-
lation, particularly with respect to the assertion in the partially canceled
passage shown in Figure 5.11: “Thou openest thy hande & replenyshest
all thynges lyuynge with thy blessynge” (emphasis added). Another mar-
ginal note adjacent to this passage supplies an alternative grammati-
cal form for “Thou openest”: “Doost thowe [open]”—thus changing a
confident assertion of God’s providence into a question or request, and
bringing the syntax of this plea for divine providence into line with what
Ryrie characterizes as a necessarily indeterminate process. 57 Additional
underlinings and marginal marks throughout Manner’s copy of the
Goodly Prymer continue to critique the translation in this manner. With
respect to readers’ marks in this association copy of the Goodly Prymer,
as well as those marks and canceled annotations made by Lucie Savage
in the 1534 Regnault Hore discussed in section two, this essay inter-
sects with the work of scholars who extract “material traces of women’s
reading found in the margins and title-pages of early modern books.”58
Whether or not Manners and Savage, for example, were connected to
members of those families in Katherine Parr’s extended circle remains to
be determined, but it is certainly not impossible: ongoing studies have
now traced borrowings from Marshall’s primers not only in Katherine
Parr’s “personal prayerbook,” but also in collections of prayers written,
compiled or read by Queen Elizabeth, and in private compilations by in-
dividuals such as Elizabeth Tyrwhit.59 While such borrowings show that
women in Katherine Parr’s circle and beyond were reading these early
reformed primers, their borrowings are not limited to reformed works:
Susan Felch, for example, juxtaposes printed Books of Hours with pri-
vate prayer books and compilations from this same early period of re-
form in England, identifying what she calls a “cheerful ecumenicity” in
individual efforts to construct prayer miscellanies “whose offerings are
both consistent with the new Protestantism and part of the ongoing,
continuous tradition of Christian prayer.”
Conclusion
The examples of marginalia discussed here confirm previous studies of
such interventions in early Tudor Books of Hours: on the level of simple
piety, readers marked their prayer books in order to guide themselves
back, daily, to prayers offering spiritual comfort, exhortation, or even
timely warning. Although it is possible, given such an iterative context,
to draw considerable information from the slightest marginal evidence,
even in this small sample the picture changes as reformed readers leave
traces of their attempts to pray directly to God. This study can be fur-
ther contextualized by (and contributes to) ongoing studies of private
prayer miscellanies, including prayers from both pre-Reformation
and post-Reformation sources—compiled by the same readers who
had learned to parse indulgences and read their prayer books critically
during the years of reform.
Notes
Particular thanks are due here to the Folger Institute for granting me a Short-
Term Fellowship in 2013 that facilitated my initial survey of all Latin Horae and
English primers in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
1 See Austen Saunders’ chapter in this volume.

2 Following the 1534 Act of Supremacy, a proclamation in June of 1535
required that the title of “pope” or “papa” be erased or otherwise expur-
gated in prayer books and other documents, and a subsequent 1538 proc-
lamation required similar treatment for all prayers promising indulgences,
referencing Purgatory, or naming any of the Catholic popes and certain
saints, especially Thomas Becket; see Hughes and Larkin. Tudor Royal
Proclamations, 236–37.
3 Duffy, Marking the Hours; also see The Stripping of the Altars.
4 “Cut-and-Paste Bookmaking” [1].
5 Erler, “Devotional Literature,” especially at 501–6; also see Susan Felch’s
concise but comprehensive overview of the migration of the canonical hours
from clerical breviary to Book of Hours, “A Brief History of English Private
Prayer Books,” in Elizabeth Tyrwhit, 19–31. For a detailed summary dis-
cussion of the contents of the Prymer or book of hours, see Bishop, “On the
Origin of the Prymer,” xi–xxxviii.
6 On the use of the rosary (or “the Psalter of Our Lady”) as an alternative
to manuscript or print Books of Hours, see Dillon, “Praying by Number,”
at 454.
7 Hoskins, Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis; Burton, Three Primers Put Forth;
and Butterworth, The English Primers.
8 Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 503; also see, by the same author, “Maner to
Live Well,” 229–43.
9 Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 146.
10 Hore presentes ad usum Sarum (Paris, 1502), Folger Library (HH219,
Hoskins 24, STC 15897).
11 Ibid., fols. b8v, h6r and I2r; references to popes are also erased throughout
the Kalendar.
12 This emendation appears on the final page of the unfoliated index of Folger
STC 15897; readers of a slightly earlier but otherwise quite similar version
of this Vostre imprint, now in the British Library, have left the error uncor-
rected. See Hore presentes ad vsum Sarum (Paris, 1498), British Library
(BL IA 40335, Hoskins 24).
13 Officium beate Marie virginis ad vsum Sarum… (Paris: Symonis Vostre,
1512), Folger Library (STC 15913, Hoskins 34, HH 155/11). See Eamon
Duffy’s account of prayers added over time to the fifteenth-century manu-
script Book of Hours belonging to John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (Mark-
ing the Hours, 69–80).
14 “O d[omi]ne Jesu, dei invisibilis imago, splendor et claritas, gloria eius, qui
patienter, ut a Judaeis capereris, ligareris, severissimaeq[ue] per omnia tract-
areris[,] noctu tulisti: Da [ut?] ex tenebris evocati, in tuo lumine ambulem[us],
ne tenebrarum nos occupent lemures. Amen.” (“O lord Jesus, image, splendor
and renown of the invisible god, his glory, you who were patiently bound and
by the Jews, taken at night: permit us to walk out of the shadows in your light,
so that the demons of the shadows may not capture us”), sig. C3r.
15 Precationes Christiana. With the exception of minor variations in phras-
ing, the untitled prayers added by the reader of this Vostre Hore (STC
15913), align precisely with the sequence of prayers printed in the 1535–
40 edition of Faber’s collected works (fols.12r–14r); the Latin text can
be accessed in the later 1579 edition at the following URL: http://daten.
digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0002/bsb00021446/images/index.htm-
l?id=00021446&groesser=&fip=eayaxssdaseayayztsxdsydsdaseayafsdre-
wq&no=1&seite=3.
16 Representations of Christ as the “dei invisibilis imago,” or the human face
of an incomprehensible godhead, were pervasive in the Pauline epistles,
e.g., Colossians 11–17; Hebrews 1.3, 13.15; 2 Corinthians 3.18, 4.47; and
Romans 8.29.
17 Felch, Elizabeth Tyrwhit, 36.
18 See the Bodleian copy of STC 15913, sig. f 8r, in which this error remains
uncorrected.
19 In comparison, see the much more casual hand of the added index entry in
the 1502 Vostre edition (Figure 5.1). On distinctions between “book script”
and “documentary script,” see Derolez, Palaeography, 5.
20 Additional differences throughout include variations in abbreviations (with
corresponding changes in line length but not phrasing) and, less frequently,
in the subjects of border woodcuts. I am grateful to Goran Proot for his
assistance in noting and measuring such variations.
21 Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis Ecclesie ritum…
(Paris: François Regnault, 1530), Folger Library (STC 15968, HH220,
Hoskins 93). On the queen mother’s association with this indulgence, see
Duffy, Marking the Hours, 144.
22 Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis Ecclesie ritum…
(Paris: François Regnault, 1534), British Library (STC 15984, HH223,
Hoskins 113); for additional examples of what Duffy refers to as “neat and
minimalist conformity,” see Marking the Hours, 149–61.
23 See, e.g., fol. 31v in both imprints. Small check marks in the borders of the
Little Office of the Virgin in STC 15968 can be found in Matins, fols. 14r,
15v, and 16r; Lauds, fols. 17v and 18r; Prime, fols. 29r, 29v, 30r, and 31v;
Terce, fol. 34r; sexte, fol. 34v; None, fol. 37r; Vespers, fol. 39r; and Com-
pline, fol. 43r. Additionally, the pattern of feather-like check marks is also
evident in the Suffrages following Compline where two manicules point to
non-papal indulgences (fols 16v and 18v).
24 See, e.g., Regnault, Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisbur-
iensis Ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1534), British Library (BL C.34.h.2, Hoskins
113), fols. 54r and 69r); and Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum
Sarisburiensis Ecclesie ritum (Paris, 1536), British Library (STC 15987, BL
C.34.h.15, Hoskins [not listed]), fols. 49r, 59r, 63r, 64r and passim.
25 Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie ritum
(Paris, 1530), British Library (BL C.35.h.11, Hoskins 93), fol. 190v. [n.b.:
the foliation of this page in both STC 15968 and STC 15984 is incorrectly
given as “xc” rather than “cxc”].
26 For a comprehensive discussion of “The Fifteen Oes,” see White, The Tudor
Books, 216–29.
27 Sig. X6v.
28 British Library STC 15968, sig. 57v. For a discussion of one of these images,
“the Virgin and her titles,” which also appears on the title page of Regnault’s
1530 Book of Hours (STC 15973), see Duffy, Marking the Hours, 153.
29 Hore Beatissime virginis Marie ad legitimu[m] Sarisburie[n]s (Paris, 1534),
British Library (STC 15984, BL Shelfmark c.35.e.11, Hoskins 113).
30 See the identical image in Figure 5.6, where a reader has added the descrip-
tion of Christ as a “hygh and mighty prince.”
31 The Latin adjective “cascus” (“old” or “old-fashioned”) is etymologically
related to the adjective “canus” (“whitened with age”). I am indebted to
Earle Havens for expanding the abbreviations in this inscription and to Troy
Tower for tracing its etymological connections.
32 Marks such as these very definitive crosses and the manicules discussed in
section three may well fall into the category of “pragmatic” readers’ marks,
in this case religiously motivated, as referenced in this volume by Georgi-
anna Ziegler.
33 See, e.g., fol. 73v.
34 Fols. 54v–56r, 65v–66r, 75v–76r, and passim.
35 This stamp associates the rebound volume with the Newman Society
(Oxford University Catholic Society), established in 1878.
36 Fol. 108r.
37 Shagan, Popular Politics, 7; cited in Erler, Dissolution, 1.
38 On this iconic Cromwell vignette, see Cavendish, Life and Death, 90; on the
translation project, see Underwood, “Thomas Cromwell,” esp. 520.
39 Butterworth, The English Primers, 49: “the printers and books sellers of
Antwerp had been waiting for this very change, and thousands of volumes
containing portions of the Scripture in English began to be imported into
England.”
40 A prymer in Englyshe, with certeyn prayers & godly meditations, very
necessary for all people that understonde not the Latyne tongue (Lon-
don: John Bydell for William Marshall, 1534), Folger Library (STC 15986,
Hoskins 117).
41 In the Bodleian copy of STC 15986, even these two brief sections on the
Blessed Virgin Mary have been heavily canceled.
42 A Goodly Prymer in Englyshe, Newly Corrected and Printed… (London:
John Bydell for William Marshall, 1535), British Library (STC 15988, BL
C.25.g.17, Hoskins 119). For Marshall’s warning to readers, see fols. A3—
A4; also see Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 504.
43 On the English practice of publishing translations of Luther’s work “with
his role as author disguised,” see Pettegree, “Printing and the Reformation,”
at 157.
4 4 A Goodly Prymer in Englyshe, Newly Corrected and Printed… (London:
Thomas Gibson for Thomas Marshall, 1538), Folger Library (STC 15998,
Folger HH170/5, Hoskins 199).
45 Ibid., fols. B1r and B1v. On Dyson, see Steele, “Humphrey Dyson,” 144–51.
46 Ps. 131/130:1, Goodly Prymer (1538), sig. Q1r.
47 Ps. 51/50:13, Goodly Prymer (1538), sig. X1r. I am grateful to Heather
Wolfe for her assistance in evaluating these limited handwriting samples.
48 Being Protestant, 207–8; also see Alexandra Walsham’s discussion of “the
lived experience of people who embraced the reformed religion” in her
review of Ryrie’s study: “Reformation Britain,” 953–55.
49 Goodly Prymer, (1538, STC 15998), fol. O2v.
50 Costley, Miserere Mei.
51 For an introduction and twentieth-century translation, see Donnelly, Prison
Meditations.
52 Butterworth, The English Primers, 67–66 and 111.
53 Matthew 15:21–27 and Mark 7:24–30. On Savonarola’s “painting of word
pictures,” see Lesnick, “Preaching in Medieval Florence,” 199–247. I am
grateful to Stephen Campbell for drawing my attention to this aspect of
Savonarola’s sermons.
54 Goodly Prymer (1538), sig. X2r. The first person singular tense appears
in Savonarola’s “Explication” and Marshall’s translation, but not in the
biblical sources for this episode.
55 Ibid., fol. Q1r.
56 “A Christen Instruction,” sig. A8v.
57 Ryrie, 955.
58 White, “Dismantling Catholic Primers,” 93–113.
59 Mueller, Katherine Parr, 501–8 and passim; Marcus, Elizabeth I: Collected
Works; Collinson, “Windows in a Woman’s Soul,” 87–118; and Felch,
Elizabeth Tyrwhit’, 33 and 22–27.
6 Articles of Assent
Clergymen’s Subscribed Copies
of the Thirty-Nine Articles of
the Church of England
Austen Saunders
From 1571 all Church of England clergymen inducted into new parishes
were required to appear before their congregations on a Sunday during
service time and read through the Thirty-Nine Articles. They then had
to swear assent to them. From 1662 they had to do the same with the
morning and evening services from the Book of Common Prayer as well.
This ceremony became known as “reading in” and was part of parish
life until 1975.1 Because their right to possession of their livings de-
pended on these acts, clergymen kept records of them. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries they did so by writing memoranda in copies
of the Thirty-Nine Articles which they had signed by witnesses. This
chapter introduces this practice by drawing on evidence from a survey
of fifty-four examples (see Appendix A for details). It is not possible
to say how representative this sample is, but it includes examples from
the 1570s to the eighteenth century and from across England (although
there is a bias towards the South East and East Anglia). It should be
noted that twenty-five examples are taken from a single volume of sub-
scribed copies in the Bodleian Library which was compiled in the first
half of the eighteenth century by Richard Rawlinson. 2
My aim is to reconstruct the practices which created this sort of marked
book and to show that they provide evidence about how the Church of
England was experienced at parish level. The importance to the Church
of England of practices involving the Book of Common Prayer and suc-
cessive printed editions of the Bible is often recognized. The Thirty-Nine
Articles are, however, more often considered in terms of their intellectual
content and not as a printed book in frequent use. I hope to demonstrate
that this is an oversight and that the Thirty-Nine Articles should be num-
bered amongst the printed books whose use defined England’s national
Church. My methodology involves drawing on multiple examples rather
than exhaustively describing a small number of case studies. This is done
in order to establish how widespread the phenomenon was and to show
how it was part of a broader network of practices.
The chapter begins with a short description of a typical example be-
fore quickly moving on to establish the legal and political contexts which
shaped the practice of subscription. Establishing these contexts makes it
116 Austen Saunders
possible to test ideas about the motivations of those who participated
in the practice, the social contexts within which it took place, and the
implications of this practice for participants’ subjective understanding
of themselves as political subjects, religious believers, and members of
communities.
The following memorandum is a typical example from a subscribed
copy of the Articles:
Memorandu[m] that Thomas Chaundler Clerke & Parson of Thrux-

ton in the countie of South[ampton] did on the 5th day of September
being the Sunday next after his induction into the said Parsonage in
time of morning prayer there and in the audience of his parishioners,
(according to the Statute of this Realme in that behalfe) publicklie
reade the articles whereupon it was agreed by the Archbishops &
Bishops of both provinces and the whole cleargie in the convoca-
tion holden at London in the yeare of o[u]r lord 1562 and for the
avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishing of consent
touching true religion with declaration of his unfained assent and
consent there unto. In witnesse ^whereof^ wee whose names are
heare underwritten have to these p[re]sentes subscribed the 5th day
of September, anno do[min]i 1613:
Teste Robert Challacomb Clericus
This Roger [a rough ψ] Hales marke.
Roberte [a rough R] Clerke his marke
Roberte [a rough mark] Augers marke
This memorandum was added in 1613 to a blank page at the end of a

1571 edition of the Articles.3 Thomas Chaundler was not unusual in us-
ing an old edition. It was almost as common for copies to be subscribed
when they were thirty or forty years old as when they were brand new.4
Subscribed copies display a recurring set of features. I will provide
further examples throughout this chapter but, to begin with, I will sum-
marize my findings. Typically, a blank page at the front or back of one
of the hundred or so stand-alone editions (typically of thirty-two pages)
which were produced before 1700 will bear a manuscript text stating
that a named clergyman read through and declared his assent to the
Thirty-Nine Articles in a named parish church on a specified day. The
signatures of witnesses then follow. There is no standard wording for
memoranda and examples differ slightly from each other, but they are
normally phrased in ways which echo legal documents (such as deeds
poll) or the laws which made reading in a requirement. They are nor-
mally in English, but occasionally in Latin.5 Although many clergymen
owned copies of the Latin version of the Articles, it was their English
copies they had signed.6 Presumably this was the copy they read to their
Articles of Assent 117
congregations. The witnesses might include churchwardens, schoolmas-
ters, and sometimes other clergymen. Normally all the witnesses were
men, but sometimes women signed.7 Illiterate witnesses made marks
next to their names. Subscribed copies were clergymen’s own and, when
they moved to new livings, they sometimes added new memoranda.8 By
the nineteenth century it had become usual for reading in to be recorded
using a standardized certificate.9
Turning to the contexts which shaped this practice, the legal context
was established by Acts of Parliament in 1571 and 1662. The 1571 Act
stipulated of all clergymen admitted to a benefice with cure that:
except that within Two Months after his Induction he do publickly

read the said Articles in the same Church whereof he shall have
Cure, in the Time of Common Prayer there, with Declaration of his
unfeigned Assent thereunto, and be admitted to minister the Sacra-
ments within One Year after his Induction, if he be not so admitted
before, shall be upon every such Default, ipso facto, immediately
deprived.10
The 1662 Act of Uniformity added that:
every person whoe shall hereafter be presented or collated or put

into any Ecclesiasticall Benefice or Promotion within this Realme
of England and places aforesaid shall in the Church Chappell or
place of publique worshipp belonging to his said Benefice or Pro-
motion within two Monthes next after that he shall be in the ac-
tuall possession of the said Ecclesiasticall Benefice or Promotion
upon some Lords day openly publiquely and solemnly read the
Morning and Evening Prayers appointed to be read by and accord-
ing to the said Booke of Common Prayer att the times thereby ap-
pointed and after such reading thereof shall openly and publiquely
before the Congregation there assembled declare his unfeigned
assent and consent to the use of all things therein contained and
prescribed.11
The 1662 Act included prescribed wording for his assent:
I. A. B. doe declare my unfaigned assent and consent to all and every

thing contained and prescribed in and by the Booke intituled The
Booke of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments
and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church according to the use
of the Church of England together with the Psalter or Psalmes of
David pointed as they are to be sung or said in Churches and the
form or manner of making ordaining and consecrating of Bishops
Priests and Deacons.
118 Austen Saunders
Some memoranda explicitly acknowledge these Acts. For example John
Burscough noted that he
in obedience to an Act of Parliament of the 13th of Elizabeth did

read the 39 Articles of Religion within mentioned October 26 1662
in the afternoon at the time of divine service and did declare his
Assent unto them.12
Many closely echo the Acts’ wordings, using key phrases such as “pub-
likly reade” and “unfeigned Assent” along with careful notes of the time
of day the reading took place and the fact that it was a Sunday to record
compliance with all legal requirements.13 However neither Act specified
that a written record be kept of reading and assenting. The 1571 Act
established separate obligations for clergymen to subscribe to the Arti-
cles before a bishop and for records, known as Subscription Books, to
be kept at diocesan level. Reading and assenting to the Articles before
a new incumbent’s parishioners was an additional requirement with no
prescribed form of certification.
The laws which defined the practice of reading in were a response to
an enduring problem – how do governments ensure that policies decided
centrally are implemented nationally? Both Acts were passed at times
when establishing and maintaining control over the Church of England
were priorities for those in power.14 On both occasions those in author-
ity turned to the printed book as a technology for implementing policy.
They did so by mandating behaviors involving printed books (reading
and assenting to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common
Prayer) and establishing a penalty for non-performance (legal forfeiture
of livings).
This solution worked in two ways: cascading and weeding out.
Doctrine (via the Thirty-Nine Articles) and liturgy (via the Book of
Common Prayer) were approved by both houses of Parliament and then
cascaded by the bishops (themselves sitting in the Lords) to the clergy,
and then to parishioners, through prescribed ways of using printed
books. Priests who were unwilling to participate in this cascading pro-
cess were weeded out when they refused to subscribe to the Articles or to
read them before their parishes. Declaring assent was a common experi-
ence. Ministers facing the demand to assent to the Thirty-Nine Articles
could at various times have been asked to swear Oaths of Allegiance (to
monarchs), Oaths of Supremacy (repudiating Papal authority), Oaths of
Abjuration (repudiating the Jacobite claim), and oaths to the Thirty-
Nine Articles themselves when matriculating as students. Demanding
yet another act of public assenting was a standard policy tool which
lawmakers reached for because it worked. Men were willing to die rather
than swear the Oath of Supremacy and were willing to throw away their
careers rather than swear the Oath of Abjuration.15 Thus (in theory at
least) laws demanding public reading and assenting to the Thirty-Nine
Articles delivered a body of clergy willing to implement Parliament’s will
in parishes across the country, equipped with practices which enabled
them to do so.
The process did not always work perfectly. In November 1624 John
Davenport read through the Articles and had his copy subscribed by pa-
rishioners when he took up the living of St Stephen Coleman Street in the
City of London.16 Two years later he was helping to organize the feoffees
for impropriations, a scheme to buy the rights to make appointments to
parishes and to give them to puritan clergyman. In 1633 he left England
for Holland after deciding that he could no longer in conscience con-
tinue as a conforming member of the Church of England and in 1637 he
emigrated, with members of his former congregation at Coleman Street,
to Massachusetts. Why was he not weeded out by the need to subscribe
to the Articles and publicly declare assent to them? His views may have
shifted, but the key point is that reading in did not guarantee future
conformity.
Nevertheless, reading in is an example of the reliance policy makers
placed on printed books to regulate the Church. They were of course
an efficient way to distribute texts, but legislators also treated them as
physical objects which clergymen were required to use in their churches.
The statutes specifically required new incumbents to “read” the Articles
and the Book of Common Prayer. The wording is specific and excludes
alternatives such as reciting from memory. Even allowing for some elas-
ticity in the meanings of “read,” there remained a clear expectation that
the books would be physically present. This was a partial answer to
the challenge of enforcing uniformity across a whole kingdom. It was
impossible to monitor every service in every church and even harder to
look into the consciences of ministers. But Parliament could insist that
printed books, which were manufactured in conditions which allowed a
degree of oversight and standardization, be present in parishes at defined
times. The Book of Common Prayer and the Bible were to be present
much more regularly, but the Thirty-Nine Articles also had to be pro-
duced on certain occasions (including reading in). Standardized doctrine
was to be at least physically present in every parish.
If those were the motivations of legislators, the motivation clergymen
had for making subscribed copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles was their
need to demonstrate that they had obeyed the legal requirements of read-
ing in. The law said that they had no right to their benefices if they
had not read and assented to the Articles but did not specify a process
for removing non-conforming clergy. In practice enforcement depended
on investigation during episcopal visitations (when the question was
religious conformity) or legal proceedings when a living was disputed
(when the question was possession of property). Given that a minister’s
worldly possessions were at stake as well as his spiritual appointment,
120 Austen Saunders
it was (as the standard nineteenth-century handbook put it) “prudent to
obtain from the churchwardens, or some other inhabitants of the par-
ish, a certificate that the new incumbent has complied with the above
forms.”17 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century priests agreed and their
subscribed copies of the Articles are tokens of their prudence. This was
not an entirely improvised practice. It imitated other practices which at
times might be required of clergy, such as that every resident minister in
the diocese of Lincoln in the 1570s present at visitations “a true certifi-
cate in writing under the hands of their Churchwardens” certifying that
they had said the communion service according to the legally prescribed
form at least once a quarter.18 Ministers anticipated similar needs when
they had their copies of the Articles subscribed.
Subscribed copies could be used to demonstrate religious conformity,
especially during episcopal visitations. Visitations were a routine pro-
cedure for enforcing religious conformity at parish level but visitation
articles only sporadically included questions about reading in.19 The vis-
itation articles for Lincoln in 1585 and 1588, for example, asked church-
wardens whether the incumbent of each parish “hath not within two
months after his induction publiquely reade the said Articles in your
Church in the time of the Common praier there, with declaration of
his unfeigned assent thereunto?”20 But most visitation articles did not
address reading in. They were more likely to include questions about
the public reading of royal injunctions, homilies, or the Canons of the
Church of England. A range of printed texts was used to enforce con-
formity, among which the Thirty-Nine Articles were not usually the
most prominent. This changed immediately after the Restoration when
a question about the Thirty-Nine Articles was included as standard in
all visitation articles for 1662, the first since the Restoration. Those for
London asked of each incumbent:
did he within two months after his induction, publickly in the

Church upon some Sunday or Holiday, in the time of Divine
Service, read the 39 Articles of the Church of England, established
by Authority, and there publickly declare his assent therunto?21
Articles for other dioceses included very similarly worded questions. As

the Church hierarchy set about re-establishing baseline conformity fol-
lowing the end of the Commonwealth, the Thirty-Nine Articles were
fixed upon as a key test of clerical compliance. Given this heightened
attention, it would have been particularly important for ministers after
the Restoration to have records of reading and assenting to the A
rticles.
It is therefore unsurprising that whilst examples of the Articles sub-
scribed during the Commonwealth are rare or non-existent (I have seen
none dated after 8 April 1649), the practice reappeared in 1660. 22 Thus
George Hynd had a memorandum signed by witnesses stating that, after
being presented by the Crown to the Rectory of Milton in Berkshire on
28 August 1660, he had read and assented to the Articles on 2 Septem-
ber. 23 And John Wilde wrote a record of having read and assented to the
Articles on the very same Sunday. 24
Subscribed copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles were made to support
claims to property as well as to demonstrate religious orthodoxy. This
is what happened in June 1642 when a priest called Thomas Sheppard
performed the ceremony of reading in in the middle of an empty field in
Oxfordshire, not far from where John Hampden would be killed in bat-
tle a year later. The field was where the church of the abandoned village
of Warpsgrave had once stood. The living worth £20 a year still existed
and Sheppard was, at the time he read through the Articles, engaged in a
dispute for possession of what was effectively a sinecure. 25 In support of
his claim he wrote a memorandum in his copy of the Articles recording
that he had read them in “the place where the Church aunciently stood”
and had it signed by witnesses including a local farmer whose family
had been shepherds in the area at the turn of the century. 26 This was
the closest he could get to a congregation of parishioners and was meant
to demonstrate that he had (in the words of the memorandum) been
“inducted into the reall & actuall possession of the Rectorye [i.e. the liv-
ing] of Warpsgrave.” This could be important evidence in disputed cases
when adversaries might cite non-performance as grounds for depriva-
tion. In one much later case which came before the civil courts in 1828,
one of the parties freely admitted that he had physically prevented his
adversary from entering the pulpit to read the Articles. The other man
had read the Articles in the porch instead until, when removed from
that, he had finished them in the Churchyard witnessed by several hun-
dred congregants. Was this enough for him to take legal possession of
the living? The court found that it was. 27
Subscribed copies of the Thirty-Nine Articles remained in the pos-
session of clergymen and, because they could be used in case of legal
contests about property, were part of his private archive of important
documents. They were a product of the same needs which led people to
record details of debts, leases, and legal disputes in the blank spaces of
books. Printed books were an habitual repository for such records and a
copy of the Thirty-Nine Articles was an obvious place to record that the
process of reading in had been completed. It was easier to keep a single
copy of the Articles with multiple memoranda safe than to keep hold of
many small documents.28
Copies of the Articles may have been manufactured to facilitate this
practice. They were often printed in an unusual design with a single
blank leaf at the front (before the title-page) bearing a woodcut tail-piece
and the signature A1. This shows that these were not blank leaves added
by binders, but integral parts of the printed book. Some ministers used
this blank leaf for their memoranda and it is quite possible that they
122 Austen Saunders
were included specifically for that purpose. 29 If that were the case, then
political policy, readers’ practices, and book production were linked in
a cycle of influence. New political objectives became imaginable (unifor-
mity of codified doctrine cascaded to each parish by minsters) because
printed books provided a way of pursuing them. New policies about
using printed books were then adopted (the requirements for reading in)
which, in turn, gave rise to new practices for readers (producing sub-
scribed copies of the Articles). Printers then responded to these practices,
producing books which were physically suited to them. Eventually, the
whole cycle could start again as yet more possibilities suggested them-
selves to policy makers in light of the new products now being produced
by printers. This may have influenced the imposition of new require-
ments in 1662. The economics of printing were also affected as the prac-
tice of reading in must have helped support the market for stand-alone
editions of the Articles.
Subscribed copies of the Articles record episodes of sociability which
tell us about ministers’ contact with parishioners, local clergy, and
friends. When Matthew Smallwood arrived at Bramfield in Suffolk in
1677, a fellow clergyman named William Bacon visited from nearby
Beccles (where he was vicar) and signed alongside three local men. 30
Witnessing each other’s reading in would have strengthened ties be-
tween local clergymen. Sometimes ministers and witnesses share sur-
names, suggesting that relatives were present.31 Other subscribed copies
show that non-resident clergy habitually visited new livings to read in
(as indeed the law required). Leonard Hutten spent his whole adult life
at Christ Church, Oxford, holding several rectories as a non-resident.
Nevertheless in 1601 he travelled to Flore in Northamptonshire to read
in. He had a copy of the Articles subscribed by the curate who served
the parish as well as by the vicar of nearby Weedon Bec. 32 In 1615 he
made the shorter journey to Westwell in Oxfordshire for the same pur-
pose, when again the curate who actually ministered to the parish was
amongst the witnesses.33 Even though these visits would have been brief
and perhaps never repeated, they meant that ambitious clergymen had
a more than legal relationship with the parishes from which they drew
their incomes. Even non-residents climbing the ladder of preferment saw
their parishes at least once and met their parishioners. This marked out
an ordained non-resident’s living from other sorts of landed property,
including that of lay rectors (landowners who were not ordained but
who owned the right to collect tithes) who were not covered by the laws
requiring reading in.
Subscribed copies of the Articles made these encounters legible. A copy
subscribed by churchwardens, the parish clerk, the schoolmaster, and
other parishioners along with the new minister’s friends became a re-
cord of a parish community and the minister’s own network of contacts
which had intersected with that parish. Moreover, the memorandum
recorded a clergyman’s arrival in a new community. Witnesses acting as
representatives of the parish community signalled their recognition of
the new minister’s credentials and addressed him in the person of their
offices within the administrative structures of the parish.
Making inscriptions put clergymen in a new position. For the first
time during the process of ordination and induction, they became the
ones responsible for documenting their own orthodoxy. Previously their
superiors (for example the bishops before whom they subscribed) had
performed this validating task. But at the same time they had to ask
their own congregants to sign as witnesses. Without these signatures,
the document was of little use. A memorandum produced in Essex in
1633 makes that clear, stating that John Fuller had read that Articles
in the church at Stebbing: “In wittness whereof wee the inhabitants of
the said parish beeing then Auditors of the same doe hereunto putte our
hands”34 (see Figure 6.1). The practice of making subscribed copies of
the Articles thus created a complicated dynamic of reciprocal author-
ity at parish level. Ministers were responsible for cascading orthodox
doctrine in their parishes but their parishioners, when they subscribed
memoranda, were given an implicit authority to validate that this had
been done lawfully. This manifested an assumption that ordinary pa-
rishioners be familiar with this key text of the Church of England and
able to involve themselves (even if at a low level) in policing the laws
which controlled it.
How exactly were parishioners able to judge conformity? Would they
notice if a new incumbent “forgot” to read Article XVII: “Of Predesti-
nation and Election”? Or if he missed out the start of Article XX: “The
Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in
Controversies of Faith” and instead began it at “it is not lawful for the
Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written”?
Perhaps literate witnesses read along with the new incumbent, track-
ing him line by line. Visitation articles created the same problem when
they demanded of churchwardens a detailed familiarity with the con-
tents of the Book of Common Prayer, for example asking if ministers
were delivering services according to it “without putting in any thing of
their owne, or taking awaye.”35 How much weight could visiting bish-
ops place on churchwardens’ knowledge? The bishops themselves rec-
ognized this general problem. One solution was to require ministers to
read publicly the injunctions which defined their responsibilities, “that
the whole parish may know and understand to what things as well the
ministers as them selves are bound.”36 The Church of England thus at-
tempted to police itself through its members, right down to parish level.
It placed demands on all of them not just to understand its doctrines,
but to participate in its governance. It would have been impossible to
pursue this aim without being able to call on a range of practices involv-
ing printed books.
124 Austen Saunders
Figure 6.1 Thirty-Nine Articles (1633) Bodleian 4° 277(4), sig. A1r. By permission
of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
When the system worked it created a virtuous circle of reciprocal

authority. Conforming ministers cascaded lawful doctrine down to
knowledgeable parishioners who weeded out non-conforming clergy
who did not fulfil their obligations. But if things went wrong, the cir-
cle could turn vicious. Non-conforming ministers would fail to cas-
cade doctrine to parishioners who, not being properly ministered to,
would be unable or unwilling to call out this dereliction of duty. This
makes the weeding out part of the process look redundant, as it seems
it would only work in an already well-regulated Church. And what
was the point of the cascading process if parishioners were already
knowledgeable? But two points should be borne in mind. First, min-
isters had already undergone a multi-staged process of vetting before
they arrived in a parish, including subscribing to the Articles before
a bishop. Reading in was a last backstop to test their conformity, not
a front-line defence. Second, the cascading element was amongst the
procedures of the Church of England designed to provide stability over
time. Reading in, like catechising, was a means by which knowledge of
the Church’s doctrine was kept current at grassroots level. Although
testing it had to rely on congregations of already knowledgeable and
conforming parishioners, it served to refresh knowledge of the Articles
and emphasized their importance.
The dynamic of reciprocal validation was disguised when clergy-
men enjoyed a higher status than the witnesses who certified their
conformity. For example, George Stradling, son of Sir John Stradling
of Glamorganshire and fellow of All Soul’s College, Oxford, asked
two illiterate parishioners in Kent to make their marks in November
1666. 37 Hierarchies would be even more marked when the clergyman
was a high-flying non-resident. How would the churchwardens of
Hartfield in Sussex have behaved in 1640 when George Morley, chap-
lain to the earl of Carnarvon and associate of Edward Hyde, Gilbert
Sheldon, and Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, visited to take posses-
sion of his living? The visual contrast between the text of the memo-
randum recording that he had read the Articles which Morley wrote
in his elegant italic hand, and the angular scripts full of old-fashioned
secretary forms which the churchwardens and other parishioners used
to subscribe their names, reflects the very different worlds these men
inhabited. 38
Yet despite differences in social status, the churchwardens, school-
masters, parish clerks, and other parishioners who were asked to sub-
scribe memoranda were being invited to do their duty as members of
what Mark Goldie has called “the unacknowledged republic” of small
office holders. 39 These were the men of little (or even no) property who
did not serve as magistrates or sheriffs or as electors of MPs, but who
filled local offices as, for example, constables, churchwardens, and par-
ish clerks. England could only be governed with the assistance of these
men. Although they were excluded from what seem like the primary
institutions of civic politics, perhaps half of all men held one of these
offices in the course of their adult lives. Some of the witnesses who
signed copies of the Articles were holders of these small offices. Even
for those who were not, signing memoranda was a part of participa-
tory civic life and it conferred a small dignity to sign one’s name – or
even make one’s mark – in an official capacity at the request of an ed-
ucated newcomer. The practice enlisted parishioners as participants in
the processes of cascading and weeding out which were used to control
the Church. It was a practice of grassroots validation which would
have generated subjectively grounded legitimacy for the Church’s
power structure by soliciting the agency of its most lowly participants.
Occasionally (but rarely) women exercised agency in this way. Mistress
Abigail Busby signed a memorandum that William Rechford had read
126 Austen Saunders
the Articles in September 1660.40 She may have been the wife of John
Busby who as patron presented Rechford to the living of Addington
in Buckinghamshire. The same memorandum was also signed by one
Mistress Saunders, whose name comes immediately beneath that of
Master Thomas Saunders. These examples are exceptional, but they
are evidence that women had some opportunities to act as members of
the unacknowledged republic.
When witnesses signed a subscribed copy they gave a minister some-
thing valuable because it substantiated his legal right to possession of
his living. Signing could involve making promises to act on his behalf
in the future, as when witnesses signed to confirm that they “doe &
will testifie, being therunto required & called” that Francis Mansell
had read in properly in 1630.41 Most witnesses probably didn’t think
of this as a discretionary act but as a sort of duty consequent on their
position within the parish. Nevertheless, it belonged within a wide-
spread economy of exchange by which social ties were articulated
through gift-giving, including gifts of books.42 Furnishing a new min-
ister with a subscribed copy of the Articles was a mark of respect and
a recognition of his place within the parish hierarchy. When witnesses
were of equal standing to the minister, recognition might be recipro-
cated through other forms of gift. For example, when Samuel Parker
went to Chartham in Kent to read in in 1667, his friend Nathaniel
Bisby went with him and signed a memorandum as a witness.43 Parker
in turn dedicated two published books to Bisby at around the same
time.44 There was a symmetry to Bisby affixing his name in manu-
script to one printed book to acknowledge Parker’s conformity and
Parker affixing Bisby’s name in print to two others to acknowledge
their friendship.
As a record of obedience to the law and as an articulation of a range
of social relationships, making subscribed copies of the Thirty-Nine Ar-
ticles was one amongst a much wider range of practices which defined
participants’ relationship with the state and other sources of authority.
The wording of memoranda reflected an understanding that reading in
was required by laws the ultimate aim of which was a uniform national
Church. John Burscough noted in 1662 that he had read the Articles
“in obedience to an Act of Parliam[en]t of the 13th [year of the reign]
of Elizabeth” whilst Leonard Hutten included in a memorandum the
part of the Articles’ full title which stated that they were “for auoiding
of diuersitie of opinions, and for the establishing of consent, touching
true Religion.”45 Memoranda like this were written acknowledgments
by ministers that they were subject to such authority. Over time, the
source of this authority changed. Almost all copies of the Thirty-Nine
Articles were printed with the royal arms on them, which changed with
each monarch. But old symbols remained in circulation when copies of
the Articles were used over several decades, like the 1593 copy bearing
the arms of Elizabeth which John Price signed in 1622.46 Normally this
signalled continuity as laws lasted longer than mortal monarchs, but this
ceased to be the case in the middle of the seventeenth century. William
Jemmat continued with old practices but trimmed them to new times in
1649, recording that he had read the Articles “excepting what the Parlia-
ment hath taken away.”47 The copy he signed was printed in 1642 with,
instead of the royal arms, Parliament’s portcullis insignia and a colophon
reading “Printed for the benefit of the Common-wealth.” Jemmat didn’t
have his memorandum signed by witnesses, perhaps an acknowledge-
ment that following the abolition of episcopacy and monarchy, assent
and subscription were no longer legally enforced. Yet just eleven years
later, after the Restoration, the revival of the practice became a sign that
continuity had been preserved after all.
Ministers who performed reading in did so as individual believers
with consciences called upon to declare personal assent at the request
of the state. It was an example of a response to a demand that religious
subjects should believe inwardly with informed conviction. M aurice
Rowland declared that he “willingly and from his heart assented to all
and aney of them to be true and agreable to the Scriptures.”48 George
Morley wrote that he had read the Articles “which I believe to be
Orthodox and agreeable to Gods word”49 (see Figure 6.2). The most
common phrase used to signal inward conviction was “unfeigned assent”
(a phrase taken from the 1571 Act). Early modern subjects were trained to
think of using books as a way of testing conscience. In 1584 archbishop
Whitgift required clergymen to subscribe to propositions including the
validity of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer.
Rounding up those who refused proved an easy way of catching puritan
ringleaders. In 1633 many ministers refused to read Charles I’s Book
of Sports in their churches because they believed it to be blasphemous.
Giving public assent to the contents of a book was treated as a perfor-
mative act which both revealed and constituted conscience. A subscribed
copy of the Articles was therefore a manifestation of conscience which a
clergyman could put in his pocket. He could show it to parishioners or to
visitors. He could carry it to his next parish and use it again. This part of
his conscience wasn’t an inward faculty or an inscrutable instinct. It was
a history of practice validated by a group of named people.
Although this form of conscience turned on individual ministers’
responses to requirements imposed by the state, ministers’ subscribed
copies signed by their parishioners reflect the degree to which laws
only had meaning in the context of a local community. Royal and
Parliamentary authority was a meaningless cypher unless applied to
real people in real places. The whole point of the requirements of read-
ing in was to mould a conforming national Church at parish level. In
the juxtaposition of royal arms, memoranda, and signatures, a three-
part relationship was made visible involving state authority, individual
128 Austen Saunders
Figure 6.2 Thirty-Nine Articles (1640) Bodleian 4° 277(6), sig. A1v. By permis-
sion of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
conscience, and parish community. The royal arms were a symbol of

sovereignty, but they changed over time whilst the practices of assenting
and witnessing remained constant. The individual sovereign stood over
the nation but the national identity upon which sovereigns’ claims de-
pended was constituted through the communities and practices which
defined that identity and made it visible to its subjects. As was demon-
strated in the 1640s and 1650s, it was possible to imagine a nation
without a monarch, but not a monarch without a nation. This depen-
dence is played out on the marked pages of subscribed copies of the
A rticles. The royal arms stamp authority on the subscriptions which
at the same time underwrite royal authority. Subscribed copies of the
A rticles were records of small, local, and sometimes transitory groups
of people enlisted as participants in the complex flows of agency and au-
thority which underpinned the early modern English state. A clergyman
making a subscribed copy of the Thirty-Nine Articles thus manifested a
triple identity. First, as an individual believer with a conscience; second,
as a member of a national Church exercising authority across the whole
country; and third, as a member of a specific parish. At one extreme
he was a unique subject exercising belief and conscience. But he was
simultaneously at the other extreme an abstract and interchangeable
member of a nation state and a national Church obedient to uniform
laws which operated without diversity. In between he was a member of
a specific parish community tied to one named place and connected to
other named people each with their function in the parish.
In conclusion, what can we learn from subscribed copies of the Thirty-
Nine Articles? As an archival source they provide biographical details
about individual clergymen. Although they are difficult to find because
subscriptions are not systematically recorded in catalogues, they include
information which may not be available from other sources about what
livings ministers held and when they took them up. More broadly, they
provide an insight into the involvement of churchwardens and other pa-
rishioners in monitoring the processes by which the Church was governed.
Whilst authority flowed down through a carefully maintained hierarchy,
subscribed copies demonstrate that there were opportunities for low-level
members of the Church to exercise a degree of authority when they fixed
their names to memoranda confirming that ministers had fulfilled their
obligations. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of practices involv-
ing printed books to the management of the Church of England. Without
them, policy makers would not have had the tools they needed to enforce
the degree of conformity they sought. Together, these forces helped to
shape experiences of the Church of England at parish level.
Appendix A: Some Subscribed Copies of the Articles
Current Location Shelfmark Date of Date of Incumbent Parish

Copy Subscription
Cambridge, G.15.42 (17) 1612 1624 Uncertain Uncertain

Magdalene
College
Cambridge, G.15.42 (17) 1612 1632 Matthew Uncertain
Magdalene Brownrygg
College
Cambridge STC 10046 1593 1604 Richard Lobe Stoke Lyne, Oxon
(Massachusetts),
Harvard
University
Houghton
Library
(Continued)
Copy Subscription
Cambridge STC 10048 1612 1624 John St Stephens

(Massachusetts), Davenporte Coleman Street,
Harvard City of London
University
Houghton
Library
Cambridge STC 10055 Uncertain 1660 George Hynd Milton, Berks
(Massachusetts),
Harvard
University
Houghton
Library
Eton, Eton College [not available] 1690 1695 Henry Unknown
Library Godolphin
London, British C.95.c.22 1720 1761 Henry Austen West Wickham,
Library Kent
London, British T 1013 (12) 1612 1615 Fancis Calcott Boughton
Library Monchelsea,
Kent
London, British T 1013 (20) 1684 1688 John Younger Bishopstone, Wilts
Library
London, Lambeth A.57.3/1562 1605 1607 Peter Taylor East Cowton,
Palace Library Yorks
London, Lambeth ARC A 57.3 R 1661 1667 John Doughty Buxton, Norfolk
Palace Library 63 (2)
London, Lambeth ARC A 57.3 R 1661 1669 John Doughty Buxton, Norfolk
London, Lambeth ARC A 57.3 R 1661 1671 John Doughty Earsham, Suffolk
London, Lambeth H5137. 1684 1690 John Cooper Trottiscliffe, Kent
Palace Library C4[SR3]
London, UCL Lansdowne 1631 Uncertain Uncertain Uncertain
Tracts 11/8
Oxford, Bodleian 4.A.96.Th. 1605 1612 Maurice Bersted, Sussex
Rowland
Oxford, Bodleian 4.A.97.Th. 1616 1640 George SelfeShipton under
Wychwood,
Oxon
Oxford, Bodleian 4.Rawl.151(1) 1571 1577 Thomas Ware St Mary-le-Bow,
City of London
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1586 1590 Anthony Sanderstead, Surrey
(1) Batten
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1586 1613 Franncis Kirby Misperton,
(1) Dalton Yorks
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1571 1613 Thomas Thruxton, Hants
(2) Chaundler
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1593 1622 John Price South Wootton,
(3) Norfolk
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1593 Uncertain John Ham Harnhill, Goucs
(3)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1631 1633 John Fuller Stebbing, Essex
(4)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 Uncertain 1666 George Sutton at Hone,
(5) Stradling Kent
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1640 1640 George Hartfield, Sussex
(6) Morley
Copy Subscription
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1612 1642 Thomas Warpsgrave, Oxon

(7) Sheppard
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1642 1645 Anthony Ripple, Kent
(8) Bramstone
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1628 1660 John Wilde Uncertain
(9)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1642 1649 William St Giles, Reading,
(10) Jemmat Berks
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1624 1660 William Addington, Bucks
(11) Rechford
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1662 1662 John Stoke next
(12) Burscough Guildford, Surrey
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1632 1667 Samuel Parker Chartham, Kent
(13)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1675 1676 Obadiah Bekesbourne, Kent
(14) Brokesby
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1675 1676 Obadiah Ivychurch, Kent
(14) Broksby
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1674 1675 Matthew Huntingfield,
(15) Smallwood Suffolk
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1674 1677 Matthew Bramfield, Suffolk
(15) Smallwood
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1674 1675 Thomas Baker Streatham, Surrey
(16)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1681 1682 John Coleshill, Warks
(17) Kettlewell
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1684 1688 Henry Ga[…] Uncertain
(18)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 Uncertain 1690 Edward Glyn Broughton Poggs,
(19) Oxon
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1693 1697 John Leng Coton, Cambs
(20)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1693 n.d. John Leng Coton, Cambs
(20)
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1693 1697 Thomas Cranham, Essex
(21) Whetham
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1693 1697 Uncertain North Ockenden,
(21) Essex
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1702 1704 Samuel Harris Walgrave,
(22) Northants
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1702 Uncertain Samuel Harris Walgrave,
(22) Northants
Oxford, Bodleian 4° Rawl. 277 1708 1711 Thomas Ponteland,
(23) Dobyns Northumberland
Oxford, Bodleian 8.Rawl.713 (2) 1628 1634 John Clarke Fiskerton, Notts
Oxford, Bodleian Vet.A.1.123 1581 1622 Edward Cottingham, Yorks
(2) Gibson
Oxford, Jesus T.3.5 (8) 1629 1630 Francis Easington, Oxon
College Mansell
Oxford, Lincoln N.1.22 (3) 1593 1601 Leonard Flore, Nothants
College Hutten
Oxford, Lincoln N.1.22 (8) 1604 1615 Leonard Westwell, Oxon
College Hutten
Washington D.C., STC 10046 1593 1602 Thomas Great Rissington,
Folger Whittington Gloucs
Shakespeare
Library
132 Austen Saunders
Notes
With thanks to Peter Auger, Arnold Hunt, Dunstan Roberts, and Alison Shell.
All errors are my own.
1 See Appendix A for information regarding citations of the various sub-

scribed copies of the Articles. The first recorded use in the OED of “to
read in” as a verb is dated 1800. “Reading in” as a noun is first recorded in
1836. The requirement to read through the Thirty-Nine Articles was con-
firmed by the 1865 Clerical Subscriptions Act. The 1974 Church of England
(Worship And Doctrine) Measure gave the General Synod of the Church of
England power to change requirements for clergy to give assent to doctrine.
This power was exercised the next year and a declaration of assent replaced
the requirement to read through the Articles. See Amending Canon No. 4
(in particular substituted new Canon C 15).
2 Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl 277.
3 Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (2).
4 I have found twenty-two examples out of fifty-four of memoranda added to
books less than five years old and ten to books more than twenty years old.
5 For a Latin example see London, British Library, T 1013 (12). This memo-
randum was signed in 1615 by several witnesses who made marks and were
presumably illiterate. They must have taken the minister’s word when he
told them what they were signing.
6 Maurice Rowland owned both a Latin version (London, Lambeth Palace,
A.57.3/1562) and an English version (Oxford, Bodleian, 4.A.96.Th.). It was
the English version he had subscribed when he took up a living in 1612.
7 For example Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (11).
8 Matthew Brownrigge wrote memoranda in the same copy in 1624 and 1632
(Cambridge, Magdalene College, G.15.42 (17)). Mathew Smallwood had his
copy of the Articles signed at Huntingfield in Suffolk on 30 March 1675
and at Bramfield (again in Suffolk, five miles from Huntingfield) on 28 June
1677 (Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (15)). Obadiah Brokesby had his
copy signed at Ivychuch in Kent on 25 February 1676 and at Bekesbourne
(near Canterbury) one week later on 4 March (Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl.
277 (14)).
9 See Hodgson, Instructions, 24–28.
10 13 Eliz c 12.
11 14 Car 2 c 4.
13 See for example a memorandum dated 1590 in Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl.
277 (1); and a memorandum dated 1675 in Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277
(16).
14 See Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, for a classic account of the
struggles of the Elizabethan authorities to maintain control over the Church
of England in the face of opposition from Presbyterians and others who
worried that the Church was not yet ‘reformed’ enough. The 1662 Act was
passed soon after the Restoration and was part of a wider project to re-
establish forms of government similar to those in place before the civil wars.
15 On the development and implications of oath taking in early modern
England, see Jones, Conscience and Allegiance.
16 Cambridge (Massachusetts), Harvard University, Houghton Library STC
10048.
17 Hodgson, Instructions, 26.
18 Injunctions, sig. A2r.
19 Visitation articles are sets of questions which were put to churchwardens
during a visit by a bishop to an individual parish. These visits are known as
an episcopal visitation and were usually meant to occur every three years.
20 Articles to be enquired of by the church-wardens and swornmen within
the Dieocsse [sic] of Lincoln (1585), sig. B1r. Repeated verbatim in Articles
(1588).
21 Articles (1662), sig. A3r.
22 For the 1649 example, see Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (10).
23 Cambridge (Massachusetts), Harvard University, Houghton Library STC
10055.
25 See Oxford, Oxfordshire History Centre, Oxf. Dioc. Papers c.264 (Register).
26 Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (7). The farmer’s name was John Wotton.
On the Wotton family, see Oxford, Oxfordshire History Centre, MS Oxf.
Archd. Oxon. c 118, and I/ii/1–5.
27 See Law journal reports, old series, vol. 6, pp. 284–285.
28 Stephen Orgel makes the argument that a printed book was a practical and
sensible place to inscribe important documents. See “Margins of Truth,” 95.
29 See for example Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (4), subscribed in 1633.
31 Edward Lobe witnessed Richard Lobe’s induction in 1604. See Cambridge
(Massachusetts), Harvard University, Houghton Library STC 10046.
32 Oxford, Lincoln College, N.1.22 (3).
33 This time the memorandum was inscribed on a copy of the Canons of the
Church of England bound with Hutten’s subscribed copy of the Articles. See
Oxford, Lincoln College, N.1.22 (8).
35 Articles (1574), sig. A2r.
36 Injunctions, sig. A3r.
39 See Goldie, “The Unacknowledged Republic.”
41 Oxford, Jesus College, T.3.5 (8). Mansell was Principle of Jesus College.
42 On the culture of gift-giving see Zemon Davis, “Beyond the Market.”
4 4 The dedicated books were A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick
Philosophie (1666) and An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine
Dominion and Goodness (1667).
45 Oxford, Bodleian, 4° Rawl. 277 (12); Oxford, Lincoln College, Oxford,
N.1.22 (8).
48 Oxford, Bodleian, 4.A.96.Th.
7 Lady Anne Clifford Reads
John Selden
Georgianna Ziegler
On February 18, 1638, Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke,

Dorset, and Montgomery, began reading the second edition of John
Selden’s Titles of Honor (1631). She was able to get through it in about
a month: “I did make an ende of reding, or over loking itt all over the
first of Marche folloinge 1638.” We know this because she carefully in-
scribed her reading dates on the title page of a copy of this book which
is now at the Folger Shakespeare Library1 (see Figure 7.1).
Inside, the book is full of pencil markings with just a few manuscript
notes, but the markings and the number of turned down or turned up
leaves tell a story of their own about how she read this book, why she
wrote in it, and what it meant to her.
Why Read Selden?

Lady Anne Clifford’s interest in Selden and his influence on her is best
understood by locating it within the context of her life. Although much
recent scholarship has made the details of her life more familiar, a
brief summary is helpful to explain her specific interest in the Titles
of Honor. 2 Lady Anne was born in January 1590 to Margaret Russell,
daughter of Francis Russell the second Earl of Bedford, and George
Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland. She was thus part of two powerful
political families. Her Russell grandfather was a member of Elizabeth
I’s privy council; her father, George Clifford, was the queen’s champion.
Through two prestigious marriages – first to Richard Sackville, third
Earl of Dorset and then to Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke – she
further increased her position among the noblest families of England. By
her first husband she was related to the Howards and by her second to
the Sidneys. Years before she married Philip Herbert, she had socialized
with his mother, Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and as a girl
had known his cousin, Lady Mary Sidney Wroth.3
The death of her father in 1605 when she was fifteen determined the
direction of much of the rest of her life. Bypassing his daughter, George
Clifford left his vast estates in Yorkshire to his brother Francis, with
the Westmorland estates to follow upon the death of Anne’s mother,
Lady Anne Clifford Reads John Selden 135
Figure 7.1 D
etail of Lady Anne Clifford’s inscription on the title page of John
Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 1631), Folger Folio STC 22178
copy 3. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library un-
der a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Licence.
Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. Thus, no property or titles

descended to Anne herself. Margaret Clifford was determined to retrieve
her daughter’s inheritance, and she immediately sued for recovery of the
Clifford estates, while establishing her own presence and interest in her
Westmorland estates as a source of much-needed revenue.
136 Georgianna Ziegler
The Countess of Cumberland was a formidable woman, well-educated
and conservatively Protestant. She began the long process which Anne
would continue of retaining lawyers and hiring antiquarians to seek
out ancient documents in support of her daughter’s case. Even Anne’s
two marriages were made with an eye to obtaining the support of a
powerful husband who could pursue her interests. Unfortunately, nei-
ther relationship was entirely happy, and neither brought the hoped-for
settlement. Anne continued to pursue her interests until finally in 1643
the last of the Clifford male heirs died, leaving her at the age of fifty-
three sole inheritor of the estates. The unthinkable had happened, and
Anne Clifford could now style herself, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke,
and Montgomery, “Barones Clifford Westmorland and Vescy; and High
Shreives of that County and Lady of the Honor of Skipton in Craven.”4
She had become the greatest female landowner in England.
John Selden, prominent jurist and intellectual, was a friend of Clifford’s.
He had studied law at Clifford’s Inn, the ancient London property of the
Clifford family, where Lady Anne evidently kept a few rooms for her own
use when in London.5 Selden was friends with William Herbert, older
brother of Clifford’s second husband, and he moved in a circle including
the earls of Pembroke, Arundel and Kent, all of whom were related. Selden
was also friends with Samuel Daniel (Clifford’s childhood tutor) and Ben
Jonson.6 Clifford knew all of these people, and refers to Elizabeth Grey
the Countess of Kent and John Selden as “worthy kind friends to me.”7 It
is possible that Selden was one of the antiquarian experts whom she called
upon over the years to help with the claims to her properties. Certainly,
the men with whom she worked in collecting records relating to her in-
heritance, men such as Simon D’Ewes, Roger Dugdale, Matthew Hale,
St. Loe Kniveton and Augustine Vincent, were all antiquarians, scholars
and lawyers from John Selden’s circle.8 Selden’s Titles of Honor was a
book that Clifford consumed with much interest because it traced the his-
tory and customs of titles from ancient times and as they came to be used
in England, with direct relevance to her own situation.
How the Countess Read Her Selden

Clifford’s copy was the enlarged second edition of 1631. When she read
the Titles in February and March of 1638, she was forty-eight years old
and was probably staying either at Baynard’s Castle in London, or at
Wilton or Ramsbury Manor, two of the Earl of Pembroke’s residences in
Wiltshire, to which she retreated after separating from him in 1634. Her
secretary, George Sedgwick, later wrote of her:
She could give a good account of most histories that are extant in
the English tongue. Indeed she was an indefatigable reader, and had
a library stored with very choice books, which she read over, not
cursorily, but with judgment and observation.9
In her study of Clifford as a book collector and reader, Heidi Brayman
points out that she is known to have owned close to seventy books: the
forty-eight books depicted in her portraits and at least twenty others.10
The Folger copy of Selden’s Titles of Honor is a recent addition to that
list, not known to Brayman.11
Sedgwick says that she read her books, “not cursorily, but with
judgment and observation.” As the work of numerous scholars has
shown, we need to broaden our concept of “reading” when consid-
ering the early modern period. We know from Clifford’s diaries that
she was often read to by her servants or secretaries, and her books
display characteristic underlinings and marginal crosses and lines in
graphite (see Figure 7.2), as well as comments, sometimes in more
than one hand.
The seminal article on Gabriel Harvey’s reading by Anthony Grafton
and Lisa Jardine made us aware of the transactional nature of much
early modern reading, and Brayman has suggested that the arrange-
ment of a reader and an engaged listener “challenges our definition
Figure 7.2 Detail of annotated page 594 from Selden, Titles of Honor, Folger
STC 22178 copy 3. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International Licence. Photograph by Georgianna Ziegler.
of the term ‘reader’ itself.”12 I want to suggest “transactional reading”
as a term that describes the method employed by Clifford, distinguishing
it from “pragmatic reading” as described by Lisa Jardine and William
Sherman. In the latter, a scholar or lawyer such as Henry Wotton or
Gabriel Harvey marks up a treatise to provide a “‘route’ or ‘path’
through the text,” or to guide a reader to the answer of a particular
legal question.13 In Clifford’s case, she often had more than one reader
on a volume, and I think it’s likely that the passages were marked as
they read out loud to her and she directed them in what was of interest
to her. The transaction, then, is multi-directional: the text (in this case
Selden) being read aloud by a secretary to Clifford, then working back
again, Clifford’s oral instructions to the secretary for marking passages
of interest to her in the text, then her overlooking of the text, especially
the marked passages, and in a few cases, adding more markings. This
method creates an active exchange that flows back-and-forth, employing
the voice and hands of an intermediary, and the voice and sometimes
the hand of the person read to. In his great book on the human body,
Helkiah Crooke stated that we remember better those things we have
heard, and that by hearing something read, “we receive more profit then
by bare reading,” because those who read aloud can also explain things
to us as they go along.14
The engagement of eyes, ears, and hands was all part of the phys-
icality of reading which Helen Smith has called to our attention:
“Reading . . . was understood to be both a bodily and an embodied
practice: an act of consumption that was productive and reproductive
in physical as well as intellectual terms.”15 In her diaries from 1616 to
1619, Clifford notes twenty-five “specific moments of reading, twenty
of which are scenes of aural reading,” often when she is engaged with
sewing, and we have accounts of Margaret Hoby and Elizabeth Isham
doing the same.16 I’d like to suggest that employing the hands in an ac-
tivity such as embroidering, lacemaking, or knitting, uses motor skills
that can free the mind’s perceptual skills to what is being read. Clifford
mentions working pillows in the “Irish stitch,” which Susan Frye has
identified as “flame stitch,” characterized by “ a series of straight
stitches to produce a geometric pattern of zigzags in colored silks.”17
Once having learned this repetitive stitch, the hands automatically rep-
licate it while the mind is free to think about the words and ideas it is
hearing.
We can usefully compare Clifford’s statements of reading inscribed in
the six surviving books containing her annotations. The earliest record
is the 1625 reading of Barclay His Argenis, just recently published. Her
reader notes that he began “to reade this booke to your Ladiship” on
January 16th and ended it on January 25th, 1625.18 We then move to
Clifford’s own inscription on the title page of Selden: “I beegane, to ovr-
loke this Booke the 18 of Febuarary and I did make an ende of reding,
or over loking itt all over the first of Marche folloinge 1638.” About a
dozen years later, she wrote in the 1605 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia:
This Booke did I beegine to Red over att Skiton in Craven aboutt the
Latter=ende of Januarey and I made an ende of Reding itt all ower
in Apellby Castell in Westmorland the 19 daye of Marche following,
in 1651.19
In 1665, we find her reading the Introduction to a Devout Life by

St. Francis de Sales (1648):
This Book was begun to be read to your Ladyship in Brougham

Castle the 9 day of March, 1664–1665 by Messrs Geo. Sedgwick,
Thos. Strickland and Johy Taylor. And they made an end of reading
it to you in the same Castle the 15th day of the same month. 20
In 1669 Clifford read Anthony Weldon’s The Court and Character of

King James as noted and ventriloquized by one of her readers: “about
the beginning of June in 1669 I began to read this Booke myselfe in
Appleby Castle and I & diverse of my menserv[ant]s made an end of
readinge of itt the 21st of the same in 1669.”21 And finally, as Stephen
Orgel has shown, there are a number of inscriptions in her copy of the
1609–1610 Mirror for Magistrates, indicating that the readings began
on 21 March 1670, and ended in 1673. Like the note in the Arcadia and
in Weldon, they record not only the date but the name of her residence
where the reading occurred – a type of marking that Jason Scott-Warren
calls “chronotopic.”22 Most are in the hand of her secretary William
Watkinson, who sometimes writes in his own voice, sometimes in hers,
but one of the notes is written by herself: “this I red over the first of May
in Brough. Castel in 1670.”23
It is only the Selden, however, which Clifford says, twice, and very
specifically, that she “overlooked” as well as read – the former term an
important distinction in the kind of reading she sees herself giving this
book. The term “overlook” according to the OED means: “To look (a
thing) over or through; to examine, scrutinize, inspect; to peruse, read
through.” The combination of reading and overlooking goes back at
least as far as Chaucer in The Book of the Duchess (ca. 1396) where
the narrator takes up a romance when he has trouble sleeping, and says,
“Whan I had red this tale wele,/ And overloked it everidele,/ Me thought
wonder, if it were so.”24 Overlooking suggests an activity that intensifies
reading – one reads first then goes back to examine more thoroughly.
Or, one might look through the book carefully, read it, and then over-
look it again, as Clifford says she did. This process inspires Chaucer’s
narrator to write his dream vision, and it indicates the scrutiny which
Clifford applied to Selden’s Titles of Honor, a text intimately related to
her own agenda of inheritance. Indeed, some of the markings suggest a
second layer, as the darker and thicker graphite X’s and lines on top of or
added to markings on p. 594 concerning the title of Prince of Wales; or
p. 793 where ink has been added over the pencil lines marking a section
on the history of the Garter; or pp. 393, 399, and 539 where marginal
glosses have been added in ink to pages already marked in pencil. As
Bill Sherman has pointed out, “printers did not provide everything that
every reader needed to make sense of the text.”25 Although Selden pro-
vides detailed marginal printed citations to his many sources, Clifford
and her readers added more marginalia to mark passages of particular
interest to her and thus serve as memory aids.
Selden’s Method and Clifford as (Un)-Expected Reader

Selden himself was a compiler; indeed, as Jeffrey Todd Knight has
shown, during the early modern period, “compiling was fundamen-
tally entwined with textual production.”26 In some respects, Selden’s
method was similar to that of his older contemporary John Higgins,
whose acquisitive style is described by Harriet Archer in this volume
as “predicated on his editing, expanding or responding to the work of
others.”27 Selden has built a topical “library” in his Titles of Honor
that draws upon a vast number of printed books and manuscripts at
his disposal, which he carefully enumerates in his Preface, then pins
as marginal printed glosses throughout his text, and finally expands
upon further in his section on “Amendements” at the end. Selden
builds a narrative around the history of titles using copious quotations
from his sources, which he gives in the original Latin, French, Italian
or Spanish
without Translations . . . For either the Discourse in English that

accompanies it, sufficiently supplies a Translation, or else the matter
and language is such that a fit Reader, assisted with that discourse,
may without difficultie understand it. 28
Selden also has specific ideas about who that Reader might be: “I expect
not here a Reader without some such measure of knowledge as is usually
had by Liberall Education . . .”29
Selden’s expected reader is male with the liberal education grounded
in Latin, assumed at the time. Clifford is female, and while she was
given a good education with a governess, tutors, and a good library, she
did not have a “Liberall Education,” based on the classics, and her fa-
ther did not approve of her learning languages. 30 Nevertheless, Clifford
turned out to be one of Selden’s best readers in the close way she engaged
with his book. So much work has been done on the reading practices
of early modern women in the past ten years or so, that we no longer
have to prove, in the words of Julie Crawford writing about Mary Hoby,
that “women, like men, read in scholarly and goal-oriented ways.”31
Certainly Clifford’s goal was to use Selden’s historical and legal exam-
ples to buttress her own claims as her father’s heir, and over the years
of pursuing litigation and collecting evidence, she had gained a de facto
knowledge of law. Indeed, as Tim Stretton has shown, such knowledge
was not unusual among a number of elite women at the time who “took
an active interest in their legal affairs and gained considerable expertise
in various fields of law.”32
Clifford’s method was similar to that employed by her older con-
temporary Robert Nicolson, as described by Jason Scott-Warren in
this volume. Warren writes that “Nicolson opens his books up and
inserts materials into them so as to establish his own status as a new
scion growing on the old stock.”33 Clifford inserts herself into Selden
by marking the names of others who are related to or somehow con-
nected to her, and by so doing she grafts herself onto the past of her
family and associates to legitimize her hereditary claims. 34 Her prog-
ress through the book is further asserted by the paper slips used as
bookmarks and the dog-eared corners of pages turned up or down,
leaving a palpable physical trail showing the literal “handling” of
the book.
Selden’s larger historical approach is close to that adopted by Clifford
herself. As Graham Parry has written, Selden was the most learned
historian of his time, and early on in his writings he espoused the “prin-
ciple of ‘synchronism,’” already used by Camden. 35 This method in-
volves “the use of sources as close as possible to the events described,
collation with comparable documents, and the matching of events with
a reliable chronology.”36 Clifford used the same method in compiling
her Great Books; adding to work begun by her mother, she collected all
the documents available from the history of her family, going back to
the twelfth century and continuing to the present. These she had tran-
scribed, noting their sources, and adding her own comments as Selden
does in his work. In particular, when she went through the collection
made for her by antiquarian Roger Dodsworth, she made annotations,
underlining “people and places relevant to her project,” much as she
does in her copy of Selden. 37 To these documents she also added exten-
sive historical accounts of her own, bringing the history of her family
up to date. The purpose of the synchronic method for Selden was “to
assert the antiquity and authority of the law,”38 a purpose which also
lies behind Clifford’s great compilation. But beyond that purpose, “the
Great Books of Record show her determination to produce an epic nar-
rative of dynastic power and honour, through which she interwove her
own identity.”39 Clifford’s own method of working and her use of legal
materials thus made her perhaps a better reader of Selden than he might
have imagined.
Reading as a Matriarchivist
Although Selden’s Titles “long served as a handbook for those concerned
with genealogy and other ‘antiquarian’ matters,”40 it was especially rel-
evant to Clifford’s situation, both as legal claimant and as creator and
preserver of her family history. It is possible that she did not know of
the first edition of Titles, since she has underlined “sixteen yeers” in the
dedication where Selden remarks on how long ago the first edition was
published.41 In August of 1637, five months before reading the book, she
had made the second claim on her lands as Countess of Pembroke, and
as she later writes,
they were the third and last claymes made thereunto, For then the
civill warres broke out in thatt extremity in the northerne partes
thatt noe more claymes could be made there dureing my unckle of
Cumberland and his sonne’s life tyme.42
The markings begin in the Dedication, Preface, and Contents of

Selden’s book and continue all the way to the end. I focus primarily
on Clifford’s reading of Selden’s Preface, the chapter concerning titles
for women, and attention paid to Selden’s sources and to historical
figures related to herself and her friends, as a way of extrapolating
her larger interests and working methods. She was the supreme exam-
ple of what William Sherman has called a “matriarchivist,” a woman
who organized “goods, information, and history in the early modern
household.”43 And as we follow her paths through the book, we see her
mind choosing items that can be added to or supplemented by her own
history which she continued crafting throughout her life in manuscript,
paint, and stone.
In the Preface, Selden defines four kinds of “Nobilitie or Gentry”: (1)
“such as are borne of good and just Parents”; (2) those whose parents are
“Men of Power or Gouernors”; (3) those whose ancestors were honored
in war or at games; and (4) a person “that hath his owne inbred dignitie
and greatnesse of Spirit. Of all which, this is the best kind of Nobili-
tie.” These passages (except for wars and games) have been marked with
pencil lines in the margins, and “this is the best kind of Nobilitie” is
underlined, as is a phrase following closely on, “or from a mans own
worth.”44 While Clifford sought to inherit her lands as the rightful heir
to her father, which would follow from the first kind of nobility, birth,
she also appreciated that “greatness of Spirit” or worth is important as
well. In later years she wrote of her first husband, the Earl of Dorset who
was a spendthrift, that he
was, in his own nature, of a just mind, of a sweet disposition and

very valiant in his own person; he had a great advantage in his
breeding, by the wisdom and devotion of his grandfather, Thomas
Sackville, who was then held one of the wisest men of that time.45
Perhaps it was Clifford’s long-standing inheritance case that led Selden
to add a whole section “Of Feminine Titles” to the second edition of his
book. It is true, however, that in an earlier work on English law, Jani An-
glorum (1610), Selden had already shown interest in “the prominence of
women in British affairs,” as he looked at ancient British society. Begin-
ning with women such as Boadicea and Cartismunda, “Selden praises
the qualities of women as leaders and vindicates their legal and custom-
ary rights to supreme authority in a state.”46 Now in the second edition
of Titles of Honour, Selden elaborates on women’s inheritance of titles.
Clifford read this section carefully as the markings indicate.
Selden remarks,
Of foeminine Titles, some are immediately Created in Women,

some are Communicated by their Husbands, others are Transmitted
to them from their Ancestors, and some also are Given to them as
Consequents only of the dignity of their Husbands or Parents;47
The underlined portions indicate the two that interested Clifford. In par-
ticular, the way she made an account of her own history in her Great
Books shows that transmission of titles from ancestors was very important
to her. Selden goes on to say that there are three kinds of “Transmission
of titles to women”: by Limitation, by Assignment, and “by the very pos-
session of the Territories to which they are inseparably annexed.”48 While
Clifford marks the whole passage, she especially underlines the last part,
and puts a little cross next to it in the margin, as “possession” of lands has
always been of primary importance to her. She also marks Selden’s further
comment: “And without customes or contracts to the contrary a ‘female
vpon a generall limitation to the heires, may be heire as well as a male’.”49
Clifford’s particular interest in women’s “possession of the Territo-
ries to which they are inseparably annexed” underscores the concept of
“inalienable property” which, as Mary Chan and Nancy Wright have
shown, was important to her. “Inalienable property” is “understood
as ‘a constitutive property of a subject,’ meaning it is an attribute of a
person which cannot be sold or exchanged.”50 Clifford saw the West-
morland lands that had belonged to her family for generations as “an at-
tribute of her ‘self’” – they helped to define who she was, which included
not only the lands but the offices and duties that accrued to them. 51
This was in contrast to lands that came to her through the dowry or
jointure of her marriage contracts – these she saw as commodities that
could be used in business transactions, and was willing to let them go if
need be.52 Taking possession for Clifford meant traveling north in 1649
after the Civil War when she was free to do so, making her way among
her various properties, spending time in them, and initiating repairs and
construction projects. She also marked her land through the creation
of monuments. In her perceptive study of Clifford’s autobiographical
writings and architectural pursuits, Anne Myers writes that the links
between “a legal document and a piece of physical property” were ex-
ploited by Clifford “in order to create a record of legal ownership which
did not exist solely on paper but was authoritatively inscribed on the
properties themselves,” in the many memorials written in the stone of
her buildings. And indeed, her renovations were done in an earlier archi-
tectural style, for “these ancient architectural foundations were meant
to prove her own ancestral ones.”53
Clifford was very conscious of the relationship of property to the fe-
male line in her family. In a notable passage in her Kendal Diary of
1649, she recalls that two of the homes of her younger daughter Isabella
(married to the Earl of Northampton) and one home of her older daugh-
ter Margaret (married to the Earl of Thanet) are on lands very near
places where she and her mother had lived; she writes “the destiny is re-
markable.”54 As Clifford makes her way through the section on “Female
Titles,” she is interested in medieval cases involving inheritance through
the female line, marking “without customes or contracts to the contrary
a female upon a generall limitation to the heires, may be heire as well as
a male.”55 Selden cites a decision by the great thirteenth-century lawyer,
Henry de Bracton, upheld under Edward III, “that every sister vpon a
partition might (if there were whole dignities enough) haue one.”56 This
phrase and the mention of Bracton are both underlined and crossed in
the margin. Clifford notes the distribution of lands to several earls by
King John based on their inheritance through the female line, and she
underlines the statement that, “husbands . . . also [could be] raised into
any of the two dignities of Earle or Baron by reason of the right dis-
cended on their wiues.”57 One of these, William first Earl of Pembroke
who came into the title from his wife Isabel de Clare in 1199, “deriving
their right through his [the Earl of Gifford’s] sisters,” Clifford underlines
in ink.58 Her interest here is in descent of the title through a woman
but also the Pembroke earldom itself, to which her second husband be-
longed. The importance of these pages to Clifford is further indicated by
the evidence of her handling them; the top corner of page 882 is turned
down, the bottom corner of page 883 is turned up, and a thin slip of
paper has been inserted between the two pages as a bookmark.
Selden gives various references to legal sources for the practice of rais-
ing husbands to earl or baron “by reason of the right discended on their
wives,” but Clifford marks in ink next to his statement that “examples of
this kind are also easily found in divers collections of things of that na-
ture.” Reading down page 883 where Selden compares the early practice
in France with those in England, she marks his passage acknowledging
that in earlier times, titles
were given to the persons that first bore them, and to their heires . . . and
not restrained to the heires of the body, or to males only, as the most
are at this day, and for many yeeres have beene, especially in England.
Selden devotes his last section on Feminine Titles to a discussion of the
claims of the young Duke of Norfolk, during the reign of Henry VI,
to the castle and title of Arundel. He was granted the title “by reason
of the possession of the Castle,” and later a similar decision was made
upon his heirs for the “same reason of the possession of the Castle.”
Both of these statements are underlined by Clifford and page 884 is
turned down at the top. Here is another example of how important
the concept of “possession” was to her own claims upon her land, a
possession literally marked by her buildings and monuments, but also
by the constant reiteration in her diaries, Great Books, and even the
books she owned of when and where she stayed, or slept, or visited,
or read.
Throughout the book, Clifford is also interested in Selden’s references
to people she knows or to whom she is related, even in a corollary man-
ner. She underlines such references and sometimes puts a distinctive
cross in the margin. In addition to the twelfth-century William, earl of
Pembroke and his wife Isabel, 59 Clifford marks other medieval ancestors
such as Ralfe de Neville, Earl of Westmorland,60 and Henry de B romflet,
created Baron of Vesey under Henry VI.61 It was Baron Vesey’s daughter
Margaret who married John, ninth Lord Clifford, and their history is
told in her Great Books.
From Selden’s section on titles “immediately Created in Women,” Clifford
underlines Anne Rochford, eldest daughter of Thomas Bullein (Boleyn),
who was created Marchioness of Pembroke by Henry VIII in 1533, in an
attempt to raise her stature before their marriage (see Figure 7.3). Selden
quotes from the grant of this peerage in Latin, and Clifford underlines
the provision in English “the estate being limited to her and the heires
Figure 7.3 Detail of p. 878 mentioning Anne Rochford (Boleyn) from Selden,
Titles of Honor, Folger STC 22178 copy 3. Used by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.
males of her body to be begotten.”62 Clifford, of course, would have
known that, like herself, Anne Boleyn had no living male heirs, causing
the created title to become extinct after Anne Boleyn’s death, whereas
Clifford’s inherited titles passed on to herself after the deaths of her uncle
and cousin, and eventually her daughters inherited her lands.63
Also in this section, Clifford duly notes with marginal lines titles
granted to women during her own lifetime by James I and Charles I.64 The
first is Mary Compton, mother of the Duke of Buckingham, the king’s
favorite, whom James created Countess of Buckingham in 1618.65 Mary
Compton’s third husband was William Compton, Earl of Northampton.
Clifford’s daughter Isabella married his grandson, James Compton, third
Earl of Northampton. The second is “Lady Finch made Vicountesse of
Maidstone by King James, to her and the heires males of her body” (1623),
then subsequently made “Countesse of Winchelsey” (1628).66 The lady
was Elizabeth Heneage, wife of Moyle Finch, and mother of Heneage
Finch.67 Clifford knew this family, as mentioned in her Memoir of 1603.
On a journey with her mother and other female relatives to North Hall,
Clifford records that one of their men fell ill and died, causing them all to
fear the plague. “My aunt of Warwick sent us medicine from a House near
Hampton Court where she then lay with Sir Moyle Finch and his Lady.”68
The other two recent titles she notes are Baroness Le Dispenser granted
by James I, and Baroness Ogle granted by Charles I. Lady Mary Fane
received the title Baroness Le Dispenser in 1604 from James I, in settle-
ment of an arbitration between herself and her cousin Edward Nevill
for the barony of Abergavenny. Neville had a distant relationship with
Clifford’s family via the wife of her cousin, Francis Clifford.69 Catherine
Ogle, mother of William Cavendish, later Duke of Newcastle, was made
Baroness Ogle in 1628, the title which had been her father’s. Her title
and large northern land holdings then passed to her son at her death in
1629. One of Clifford’s grandsons would later marry into that family.70
Selden discusses titles passed on to wives who “have the feminine of
what their husbands are,” and continues, “but for the question whether
or how farre these dignities so communicated continue after the death of
the husbands, see the Lawes cited,” and he mentions several including “the
Countesse of Rutland’s case.”71 Clifford has those passages marked and has
underlined the latter. The reference is to the complicated inheritance case
involving large landholdings that occurred between two parts of the family
upon the death of John Manners, fourth Earl of Rutland in 1588, making
his son Roger the fifth earl at the age of eleven.72 There were two dowager
countesses of Rutland at this point, Isabel and E lizabeth, wives of the third
and fourth earls, respectively. Much of the land was in the Midlands, and
some may have bordered on Clifford’s estates in the north. Furthermore,
one of her best friends was Katherine Manners, daughter of the sixth Earl of
Rutland, and later wife of the Duke of Buckingham.73 After Anne Clifford,
she would become one of the greatest female land owners in England, inher-
iting vast estates and houses from her mother and her husband.74
As Katherine Acheson has suggested, Clifford “constructed h erself in
terms of a metaphoric relationship to the past,” especially to “ exceptional
women taken from her panoply of ancestors,” and I would add that she
also derived empowerment from a long chain of historic women as seen in
her markings of Selden’s section on titles “communicated” to women.75
Clifford is interested in his lengthy discussion of the term Domina,
which he traces from Biblical and Roman times down to early British
law. She has underlined “Men usually called women (after fourteen) . . .
Domina, or Ladies,” and puts a cross next to the passage discussing
the use of Domina or Lady for women in England who were to be mar-
ried by “leave of the King” or by his choice.76 Indeed, throughout the
book, Clifford’s markings show interest in the history of various titles
relating to women, especially royal ones. Thus she marks “caesar” as
used for Queen Elizabeth in her correspondence with Sultan Amurad III;
Mary Tudor’s adoption of the title “Supreme Head of the Church of
England”; the use of “Defender of the Faith” for Mary Tudor and Queen
Elizabeth; and the history of the term “queen” and its subsequent use in
England.77 She is also interested in the order of the coronation of queens,
marking the English side-notes to Selden’s printing of the Latin rites.78
These royal women with titles of power under the church and state, and
the various countesses whose titles were granted during her own life-
time, whether friends or relatives, all metaphorically suggest the position
she sees herself attaining.
Because Clifford – and her mother before her – paid legal scholars for
years to collect documents related to her case, she expresses interest in
antiquarian sources consulted by Selden. For example she makes a mar-
ginal ink mark and underlines “Fitzherbert,” a reference to the early six-
teenth-century Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, whose collections of English law
cases, La Graunde Abridgement, continued to be published down into
the seventeenth century.79 She also underlines “Bracton,” “Littleton,” and
“Lipsius.” These are references to the massive survey of English common
law made in the middle ages but published under Henry de Bracton’s name
as De Legibus . . . Angliae in 1569; Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes
of England . . . A Commentarie Upon Littleton, first published in 1628; and
the recently-deceased scholar Justus Lipsius, whose commentaries on Tac-
itus were consulted by Selden.80 Among Selden’s other sources marked by
Clifford are John Foxe’s “Acts of the Church of England,”81 and the more
obscure Alexiad, a twelfth-century history by Anna Comnena, daughter
of the Byzantine emperor – whose name Clifford marks on several pages.82
It is highly likely that Clifford would have had a copy of Foxe’s Acts but not
of the Alexiad, which was as yet unavailable in English.83
The antiquarian Roger Dodsworth, mentioned earlier, was perhaps
her most important source of documents, and “also the means through
which the work of other antiquarians found their way into the Great
Books.”84 When Selden thanks Dodsworth as his source for a record
from the Wakefield courts, calling him “a Gentleman of those parts,”
Clifford marks the passage in the margin and underlines Dodsworth’s
name.85 She is also interested in whether antiquarian materials are avail-
able in manuscript or in print. She underlines “the Rolls of the Tower,”
one of Selden’s sources for documents,86 and also his statement in the
Preface that some of his historical sources are of the kind “which is
publique in print.”87 She used both kinds in her own genealogical work,
including her Great Picture, where her intellectual history and family
ancestry are depicted in books and written documents in the paint-
ing. More specifically, many of the documents originally collected by
her mother were found in the Tower of London by antiquarian St Loe
Kniveton, and subsequently copied into the Great Books.88
In the Preface to Titles of Honor, she further underlines Selden’s refer-
ence to “my deare Friend Sir Robert Cotton,” and “that inestimable Li-
brary of his Industrious, Judicious and most Chargeable Collection,”89
and she continues to underline references to Cotton throughout the
book. Like Selden, she no doubt felt personally indebted to Cotton, since
his library in London was one of the sources for copies of documents
she collected for her own case.90 Her cousin Henry had also consulted
Cotton “about the first creation of [the title] Lord Clifford.”91
In addition to all of these references related to her inheritance, C
lifford
marks the names of individuals with whom she feels a personal connec-
tion. In the chapter where Selden discusses French titles, she underlines a
reference to “Matthew de Gournay a Baron of the Duchie of Guienne,”
and next to it in the margin inserts a reference to folio 373 of the second
edition (1632) of Montaigne’s Essays, translated by John Florio (see Fig-
ure 7.4). It happens that on this particular page, Montaigne praises his
intellectual soul-mate, Marie de Gournay, the woman who would go on
to edit his works posthumously. This is one of those instances where the
reader goes beyond the traces left by the printer or the author to create a
context and marker for something that is important to her. Clifford was
fond of the Essays and probably knew the translator Florio, as he was
a good friend of her tutor, Samuel Daniel. At least twice in her diaries
she mentions having the Essays read to her, and a copy of Montaigne’s
Essays is displayed among her books in the left wing of the great trip-
tych painting featuring her early life.92 Here she associates herself with a
woman who facilitated the distribution of Montaigne’s text.
A writer whom she and Selden both knew personally was Ben Jonson.
Jonson’s dedicatory poem “To His Honord Friend Mr. John Selden”
graces the front of Titles of Honor, and later in the book, during a digres-
sion on the ancient custom of crowning poets with laurels, Selden writes,
And thus have I, by no unseasonable digression, performed a prom-

ise to you my beloved Ben Ionson. Your curious learning and iudge-
ment may correct where I have erred, and adde where my notes and
memory have left me short.93
Figure 7.4 D
etail of p. 539 with added reference to Montaigne’s Essays from Selden,
Titles of Honor, Folger STC 22178 copy 3. Used by permission of the
Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sha-
reAlike 4.0 International Licence. Photograph by Georgianna Ziegler.
It sounds as though Jonson had made Selden promise to include the his-
tory of the title of poet laureate somewhere in his book, and Selden
obliged his friend. Clifford underlines “my beloued Ben. Ionson” and
has inserted a bay leaf into this page (see Figure 7.5).
Her act carries the object marker described by Adam Smyth in this
volume one step farther.94 The bay leaf leaves no trace on the page –
indeed, since its removal and separate preservation by conservators, the
act of inserting has disappeared, except through a photographic record.
But its original insertion was not with the intent of using the book as
“a cabinet of natural history”; rather it was a personal memento from
Clifford, a mark of friendship for a man in whose entertainments she
had danced at the Stuart court.95
Finally I want to argue that Clifford’s Books of Record and her “Great
Picture” show that she had a collecting and organizing instinct similar
to Selden’s, and that these detailed and comprehensive historical projects
were her own versions of Titles of Honor with a focus on her personal
inheritance. As a “matriarchivist,” she spent much of her life paying
researchers to comb archives and copy hundreds of records proving her
inheritance, which she had bound into the four sets of Books of Re-
cord. Like Selden, she had documents transcribed in Latin, French or
Anglo-Saxon, but she also had them translated.96 In addition, she had
“the origin and location of almost every document … given in marginal
references,” much like Selden’s marginal glosses in his book.97 But she
went beyond Selden in tying all of this historical material together with
narratives of the lives of her ancestors and of herself. Her autobiography
in the Books of Record and the hundreds of pages of her diaries docu-
ment her life while constantly relating it back to what has gone before,
and grounding it in the physical buildings where she and her ancestors
Figure 7.5 Details of p. 412 with mention of Ben Jonson and p. 413 show-
ing bayleaf and bookmark from Selden, Titles of Honor, Folger
STC 22178 copy 3. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare
Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International Licence.
have lived, placing her in a historical continuum. As Alice Friedman
has noted, “the layering of meanings through juxtaposed texts, through
allusions to literature and to the Bible, is a frequent device” in Clifford’s
diary and memoirs, just as “overlapping images, heraldic devices, and
inscriptions on paintings, buildings, and memorials” became one of her
“chief vehicles for self-representation.”98
Such devices are especially evident in the two large triptychs she commis-
sioned in 1646 after she came into her property. The plan of the paintings,
which were meant as records for her two daughters who would inherit her
estates, is a complex visual account of her ancestry from medieval times
to the present. It not only shows herself in youth and age, her immediate
family (father, mother, and two deceased brothers in the center), as well as
her tutor, governess and the books that shaped her intellectual life, but it
reaches back into time by including coats-of-arms and recorded lineages
of the Clifford and Westmorland family from “six centuries before the
Norman Conquest” to her daughter’s “wedding in 1647.”99 Of the eight
small portraits on the walls of the triptych, five are of women, showing her
governess and four paternal and maternal aunts, and the genealogies make
a point of recording lines through female descent, much like her careful
reading of Selden’s Titles. Indeed, the paintings were made to be read as
much as seen. In Clifford’s world, the act of reading extends well beyond
book or paper to the placement of texts on walls, bed hangings, paintings
and monuments. As the Bishop of Carlisle noted in her funeral sermon,
“her Walls, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned” with
“Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of
Authors” and caused “her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in the
time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make
their descants on them.”100 Everyday life is lived in part through multiple
transactions of reading. The collecting, transcribing, and organizing neces-
sary for the creation of the autobiographical projects on paper, canvas and
stone which assert and prove her inherited rights, mark Lady Anne Clifford
as a true historian, and a worthy reader of Selden.
Notes
I am grateful to Lois G. Schwoerer for reading and commenting on an earlier
draft of this essay, and to Linda Levy Peck for stimulating conversations on
women, property and the law in this period.
1
John Selden, Titles of Honor, 2nd ed. (London: William Stansby for Rich-
ard Whitakers, 1631). Folger Library Folio STC 22178 copy 3. The vol-
ume was purchased from Maggs in 2011; its original provenance was Lady
Anne Clifford to the library of Sir Daniel Fleming, Kt. (1633–1701), an
antiquary who lived near her home in Ambleside, Westmorland.
2
I mention here only a few of the many studies about her, in chronologi-
cal order. Editions of her writings will be referenced in the notes below:
Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford; Lewalski, Writing Women, Chapter 5;
Spence, Lady Anne Clifford; Acheson, “The Modernity of the Early Mod-
ern;” Suzuki, “Anne Clifford and the Gendering of History;” Brayman
Hackel, Reading Material; Orgel, “Marginal Maternity;” Myers, “Con-
struction Sites;” Hearn and Hulse, Lady Anne Clifford; Matchinske, “Se-
rial Identity.”
3 For the relationship between Anne Clifford and Mary Wroth see Hannay.
4 Quoted from one of her Great Books in Spence, 160. During most of the
paper I refer to her as “Clifford” but in certain places, to disambiguate, I
use “Anne” or “Lady Anne.”
5 Most of the property had been purchased by the Society of the Inn in 1618,
but apparently a few rooms were set aside for use of the Cliffords. William-
son, 454–55.
6 Christianson, ‘Selden, John (1584–1654).’
7 Williamson, 211. Selden lived with the Countess of Kent for some years,
and in one letter to her, Clifford sends “my love and service to the worthy
Mr. Seldon” (Williamson, 197).
8 For antiquarians consulted by Anne Clifford, see Malay, “Introduction.”
For the relationship of these men to Selden see Toomer, John Selden.
9 Sedgwick, “A Summary,” I:302.
10 Brayman Hackel, “Turning to Her ‘Best Companions’,”99.
11 Although Wilton had a particularly fine library, there is no indication that
this book belonged to the Herberts; its binding and endpapers show no
indication of a Herbert provenance, and the title page does have Clifford’s
inscription in her own hand.
12 Jardine and Grafton; Brayman Hackel, “‘Boasting of Silence’,” 109.
13 Jardine and Sherman, “Pragmatic Readers,” 115.
14 Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, quoted in Helen Smith, “‘More swete vnto
the eare’,” 421.
15 Helen Smith, 414.
16 See Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 234, and Frye, Pens and Needles, 123.
17 Frye, Pens and Needles, 123. In November 1616 Clifford says “I sat at my
work” while Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s Essays to her, then three
days later she notes “I made an end of the long cushion of Irish stitch,”
Clifford, Memoir, 99.
18 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 234.
19 Quoted in Hackett, Women and Romance, 7.
20 Quoted in Williamson, 527. He records the book being in the library at Bill
Hill, Berkshire.
21 See reference and image of inscription in Elsky, “Lady Anne Clifford’s
Common-Law Mind,” 542. The book resides in the Cumbria Archive
Centre.
23 See Orgel, “Marginal Maternity,” 267–89.
24 “overlook, v.”, OED Online, Oxford University Press; online edn, June
2017, accessed 7 July 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/134802; Chaucer,
“The dreame,” fo.ccxlv recto [modern line nos. 231–33]. Clifford was her-
self a lifelong reader of Chaucer; his Works appear among her youthful
books on the left side of the Great Picture, and she is still reading Chaucer
in 1649 for solace, as she tells her friend, the Dowager Countess of Kent
(Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 233).
25 Sherman, “What Did Renaissance Readers Write,” 124.
26 Knight, Bound to Read, 5.
27 Archer, this volume, 176.
28 Selden, Titles, [sig. ¶3v].
29 Ibid.
30 Williamson writes that the prohibition may only have been against Greek
and Latin, and that based on her account books, “she was in early days
taught French,” 66.
31 Crawford, “Reconsidering,” 206.
32 Stretton, Women Waging Law, 65. In addition to Clifford, Stretton men-
tions Grace Mildmay, Elizabeth Russell, and Joan and Maria Thynne,
among many others. The quantity and classes of women involved in prop-
erty litigation, and the different kinds of law involved have been documented
by Amy Erickson in Women and Property in Early Modern England.
34 “Clifford used her sense of communion with deceased authors and de-
ceased family members alike to construct a community of the dead legiti-
mating her rights to land when the community of the living did not.” Mary
Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject,” 349.
35 Parry, Trophies of Time, 95, 99. Anne Clifford owned a copy of Camden’s
Britannia, as seen in the left-hand panel of her “Great Picture,” Spence, 190.
36 Parry, 99.
37 Malay, ed. Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 13.
38 Parry, 101.
40 Toomer, 1:166.
41 Selden, Titles, (sig. †2).
42 Quoted in Malay, ed. Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 810.
43 Sherman, Chapter 3, “Reading the Matriarchive” in Used Books, 54.
Sherman borrows the term “matriarchive” from Derrida and expands it.
44 Selden, Titles, [S3v]–[S4].
45 Quoted in Clifford, The Diaries, ed. David J. H. Clifford (Far Thrupp,
Stroud, Glouces.: Alan Sutton, 1990), 85. Further cited as Diaries.
46 Parry, 103.
47 Selden, Titles, 876.
48 Ibid., 881.
49 Ibid.
50 Chan and Wright, “Marriage, Identity, and the Pursuit of Property,” 163.
51 Ibid., 165.
52 See Chan and Wright, “Marriage, Identity, and the Pursuit of Property,”
166 and Clifford, Memoir, 93, 134n11, 135.
53 Myers, 582.
56 Ibid., 882.
57 Ibid., 882–83.
58 Ibid., 882; see also Crouch, “Marshal, William (I), fourth earl of Pembroke
(c. 1146–1219).”
59 Ibid., 882.
60 Ibid., 662.
61 Ibid., 745.
62 Ibid., 878.
63 See Ives, Anne Boleyn, 389 n, 53.
64 As Peck notes, “Royal bounty increased markedly in early Stuart England,
whether calculated in honors and titles conferred, in gifts given, in lands
bestowed, or in offices and privileges granted” (Court Patronage, 32). See
also Stone, Aristocracy.
66 Ibid., 878–79.
67 Lady Finch was called “‘the richest widow in present estate, both in ioyn-
ture, moveables, and inheritance of her owne, that is in England,’” and
according to Lawrence Stone, hers “was probably one of the most expen-
sive titles ever sold.” She negotiated for six years to get it (Stone, 110–11).
69 On this case, see Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 40.
70 See Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford, 159.
72 See Hammer, “Manners, Roger, fifth earl of Rutland (1576–1612).”
73 Clifford notes in her Great Books that during the reign of Henry VIII in
1525, Henry Lord Clifford was created first Earl of Cumberland the same
day as Thomas Manners Lord Ross was made Earl of Rutland (Malay, ed.
Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 586), indicating an old association between
the families. See Clifford, Memoir, 103 and 145 for her relationship with
Katherine Manners.
74 See Ohlmeyer, “MacDonnell, Katherine.”
75 Acheson, “Modernity,” 43.
77 Ibid., 47, 60, 109–10, 114–19.
78 Ibid., 212, 249ff.
79 Ibid., 881.
80 Ibid., 881, 883, 887.
81 Ibid., 819.
82 Ibid., 62, 103.
83 A Latin translation by David Hoeschel of the Alexiad was published in
1610 in Augsburg, and Selden may well have owned a copy.
86 Ibid., 113.
87 Ibid., sig. [§4v].
88 Malay, ed. Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 7–8.
89 Selden, Titles, Sig. [¶3r].
90 Next to a medieval document concerning Alice Countess of Lancaster in
the Great Books, Clifford writes “In the library of Sir Robert Cotton.”
Malay, ed. Anne Clifford’s Great Books, 192.
91 Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 88, 168.
92 Clifford owned both the 1603 and 1632 editions of Montaigne’s Essays. In
her Diary for November 1616 she writes: “Upon the 9th I sat at my work
and heard Rivers and Marsh read Montaigne’s Essays, which book they
have read almost this fortnight” She also hears Montaigne being read on 28
January 1617 (Clifford, Memoir, 99, 117).
94 Smyth, this volume.
95 Clifford danced in Jonson’s Masque of Beauty and Masque of Queens in
1608 and 1609.
96 Selden usually prints passages from documents in the original languages,
especially Latin, but paraphrases or summarizes in English.
97 Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 164.
98 Friedman, “Constructing an Identity,” 362.
99 Spence, Lady Anne Clifford, 195.
100 Rainbowe, A Sermon, 40. See also Fleming, Graffiti.
8 Marital Marginalia
The Seventeenth-Century
Library of Thomas and
Isabella Hervey
Emma Smith
Ickworth Hall, Suffolk, October 1686

Four months after his wife Isabella’s death, Sir Thomas Hervey returned
to one of her favorite books, Symon Patrick’s The Hearts Ease, or
A Remedy Against All Troubles (1671). Patrick’s consolatory discourse
for those grieving impressed on its readers that death is “First, Com-
mon; Secondly, Necessary; Thirdly, Good,” and counselled “against im-
moderate sorrow.”1 The Herveys’ much-used copy of this small book is
marked with extensive Latin manuscript commentary. On the flyleaf,
one hand has written “Isabella Hervey, read in October 1686.” Two
interleaved manuscript lines in darker ink begin “O decus atque dolor.”
A tremulous third hand at the bottom of the page reads “This was my
most pious, chast, and charitable mothers Book. Bristol.”2
These multiple inscriptions are typical of the late seventeenth-century
book collection of Thomas and Isabella Hervey, later taken up by their
son, John Hervey, created Earl of Bristol in 1702. This modest provincial
library consists of some two hundred volumes still at Ickworth, near
Bury St Edmund’s, as part of an impressive later estate now owned by
the National Trust. In addition to this core collection, tracing the dis-
tinctive ownership marks of Thomas and Isabella through rare book
dealers and special collections catalogues has so far revealed more than
thirty other volumes that once belonged to the couple’s library.
In many ways the Herveys’ collection is an unremarkable one. Its pur-
chasing choices are often conservative, its printed books unexceptional.
Where it is compelling is in its unique customization: the ways in which
the affordances of the early modern book as a space for inscription and
marginalia transform its affective significance. As Lisa Gitelman iden-
tifies in discussing the job-printing of a later period, we tend to assume
that print is for reading, even though we know that books and other
documents are often explicitly designed to encourage manuscript par-
ticipation, and even as humanist instruction told early modern book
owners to read with pen in hand.3 What the Hervey collection reveals
through these manuscript interventions is an unusually insistent sense of
a couple, rather than the individuals, as owners. We gain a glimpse of
156 Emma Smith
marital and familial relationship enacted and authorized via books and,
perhaps, by implied shared reading.
Thomas’s inscription “O decus atque dolor,” adapted from the mourn-
ing of Pallas in the Aeneid and added to some books in the collection
on Isabella’s death, suggests that their library was one important itera-
tion of their marriage and its emotional freight, as well as a means by
which the family shaped Isabella’s own posthumous character and leg-
acy. The Hervey library showcases one particular and insistent aspect of
early modern marginalia—signatures and proper names—marks that,
as Jason Scott-Warren has discussed, “connect the physical books with
particular individuals and locales.”4 Signatures of the Herveys before
and after their marriage, and of subsequent members of the family, and
the use of inscribed names as a memorial or mnemonic, establish the
library as a means by which changing relationships and patterns of own-
ership were asserted and consolidated. Inscribing books that had a par-
ticular sentimental value on the death of his wife reframed the library as
a site of mourning and of record for Thomas Hervey in the immediate
months of his widowhood. Names written into the books of the Hervey
collection construct, confirm, and record family ties. They establish title
pages as a key location in this collection contributing to “the sprawling
culture of life-writing” that Adam Smyth discusses in his Autobiogra-
phy in Early Modern England.5 The very situatedness of these marked
books within the Hervey household raises significant conceptual ques-
tions about our investment in the location, the origin, of particular book
collections. Much scholarly activity in provenance research prioritizes
and authenticates particular owners and periods in the lives of early
books: perhaps we need to reconsider those investments in what dias-
pora studies usefully identifies as the myth of “the ancestral homeland
as [a] true, ideal home.”6 The Hervey collection, then, challenges some
prominent contemporary narratives about the reconstruction of historic
library collections, about the distinctiveness of women’s reading, and
about the affective investments of books and of book history.
Thomas and Isabella Hervey

Thomas Hervey (1625–1694) was the third son of Sir William Hervey
(1585–1660), and his second wife, Susan Jermyn. A middle brother,
William, died as a young man in Cambridge and was eulogised by
Abraham Cowley as “like to the Stars, to which he now is gone.”7 John
Hervey, the elder brother, was an ambitious courtier who was elected
to Parliament in 1661, one of the principal shareholders in the Duke of
York’s theatre and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He left the running of
the family’s Suffolk estate at Ickworth to his younger brother Thomas.
Thomas himself had some wider professional ambitions: he bought a
seat on the Navy Board in 1664 and was MP for Bury St Edmunds from
1679 to 1690. He is mentioned a number of times as a dining companion,
Marital Marginalia 157
without much affection, in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who conveys the
strong impression that Hervey does not work very diligently. He is “a
man less necessary” (10 February 1655/1656), and “but a coxcomb he
is and will never be better in the business of the Navy” (7 November
1666).8 The main business of Thomas Hervey’s life seems to have been
the wooing of his wife, Isabella May, and their married life in Suffolk.
Isabella (1625–1686) was born in the same year as her husband. Her
father, Humphrey May of Norfolk, was close to James I who knighted
him in 1613. May was an ambitious courtier who gained the valuable
patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, and perhaps it was the residual
ambition of the May family, even after Humphrey’s death, that initially
kept Thomas and Isabella from marrying.
Thomas Hervey and Isabella May conducted a long epistolary courtship
throughout the 1650s, before their eventual union in 1658. Their fraught ex-
tended romance was operated in the houses of shared acquaintances in Lon-
don and country society, aided by clandestine letter drops. Thomas writes
in emotional agonies after a frustrating social encounter in March 1651:
If you have not written this morning, or cannot find a time to give
me your paper, let me desire you it may be ready against night, and
tell me (for it was done in such hast as I am allmost afraid) whether
you took not my paper yester-night in your mothers chamber; but if
I be not much deceived, I saw you when you cam down take it out of
your pocket, & put it where your master languishes to be.9
It is a rare example of a written text explicitly substituting for physical

contact between the lovers, a kind of Clarissa or Love-letters Between a
Nobleman and his Sister avant la lettre—but it’s a telling one and can be seen
to anticipate something of the proxy charge of their shared marital library.
More than a year later, the clandestine fun, if such it was, was wearing off:
Soberly, my dearest, I am allmost a weary of this discreet part, tho

I consider for whose sake it is I endure all this, which would else be
intolerable… Never, oh never, my dear heart, can I be fully at peace
till ye happy hour in which without injury to you I may lay by my
disguise; & even this I would not wish if you may any other way be
happier. So much I love you above my self, who am yet ye dearer to
my self for being so intirely yours (May 30 1652).10
Thomas’ letters survive in late Victorian publication edited by Sydenham

Hervey and published in 1894. The originals of his correspondence are in
the Bury St Edmunds record office, but no records suggest that Isabella’s
letters have survived. Correspondence, as often in the archive, survive
only as soliloquy: the reciprocity of shared letter-writing is replaced by the
monologue of one-sided persistence, and this structure has implications
for the apparent reciprocity of their later married library inscriptions.
158 Emma Smith
Sydenham Hervey’s choice of a descriptive subtitle for the volume “with Sir
Thomas Hervey’s letters during courtship & poems during widowhood”
forms part of a powerful Hervey family trope of Thomas and Isabella’s
unusually reciprocal and happy marriage, and in particular of Thomas’s
own uxoriousness. The couple’s memorial at Ickworth church extends
this construction of their relationship: “Here lye the bodyes of Sir Thomas
Hervey and Dame Isabella his wife, who were most eminent examples of
piety, charity, and conjugal affection.” Thomas’s annual elegies on the
anniversary of Isabella’s death were also published by Sydenham Hervey:
“The first anniversary on ye death of ye excellent Issabella Lady Hervey,
my dear wife, who dyed ye fifth day of June, anno domino 1686, att five
of ye clock in the morning being Saterday, (the day of her birth also).”11
Amid more clichéd expressions of mourning, Thomas is capable of rue-
ful self-knowledge. On the fifth anniversary, for instance, he wrote that
“I blush to see my selfe thus long survive/ Thee, without whom I thought
I could not live/ So many dayes as now I have done years.”12
The Hervey books

If conventional poetry is one means of memorialization, then books of-
fer a more eloquent form of elegy. More than 240 extant books can be
identified as belonging to the couple. This is not a large collection by
late seventeenth-century standards: the 1681 catalogue of the collection
of the Lucy family of Charlcote Park, for instance, lists 1400 volumes,
and a Sussex book collector almost exactly contemporaneous with the
Herveys, Samuel Jeake (1623–1690), amassed more than 2,000 items for
his “Register of all my Bookes, Pamphlets, Manuscripts, & F ragments.”13
Samuel Pepys, a colleague of Thomas Hervey’s at the Navy Commission-
ers, owned almost 3,000 volumes.14
The overall shape of the collection is not unusual for similar libraries
of the time. David Pearson’s account of five seventeenth-century male
book owners—each with far larger collections than that of the Herveys—
identifies certain shared books across all the collections. Like the others,
the Herveys owned works of St Augustine, Joseph Mede, Henry Ham-
mond, Erasmus, and a Book of Common Prayer, and they also shared
contemporary taste in owning Camden’s Britain, Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum,
John Barclay’s Argenis and Herbert’s The Temple. On the other hand, they
did not apparently own titles that were widely represented in Pearson’s
sample, including Gerhard Voss’s history of Pelagianism, Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica and the work of devotion The Causes of the Decay of
Christian Piety, or works by Richard Baxter, Henry More, Hugo Grotius,
Thomas Browne, John Owen or James Ussher.15
Their oldest book is a 1514 edition of Gesta Romanorum; the most
recently published is a pamphlet on The Necessity of Parliaments pub-
lished in 1689, after Isabella’s death. More than forty individual titles
date from the sixteenth century and there is evidence that many of these
were inherited by Thomas Hervey from his father. Nevertheless, a major-
ity of the collection—both new and older books—was probably bought
by the couple during their marriage. More than seventy-five books are
printed outside England—the majority of these French—and there is a
large proportion of French language material. Only about a quarter of
the library is in Latin. There are works of philosophy, history, new sci-
ence, and law by Erasmus, Hobbes, Euclid, Seneca, Descartes, Gassendi,
Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bacon, Robert Boyle, Holinshed, and Edward
Coke. Inevitably there is a good deal of material relating directly to poli-
tics, including numerous pamphlets of speeches such as the 1654 edition
of His Highnesse the Lord Protector’s speeches to the Parliament in the
Painted Chamber, the 1655 A catalogue of the lords, knights, and gentle-
men that have compounded for their estates and Eikon Basilike (1648).
These bear the marks of having been bound together in larger volumes,
including manuscript numbers on the title page and a table of contents
for a composite volume on one of the pastedowns: these collections were
probably broken up and individually rebound early in the twentieth cen-
tury. There is relatively little household or estate management beyond
Gervase Markham’s Hungers prevention: or, The whole art of fovvling
by water and land (1655), and only one book on medical or physical
wellbeing, The temperate man, or The right way of preserving life and
health (1668). Texts we would now call literary—what Alan B. Farmer
and Zachary Lesser in their analysis of the Shorter Title Catalogue by six
broad categories call “Poesy and the Arts”—are rather minimally repre-
sented.16 A 1623 Shakespeare First Folio, now in a library in Japan, seems
to have been an outlier: their only other drama so far identified is North-
ward Ho (1607)—discussed below—and a 1647 translation of Guarini’s
Il Pastor Fido by Richard Fanshawe. Thomas and Isabella owned George
Herbert’s The Temple (1641), a 1561 copy of Langland’s Piers Plowman,
and volumes of poetry by William Davenant and by Abraham Cowley,
the eulogist of William, Thomas’s older brother. There is also a copy of
Jonson’s translation of the Art of Poetry (1640) in their library.
The largest single category of works owned by Thomas and Isabella
is, as expected, on topics of religion, religious advice and sermons.
They tend towards applied religion rather than biblical hermeneutics,
including works by Donne, Andrewes, and Joseph Hall. One review of
the collection, observes, noting volumes on Foxe and the Cathars, that
the couple “seem to have had a particular interest in religious persecu-
tions.”17 Perhaps one of the most interesting and unique volumes in the
library is a Little Gidding Harmony, a unique cut and paste collage of
the Gospel accounts to produce a chronological narrative, curated by
the young Virginia Ferrar.18 A favorite author seems to have been the
royalist cleric and moralist Henry Hammond (1605–1660), whose work
was particularly popular for young people: Charles I sent his son Henry
160 Emma Smith
Figure 8.1 T homas Hervey’s inscription marking Isabella’s death, on a copy

of Henry Hammond’s The Power of the Keyes (1647). By permission
of the National Trust, Ickworth (NT 1.B.2.9(1)).
a copy of A Practical Catechism (1646) from Carisbrooke. Thomas and

Isabella apparently followed Hammond throughout his career, acquir-
ing eight of his religious and didactic titles (see Figure 8.1).
The books inherited from William Hervey will be discussed below.
What is also noteworthy about the collection is the number of books
that bear earlier signatures and so seem to have been acquired as gifts
or as second-hand purchases. Thomas and Isabella’s collection tends to
the retrospective: more than half of their books were published before
they themselves reached adulthood. A 1561 copy of Calvin’s Institutes
is marked “Henry Copingers booke of Buxall”: Copinger was the rector
of Lavenham Church—twelve miles from Bury St Edmunds—who died
in 1622 (see Figure 8.2). A 1585 copy of Lipsius has the signature of the
humanist, diplomat, and friend of Sir Philip Sidney “Danielis Rogerii”;
another book has “Thomas Whyte his book 1638” written on the title
page. These marks of other owners coincide with the new ownership
marks of the Herveys and establish the title pages of the collection as an
archive of the books’ prior itineraries.
Reading at Ickworth
The main category of marginalia in the Hervey books is the inscription of
proper names, sometimes as apparent marks of ownership or self-assertion,
sometimes as memorial or recollection. Other forms of marginalia
and marks of reading are scattered through the books in the collec-
tion, although, as always, it is difficult to be sure how to attribute and
interpret them. The initial comedies section of Mr William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) is heavily marked. The first play
Figure 8.2 A
previously owned copy of Calvin’s Institutes (1561), reinscribed for
Tho: & Isabella Hervey. By permission of the National Trust, Ickworth
(NT 1.A.3.3).
in that volume, The Tempest, has been marked with a particularly com-
plicated system of symbols that can be seen elsewhere in the collection (in
the 1673 edition of Edward Chamberlain’s Angliae Notitia; or the Present
State of England, for example), but perhaps because this was so laborious, it
has not been continued further into the book. Thomas seems to have often
used a red pencil for commonplacing, either with a marginal line or with
the trefoil or clover symbol with which he frequently ended his signature.
Religious books in the collection tend to show the most consistent
signs of use: clearly the library was an important part of devotional prac-
tices for the Herveys, and some of the marginal emphasis in religious
162 Emma Smith
books may be revealing. Sherlock’s The Practical Christian (1677) has a
red clover mark by some passages including in the section on “the great
necessity of self-examination”: “he who daily accounts with himself and
his offended God for his daily transgressions, shall have but one day’s
sins to account for upon his dying day.” Later, in the section “A Form of
Confession of Sin” he has put similar red mark by a prayer for “all the
sinful Lusts of the Flesh.”19 A copy of Daily Devotions (1682) is also
marked in red: this seems to differentiate certain of its statements from
others. For example, marginal marks in the opening on pages 94–5 seem
to praise God “for giving me a Heart to pardon mine enemies,” “for
the Ministry of Angels,” and “for all the faithfull departed,” but not,
since it is noticeably unmarked, “for the gratitude thou dost enable me
to pay my Friends” or “for the capacity and extent of my Soul.”20 In the
pastedown of a 1639 Book of Common Prayer the reminder “The 33
Chap of Ecclesiasticus an excellent lesson for servants” has been written
(the last verses of the book give advice that the servant should be kept
busy and given “bread, correction and work”: “Set him to work, as is fit
for him: if he be not obedient, put on more heavy fetters /But be not ex-
cessive toward any; and without discretion do nothing”). The note sug-
gests Thomas’s aspirations as master of his house and servant, but also
perhaps indicates a lack of confidence in his management.
A few books are marked to make their information easier to refer-
ence: the new peers listed in Englands Glory: Or an Exact Catalogue of
the Lords of his Maiesties most Honourable Privy Councel (1660) have
been numbered in the margin, although again Thomas Hervey has been
distracted after a couple of pages. (It would be another two generations
before Thomas’s grandson was raised to the peerage,) In other cases,
Thomas Hervey seems to have used binders’ leaves or space on the title
page in a number of volumes to create a minimal index to sections of
particular interest: page numbers for “Confes[sion],” “evening praiers”
and “for acceptation of Acts of Humiliation” are given on a leaf at the
beginning of Daily Devotions.
The majority of the collection does not show much sign of active reading.
There is one major exception to this. Thomas has written his version
of a Latin tag “o decus atque dolor”—the statement of mourning from
book 10 of Virgil’s Aeneid—into at least seven books in their collec-
tion. Sometimes this is accompanied by a date placing the inscription or
the consultation of the volume, usually in the immediate aftermath of
Isabella’s death in 1686. Richard Sherlock’s The Practical Christian has
“O decus atque dolor nunquam quie vit ut quies edebbonis” and “Read
in August: 1686” (two months after Isabella’s death). Other books with
this same post-mortem attention from Thomas Hervey seem to have
originally belonged to Isabella before her marriage. Henry Hammond’s
Of Schisme and Joseph Hall’s Resolutions and decisions of divers prac-
ticall cases of conscience both bear the name “Isabella May” as well
as the joint inscription typical of the couple’s marital library. Perhaps
Thomas gained proximity to his dead wife, or particular forms of famil-
iar comfort, by returning to those books she herself most closely studied.
Isabella’s own signature has a distinctive crossbar across the ‘I’, and this
distinguishing feature makes it clear that, while she has written her own
name into several books, a couple of “Isabella May” inscriptions are by
Thomas himself. It seems that he has written her previous existence into
those books, retrofitting them with her prior identity. As in those partial
records of their epistolary courtship, Thomas’s voice evokes, but is not
identical with, something more mutual: it is a monologue that implies but
cannot reproduce dialogue. It is tempting to speculate about the emotional
motives for this kind of marginalia, but one thing is clear: it establishes
that proper names in the Hervey collection are not the sole property of
their owners. Names in books are not necessarily signatures.21 “Isabella
May” here functions as a double mnemonic—of the identity lost in mar-
riage, and of its owner, now dead. Thomas’s inscription here, as in the
example of The Hearts Ease with which we began, registers a temporal
range in the material object, bringing the chronologies of his marriage and
of subsequent events into synchronic focus on the pages of the book.
“Tho: & Isabella”

The most prominent marking of these books, and their most compelling
indication of use, is a mark it is tempting to see as one of ownership,
marking the joint property of the couple on their marriage. Three quar-
ters of the books in the extended Ickworth collection bear the ownership
mark “Tho: & Isabella Hervey.” They have been marked, apparently
in Thomas’s hand, and perhaps in batches: the books that were already
in his library on his marriage in 1658, for instance, look from similar-
ities in the ink to have been reinscribed for the new married couple at
the same time, and sometimes the mark of wet ink blotted on the fac-
ing page suggests particular haste in completing a repetitive task. Five
books are marked “Isabella & Tho: Hervey,” but these, too, appear to
be in Thomas’s writing, and closer inspection reveals that limited blank
space has made Thomas more flexible about the ownership mark, adding
“Isabella &” to his own existing signature. A large proportion of the col-
lection bears the mark “Tho. Hervey,” often followed by a clover sym-
bol. Publication dates make it possible that some of them were owned
by him before he was married, but we also see Thomas continuing to
write his individual name into books acquired after the marriage. The
title pages that assert the Herveys’ coupledom also continue to assert his
independent identity. Ten books are marked “Isabella May,” perhaps
suggesting that they were in the bride’s possession before marriage, and
in two cases the mark is “Isabella Hervey.” Eikon Basilike, for example,
is marked with the couple’s inscription and with each of their names
164 Emma Smith
individually. In addition, around twenty books are marked with William
Hervey’s name, and John Hervey, son of Thomas and Isabella, marks the
majority with his signature, and, later, with his 1702 bookplate marking
his elevation.
The standard marginal mark that defines this collection, then—the
mark that makes it visible as a collection—is “Tho: & Isabella Hervey.”
This is usually inscribed on the title page or the verso of the facing page,
and more than once on the preliminary leaves of a volume, and on a few
occasions on the binders’ leaves or pastedown at the end as well. Nev-
ertheless, a significant minority of the books drop the surname and are
simply marked “Tho:& Isabella.” First names only as ownership marks
have a particular quality of intimacy. Since they do not mark the book
within the familial context denoted by the surname, they don’t do the
work of inscribing Herveyness, which gathers momentum as subsequent
generations inherit and reframe the books in the collection. Rather, the
first names written in the books seem more like a private message. Jason
Scott-Warren, who compares early modern marginalia to graffiti, identi-
fies the ownership mark as a kind of tag, the celebration of self”: “a per-
son, a place, and the documentation of a relationship between them.”22
Juliet Fleming claims that graffiti has “a simple and paradigmatic in-
stance, ‘I was here.’”23 We can modify this invaluable observation in a
key way when looking at the Herveys’ ownership mark: it seems to con-
vey “we were here.” Part of the work of the inscription is to acknowledge
Thomas’s changed status as a married man, perhaps particularly after a
wearyingly long courtship: “I’m married! Look!.”
Even if, as the paleographical evidence suggests, Thomas is solely re-
sponsible for the redesignation of their prior individual libraries into a
single, married collection signified by the “Tho:& Isabella” portman-
teau, this mark nevertheless carries the force of co-ownership. Isabella’s
name—and her right to read if not her actual practice of reading—is in-
scribed in works by Robert Boyle and Machiavelli, just as she is in more
obvious religious titles such as the works of Henry Hammond; there
is no distinction between the way works on, say, politics are described
from the way that works of vernacular literature are described. We do
not know whether Isabella read French—she may well have done—but
the French language books are all similarly marked with her name. Writ-
ing of a book marked by a second wife whose name joins those of her
husband and step-children, Scott-Warren observes that the “‘I was here’
of graffiti becomes visible partly because the ‘I’ has a new name, an
altered identity to experiment with, a new signature to tag.”24 Thomas
seems to be marking his own altered identity as a married man as much
as he is incorporating his new wife into his bachelor property. That dark
ink that marks many of the joint inscriptions conjures his work register-
ing his changed life by superimposing “Tho: & Isabella” over the top of
the previous “Tho: Hervey.” That these ownership claims do something
more than simply claim the book is suggested through repetition. Most
books in the Herveys library have a clutch of names: Thomas Hervey,
Thomas & Isabella Hervey, Tho:& Isabella, often more than once. Some
act of iteration is being underscored here that is in excess of mere posses-
sion: property meets propriety.
Sometimes the ownership tag captures time as well as self. Some books
bear the marks of gift-giving and thus inscribe other horizontal relation-
ships. A 1683 book of Ciceronian rhetoric is inscribed “Tho: Hervey: 16
may: 83: by Kez: Hervey”: Kezia Hervey was probably Thomas’s sister,
although she may have been his daughter of the same name. A copy of
Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Holy War bears the names of sev-
eral members of the Reynolds family, in-laws of Thomas and Isabella.
A 1662 sermon by Peter Gunning has the inscription “sent by my brother
Sir John Poley for a new yeers gift 1662.” A copy of a French book of
architecture bears the likeable family inscription “11 July 1684. The day
that Jack came home from France,” marking a landmark in the imme-
diate domestic life of the family, using a familiar name for their son
John Hervey, and, though not expansive, nevertheless expressive of re-
lief and pleasure at his return to Suffolk. The couple’s copy of Eikon
Basilike is marked “Read in March 1686” and a book of sermons “Read
in June 87.” It is tantalizing to wonder whether these, and several other
examples, capture solo or joint reading.
A large number of early books bear the mark of Thomas’s father, Sir
William Hervey (1586–1660). Perhaps the most interesting marginalia
in William Hervey’s books is his habit of including the prices paid, in-
cluding five shillings for a French book on the wars of religion and six
shillings for a French translation of a Spanish book on civil wars, sug-
gesting that these French language books were bought from, or via, an
English bookseller. Many of Thomas and Isabella’s books thus reframe
elements of William Hervey’s library, just as their own son writes his
name and sometimes that of his wife into the books. Married to his own
first wife, another Isabella, it’s striking to see the Herveys’ son John later
imitate their mark, writing “John & Isabella” in a handful of inherited
books, including Seneca’s Morals by Way of Abstract (1682). The col-
lection goes on through the generations. The couple’s granddaughter has
written a childish prayer in Daily Devotions: “Isabella Carr Hervey her
book. To give her grace therein to look /and when the bell for her doth
tole /Lord Jesus Christ receive her Soul./amen & amen.”25 One book
bears the marginal inscription, probably again by a child: “Elizabeth
Reynolds is my nam and,” but the writer seems to have been interrupted.
Books gather onomastic associations with Mary Lepel, the wife of the
second earl: the book marked with news of Jack’s return from France
also has a later inscription “Ex libris Dominae Mariae Herveaei,”
and on the titlepage of Angliae Notitia (1673) the name “M. Hervey”
has been written. Frances Meres’ translation of Granados Devotion:
166 Emma Smith
Exactly teaching how a man may truely dedicate and devote himselfe
unto God (1598) is marked “Harriet Hervey my Book which my Lord
Bristol gave me in the year 1727,” and the pastedown of a copy of De
L’art de Parler (1676) tells us “This book hath been intensely studied by
one Charles Hervey.” Bacon’s essays (1642) are marked “J Hervey” and
“Oxford January 24 1643.” These inscriptions establish the collection as
a family archive across multiple generations.
Isabella May/Hervey
Perhaps the most interesting, and simultaneously frustrating, presence
in the library is Isabella May, later Hervey. On her marriage to Thomas
it seems that Isabella owned a small number of books, mostly religious
titles. She wrote her own name into about ten volumes, in the form
“Isabella May” or sometimes “Isabella Mays” or “Isabella Mays book.”
These books, too, have been reinscribed with some version of their mar-
ried inscription, in all cases apparently by Thomas, incorporated into a
joint library. There is no evidence of her reading habits or of her involve-
ment in the books marked with her name. But the evidence of the memo-
rial inscriptions written by the widowed Thomas suggests that Isabella’s
own books retained a distinctiveness even as they were incorporated
into the larger collection.
The Hervey collection thus registers two potential alternative narra-
tives of women’s reading in the period. The more familiar one is of wom-
en’s books as physically, conceptually, and generically separate from a
male or family library, often kept somewhere other than the newly fash-
ionable dedicated library room, perhaps in a bed-chamber or closet. 26
This has been interpreted as part of the “increasingly solitary, silent and
private activity” of reading, particularly by women, in the period, as dis-
cussed by Heidi Brayman. Brayman cites Thomas Peyton’s commenda-
tory poem to the 1647 folio collection of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays,
which lewdly imagines “Ladies Closets” filled with “pretty Bookes.”27
Almost all of the examples of women’s reading and book ownership
that have been recovered by recent scholars have conformed to this
pattern of distinctiveness. David Pearson’s ongoing list of seventeenth-
century book owners includes a number of women, some well-known
and others less so. He includes Anne of Denmark, Anne Bayning, Vis-
countess Bayning, Elizabeth Capell of H adham, Catherine Cavendish
Baroness Ogle, Anne Clifford, Lady T heophyla Coke, Dorothy Cotton,
Mary Dormer Countess of Carnarvon, Frances Egerton the Count-
ess of Bridgewater, Anne Fanshawe, Ursula Gerard, Elizabeth Talbot
Grey Countess of Kent, Margaret Hoby, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York,
Elizabeth Isham, Frances Jodrell, Elizabeth Puckering, Mary Rich
Countess of Warwick, Anne Stanhope, and Frances Wolfrestoun. 28
What is distinctive about all these owners in their quite different social,
educational, geographical and familial contexts is the documentary ev-
idence from inventories, probate valuations, catalogues, inscriptions or
bookplates identifying their books as their own sole property. The hus-
band and wife book owners Edward and Cary Coke of Holkham Hall,
for instance, or Baptist and Dorothy Noel of Rutland, each had their
own individual armorial bookplate. Frances Egerton’s library was re-
corded in a “Catalogue of my Ladies Books at London; Taken October
27th 1627,” and Katherine Ashe of Felbrigg made her own list of her
reading, including practical and devotional texts alongside the popu-
lar satirical poem Gallantry-A-la-mode, plays by Dryden, Otway, and
Wycherley, and the prognostications of Nostradamus. 29
As Ashe’s list begins to suggest, another assumption from recent work
to recover women’s reading is that they preferred particular genres. “In
the case of most family libraries we find the husband’s name rather than
the wife’s,” concluded David McKitterick surveying seventeenth-century
female book owners, nothing that those books which are identified as
belonging to women tend to be in the vernacular.30 There is much ar-
chival evidence to suggest the truth of this linguistic preference during
the period. Sir Nathanial Bacon of Stiffkey left English books to his
wife and daughters, and books in French and Latin to male members of
the family; John Florio left books in Italian, French and Spanish to the
Earl of Pembroke and English books to his wife; Arthur Throckmorton’s
widow kept the English books she liked best from a collection of books
given to Magdalen College Oxford.31
In part, then, Thomas Hervey’s particular attention to his wife’s
books after her death, marking them with the Virgilian mourning tag,
suggests that despite being marked with their joint names, these books
were particularly Isabella’s. He returns or redesignates a small subsec-
tion of the main library as a distinctly female collection, corroborating
the widespread view of the increasing physical and generic distinctive-
ness of women’s reading in the period. Her son’s recollection in The
Hearts Ease confirms this association: “This was my most pious, chast,
and charitable mothers Book.” Read in this wider context, the collection
encodes individual ownership and the different reading practices of hus-
band and wife.
On the other hand, the collection emphatically represents all the books,
whatever their language or subject, as belonging to the couple’s joint
library. There is no sense that only English language books can properly
belong to both, or that romance, religious devotion or household man-
agement are genres suitable to Isabella alone. The joint inscriptions in
the books may well construct, rather than reflect, an ideal intellectual
partnership, but the inscribed project of marital reciprocity is highly
distinctive and challenges orthodox ideas of women’s reading as a sepa-
rate, private, gendered, or individualized sphere. Only if we assume that
women’s reading was always and inevitably different from men’s does
168 Emma Smith
the history of that reading assume a particular narrative importance:
we could read Isabella’s absence in the library as a sign of equality and
incorporation rather than marginalization and erasure. Even if the joint
inscription of the library invents rather than witnesses mutual access to
the content of the books, it uses the title pages of the collection to delin-
eate a particular material version of companionate marriage.
Dispersal
The impulse to reconstruct this library is in part a sentimental one, and
one that attempts to fix a collection in a particular place and time. The
afterlife of Thomas and Isabella’s library, some of it in Ickworth with
their descendants, some in other libraries around the world, testifies
to the portability of individual books and the fungibility of the library
collection. Thomas and Isabella’s joint library contains an interesting
sixteenth-century collection, gathered by Sir William Hervey and other
members of the family, and develops into an eighteenth-century one in
the hands of their son John Hervey, whose printed diary records many
book purchases including £2. 13s for “Mr Lockes works in 3 vol” and
a two-guinea subscription to Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. 32 Many
of the books marked for the couple also show three or more generations
of ownership marks, as older books are inherited and reinscribed into
new and expanded collections. For example, the 1612 title L’Histoire
de la decadence de l’empire grec bears the serial mark of William
Hervey—including the price paid of 20 shillings—then the familiar
“Tho: & Isabella Hervey,” and then the armorial bookplate marking the
1702 creation of John Hervey as Baron of Ickworth. Another French-
language book, Veues des Belles Maisons de France (1680) is marked
for Thomas and Isabella, and also “Ex libris Dominae Mariae Herveaei.
Ex Dono Domini Comitis De Bristol. 1742”; Joseph Hall’s Balm of Gilead
(1646), still at Ickworth, and a 1560 copy of Ariosto’s Orlando F urioso
sold by Quaritch in 1928, are both marked “Elizabeth Countess of
Bristol her book” and dated 1735 and 1708 respectively. Such books
thus belonged to Thomas and Isabella Hervey, to be sure, but there is
no real bibliographic reason to privilege this particular period of their
itineraries, and to downplay the authenticity of their other existences.
Contrary to its popular associations of permanence and fixity, any
library is always in motion across numerous axes: place, persons,
extent. That motion is not always one of expansion. Books joined the
Hervey collection, but they also left it. Tracing books, like the Meisei First
Folio of Shakespeare, that have travelled from Suffolk into other collec-
tions is compelling not simply as a tracing exercise to bind those objects
back to the Herveys, but as a case study in the porosity of the early
country house library over the intervening centuries. Studies of libraries
tend to focus on the acquisition of books, rather than their dispersal, or
there is a tendency to bemoan or make into exceptions those books that
leave the collection. Acquisition comes to stand as the library’s positive
activity, and deaccession or loss as its dark twin, but both are import-
ant for the practical, personal, and ideological management of a book
collection.
So far, I have identified a further two dozen books with the Thomas
and Isabella ownership mark in rare book libraries and booksellers’ cat-
alogues, some of which are available for consultation, such as Fynes
Moryson’s account of his Elizabethan travels, his Itinerary (1617), now
in Durham library, or another of William Hervey’s books, The World of
Wonders (1607), now in the Bodleian. Others emerge at points of sale
but then disappear again, including a 1570 edition of The Ship of Fools
that once belonged to William Morris and was sold at Christie’s in 2001,
or two volumes of Machiavelli, publishing in Firenze in 1530–1531 and
described as “very fine large copies ruled with red lines,” sold as part of
the attempt to rescue the Malborough family of Blenheim from bank-
ruptcy in the huge Sunderland Library of 1882. 33
When and why did these books leave Ickworth? An analysis of these
fugitive titles is interesting in trying to track the processes of dispersal:
books may have left the collection at random, in a trickle, or in some
specific and intended transfers, as sales or gifts. Perhaps migrants from
the library tell us something about the relative value of different titles
at different times. That may be true: early modern play quartos became
highly desirable collectors’ items in the early twentieth century, and one
item that has left Ickworth is a copy of the 1607 city comedy by Thomas
Dekker, Northward Ho, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in
Washington DC. But the provenance information stored with the book
reveal that it was owned by the theatre historian Jean Genest (1765–
1839) and subsequently sold by the London bookseller Joseph Lilly in
1859, so it had already left the Hervey collection by the early nineteenth
century. Whatever prompted the initial movement of this play—the only
single-play edition known to have been part of Thomas and Isabella’s
library—it was not the collecting frenzy of the modern age. While some
of their other books that can be identified from different collections, such
as their copy of the anti-Jesuit work Anti-Coton (1611) now in Durham,
or the account of Charles II’s genealogy published as Stemma Sacrum
in 1660, now in Chetham’s library, or the Paris publication Chronologie
des Estats Generaux (1615) now in King’s College London, are inter-
esting books to specialists, they do not obviously present themselves
as individual plums. Relatedly, literary titles which could have fetched
high prices in later periods—poetry by George Herbert, for instance, or
works by Donne, Montaigne or Bacon—were retained in the collection
and are still part of the library at Ickworth. Money, that’s to say, does
not seem to have been an obvious motivating factor in the dispersal of
their books.
170 Emma Smith
There is some evidence that pressures on space—a constant spur to
deaccession across all periods—may have had an impact, particularly
at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Four of Thomas and Isabel-
la’s books are now in Durham library, as part of the Routh Collection.
Martin Joseph Routh, classical scholar and President of Magdalen Col-
lege Oxford, gathered his book collection during the first half of the
nineteenth century. He acquired four Elizabethan works that had been
owned by the Herveys, including a souvenir of Elizabeth’s coronation
that had belonged to William. Perhaps these were sold amid the turmoil
of moving to the new neoclassical Ickworth House, built by the fourth
Earl of Bristol. The family moved into this partially completed folly in
1829. A later member of the family recalled that “old family books…
were left at Ickworth Lodge in 1830 when the move was made into the
Round house,” although the title given as an example, the 1681 edition
of The Devout Christian, marked for Thomas and Isabella and for their
children Kezia and John, is still at Ickworth. 34 Large inset bookcases in
the grand library in the rotunda are designed for impressive folio vol-
umes: it is perhaps not coincidental that the majority of the books from
the collection that have left Ickworth are in smaller formats.
The exception to these speculations about book format and the possible
date of leaving the collection is the Shakespeare First Folio, which seems
to have been a relatively early eighteenth-century migrant. In addition
to the signature of John Hervey, it also bears a bookplate from Hagley
Hall, the Worcesterhire seat of the Lyttelton family. It remained in that
family until 1990, when it was transferred from Viscount Cobham to
Meisei, as part of the energetic collecting policy of the university’s then
President, Mitsuo Kodama, who had acquired ten copies of the First
Folio by that date.
Hagley Hall was an eighteenth-century Palladian house praised
in James Thomson’s popular poem The Seasons (1744). There are
strong ties of association between the Herveys and the Lyttletons in
the eighteenth century. Molly Leppel (1697–1768), wife of John, Lord
Hervey (1696–1743), a significant figure at the court of George II and
a correspondent of Voltaire, mentions them in her correspondence, and
her husband discusses George Lyttelton in unflattering terms (“His face
was so ugly, his person so ill made, and his carriage so awkward, that
every feature was a blemish, every limb an incumbrance, and every mo-
tion a disgrace”).35 One of George Lord Lyttelton’s own verse epistles
written from Paris, “To the Rev. Dr Ayscough, at Oxford” (1728), lists
Shakespeare amid a library of French writers.36 Lyttelton was a sponsor
of Alexander Pope, the dedicatee of Fielding’s Tom Jones, and paro-
died in Smollet’s Peregrine Pickle. He was also the recipient of a bust of
Shakespeare based on Peter Scheemakers’s statue in Poets’ Corner, from
Pope; perhaps the copy of the Hervey First Folio operated similarly in
this literary gift economy. It seems probable that the book made its way
there at some point in the later eighteenth century, before it carried sig-
nificant economic value.37 That some of the departures from the Hervey
library may well have been gifts is demonstrated by an inscription re-
corded by a bookseller in another volume. A first edition of Holinshed’s
Chronicles (1577), sold at Christie’s in New York in 1996 for $8000
(whereabouts now unknown), notes a number of inscribed names
including Thomas Beomont and Thomas Cotton as well as “Thomas and
Isabella Hervey.” An inscription reads: “This volume was presented me
by the Earl of Bristol 1762” (the 2nd Earl, George Hervey (1721–1775),
ambassador to Spain and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland). Thus, the impulse
to keep books together that is so intrinsic to provenance research and to
modern library practices was not, it seems, shared by the Hervey family.
Postscript: New York, 2017

In the hush of a high-end Madison Avenue antiquarian bookseller, I
consult the latest title from Thomas and Isabella’s library chased down
through online searches. The pamphlet Englands Glory, or, an Exact
Catalogue of the Lords of his Majesties Most Honourable Privy Coun-
cel (1660) is a list of the Restoration establishment, marked “Tho: &
Isabella Hervey” on the title page verso. It also bears the ownership
stamps of the Royal Institution. I can see where Thomas has numbered
the peers in the dark-brown ink recognizable from his inscriptions.
I have the irrational feeling that this alienated item ought to be given
back to Ickworth, that it belongs with Thomas and Isabella’s collection
in Suffolk, that it is intrinsic to the emotional and ideological contours
of their library and the relationship that it captures. But I can also
see that Englands Glory is at home here in New York too: the very
portability of books makes transferability, dissemination, and move-
ment the element in which print operates. Marginalia, particularly in
the form of the personal names and inscriptions that I have discussed
as constitutive of the Herveys’ collection, interrupts this movement by
inscribing books with a particular moment, and by witnessing and au-
thenticating a specific material encounter. Diaspora studies identifies
that privileged and idealized tropes of the “ancestral homeland” func-
tion to underscore the communal identities of dispersed peoples, who
retain a collective memory of an original homeland “to which they, or
their descendants, would (or should) eventually return when conditions
are appropriate.” Perhaps dispersed books, too, retain this memory or
“diaspora consciousness.”38 Although Thomas and Isabella Hervey
seem, without fuss, to have registered their own temporary ownership
of books that had previously been marked by other readers and users,
their own distinctive proprietorial marks eclipse those prior claims.
The sentimental force of the ampersand “Tho: & Isabella,” like the
graffitied tag, is indelible.
172 Emma Smith
Notes
1 West, The Shakespeare First Folio, Figure 1.1, 56.
2 NT 3092906.
3 Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 21. See also Stallybrass, Little Jobs, 315–42.
4 Scott-Warren, Reading Graffiti, 365.
5 Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, 209.
6 Safran, Diasporas in Modern Societies, 83.
7 Cowley, On the Death of Mr. William Hervey, 16. The family owned a much
annotated copy of the 1778 edition of Cowley’s Works, which served them
as a template for mourning later family deaths. John Hervey has written
alongside the elegy to “my good uncle”: “Almost all this ode may be (most
critically) applied to my dearest wife Mrs Isabella Hervey as to character
and […] her wretched husband, as to grief for the loss of her.”
8 www.pepysdiary.com.
9 Letter-books of John Hervey, first Earl of Bristol, 1:9.
10 Ibid., 1:15.
11 Ibid., 1:31.
12 Ibid., 1:36–7.
13 Mandelbrote, Personal Owners of Books, 188 and 182.
14 Loveman, Samuel Pepys and his Books, 248.
15 Pearson, Patterns of Book Ownership, 139–67.
16 Farmer and Lesser, What is Print Popularity? 9.
17 Purcell and Fishwick, The Library at Ickworth, 374.
18 On the Harmonies, see Smyth, Shreds of Holinesse, 452–81, and Ransom,
Monotessaron, 22–52.
19 R. Sherlock, The Practical Christian (London, 1677), 8 and 84. (NT 3094826).
20 “A humble Penitent,” Daily Devotions ([London?], 1682), 94–5. (NT 3094909).
21 On the implications of the signature as the mark of “the separated self […]
produced by these structures of detachment and reiteration,” see Goldberg,
Writing Matter, 239 ff.
23 Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 72.
25 “A humble Penitent,” Daily Devotions (1682), (NT 3094909). This
commonplace is widely used; see Katherine Acheson’s essay in this volume.
26 Susie West notes that probate inventories generally distinguish between
the books belonging to husband and wife, and make clear that women’s
books were usually stored and identified separately. See An Architectural
Typology, 441–464.
27 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 36 and 41.
28 Pearson, English Book Owners in the Seventeenth Century.
29 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 260–81; Ketton-Cremer, Felbrigg, 51.
30 McKitterick, Women and Their Books, 361 and 371.
31 Pearson, English Book Owners.
32 Hervey, The Diary of John Hervey, 92–3. It’s a mark of John Hervey’s true
interests, however, to compare his modest expenditure on books with his
outlay on horses (120–8).
33 Bibliotheca Sunderlandia Sale Catalogue, 603, lot 7787.
34 Diary of John Hervey, 273.
35 Letters of Mary Lepel, 161–2; Sedgwick, Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, 123.
36 Extracts from Lord Lyttelton’s Poetical Works (1795).
37 West, The Shakespeare First Folio, Figure 1.1, 56.
38 Safran, Diasporas in Modern Societies, 83–5.
Section 3
Modes
9 Studied for Redaction?
Reading and Writing in the
Works of John Higgins
Harriet Archer
At the beginning of John Higgins’s First Part of the Mirror for Magis-
trates (1574), Higgins-the-narrator reads a book, then has a vision. “A
persone tall,” covered in “bloud that freshly trickled from his wounde,”
addresses him and begins to recount the Trojan Brutus’s foundation of
Britain.1 The figure is Albanact, Brutus’s son, drawn back from the dis-
tant beginning of ancient British legend, to provide a history that records
cannot. When he begins to speak, “Depe from his breste, he threwe an
vnked sounde”; five years before the publication of Edmund Spenser’s
Shepheardes Calender (1579), Higgins reaches into an old vernacular
lexicon to capture Albanact’s strangeness. 2 Here, at the interface be-
tween sound and memory, the inscribed Higgins struggles to make sense
of the national origin myth in its freshest, most evanescent form. Yet
nothing could be further from the extratextual Higgins’s literary prac-
tice. Perhaps suspicion should have been raised when it is A lbanact, not
Brutus himself, who approaches Higgins to retell and extend his father’s
story, itself an extension—backwards in time—of William Baldwin’s
more famous collection of morally instructive historical tragedies, pub-
lished as A Mirror for Magistrates in 1559 and 1563, which the in-
scribed Higgins buys and reads before his visionary encounter with the
Britons. In her discussion of early modern prose continuations, Natasha
Simonova notes,
[t]he fact that all writers of continuations must begin as readers of

the source text means that each continuation is also a record of read-
ing and reception…The writing of continuations thus undermines
the boundaries between the passive consumption and active produc-
tion of literature.3
In this chapter, I want to situate Higgins on this boundary, the site of

marginal annotation itself.
In one text after another, Higgins insinuates himself into existing—
but often incomplete or outdated—projects. Best known as the author of
his prequel to Baldwin’s Mirror, Higgins also revised Richard Huloet’s,
or Howlet’s, Abcedarium (1552), an English-Latin lexicon printed in
176 Harriet Archer
1572 as Huloets Dictionarie; expanded Nicholas Udall’s Flowers, or,
Eloquent Phrases of the Latine Speech, Gathered out of the Sixe Come-
dies of Terence, printed in 1575 and 1581; translated The Nomenclator,
or, Remembrancer of Adrianus Junius (1585); and edited a compilation
of his own and Baldwin’s Mirror complaints in 1587. His later Answere
to Master William Perkins, Concerning Christs Descension into Hell
(1602), comprised a dialogue between the author and the theologian
Perkins, which quibbled over the wording of the Creed.4 So Higgins’s
entire oeuvre is predicated on his editing, expanding or responding to
the work of others. Higgins’s reading material, a collection of innovative
mid-century humanist texts is, then, studied for redaction: “to compile,
arrange, or set down in a written document”; “[t]o put (writing, text,
etc.) in an appropriate form for publication; to edit.”5 Might we produc-
tively reframe Higgins’s expansion of his hypotexts as an extension of
marginal annotation in print, or recast his hypertexts as paratexts?
In most existing criticism, Higgins is portrayed as tedious, backwards-
looking, and essentially negligible as an early modern voice. But as a
twenty-something finding his literary feet in the early 1570s, he is as
notably exercised by questions of self-presentation and definition as
the likes of George Gascoigne, John Lyly or Nicholas Breton, and, like
Gascoigne and Spenser, with poetry’s role in the construction of a new
nationhood. His Dictionarie definition of the name ‘John’ sees him
engaging with these questions with dry, self-referential humor: after
detailing the Apostle, he notes, “There were many mo of this name, both
Princes and worthy wryters, as the histories tell.”6 While he may be a
“worthy wryter,” though, there are ways in which Higgins could be con-
sidered not an ‘author’ at all, but rather one of the secondary, marginal
figures who challenge modern notions of authorship in the landscape of
early modern print. So, why focus on Higgins-the-writer as a subject,
if he serves so well as an embodiment of sixteenth-century collabora-
tive authorship and emendation? In some ways, he is a lightning rod for
the questions that such a model of collaborative authorship raises. The
spectrum which stretches from manuscript evidence of his reception by
readers to his own reception of his reading in print offers a way to view
early modern textual exchange precisely as a spectrum, only retroactively
parceled up into discrete roles: author, editor, reader. Indeed, to speak
of the intersection of these roles across Higgins’s extant works is still to
demarcate their functions too definitely. However, Higgins is also useful
because these difficulties evidently concern him, whether viewed as an
author or author-function: his oeuvre returns tirelessly to the theme of
authorship, and never produces a work in which the stability or authority
of the text, or the relationship between text, hypotext and paratext, is
not at issue. Rather than using a particular reader, like Gabriel Harvey,
or work, such as Sidney’s Arcadia, as the organizing principle, therefore,
I will suggest that reading marginalia and excerption as theorized and
Studied for Redaction? 177
practised across Higgins’s works and their reception, in manuscript and
print, offers a new perspective on how authority is constructed and chal-
lenged at various stages of a text’s production, and how it defies attempts
to understand such production as a strictly linear process.7 Kevin Dunn
underscores the two-way traffic of authority embodied in the marginal
gloss, “the essential genre” in the Middle Ages, and
the ligature between authority and writer. Whether the gloss was the
writer’s in the margin of an authorized text or an authority cited to
buttress the writer’s words, the scene of writing always appeared as
an interplay between a preestablished ‘master text’ and the writer’s
liminal approach to that text.8
Marginal annotation traverses the boundaries between acts of reading,

writing, and editing; Higgins’s role, I will suggest, is best understood
with reference to that of the marginal annotator.
Of particular interest is the gap between Higgins’s metatextual en-
gagement with the processes of textual production, and his acknowl-
edgement of the realities of his own generative process—the tension
between the capacity the printed text has to stabilize knowledge, the
adherence to which is prominent across Higgins’s works, and the por-
trayal or recognition of instability which also pervades his oeuvre. The
consistency with which this tension governs Higgins’s publications de-
spite their generic range—from dictionary and epitome to verse history
and exegetical dialogue—is especially striking. His most influential
and famous work, the monumental 1587 edition of the Mirror for
M agistrates, is a compilation of existing texts framed by an audacious
act of self-editing or revision, which rewrites, and even re-dates, the nar-
rative of its own composition even as it asserts a new commitment to
textual and historiographical stability.9 This paradox lies at the heart of
Higgins’s intellectual practice throughout his career. In some respects,
he is the archetypical humanist, a product and proponent of the educa-
tive project of Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas Elyot, and Thomas Smith,
while this early Tudor framework also serves as a means of stabilizing
a raft of late Elizabethan anxieties.10 Meanwhile, Higgins’s output is
itself, of course, subject to readerly engagement. This chapter draws on
a selection of manuscript marginalia found in the Folger Shakespeare
Library’s holdings of Higgins’s printed works, to explore the ways in
which such traces of reading bear witness to the kind of redactive activ-
ity which Higgins himself undertook, in direct opposition to his injunc-
tions to readers in his oeuvre’s prefatory material.
The role of the reader in the perfection of the early modern text is, by
now, a critical commonplace. The residual imperfection of such works
operates on a more prosaic level than Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological
conception of the literary work as a dynamic interaction between text
178 Harriet Archer
and reader, but nevertheless exists regardless of whether ‘gaps’ are delib-
erately left in place by the author or not.11 Stephen Orgel explains,
the book was not in its final form when it left the printing house: it
was unfinished because it was unbound, obviously, but also because
it was, in both early modern senses, ‘imperfect,’ incomplete and
incorrect…[T]o have a final, authoritative text, the early modern
reader had to do the correcting.12
Similarly, faith in the “fixity of print” continues to be critically eroded.

Jeffrey Todd Knight has shown both the printed text and the printed
book itself in flux, observing that,
[l]ike the bound volumes that accommodated them, printed works

of literature in early handpress culture were frequently the outward
products of some order of compiling. But beneath these surface indi-
cators on title pages, we know too that text collecting and assembly
were important catalysts for discursive production and even cre-
ativity. The malleability of books – figurative rather than physical –
lies at the heart of what literary scholars have long identified as the
essentially imitative nature of Renaissance writing: the appropria-
tion and manipulation of existing models, primarily from antiquity,
and the assertion of writerly roles through or against one’s source.13
These observations’ pertinence to John Higgins’s writing is compelling,

and helps to make sense of the slippage between reading, editorial inter-
vention and new composition which occurs in and on these books in the
name of amending the imperfect. As William H. Sherman makes clear,
however, the reader—or ‘book-user,’ since reading is not the only activity
to which marginalia bears witness—may or may not take that process
of perfection in the direction the text itself encourages or anticipates.14
The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574)

and The Mirour for Magistrates (1587)
Higgins became involved in the complex transmission history of the Mirror
for Magistrates perhaps as early as 1570, editing Baldwin’s 1563 version for
the first in the decade’s frenzy of expansions.15 After the revised text was
printed in 1571, Baldwin’s Mirror was repackaged as The Last Part of the
Mirror for Magistrates, and printed to accompany Higgins’s First Part in
1574 and 1575. A new, further extended Last Part was printed in 1578, in
tandem, probably more by accident than design, with Thomas Blenerhas-
set’s Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, a scion of the tradition set
at a remove from the others, and printed not by Marshe but by the other-
wise unknown Richard Webster.16 The Mirror tradition’s development was
predicated on the imperfection of its series of iterations. Baldwin’s seminal
work, and subsequently Higgins’s First and Blenerhasset’s Second parts,
all respond to the incompletion of their antecedents, beginning with John
Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431–1438, first printed 1494) which Baldwin had
been commissioned to extend up to the present day; all see their author-
narrators called away to other affairs and unable to complete their own
historical narratives. Like Sidney’s Philisides, Baldwin is reanimated in his
inscribed persona throughout the extensions of the corpus into the 1580s,
after his death from the plague in 1563; like that of Simonova’s Sidney,
Baldwin’s “rebirth…is the temporary one of a ghost on the stage: he lives
only long enough to see the gaps in his unfinished work completed, exor-
cised by the success of his haunting.”17 Baldwin’s predecessors, Lydgate
and, ultimately, Giovanni Boccaccio, are also invoked at once as spirit
guides and reading material. Higgins’s 1574 Mirror verse presents itself
as a visionary emanation from Baldwin’s original, the psychedelic product
of reading alone, untethered from the humanist framework within which
Higgins claims paratextually to operate. Yet it is also the embodiment
of Orgel’s marginal annotator, “the reader in the book,” as the narrator
Higgins takes to his bed only to slip between the covers of the Mirror itself.
Not only did the collection of tragic histories purport to encourage the
improvement of its readers’ behavior, therefore; it also elicited a textual
response, which was in turn the subject matter of its meditations on
the instability of historiographical writing.18 Timothy Hampton argues
that exemplary Renaissance texts demand the transposition of interpre-
tation and ideology into action in the public sphere.19 Orgel similarly
differentiates “the use of reading…from the act of reading,” in the trans-
formation by the reader of “the book into a repertory of usable moral ex-
amples.”20 Here, though, readerly action is also textual; the distinction
between the private world of hermeneutic engagement with the text and
public action, bridged for Hampton by the rhetoric of exemplarity, is
significantly blurred in the Mirror tradition, which constitutes a public,
ideological action in the form of print publication. 21 The action required
of its readers extends from buying and ‘marking’ or ‘noting’ the trage-
dies to composing and compiling additional verse complaints to perfect
their history, to the extent that these collaborative textual endeavours
overshadow the work’s interest in extratextual ethical progress.
Related to the textual proliferation encouraged by the paratexts of
successive Mirrors for Magistrates is the generative force of the ‘mirror’
metaphor. Aside from its admonitory generic significance, rooted in the
medieval speculum principis tradition, the image of the mirror denotes
a dynamic of reciprocal or co-dependent production. Slights employs
it in his discussion of the margin’s relation to the so-called parent text:
“readers cross, erase, and retrace the borders of Renaissance texts so
often that it is sometimes unclear which side of the self-reflecting mirror
of the twinned text they are on.”22 Iser also uses the image to theo-
rize the phenomenology of reading, suggesting that “[t]he manner in
which the reader experiences the text will reflect his own disposition.”23
180 Harriet Archer
Exhorted to see themselves in the text, then, it is unsurprising that a
series of readers find themselves among its pages.
The Mirror for Magistrates’s annotator best known to scholarship is
Lady Anne Clifford, whose extensive marginal notes, and those of her
amanuenses, in Richard Niccols’s 1610 edition of the text have been ex-
plored by Stephen Orgel. 24 Countess of Dorset having married R ichard
Sackville, a descendent of Mirror author and first earl of Dorset Thomas
Sackville, Clifford “saw herself in [the Mirror], both her family history
and her own trials and triumphs.”25 As Orgel notes, though, she came
to the book late in life, and paid remarkably little attention to the com-
plaint composed by her husband’s distinguished literary ancestor, mis-
taking Higgins’s verse “Induction” for Sackville’s at first, and failing
to pay any heed to the “Complaint of Buckingham” which followed
Sackville’s actual visionary prologue. 26 Nevertheless, she and her ser-
vants annotated the work extensively, “to make A Mirror for Magistrates
her own, both to reinvent it as a part of her life and to command the
attention of her staff, to render it an aspect of her authority.”27 Higgins’s
reinvention of Baldwin’s Mirror in his continuation, the First Part, may
be seen as a comparable act of readerly appropriation and authorization.
Higgins is the first editor of the Mirror corpus to engage seriously with
printed marginalia; Baldwin, who had employed the mode to complex
and uproarious effect in his prose satire, Beware the Cat (MS c.1553, first
printed 1570?), confined paratextual commentary to the prose framing
narrative in the 1559 and 1563 Mirror texts.28 In the 1574 First Part,
Higgins co-opts, revises, and then annotates Baldwin’s 1559–1563 “Ded-
ication,” drawing attention to references to ancient authors, and occa-
sionally, to the four cardinal virtues they promote. 29 This annotation
also draws attention to Higgins’s mastery of the established humanist
canon, in a way comparable to the marginal glosses found in Baldwin’s
own hypotext, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.30 Higgins’s 1574 “Complaint
of Porrex” is also accompanied by marginal references to the sources for
the mythological and historical stories to which the complaint alludes.
Not citations, these marginal notes merely give the name of the relevant
classical authority, “which contains folded within it the entire history”
of both author and exemplar for the reader to unpack.31 By contrast, his
“Complaint of Nennius” lists the historians Lanquet, Stowe, and Graf-
ton alongside Nennius’s claim that his father “raignde not full a year”
according to certain historiographical evidence, and “Flores Hist.” in the
margin by the subsequent stanza, as originator of the conflicting sugges-
tion that “[h]e raigned fourtye yeares as other tell,| Which seemes as tis a
tale more true by farre.”32 Here, Higgins’s marginalia explicitly reinforce
the vulnerability of historical texts to error. While reaffirming his Mirror
as the product of careful antiquarian study, they also foreground, as
Baldwin’s Mirror had, the conflict between historiographical authorities.
Most absurdly, the fictive Nennius presents his father as subject to the
contingencies of textual transmission, able to recall the details of his auto-
biography only through his own reading in the chronicles; perhaps Anne
Clifford identified with the subjects of these textually bound heredities.
Elsewhere, I have characterized Higgins’s contributions to the expand-
ing Mirror for Magistrates corpus as anxious about the flimsy textual
basis on which his national history is built, paying attention to the ways
in which he dramatizes the distance across which the British past has to
be accessed, and ultimately as disillusioned with the humanist project
he frames the Mirror as; his 1587 edition of the complaint collection
exhibits doubts about the efficacy of historical exemplarity to prompt
morally sound behavior.33 Either despite, or in response to, these doubts,
Higgins’s 1587 edition of the complaint collection redoubles its emphasis
on the duty of the reader to ‘note’ and ‘mark’ in his verse frame, excis-
ing the hesitation and empathy of his 1574 encounter with the ghostly
Britons, and models the practice himself by the addition of marginal stars
next to the kind of sententious phrases readers ought to heed and note
within the complaints. As Daniel Wakelin reminds us, “[d]irecting peo-
ple to one kind of reading also encourages the forgetting of other forms
of reading, and the forgetting of other elements of the text”; margina-
lia encourage reading which is “discontinuous,” “uneven,” or “focused
on some moments more than others.”34 Higgins’s marginal notes and
markings speak to his ever sterner attempts to shore up textual stability,
deflecting attention from the absence of evidence for his history, or that
history’s alterity, by encouraging readers to inscribe their faith in his
narrative in the form of stars or manicules, or to excerpt the specified
axioms to incite virtuous action. But the action which extant manuscript
marginalia record reflects back Higgins’s own piecemeal construction of
the text, exposing the reliance of historiography on textual fragments.
Marginalia added by readers of the Folger’s Copy 1 of the 1587
Mirror demonstrate not only the kind of reading which Higgins
explicitly encourages, but also the kind of reading of which the text
as a whole is made up.35 Of course, noting and marking carry meta-
phorical as well as literal force; additionally, it is possible that readers
excerpted the morally educative maxims that Higgins had in mind and
recorded them elsewhere under thematic headings: Robert Allott’s 1600
England’s Parnassus is a commonplace book in print which does just
that. But marginalia in this copy do not verbally signpost worthwhile
extracts—underlining seems to stand in for marginal notation. Instead,
they preserve traces of readers who have “corrected, amended, set in or-
der and enlarged,” as Higgins’s Dictionarie has it. These additions and
emendations themselves fall broadly into four types: factual corrections,
a small number of subjective revisions, augmentations—such as the pro-
vision of additional examples or indexes—and glosses or citations. 36
Aping a frequently printed kind of marginalia, the glosses and cita-
tions play what may be theorized as a performative, almost public role,
182 Harriet Archer
displaying the reader’s learning (either from memory or a well-stocked
library), and fulfilling the function of editor and/or of scholarly appara-
tus.37 Annotation to this particular copy provides references for unac-
knowledged quotations from or allusions to Horace, Ovid and Cicero
in the main text, and cross-references the complaint of Bladud with
Camden’s Britannia.38 Have the readers of these texts misunderstood
the appropriative eclecticism of humanist education, and the purpose
of the commonplacing which their annotations seem to play out in re-
verse? Or do these marginalia call up the Mirror contributors for the
misrepresentation of their authorial practice: in their paratexts’ lists
of source material, should they have included Horace and Ovid where
they cite historiography and ethical manuals?39 By augmenting the
citation of source texts, from whose pages the Mirror authors are shown
to have excerpted numerous passages, rather than playing the game of
marking phrases with which they particularly agree, readers of this copy
appropriate the educative authority of the text’s authors. The marginal
additions transform the book, and make manifest the processes of com-
pilation ostensibly subsumed within its stated generic identity: lifting
the bonnet of Baldwin and Higgins’s exemplary catalogue, to reveal its
mechanics as a repository of humanist gleanings.
One manuscript redaction in particular, though, enacts precisely the
lectoral transformation with which its authors are so preoccupied, in
the midst of its narrative expression. In George Ferrers’s “Fall of Robert
Tresilian,” Richard II’s chief justice of the King’s Bench admits to the
malleability of the law, which
…wee did interprete and statutes of the land,

Not truely by the texte, but newly by a glose:
And wordes that were most playne, when they by vs were skand,
Wee tourned by construction to a welshmans hose.40
Tresilian specifically draws unmediated engagement with the text into

opposition with the mediation of the gloss through the internal rhyme
of “truely” versus “newly,” when he recalls how he and his fellow
lawyers were adept at manipulating the written word. In the Folger
copy, a reader has replaced ‘welshman’ with ‘shipmen.’ The annota-
tion seems to seek to correct an idiomatic expression, although in fact
both analogies were current throughout the work’s print history, with
minimally different force. As Angus Vine explains,
Welshmen’s hose was proverbial at the time for its poor fit and pli-
ability and renowned for its ability to be stretched. Ferrers’ analogy
underscores the similar elasticity of language and warns the Mirror’s
readers of the worrying ease with which a glossator, legal or other-
wise, could stretch the meaning of a text to suit his or her purpose.41
The shipman’s hose, by contrast, refers to “a statement of wide applica-
tion that can be turned to fit any case.”42 In a passage which happens
to comment on the problematic relationship between marginalia and
main text, the Folger copy’s annotator seeks to revise the main text from
the margins—perhaps correcting what they assumed to be a mistake on
Ferrers’s part, and at once confirming and disrupting Tresilian’s testimony.
Huloet’s Dictionarie (1572) and The Nomenclator (1585)

In 1572, Higgins had contributed a prefatory poem, alongside those
of Thomas Drant, William Bullein and others, to John Sadler’s trans-
lation of the fifth century military treatise Epitoma rei militaris, or
De re militari, printed by Thomas Marshe as The Foure Bookes of
Flavius Vegetius Renatus. In this verse, Higgins locates in the text a
nexus of learning whose impact is shifting and multivalent. Sadler,
through his translation, “shewes so well:| That thou by practise mayest
attaine, and therein soone excell,” a recommendation which seems to
apply as much to the practice of translation as the information which
this specific translation makes available.43 The pedagogical agency then
jumps from Sadler to the book itself, which “doth teache, to muster and
to chuse:| And after choyse what exercise, to practyse learne and vse.”44
Most telling, though, is Higgins’s statement of the triangulation of mu-
tual teaching and learning between the translator, author, and reader:
Vegetius teacheth Englishmen the Feates of warre at will,

And learnes himselfe a language straunge, he erst ne wist before,
Thus he by Sadler taught, of warre doth teache and learneth more.45
Higgins’s implication that the author, or perhaps the author as a

metonym for his book, learns more by Sadler’s translation than he/it
teaches, propounds a productive vision of an educative textual feed-
back loop whose primary agent is an author “in the second degree,” the
editor-translator.46 This was the role Higgins was to embody through-
out his literary career.
While the Mirror was, of course, a work which played on histo-
ry’s didactic function, Higgins’s periodic contributions to the cor-
pus alternated with more explicitly pedagogical publications. These,
no less than Higgins’s Mirror, were committed to the nationalist-
humanist project of elevating English scholarship, following in the
footsteps of—above all—Thomas Elyot.47 In the same year as his
commendatory poem for Sadler, Marshe printed Higgins’s revised
edition of Howlet, or Huloet’s Abcedarium, an English-Latin lexicon
aimed at the relatively advanced student of Latin, which Higgins’s re-
visions rendered almost fully trilingual with the addition of French
synonyms (to supplement the Latin entries, also greatly expanded).48
184 Harriet Archer
D. T. Starnes notes that “Higgins more than Huloet consciously em-
phasized the principle of synonymy and of copy”; his revised dictionary
“exemplified nearly all the methods suggested by Erasmus to obtain co-
piousness and elegance, and skill in varying the expression of thought.”49
With this specific modification in mind, Dunn’s assertion that Erasmian
copia “freed one from overdependence on any one authority through
the very abundance of rhetorical possibility,” raises an intriguing con-
nection between Higgins’s dictionary and his practices of authorship. 50
According to Starnes, though, Higgins’s performative indebtedness to
named authorities was more likely to move in the opposite direction,
citing “demonstrably real sources” in his Dictionarie’s address to the
reader, “though some of these he drew upon but slightly.”51
In fact, James Sledd has portrayed Higgins’s editorial overhaul of the
Abcedarium as the work of an author with a clear projection of his own
literary interests. He “presented the first substantial number of Martial’s
epigrams to appear in English dress,” for example, and “includes a
good deal of material showing a strong interest in history, especially in
the falls of states and princes,” including some translated verses which
would be reprinted as part of his 1574 tragedy of Albanact. 52 Sledd
suggests that Higgins may have begun work on his additions to the
Mirror by 1571, adding weight to the theory that he had been enlisted by
Thomas Marshe to edit the 1563 Mirror for publication in 1571—a text
whose historical veracity and specificity was enhanced by the incorpora-
tion of additional dates and toponyms, in line with Higgins’s practice. 53
The Dictionarie, then, acts almost as a commonplace book of Higgins’s
own, a snapshot of a moment in the progression of his learning and
thought in dialogue with his reading, characterised by
the instabilities, incestuous plagiarism and occasional errors of early

modern dictionaries and thesauri [which] attest in their own way
to the fluid and contested natures of particular ideas, illuminat-
ing the variations and possibilities of specific lexicons at particular
moments in time.54
Sixteenth-century compilers acknowledge the impracticality of treating

printed word-lists as fixed records, and encourage readerly participa-
tion; these works are, they emphasize, in progress. John Withals’s 1553
dedication of his hugely popular Dictionarie (first printed 1553, revised
in 1568 and 1574 by Lewis Evans) to Thomas Chaloner hopes that his
prologue will induce Chaloner himself “to put your helpynge hande to
the finishyng of this litle booke,” while Evans’s 1568 preface presents his
revised version to Archbishop Edmund Grindal as a garden which has
been tended and weeded, where the organic metaphor leaves room for a
subsequent reiteration of this process. 55 The evidence of factual correc-
tions in manuscript, such as emendations to misprinted page numbers,
and other small typographical errors, demonstrate the extraordinary
care with which these very dense and often quite specialized texts were
examined by their near-contemporary readership. Read in tandem with
the evidence of successive ownership left decades and centuries after
the texts’ publication, such attention makes clear these books’ statuses
as working resources passed around families and communities, rather
than static artefacts. 56 Indeed, Withals’s Dictionarie bears this out in its
printed contents, too, reminding its juvenile readership that “ Exercenda
tria haec veniunt, equus, liber, arma, Three things must alwaies bee oc-
cupyed and used, to witte, a horse, a booke, and armour.”57 This maxim
efficiently captures the sense that, just as neglected metal rusts and mus-
cles atrophy, so a text’s value is diminished if it is not constantly active
and exercised—the author tellingly places the book between the living
and the inanimate, active and passive, in that list. Perhaps the practice
of storing up supplementary knowledge for the benefit of future genera-
tions goes some way to explain the marginal addition by one of Withals’s
seventeenth-century readers of the adage, “A midsomber grote wel and
truly gotten is worth four pence halfpenny at Christmas.”58
While Withals figures the child’s memory as a book wherein the
reader of his words “may with litle labour perfitely imprinte them,” John
Baret’s Aluearie or Triple Dictionarie (1574) presents the book itself
as an empty container, ready to be filled by the industry of its readers,
in his metaphor of the bee hive.59 His narrative of the work’s composi-
tion is grounded, not in conference with learned authors as in Higgins’s
Dictionarie’s preface, but in the schoolroom. Baret recalls how,
perceyuing what great trouble it was to come running to mee for euery
word they missed…I appointed them certaine leaues…euery day to
write the English before ye Latin, and likewise to gather a number of
fine phrases out of Cicero, Terence, Caesar, Liuie, &c. and to set them
vnder seuerall Tytles, for the more ready finding them againe at their
neede. Thus within a yeare or two they had gathered togither a great
volume, which (for the apt similitude betweene the good scholers and
diligent Bees in gathering their wax and hony into their Hiue) I called
then their Aluearie, both for a memorial by whom it was made, and
also by this name to incourage other to the like diligence.60
Crucially, Baret adds,
if students desire any more phrases beside them which here wee haue
gathered, they may themselues like diligent Bees here place such as they
reade in good authours, vnder their proper Tytles, or in the margent of
this booke, for their owne priuate vse against they shall neede.61
Such are the working manuscript compendia found in the Folger collection.
Higgins, though, draws the lines between text and ‘margent’ back
into his Dictionarie, making distinctions between writer and reader in
186 Harriet Archer
his prefaces which discourage the reader’s textual involvement, beyond
grateful acknowledgement of the work’s utility. By contrast to the ex-
amples above, editing is portrayed in these paratexts as the preserve of
the envious carper, whose reading is hasty, unlearned and destructive.
Thomas Churchyard’s poem which commends Higgins’s Dictionarie ad-
dresses the book itself and asks that it encourage Higgins to seek
A patrone that doth learninge loue, and hates no gifte of grace,

To keepe this booke from busy braynes, that would this worke
deface.62
While Churchyard’s primary meaning of ‘deface’ is probably the Oxford

English Dictionary’s obsolete sense 4, “To destroy the reputation or credit
of; to discredit, defame,” Higgins’s own definitions bear out a semantic
crossover with the mutilation of the material text.63 In his commendatory
poem for Baret’s collaborative Aluearie, Arthur Golding had praised the
work’s assistance in repairing
Our Inglishe tung driuen almost out of kynde,

Dismembred, hacked, maimed, rent, and torne,
Defaced, patched, mard, and made a skorne.64
For Churchyard and by implication Higgins too, though, it is precisely

the act of readerly collaboration which effects this mutilation. One
specific dispensation to the general reader to add content to Higgins’s
Dictionarie feels excessively simplistic and suspiciously insincere, when
Higgins allows,
Where you finde a verbe withoute this signe To, before him (which is
oure Englishe note of the infinitiue mode of al Verbes, (except Passi-
ues) you may adde the signe thereto, as in this Verbe Laye, where is
Laye blame, Laye to ones charge, Laye in waite, which are in their
places so easye for him to vnderstande that knowes a Verbe from a
Nowne, that they neede no exposition: and signifye, To laye blame,
To lay to ones charge, To laye in wayte. 65
His apparently arbitrary choice of examples hums with accusatory and

retaliatory undercurrents. Another dedicatory poem prefacing Higgins’s
Dictionarie divides readers into the wise who “will vewe and deeme
the best,” and the unwise, in the legendary critic Momus’s camp, who
“marke.”66 The familiar convention of paratextual references to mis-
use by critics seems to anticipate not simply generalized future censure,
but a physical encounter on the page. It is ironic, therefore, that schol-
arship has been unable to determine whether the comprehensively an-
notated Folger copy of Higgins’s Dictionarie represents evidence of an
anonymous reader’s intensive use of the text, or Higgins’s own additions
for a revised printed edition which never went to press.67
Adapted from the Dutch scholar Adriaen de Jonge, or Hadrianus
Junius’s 1567 text of the same name, Higgins’s edition of The Nomencla-
tor was released in 1585, a year or so before his final Mirror compilation
was completed.68 Hovering on the borderline between lexicography and
encyclopedia, the Nomenclator reversed the formula of Huloet’s Dictio-
narie to provide Latin terms by theme, followed by examples from Roman
authors, and translations—sometimes—into Greek, French, and finally
English, distinguished by the sequential use of italic and blackletter type.
The thematic organisation of the topical dictionary, which “assume[s] that
people preparing a text productively know what to say (if only vaguely),
but they do not know how to say it,” acts as an aid to Latin composition
of a freer sort than the alphabetical Dictionarie, requiring the reader to
browse by topic, and begins on a metaliterary note with vocabulary “Of
bookes, of writings, and all necessaries thereto belonging.”69 In the in-
terim, Marshe had printed a new edition of Higgins’s Flowers or Eloquent
Phrases of the Latine Speach (1581), with the addition of a Latin prefa-
tory poem by Thomas Newton, whose edition of the Tenne Tragedies
of Seneca was printed the same year; Newton would go on to write a
commendatory poem for the 1587 Mirror, too. Higgins, perhaps thanks
to Marshe’s sponsorship, was evidently moving in intellectually and com-
mercially successful Latinist circles; Werner Hüllen calls his Nomenclator
“one of the most elaborate and erudite onomasiological dictionaries to be
written in the Humanist spirit and to include English.”70
Nevertheless, the Folger Library’s Copy 1 of Higgins’s Nomenclator
sees one reader taking issue with Higgins’s technical expertise: where
the printed English provides a description of various nautical features,
whose names are given in Latin, the annotator provides specific English
terminology.71 So, where the Latin ‘Columbaria’ is explained as “The
holes or spaces whereout the water runneth after it is taken up therein,”
the manuscript marginalia gives “Scupper holes”;72 ‘Siparum,’ “A saile
wherewith the course or voyage of a ship is holpen, when the wind is
weake and faileth,” is translated more concisely as “a goose wing”;73
‘Pes,’ “The rope or cord wherewith the sail is hoisted,” as “the eare”;74
and ‘Circitores,’ “They that goe about & take view of the watch: the
ouerseers, or the going watch,” are “Rounders.”75 The OED gives 1596
as the earliest instance of this use of ‘rounder,’ and 1599 for ‘scupper
hole,’ which perhaps suggests that these were indeed terms that were
not in use when Higgins’s Nomenclator went to press a decade before.76
The concision of the manuscript additions also seems to improve on
Higgins’s verbosity. However, as Hüllen points out, “[i]t depends on the
training of dictionary users whether they grasp the distinction between
the language-specific form and the language-independent meaning of
the lexeme in the leftmost position” in topical dictionaries.77 Hüllen
188 Harriet Archer
specifically considers Higgins’s English elaborations to be noteworthy,
and of greater interest than the provision of “a hard lexematic equiv-
alent.”78 It appears that Higgins’s nautically minded-reader misappre-
hends the purpose of the topical dictionary, and instead asserts the
editorial agency of marginal interpolation to transform the book to dif-
ferent ends. Seth Lerer reminds us that “[n]o book is the same once it has
been marked. Its social function, its textual status, its place in literary
history…has changed irrevocably.”79 Readers of Higgins’s lexicograph-
ical works, as of the Mirror, above, can be seen changing their books
not only incidentally, by their miscellaneous use, but also deliberately,
actively refashioning their purpose and form.
An Answere to Master William Perkins (1602)

Higgins’s final work, An Answere to Master William Perkins, Concern-
ing Christs Descension into Hell (1602), begins with a preface of 22 June
1602 which wishes “THE CHRISTIAN Reader…perfect knowledge of
the Creed in Christ Iesu.”80 Enabling such perfect knowledge had been
the purpose of the work’s composition, as well as its subject matter. As
we have seen, the term ‘perfect’ is a significant container for ideas about
text, whether it refers to the completely correct or the comprehensive.
Its deployment here carries this conversation into the spiritual arena, a
transposition which surely pushes the possibility of ‘perfect knowledge’
yet further out of reach. A dialogue between Higgins and Perkins in re-
sponse to Perkins’s Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of the Apostles
(1595), the Answere discusses whether or not the assertion that “he
descended into hell” is an accidental interpolation or legitimate read-
ing, and whether the “sign of Jonah” to which Christ alludes in Luke
11:28 and Matthew 12:39–41 should interpret Jonah’s sojourn inside
the whale as a typological foreshadowing of such a descent into hell, or
the three days and nights his body spent in the tomb. Higgins does not
cite Perkins’s Exposition; instead, he appropriates chunks of it to reprint
as Perkins’s side of the discussion, and refutes, in his inscribed persona,
each point in turn. Specifically, Higgins counters Perkins’s claims that
the offending phrase, “he descended into hell,” may have been intro-
duced during the course of the text’s transmission, and argues by con-
trast for its divine authority and literal truth.
Perkins, around fourteen years Higgins’s junior, was a theologian,
preacher and prolific writer, sympathetic to puritan and Calvinist ideas
following a prodigal reformation of his dissolute youthful tendencies.81
“By the end of the sixteenth century,” says Slights, he “was propound-
ing a program for jettisoning the allegorical, tropological, and anagogi-
cal readings of Scripture and keeping only the literal”: an aim which,
far from stripping centuries’ worth of corrupting marginal commentary
away from biblical texts, Slights argues, “simply cleared the field and the
printed page for rival Protestant glosses.”82 He died exactly four months
after the completion of Higgins’s tract, on 22 October 1602. Perkins “has
long been remembered as…an important influence on the Elizabethan
Puritan movement and its New England offshoot,” but, W. B. Patterson
suggests, he was in fact “not so much an Elizabethan Puritan as he was
an apologist, perhaps the chief apologist, for the Church of England as
it emerged in the late Elizabethan period.”83 Higgins served as a vicar in
the Somerset parish of Winsham from the early 1570s. We might there-
fore expect Higgins, as the dialogue suggests, to hold rather more mod-
erate, conservative views than a figure like Perkins, who occupied a more
radical space. Higgins was not a theologian, and this was his only foray
into doctrinal debate. While anomalous in this regard, though, Higgins’s
Answere engaged with a series of, by now, familiar concerns: interpreta-
tion, textual stability, and the encroachment of voices from the margins.
The Answere is a work about textual transmission as much as it is
about doctrine. It questions the rigidity of the boundaries assumed to
govern the distinction between the marginal and the main text, occlud-
ing authorial agency; Perkins posits instead a mobile, autonomous con-
ception of scripture, and of the written in general. The dialogue’s stated
focus, the question of Christ’s descent into hell after his crucifixion, sim-
ilarly hinges on the permeability of established physical and metaphys-
ical barriers to movement, as well as the proper reading of signs: does
Jonah’s whale signify hell, or merely the grave? Perkins had suggested
that the words “hee descended into hell” may perhaps have “crept in by
negligence” to the text of the Creed, since they are not present in many
accounts by the Apostles.84 He considers that “it must not seeme strange
to any that a worde or two in the processe of time should creepe into the
Creede,” since “the Originall Copies of the old and new testament haue
in them sundrie varieties of readings & words otherwhiles, which from
the margin crept into the texte.”85 Higgins counters that many sections
of, for example, the Nicene Creed are also missing in various witnesses.
“[D]id al these therefore creepe in by negligence?” he asks, and replies,
“I thinke not.”86 The agency of annotation, then, to infiltrate the main
text from the margins, is the crux of the Answere’s contention.
The evocative image of the errant readings ‘creeping’ into the Creed
from the margin is taken from Perkins’s Exposition, as part of Higgins’s
arrogation of that text.87 It does not originate with Perkins, however; it
had been a fairly common exegetical formulation following John Daus’s
translation of Heinrich Bullinger, who observed that, in Christ’s asser-
tion, “I am Alpha & Omega (the beginning and end),” “that whiche
followeth (the beginning and end) is omitted in some copies: As though
that interpretation of that same, I am Alpha and Omega, crept in out
of the margent.”88 The margins of scripture made up the front lines
of post-Reformation confessional conflict framed as “a battle between
different types of readers,” between “Roman Catholic scholastics” and
190 Harriet Archer
“rival gangs of Protestant commentators, who could match marginalia
with the best of the papists.”89 The Jesuit John Rastell and Catholic
priest Gregory Martin both accuse Théodore de Bèze of making accusa-
tions of textual contamination too readily; Rastell calls Bèze a “blind-
ebuzzarde” for suggesting such an occurrence in St Luke’s Gospel, while
Martin rebukes “the mouse of Geneua” for doing
the like in sundrie places…[H]e is saucie against al copies Greeke

and Latin to pronounce corruption, corruption…[H]e biteth at
the text, and would change it according to his imagination, if he
might…that whatsoeuer pleaseth not him, crept out of the margent
into the text, which is his common and almost his only coniecture.90
Bèze and Perkins occupy the same confessional territory and share the
recognition that textual corruption may occur in the course of a book’s
transmission. Although the degree to which such readerly agency is con-
sidered acceptable differs, the acknowledgement of this agency informs the
centrality of interpretation, followed by the appropriative construction of
personal narratives, to late Elizabethan Calvinist doctrine which Erin Sulli-
van has set out in relation to Perkins’s theological writings.91 The legibility,
highlighted for example by Arthur Dent in his Plaine Man’s Path-Way to
Heaven (1601), of signs and marks of predestination also gestures towards
a common vocabulary between the reading of texts and of circumstances.92
Higgins, who had replaced Justice with Temperance as the primary
virtue of the Mirror for Magistrates, clearly sought to hold the centre
ground in his attack on Perkins’s admission of textual flux and lectoral
authority. Yet here, as we have seen throughout his oeuvre, Higgins’s
own work embodies these values. The Answere is another instance of
combative annotation in print, as Higgins interleaves passages of his
own amongst paragraphs excerpted from his hypotext, and so relocates
his commentary from the Exposition’s margins to its core. His address
to the reader also frankly recounts a disrupted, heuristic process of pro-
duction, foregrounding the text’s personal, scholarly history:
AT first (Christian Reader) I wrote these things more at large, inter-

posed with the other which I tooke vpon mee to aunswere. But now
I thought it farre better thus to set them at view after this maner,
which I could not with out the much abridging of that my first copie.
And this I did for two causes; the one to saue my labor in writing
them out: the other to ease thee in reading them over.93
This attention to the formal presentation of his argument, down to, the
preface implies, mise-en-page, shows us an author alert to the interaction
of text and white space—as well as evasive about his appropriation of
‘the other.’ Like the sprezzatura of the revised Dictionarie’s similar false
start (Higgins had claimed that “AT first I toke this worke of M aister
Huloets in hande (gentle Reader) onelye to enlarge, and when I had
herein passed some paineful time, I perceyued it almost a more easye
matter to make new, then to amende”) the Answere’s preface distances
Higgins from his editorial role, and the cannibalization of other writ-
ing.94 He enlarges instead on how his arrangement of the text works to
facilitate the reader’s comprehension, spelling out his use of initials to in-
dicate how separate points in the dialogue between his own persona and
Perkins correspond to one another, “so thou maiest the easier compare
the places of both togither, and better consider & sentence of both.”95
In fact this arrangement calls for the reader to flip back and forth from
Higgins’s point ‘A’ to Perkins’s point ‘A’; corresponding arguments could
have been more easily compared if they had been printed on facing pages,
or in columns, or had Higgins’s response been presented as a marginal
gloss or commentary around Perkins’s thesis, or even had points ‘A’ and
‘A’ been printed consecutively rather than as part of a longer alphabet-
ical sequence. Instead it is incumbent on Higgins’s reader to handle the
text actively.96 “We must not allege, nor take the text lamely,” H iggins
enjoins, where ‘lamely’ connotes imperfection, as well as weakness or
paralysis.97 Higgins’s preface piles up active verbs as he requests his
readers’ generosity and cooperation: “Now (if it please thee) I pray thee
on kindenesse, with conscience and charity to read them: read, regard,
and then iudge.”98 The Answere’s reception must be dynamic.
However, this call to action is followed by something approaching a per-
sonal threat to those who will mistreat his work, turning the discourse of
defacement explored above back on the reader, when Higgins adds, “but
beware thou iudge not amisse, least thy iudgment endamage thy selfe.”99
Once again, the disjuncture between Higgins’s advice and his practice is
startling. This is a work in which Higgins, taking issue with his read-
ing, has transfused the material of marginal dispute into a reworked main
text, specifically in order to argue that such a maneuver is impossible. It is
significant, in a discussion of the decorous observation of boundaries be-
tween text and margin, author and reader, that Higgins’s admonition em-
ploys a spatial metaphor: his readers may judge, but “iudge not amisse.” In
other words, the physical placement of readerly judgement is everything.
Throughout his thirty-year career, Higgins produced works which
refuse to confine the material traces of their reading to the margins.
But conceiving of his oeuvre as a series of marginal notes may help to
make sense of the complexities of its engagement with its sources. At
once generically disparate and methodologically cohesive, Higgins’s ex-
tant corpus has much in common with the marginalia it also sought to
control. Observing Higgins’s own readers at work in the margins of his
printed texts, revising, expanding, glossing, and simply registering their
presence in their books, reveals the continuum on which he understands
author and reader to coexist.
192 Harriet Archer
Notes
I am grateful to the Folger Shakespeare Institute, where an O. B. Hardison
fellowship enabled me to undertake research for this chapter. I am indebted to
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s article, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel
Harvey Read His Livy,” which inspired this chapter’s title.
1 Higgins, First Part, f. 3r.

2 Higgins, First Part, f. 3v. Cf. Orgel, The Reader in the Book, 6–7.
3 Simonova, Early Modern Authorship, 8.
4 See Schwyzer, “Higgins, John (b. c. 1544, d. in or before 1620).”
5 “redact, v.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press; online edn, December
2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/160138.
6 Higgins, Huloets Dictionarie Newelye Corrected, sig. Aaiiv.
7 Cf. Grafton and Jardine, “Studied for Action,” 30–78; Schurink, “Like
a Hand in the Margine of a Booke,” 1–24; Richards, “Gabriel Harvey,”
303–21; Stamatakis, “With Diligent Studie, but Sportingly.”
8 Dunn, Pretexts of Authority, 8.
9 See Archer, Unperfect Histories, Ch. 4.
10 See Eggert, Disknowledge.
11 Iser, “The Reading Process,” 279–99, especially at 285. Cf. Dobranski,
Readers and Authorship, 2 and passim.
12 Orgel, The Reader in the Book, 10. See also Dobranski, Readers and Authorship.
13 Knight, Bound to Read, 7. See also Dobranksi, Readers and Authorship, 60.
14 Sherman, Used Books, xx. See also Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 42;
Anderson and Netzley, Introduction to Acts of Reading, 11–28, esp. page 17.
15 See below.
16 See Archer, “Those chronicles which other men had,” 147–63.
17 Simonova, Early Modern Authorship, 56.
18 See Angus Vine and Cathy Shrank’s chapters in A Mirror for Magistrates
in Context, 89–106 and 109–25; Jellerson, “The Spectral Historiopoetics,”
54–71.
19 Hampton, introduction to Writing from History.
20 Orgel, The Reader in the Book, 15.
21 See Hampton, Writing from History, 5.
22 Slights, Managing Readers, 63.
23 Iser, “The Reading Process,” at 286.
24 Orgel, “Marginal Maternity,” 267–90.
25 Orgel, The Reader in the Book, 154.
26 Ibid., 146.
27 Ibid., 154.
28 See Griffiths, Diverting Authorities, Ch. 5.
29 See Richards, “Transforming A Mirror for Magistrates,” 48–63.
30 See Wakelin, “Duke Humfrey and Other Imaginary Readers.”
31 Hampton, Writing from History, 25.
32 Higgins, First Part, f. 69v. See Archer, Unperfect Histories, Ch. 2; Cox
Jensen, “Reading Florus in Early Modern England,” 659–77.
33 See Archer, Unperfect Histories, Ch. 2; Ch. 4.
34 Wakelin, “Instructing Readers,” 433–52, at 438.
35 John Higgins, The Mirour for Magistrates (London: Henry Marshe, 1587),
Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 13445, Copy 1).
36 This excludes the incidental notes, doodles and marks on the texts which
also inform our sense of how these works were read, but which fall beyond
the scope of this study.
37 See Jason Scott-Warren’s chapter in this volume.
38 See, for example, Higgins, Mirour (1587), Folger Copy 1, f. 25r; 28r; 31r;
83v; 96r; 122v; 229r.
39 Cross-references and citations of this kind are given in other Folger copies
of near-contemporary texts by the comparable author, editor and transla-
tor figure Abraham Fleming, including the Panoplie of Epistles (1576) and
Bright Burning Beacon (1580). For treatments of Fleming’s “secondary”
authorial status, see Cummings, “Abraham Fleming’s Eclogues,” 147–69;
Dodson, “Abraham Fleming,” 51–66; Story Donno, “Abraham Fleming,”
200–211.
40 Higgins, Mirour, Folger Copy 1, f. 111r.
41 Vine, “Bibliophily in Baldwin’s Mirror,” 89–106, esp. page 94; “† Welsh-
man’s hose, n.,” OED Online. Oxford University Press; online edn, Decem-
ber 2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/276038.
42 See “† shipman’s hose n.,” in “shipman, n.,” OED Online. Oxford Univer-
sity Press; online edn, December 2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.
oed.com/view/Entry/178249.
43 Higgins, prefatory verse to “Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus,” sig. ⁂iv.
4 4 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Cf. Slights, Managing Readers, 86–93.
47 See Green, Chasing the Sun, 14 and passim; Considine, Dictionaries, 9 and
156.
48 Starnes, “Huloet’s Abcedarium,” 717–37, at 726. See also Bately, “Bilingual
Dictionaries,” 41–64, at 49–54.
49 Ibid., at 735; 737.
50 Dunn, Pretexts of Authority, 21.
51 Starnes, “Huloet’s Abcedarium,” at 727.
52 Sledd, “The English Verses,” 251–54, at 251–52. See also Starnes, “Huloet’s
Abcedarium,” at 734. Higgins, Dictionarie, sig. F5r; Higgins, First Parte,
f. 7v.
53 Sledd, “The English Verses,” at 253; See Archer, Unperfect Histories, Ch. 1.
54 Scott, Literature, 16. Cf. Considine, Dictionaries, 4 and 9.
55 Withals, Yonge Begynners, sig. Aiiv; Withals and Evans, A Shorte Dictionarie
Most Profitable, sig. +iiv.
56 See Huloet, Abcedarium and John Withals, A Dictionarie in English and
Latine for Children, and Yong Beginners (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1608),
Folger Shakespeare Library copies; John Withals A Shorte Dictionarie for
Yonge Beginners (London: Henry Wykes, 1566), 1825:20, Bodleian Library
copy; John Withals, A Shorte Dictionarie Most Profitable for Yong Begin-
ners (London, 1574), 1054:03, British Library copy. See also Lerer, “Devo-
tion and Defacement,” 126–53.
57 Withals, Dictionarie (1608), 321.
58 Ibid., 296.
59 Withals, Dictionarie (1553), sig. Aiiv; Baret, “To the Reader,” in Aluearie.
60 Baret, Aluearie, sig. *5r.
61 Ibid.
62 Churchyard, commendatory poem, in Higgins, Dictionarie, sig. ¶ ivr. The
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery’s copy (249:01) in fact exhib-
its several examples of marginal graffiti on this leaf.
63 “deface, v.,” OED Online. Oxford University Press; online edn, December
2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/48679. See
Higgins, Dictionarie, “cancell,” sig. Giiir; “dashe,” sig. Miiir; “deface,” sig.
Mvr; “pricke wrytinges with a penne,” sig. Kkiiir; “stryke out,” sig. Ssiv v.
194 Harriet Archer
4
6 “Arthur Golding to the Reader,” in Baret, Aluearie, sig. **1r.
65 Higgins, Dictionarie, sig. ¶ iiir.
66 Ibid., title page.
67 See Wolfe, “Click-clack and crocodile tears.” It seems most likely, given the
nature of the additions, that the marginalia were compiled as a working aid
for, probably among other things, Latin verse composition—not something
Higgins is known to have indulged in, but not beyond the remit of his liter-
ary and scholarly interests.
68 See van Miert, Kaleidoscopic; Veldman, “Junius, Hadrianus [Adriaen de
Jonghe] (1511–1575);” Siber, Nomenclatoris.
69 Hüllen, Topical Tradition, 13.
70 Ibid., 359.
71 John Higgins (ed.), The Nomenclator of Hadrianus Junius (London:
Thomas Marshe, 1585), Folger Shakespeare Library (STC 14860, Copies 1
and 7).
72 Higgins (ed.), Nomenclator, Folger Copy 1, 216.
73 Ibid., 226.
74 Ibid., 226.
75 Ibid., 486.
76 See “rounder, n.2.,” OED Online. Oxford University Press; online edn,
December 2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/En-
try/167958, 1a; “scupper, n.,” OED Online. Oxford University Press; on-
line edn, December 2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.com/view/
Entry/173915.
77 Hüllen, Topical Tradition, 13.
78 Ibid., 359.
79 Lerer, “Devotion and Defacement,” at 130.
80 Higgins, Answere, sigs A2r-v.
81 Jinkins, “Perkins, William (1558–1602).” See also Merrill, Introduction to
William Perkins; Patterson, Perkins.
82 Slights, Managing Readers, 103.
83 Patterson, Perkins, 40.
84 Higgins, Answere, 1.
85 Ibid., 4.
86 Ibid., 2.
87 Perkins, Exposition, 296–97.
88 Bullinger, “Third Sermon,” 25.
89 Pender, “Reading Bale,” 507–22, at 517; Slights, Managing Readers, 107.
90 Rastell, A Briefe Shew, f. 98v; Martin, “The Preface to the Reader,” in
Discouerie, sig. A6r. See also Martin, Discouerie, 14–16.
91 Sullivan, “Doctrinal Doubleness,” 533–61.
92 Ibid., at 538.
93 Higgins, Answere, sig. A2r.
94 Higgins, Dictionarie, sig. ¶ iiir.
95 Higgins, Answere, sig. A2v.
96 See also Adam Smyth’s discussion of ‘active readers’ in this volume.
97 Higgins, Answere, 30; “lamely, adv.,” OED Online. Oxford University
Press: online edn., December 2016, accessed 28 February 2017, www.oed.
com/view/Entry/105282.
8
9 Higgins, Answere, sig. A2v.
99 Ibid.
10 Vide Supplementum
Early Modern Collation as
Play-Reading in the First Folio
Claire M. L. Bourne
In the First Folio (F1) text of Hamlet, Horatio warns Hamlet not to
follow the beckoning Ghost in case it is an evil spirit:
What if it tempt you toward the floud my Lord?

Or to the dreadfull Sonnet of the Cliffe,
That beetles o’re his base into the Sea,
And there assumes some other horrible forme,
Which might depriue your Soueraignty of Reason,
And draw you into madnesse thinke of it?1
Horatio entreats Hamlet to “thinke of” the possibility that the ghost
might lure him into a dangerous situation. But F1 Hamlet, distracted
by the apparition that “wafts” him “still,” does not “thinke of it.”
Instead, he immediately bids the ghost: “[G]oe on, Ile follow thee.”
These six lines of Horatio’s speech appear with small variations in all
seventeenth-century quarto editions of Hamlet. However, in all these
editions (except for Q1), “thinke of it” is followed by four additional
lines in which Horatio describes in more detail the vertiginous feeling of
standing on “the dreadfull somnet of the cleefe” (Q2–Q5) with the sea
churning below:
…thinke of it,
The very place puts toyes of desperation
Without more motive, into every braine
That lookes so many fadomes to the sea,
And heares it roare beneath. 2
In this way, Horatio of the quarto tradition makes Hamlet “thinke of

it”—“it” being the possible consequences of following the Ghost—more
vividly (and for longer) than the Horatio of F1. For one seventeenth-
century reader of a little-remarked copy of F1 now housed at the Free
Library of Philadelphia (FLP), the absence of these lines in F1 and their
presence in a text that was not F1 could not be ignored. In the little bit
196 Claire M. L. Bourne
of white space to the right of a short horizontal line inscribed by hand
just under “thinke of it?” the reader has written: “vide supple,” (Fig-
ure 10.1). The note is an abbreviation for “vide supplementum,” or “see
the supplement,” where the supplement to the F1 text of Hamlet was a
copy of a Hamlet quarto, quite possibly the fifth quarto of 1637.
Throughout Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet in the Free Library’s copy
of F1, the same reader has implemented and proposed textual emenda-
tions that illustrate a sustained engagement with textual variants found
in quarto playbooks published more than a decade after F1 itself. This
essay demonstrates that the reader was selectively collating this First
Folio with the quartos of Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet brought to press
in 1637 by John Smethwick, a junior partner in the Folio publishing syn-
dicate. Smethwick would not have published these quartos if he had not
sensed a demand among readers for stand-alone editions of the plays.
The reader’s collation of the older F1 texts with Smethwick’s newest
quartos embraces the multiple versions of “Shakespeare” that were cir-
culating in the mid-seventeenth century—decades before editors began
to identify this plurality as a hurdle to clarity and, more importantly, to
accessing a singular version of “Shakespeare.”
Figure 10.1 A note to the reader to see the “supple,” (or, “supplement”) for missing
lines (sig. Oo1r). Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading 197
Histories of early modern reading, or book “use” (as most scholars
in the field now refer to the range of ways early modern readers inter-
faced with printed texts), tend to distinguish between exemplary and
exceptional modes of textual contact, or as William H. Sherman has
put it, “what it is possible and (to some extent) what it is normal for
readers to do.”3 As the other essays in this collection show, the line be-
tween conventional and atypical modes of early modern book use is a
blurry one—and the traces of human interaction left in books from the
period are not always easy to see and identify, let alone interpret and
explain. It is, however, possible to say with some certainty that “spo-
radic corrections in the main body of the dramatic text” are the most
common, or “normal,” type of readers’ marks in the printed texts of
early modern plays, including copies of F1.4 And the emendations in
the Free Library copy of F1 may seem, at first, to exemplify this mode
of reading—intervening occasionally to correct mistakes. But there is
something much more concerted, systematic, and unusual going on: one
of the book’s readers is collating the apparently “perfected” Folio play-
texts against other editions. 5
In addition to collating Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet against mid-
century quartos, the reader of the Free Library’s copy of F1 responsible
for noting the extra lines in Horatio’s speech (whom I will call Reader
A) also suggested a handful of changes to Folio-only plays, referenced a
couple of Shakespeare’s source texts (down to the page number), scored
and bracketed hundreds of passages (possibly for commonplacing), and
supplied the second stanza of a song in Measure for Measure. A second,
possibly earlier, reader (whom I will call Reader B) made a few correc-
tions but, most notably, supplied the prologue to Romeo & Juliet on
the last page of Titus Andronicus. This essay provides the necessary
context for both early readers’ interventions. In doing so, it shows that
these readers recognized Shakespeare for the play-patcher he was and
that they themselves patched up speeches from the “newly corrected,
augmented, and amended” (or, “newly imprinted and inlarged”) quar-
tos available at London’s bookstalls in the mid-seventeenth century.6
In doing so, these readers made available (simultaneously) alternative
readings that had the potential to reshape key aspects of the plays’ fictive
worlds.
•••
Little is known about the history of the Free Library’s copy of F1 be-
fore Tuesday, July 11, 1899, when it was sold at auction by a member
of the Belleroche family, then living in Belgium, who said at the time
that the book had belonged to his family for more than a century.7 The
Belleroches were among the French Huguenots who settled in England for
a time after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, but it is unclear
if the family acquired the book this early.8 The highest bidder at the
1899 auction was Bernard Buchanan MacGeorge of Glasgow, who
purchased the book for £1,700—a record price for a First Folio at the
time.9 MacGeorge was in possession of the book when Sidney Lee con-
ducted his census of extant Folios in 1902 and allowed Lee “to make
a full examination of his prize.”10 Sometime between 1905 and 1908,
MacGeorge sold this folio with copies of the second, third, and fourth
folios, at £10,000 for the lot, to the notable Shakespeare collector Mars-
den J. Perry of Providence, RI.11 The First Folio is thought to have been
valued in the lot at £6,000.12 As Sidney Lee commented, “In view of
Mr. Perry’s great venture, the First Folio bids fair to become the most ex-
pensive (absolutely) of all printed books.”13 To take Lee’s word for it, the
manuscript notes and marks on the pages of the Free Library First Folio
increased the book’s cultural value, in addition to its monetary worth,
as it passed from owner to owner at the beginning of the t wentieth cen-
tury.14 In August 1919, A.S.W. Rosenbach purchased the four folios from
Perry and soon sold them to Joseph E. Widener for his library at Lynne-
wood Hall, Elkins Park, just outside Philadelphia.15 In 1944, Widener’s
son and daughter donated their father’s collection of Shakespeare folios,
including the marked-up F1, to the Free Library of Philadelphia, where it
would be stewarded by the Rare Book Department.16 In 1945, when the
news of the donation was made public, Rosenbach characterized the gift
as “most fitting” given that “Philadelphia was the place where the first
collected edition of Shakespeare was published in America.”17
When Lee consulted this copy of F1 for his 1902 census, he counted
“some forty” textual emendations in the entire book. I have counted 3
annotations, 121 emendations, 2 additions, and 603 marginal brackets.18
The annotations (all in Reader A’s hand) include a pair of references to
Tottel’s Songs and Sonnettes and Purchas’ Pilgrimes, in Hamlet and The
Tempest respectively.19 In the text of Timon of Athens, Reader A also
inscribes “Gold” as a marginal gloss for “King-killer” in one of Timon’s
speeches. In addition to these annotations, the book is peppered with lo-
calized textual emendations: the replacement of one word with another;
the suggestion of a variant word for one given in the printed text; the
addition of missing words; the elimination of redundant lines; the reas-
signment of speech prefixes; corrections to spelling; and re-punctuation.
All but three of these are the work of Reader A. In addition, two pas-
sages not printed in F1, the prologue to Romeo & Juliet and the second
stanza of a song in Measure for Measure, have been supplied (see Figures
10.2 and 10.5). Finally, passages in every play except in Henry VI (Parts
1–3) and Titus Andronicus have been scored or bracketed in the margins
(see Figure 10.3).20 The Tempest, with 54 brackets, and Antony and
Cleopatra, with 49, contain the highest number of marked passages. 21
Several phrases within the bracketed passages, including “This blew ey’d
hag” in The Tempest, are underlined. 22 Lee was puzzled by the brackets:
Figure 10.2 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. G6v. Free Library
of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
“Some of the scored passages are such as actors might be inclined to

omit in theatrical representations, but others are of the highest dramatic
value.”23 Rather than relating to performance, it is more likely that the
scored passages were marked for commonplacing. Many are songs and
most others are easily extractable—absent of character names and other
situation-specific information—while the breadth of topics they cover
would indeed be suitable to such a project. 24
Lee claimed the presence of two manuscript hands: an “earlier pen”
that he said was responsible for the intertextual references, and a “sec-
ond pen” responsible both for the additions and emendations. 25 More
recently, Donald Bailey, who examined the book for Eric Rasmussen
and Anthony James West’s First Folio catalogue, has suggested the use of
two different inks: a light-brown ink used early in the book for “mark-
ing lines, although there are some more detailed notes” (presumably the
intertextual annotations, although this is not made clear); and a dark-
brown ink used in the majority of the annotations and additions as well as
to mark one passage in Henry VIII.26 My assessment of the manuscript
marks and notes varies from both Lee’s and Bailey’s findings. Compar-
ing individual letter-forms from annotations and emendations through-
out the book leads me to believe that one hand (that of Reader A) is likely
responsible for all the emendations, annotations, and brackets, except
for three emendations made in a much lighter brown ink (Figure 10.4).
Figure 10.3 Examples of marginal brackets in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s
First Folio: The Tempest (sig. A2v) and Romeo & Juliet (sig. ff1r).
Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
Figure 10.4 Changes made to the text of the Folio by the earlier of two hands in
light-brown ink. Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
These three changes, all of which rectify obvious compositorial mis-
takes, were made by an earlier hand than the one responsible for the
other notes and marks in the book. Based on paleographic analysis, it
is possible that the earlier hand (that of Reader B) is the one responsible
for transcribing the prologue to Romeo & Juliet onto the last page of
Titus Andronicus 27 and correcting erroneous running titles (printed as
The Merry Wives of Windsor) on the last two pages of The Two Gentle-
men of Verona. 28 Reader A, who is responsible for the other ninety-five
percent of the book’s 121 emendations (and the one of most interest to
me in this essay) seems also to have been responsible for the marginal
brackets throughout the book. While this reader used more than one
kind of ink (in addition to not particularly minding if his pen was low on
ink as he continued to work), it is possible to match each of the inks used
to emend the text with the inks used to score and bracket passages for
commonplacing. The brackets must postdate Reader B’s transcription of
the prologue since Reader A, if responsible for the brackets, scored the
supplied prologue text (Figure 10.5). 29
Despite conflicting views over which hand is responsible for which of
the manuscript notes, the few scholars who have examined the book in
person agree that they were made during the seventeenth century. Lee
was tempted to attribute the brackets to “the pen of a contemporary of
the playwright,” dating some of the other annotations to “well before
1650” and the rest to “a little after that year.”30 West and Rasmussen’s
catalogue entry is even more circumspect in its suggestion that all the
Figure 10.5 Prologue to Romeo & Juliet, transcribed on the last page of Titus An-
dronicus. Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
notes “appear to date from the seventeenth century.”31 Whereas these
tentative assessments seem to be based on paleographic evidence alone,
it is possible to use bibliographic analysis to date the majority of emen-
dations and brackets to or even before the Restoration, when the book
acquired its current binding.32
According to Lee, the book underwent a “very slight examination”
before the Belleroche family sold it at auction to MacGeorge in 1899.
Based on this cursory audit, the appraisers concluded that the copy “was
not merely perfect, but had never suffered any kind of restoration.”33
The experts Lee cited were right that the Folio possessed all its original
leaves, making it one of fifty-four extant copies known to survive in such
a complete state, but they were incorrect in suggesting that the book
had never been reconditioned. 34 Tears in some of the pages were never
(and still have not been) repaired, but the book was rebound in the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century (see Appendix). Experts who have
examined the book, either in person or by looking at photographs, date
its mottled, dark-brown calfskin binding to the second half of the seven-
teenth century, at least as early as 1666 (see Figure 10.6). 35 In the course
of this process, the pages were trimmed to fit the new binding, and as a
result, manuscript emendations, additions, and brackets situated close
to the tops and sides of several pages were cropped (see Figures 10.5,
10.17, and 10.21). The corrections to the erroneous running title at the
end of The Two Gentlemen of Verona were also cropped when the pages
were trimmed, as were variants written in the margins of both Hamlet
and Measure for Measure and the first letter or two from each line of
the song verse transcribed on the last page of the latter (sig. G6v). 36
The experts who examined the Folio on the occasion of its sale in 1899
therefore overlooked one of its most important material features. So did
A.S.W. Rosenbach, who claimed in 1945 that the book existed “in its
original binding.”37 The copy’s second binding gives us the bibliographic
means to date the reader’s manuscript emendations.
If the binding provides a terminus ad quem for the notes, how early
could they have been written? Two references to Shakespeare’s source
texts in Hamlet and The Tempest were probably both written after
1625. The first of these notes cites Songes and Sonnettes, written by
the right honorable Lord Henry Haward, Earle of Surrey (also known
as Tottel’s Miscellany) as the source text for one of the Clown’s songs in
Hamlet: “Among / Surreis / sonnets / fol. 72”38 (Figure 10.7). The five
editions of the book that match the foliation mentioned in the note pre-
date F1’s publication, so regardless of which edition the reader owned
(or consulted), he was likely familiar with it before acquiring his copy of
F1.39 A cross-reference at the start of The Tempest to Samuel Purchas’
Pilgrimes just above Caliban’s soliloquy about cursing—“Setebos god of
ye Canibals / purch. pil. vol. 1. p. 35.”—dates this particular note to after
Figure 10.6 Images of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio binding.
Figure 10.7 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. pp5r. Free Li-
brary of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.
1625 (Figure 10.8).40 A printed marginal reference to “The Deuill Sete-

bos” on page 35 of the first volume of Purchas’ collection of travel nar-
ratives, published in 1625, attests to the reader’s accuracy.41 Lee claimed
that the author of this note wrote it “probably within a year or two of
the issue of that edition of Purchas” but gives no evidence for this dating.
The most I can say here is that the reader made this note sometime after
1625. Since both annotations are written in the same light gray-brown
ink, the Songes and Sonnettes reference was probably added around the
same time.
Figure 10.8 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. A5r. Free Library
Finally, it may be possible to date one other manuscript intervention—

the addition of the second stanza of a song from Measure for Measure—
to sometime after 1639, when a version of this stanza was printed for the
first time in John Fletcher’s The Bloody Brother.42 The reader might also
have copied the stanza from John Benson’s edition of Shakespeare’s Po-
ems (1640), where the song also appears in its entirety.43 The syntax of
the penultimate line as transcribed in the Free Library’s F1 (“[Bu]t first let
my poor heart free”) better approximates the text of the song in Fletcher’s
play.44 An equally, if not more, plausible explanation is that the reader
transcribed the stanza from a manuscript copy of the song circulating
before or after 1639. The song has been identified in at least twelve man-
uscript commonplace books dating from the mid- to late seventeenth cen-
tury.45 At least one matches the Free Library First Folio reader’s “first let
my poor heart free,” where the Bloody Brother quarto and other manu-
scripts have “first set my poor heart free.”46 If he did not have access to an
earlier manuscript, then we can date this addition to sometime between
the publication of The Bloody Brother in 1639 and when the book was
rebound after the Restoration since the beginning of each line has been
cropped. The same dark-brown ink is used for the Measure for Measure
stanza, the textual emendations, and the marginal brackets that appear
throughout the volume. This suggests that the emendations were made
around the same time as the reader transcribed the stanza—as early as
1639 and possibly earlier.
•••
The 729 manuscript marks and notes in the Free Library’s copy of F1
exhibit multiple forms of readerly engagement with the plays—with lan-
guage, spelling and punctuation, ideas, the relationship of the plays to
other texts, and the potential of dialogue to be appropriated for other
uses. Lee was the first to document the notes, detailing a few of them in
a short account of the Folio for The Athenæum in 1899.47 More recently,
West characterized the notes as “17th century MS. notes of value.”48
Rasmussen and West’s more recent Descriptive Catalogue of extant cop-
ies of F1 records many of this copy’s manuscript interventions for the
first time, but the entry has a number of errors and accounts only for
the brackets in the first half of the book.49 On the whole, these mark-
ings not only evince otherwise well-documented early modern reading
practices such as correction (i.e., “perfecting,” as Sonia Massai had de-
scribed it) and commonplacing. 50 They also demonstrate that printed
plays could be—and were—treated as reading matter worthy of study,
improvement, and indeed even a version of editorial collation that pre-
dates the stated investment in such a practice by eighteenth-century ed-
itors of Shakespeare.51
In particular, Reader A’s practice of collating the Folio against other
editions seems to anticipate the centrality of collating to theories—if
not always practices—of editing Shakespeare in the eighteenth cen-
tury. But Reader A’s peculiar brand of collation even differs from these
theories both in its use of editions that postdate the Folio and in the
reader’s habit of leaving some choices unresolved. Reader A does not
always seem to have been striving “to compare the several Editions,
and give the true Reading as well as I could from thence,” as Nicholas
Rowe claimed to have done; nor does he “stick invariably to the old edi-
tions … and never … depart from them,” as Edward Capell described
his protocol for editing Shakespeare’s plays several decades later. 52
Reader A’s noncommittal collation comes closest to Alexander Pope’s
1725 edition, which provided access to textual variants for the first
time: “The various Readings are fairly put in the margin, so that ev-
ery one may compare ‘em.”53 In recording “various Readings” offered
by Q5 Romeo & Juliet and Q5 Hamlet, Reader A was not guided by
a desire to “restore” the elusive “original,” the benchmark by which
Pope and other eighteenth-century editors said they were calibrating
their editorial decisions. 54 While Reader A’s use of post-F1 quartos to
emend the F1 texts of Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet may not align with
these eighteenth-century theories of editing, his use of newer texts to
improve older ones does indeed square with the early editorial practice
of choosing the text “that had undergone the most rather than the least
mediation” to serve as the copy text for a new edition. 55 Although
eighteenth-century editors claimed to be reconstructing “original man-
uscripts,” everyone before Capell actually looked to the most recent
edition, just as this seventeenth-century reader did. In this way, Reader
A’s attention to and sometimes preference for variants from later quar-
tos differs markedly from the later practice of Edmond Malone, who in
his preface to the 1790 Works declared a new criterion for textual edit-
ing: “all the variations in … quartos” subsequent to the first quarto, or
(in its absence) the Folio, “were made by accident or caprice” and thus
not worth considering. 56
While they may have been accidental or capricious to Malone, vari-
ants present for the first time in post-First Folio quartos of Romeo &
Juliet and Hamlet provided Reader A with alternate readings that he
deemed viable and sometimes even more desirable. 57 After observing
that some of the changes “bring the text into conformity with that of the
quartos,” Lee concluded that most were “doubtless due” to the reader’s
“native and unaided sagacity.”58 Although the reader exercises a certain
degree of editorial autonomy in the texts of Folio-only plays, the author-
ity behind his emendations of Romeo & Juliet, the most heavily treated
play in the book, is not only a well-tuned editorial instinct but also Q5.
Smethwick published Q5 Romeo & Juliet in 1637, just two years before
the publication of Fletcher’s Bloody Brother and so towards the early
limit of the dating range for these notes.
Thirty-seven out of the reader’s 39 emendations in this play alone stem
from Q5.59 Many of the emendations have a basis in Q4 (1623) as well,
but there are a few places where Q4 could not have been the source for
the changes.60 A number of changes also mirror changes that turn up
in F2, but again, there are more than enough that do not to make it un-
likely that he was working from F2. What this means, then, is that the
reader was improving the allegedly authoritative Folio text of the play
by recourse to a quarto printed almost fifteen years later. If R. Carter
Hailey’s dating of Q4 to the same year as the Folio is correct, then some-
one who could afford the Folio in the early 1620s probably would not
have bought both. But when a new (and “amended”) edition of Romeo
& Juliet came out in 1637, Reader A consulted it and brought some of its
variant readings to bear on the Folio text.
This is not to say that the notes necessarily date from the late 1630s
since Q5 Romeo & Juliet (along with Q5 Hamlet) were advertised
as late as 1661. Upon Smethwick’s death in 1642, the rights to print
“Hamblett, a play” and “Romeo & Juliett” were transferred to his son
Francis, who assigned them over to Miles Flesher just a month later.61
There is no other mention of Romeo & Juliet in the Stationers’ Register
and Hamlet does not appear again until it is assigned to Richard Martyn
and Henry Herringman by Richard Cotes’ estate in a 1674 entry. How-
ever, both titles show up in a list of plays and other books said to be
“published for Henry Herringman” bound with An Institution of
General History (1661).62 Of the seven plays listed in this catalogue,
the three by Shakespeare—Love’s Labors’ Lost, Hamlet, and Romeo
& Juliet—were all published by Smethwick in the 1630s. H erringman
did not finance new editions of these plays. Instead, it seems like he took
over Smethwick’s stock and was selling his old playbooks—Q2 Love’s
Labour’s Lost (1631), Q5 Romeo & Juliet (1637), and Q5 H amlet
(1637)—fifteen years before he would himself bring a new quarto of
Hamlet to press. This said, Smethwick’s 1637 quartos of Romeo &
Juliet and Hamlet endured as the newest editions of the plays until the
publication of the Third Folio in 1663, and Reader A could have ac-
cessed them at any time in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Reader A must have taken seriously Q5’s title-page claim to be “newly
corrected” and, as Massai has shown, was justified in doing so. The vari-
ant patterns she identifies in Smethwick’s earlier editions of Romeo &
Juliet (Q3, Q4, and F1) show that the publisher, who had owned the
rights to Romeo & Juliet since 1607, “valued the progressive improve-
ment of … texts and relied on the collaboration of annotating read-
ers.”63 Given that Smethwick still owned the rights to the play when it
was printed again in 1637, it is reasonable to assume that he would have
sought annotated copy when preparing this new edition. His practice of
soliciting “progressive improvements” to the text for each new edition
would explain the handful of substantive textual variants between Q4
and Q5, even though Q5 is rarely cited in modern editorial collations.
While there is no evidence to suggest that the hand at work in the Free
Library F1’s text of Romeo & Juliet was working it up for repub-
lication, he was indeed interested in the “progressive improvements”
of the annotating reader that found their way into Smethwick’s 1637
edition.
Reader A’s particular interest in the Folio text of Romeo & Juliet
may have resulted from the play having received “less editorial at-
tention” than the other plays when they were prepared from printed
copy for inclusion in the Folio.64 But Romeo & Juliet was also one of
Shakespeare’s most popular plays in print (as Smethwick’s investment
in post-Folio quartos affirms). Although no one play or constellation
of plays dominated the attention of early readers who left traces of use
in their copies of the First Folio, it is worth pointing out that the pages
of Romeo & Juliet in the copy of the First Folio that was deposited
at the Bodleian Library in 1623 (and then lost and then found again)
were “worn … almost to shreds” in the seventeenth century.65 While
certainly responsive to typographical errors and obvious compositorial
misreadings, Reader A also grappled with the sense of certain passages
by consulting Q5—making decisions not only about which variants to
address and which to leave alone but also whether to make decisive
changes to the Folio text based on the quarto or to provide quarto
readings as alternatives. In this way, the so-called “editorial accretions”
that have barred post-Folio quartos from serious consideration in most
modern editions actually recommended Q5 Romeo & Juliet to him.66
Of all the changes and suggested changes the reader records on the
pages of F1 Romeo & Juliet, the attention paid to variant words is
the most pronounced. Emendations—both decisive and provisional—
comprise almost two-thirds of his markings. A good example of a deci-
sive emendation appears in Benvolio’s description of how Romeo tried
intervening in the altercation between Mercutio and Tybalt:
… Romeo he cries aloud,

Hold Friends, Friends part and swifter then his tongue,
His aged arme beats downe their fatall points.67
Here, Benvolio recounts Romeo’s verbal and then physical attempts to

stop the fight. Romeo tries to lower their swords with his “aged arme,”
but to no avail, as Tybalt thrusts his sword under Romeo’s arm to slay
Mercutio. The reader changed “aged” to “agil,” a revision that reflects
“agill” in Q1, Q4, and Q5 (Figure 10.9).68 Both Q2 and Q3 use “aged”
here, while F2 and all subsequent folios print “able.” The use of “aged”
in Q2, Q3, and F1 could reflect a perpetuated misreading of the printer’s
copy—“-ed” and “-il” can look similar in secretary hand. Faced with the
option of “aged” or “agill” (and perhaps also “able,” if he had access to
F2), the reader chose the word that best fits the sense of the passage given
Romeo’s youth. He makes a similar change to the text when Romeo
urges the Apothecary to accept compensation for a fatal drug: “I pray
thy pouerty, and not thy will.”69 With a single down-stroke, the reader
strikes out the “r” in “pray”: “I pay thy pouerty, and not thy will.” Like
Figure 10.9 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff3r. Free Library
“agil,” “pay” makes more sense in context than the F1 equivalent and
could derive from Q1, Q4, or Q5.
Reader A makes another pair of decisive emendations in Juliet’s
desperate plea to the Friar about finding some way out of her impending
marriage to Paris:
hide me nightly in a Charnell house,

Orecouered quite with dead mens ratling bones,
With reckie shankes and yellow chappels sculls:
Or bid me go into a new made graue,
And hide me with a dead man in his graue[.]70
The reader changes “chappels” to “chapless” and “graue” to “shroud,”

both of which follow Q4 and Q5 (Figure 10.10).71 In the case of the first
change, Q1 reads “chaples” (which could read as either chapless or cha-
pels), Q2 reads “chapels,” and Q3 reads “chappels.” The reader’s iden-
tification of “chappels” as unsuitable is echoed in F2, where “chappels”
is likewise amended to “chaplesse.” It makes sense to find “chapless(e)”
skulls—those lacking bottom jaws—in a charnel house.
These decisive changes improve the sense of the F1 text they alter. But
the reader sometimes opts against F1 even in cases where the F1 text
makes excellent sense. See, for example, Juliet’s response to her father’s
incredulity at her not being “proud” of him having “wrought / So wor-
thy a Gentleman [i.e., Paris], to be her Bridegroom”:
Not proud you haue,

But thankfull that you haue:
Proud can I neuer be of what I haue,
But thankfull euen for hate, that is meant Loue.72
Figure 10.10 T he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff6r. Free Li-
Although Juliet is unhappy that he has made (“wrought”) this arrange-
ment, she stresses that she is grateful for his effort. Although she hates
the idea of marrying Paris, she acknowledges either that her father has
made the match out of love or that Paris is well-meaning in his love. The
word in question for the Folio reader is the third line-ending “haue.”
He alters one letter to change “haue” at the end of the third line to
“hate” (Figure 10.11). This alteration reflects the state of the line in all
five quartos but none of the folios. “[H]aue” works here—Juliet can-
not be proud of what she has, i.e. the prospect of Paris as a husband.
But the reader deems “hate” a better choice, perhaps because it antici-
pates her paradoxical suturing of “hate” and “love” in the following line
(or, “Chopt Logicke” as her father calls it)—Juliet is not satisfied with
the match because she hates the idea, but she is thankful for the love
motivating the match despite hating the idea. Another instance of the
reader changing a viable word in F1 comes as Juliet prepares to drink
the apothecary’s tonic:
I haue a faint cold feare thrills through my veines,

That almost freezes vp the heate of fire:73
The reader strikes out “fire” and replaces it with “life.” “Fire” is pe-
culiar to the folio tradition; all quarto editions (except Q1 which does
not include this line) use “life.” Fire makes perfect sense here given the
repeated comparison of Juliet to the sun. But the reader’s preferences for
“life” over “fire” here and “hate” for “haue” in the previous example
testify to his selective inclination towards Q5 variants.
While it may be tempting to dismiss Reader A’s spotty collation as
a sign of unserious reading, this approach can just as easily be seen as
a sign of attentive reading. Reader A consistently relies on Q5 to high-
light different versions of the same passage and, as such, recognizes
how textual plurality can shift the boundaries of character and dra-
matic circumstance. The three instances that isolate Q5 as the reader’s
Figure 10.11 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff5r. Free Li-
Figure 10.12 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff6r. Free Library
copy text also show how Reader A explores these boundaries, Juliet
asks the Friar to
shut the doore, and when thou hast done so,

Come weepe with me, past hope, past care, past helpe.74
The reader proposes “cure” instead of “care,” a variant only found in Q1

and Q5 (Figure 10.12).75 Both variants work. Juliet is beyond “care” (as
in “preservation” or “oversight with a view to protection”). She is also
so far beyond “care” (i.e., fear) at this point that she is willing to hide
underneath “dead mens ratling bones” rather than marry Paris. But she is
also beyond “cure” because she thinks that nothing can remedy the situa-
tion. The Friar’s subsequent ministering of a potion as just such a remedy
makes the suggestion of “cure” resonate beyond these lines. The use of
“past care” allows for a Juliet who is both vulnerable and fearless. The
use of “past cure” on the other hand emphasizes her vulnerability. But by
not blotting out the “a” in “care,” the reader leaves both options available.
Reader A also turns to Q5 in the Friar’s subsequent description of how
the vial of “distilling liquor” will affect Juliet once she has consumed it:
No warmth, no breath shall testifie thou liuest,

The Roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To many ashes, the eyes windows fall
Like death when he shut vp the day of life:76
He changes “the eyes windows fall” to “thy eye’s windows fall” (Figure
10.13). Although he adds the apostrophe to eyes independently of any
other text, “thy” instead of “the” is a variant reading found in both Q2
and Q5.77 In the very same line of this passage, the reader suggests that
“many ashes” could also be read as “palie ashes.”78 He does not strike
out “many” but rather scores an “x” above the word and writes “palie”
in the right-hand margin. “Palie” is only found in Q4 and Q5, with Q2
and Q3 printing “many” and F2 onwards supplying “mealy” as a third
option. This provisional change accepts both the image of Juliet’s lips
and cheeks fading to “many” ashes—ashes to ashes, dust to dust—and
the image of them losing color, that is, fading to “palie” (or, pale) ashes.
Taking these three emendations—“cure” for “care”; “thy” for “the”;
and “palie” for “many”—as a group suggests that the reader was work-
ing from Q5, since no other text prints the word supplied by the reader
in all three instances.
Another passage in which Reader A uses provisional collation to open
up interpretive possibility is Juliet’s astonishingly frank soliloquy on the
eve of her marriage to Romeo. In this speech, she calls on night (a “sober
suted Matron”) to “learn” her how to lose her virginity—“how to loose
a winning match.” At the same time, Juliet knows (or feels) enough to
anticipate the physical pleasure of this match:
Come gentle night, come louing blackebrow’d night.

Giue me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stares,
And he will make the Face of heauen so fine,
That all the world will be in Loue with night,
And pay no worship to the Garish Sun.79
The reader offers an alternative to the “I” in the second line of this pas-
sage by inscribing a caret below and an “x” above the printed “I” and
writing Q5’s “^he” in the right-hand margin (Figure 10.14).80 The sense
of the passage changes dramatically depending on which pronoun Juliet
uses. Read innocently, F1’s Juliet expresses a desire to be close to Romeo
even after she dies—when she is in heaven she wants him (cut into stars)
to be close to her. As the line is printed in Q5, Juliet expresses a desire for
Romeo to shine down on her and “all the world” after he dies—to bask
in his light. Instead of wanting him close to her in heaven, she wants to be
bathed in his light on earth. However, these lines are also charged with
physical desire. Juliet’s blood is “bayting” in her “Cheekes,” and in F1,

she imagines the ecstasy of reaching orgasm (i.e., “when I shall die”). The
reader’s provisional emendation (i.e., “when he shall die”) replaces Juliet’s
focus on her own sexual pleasure with a focus on Romeo’s. However, by
not actually crossing out “I” in favor of “he,” the reader allows for the
couple’s shared pleasure, a sense of reciprocity that Juliet stresses later
in the speech when she figures her own body as well as Romeo’s as pur-
chased goods that have yet to be possessed (or, enjoyed) by the other.
Just as he allows Juliet to continue imagining her own sexual fulfill-
ment by retaining F1’s “I” and to anticipate Romeo’s by supplying Q5’s
“he,” the reader finds similarly rich variation across the two texts in
the Friar’s admonition of Romeo for his “womanish tears” following
Tybalt’s slaying:
Happinesse Courts thee in her best array,

But like a mishaped and sullen wench,
Thou puttest vp thy Fortune and thy Loue:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.81
He places “x” above “mishaped,” “puttest,” and “vp,” and to the right
of the passage offers as alternatives: “misbehav’d,” “poutst,” and “upõ”
(Figure 10.15). In F1, the Friar likens Romeo to a deformed or ugly
(“mishaped”) and sulky woman who cannot see “Happinesse” right in
front of her, arraigning him for storing (or suspending) his current lot—
his relationship with Juliet. The provisional Q5 variants re-characterize
Romeo’s behavior: Romeo is like an unruly (“misbehav’d”) and sulky
woman who treats her present circumstances with petulance (“poutst
upõ”) even though those circumstances are, for all intents and purposes,
happy ones. Instead of simply failing to seize his “Fortune” and “Loue,”
the Romeo of the quarto text actively scorns it. And instead of being
“mishaped” (that is, born into a condition that cannot be changed), Q5
Figure 10.15 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ff4v. Free Li-
Romeo is “misbehav’d”—in control of his destiny but acting out. The

reader’s decision to preserve F1’s reading of the passage alongside that
of Q5 suggests that he thought both turns of phrase could plausibly con-
vince Romeo that he has acted against his own best interests.
Besides attending to textual variants, Reader A also proved alert to
inconsistencies in speech assignments between F1 and his Q5 copy text.
In two instances, he reassigned speeches to reflect the quarto. The more
complex of these two speech reassignments comes at the end of Juliet
and Romeo’s exchange after the masked ball. The reader is not only
alert to the speech prefixes but also eliminates language from Romeo’s
speech which is repeated in the Friar’s soliloquy at the start of the next
scene:82
Rom. I would I were thy Bird.

Iul. Sweet so would I,
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing:
Good night, good night.
Rom. Parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say goodnight, til it be morrow.
Ro. Iul. Sleepe dwell vpon thine eyes, peace in thy brest.
Rom. Would I were sleepe and peace so sweet to rest.
The gray ey’d morne smiles on the frowning night,
Checkring the Eassterne Clouds with streakes of light,
And darknesse fleckel’d like a drunkard reeles,
From forth dayes pathway, made by Titans wheeles.
Hence will I to my ghostly Fries close Cell,
His helpe to craue, and my deare hap to tell.
Hence will I to my ghostly friers close Cell
His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell.83
In addition to assigning two of Romeo’s lines to Juliet (“Parting …
morrow”) and one of Juliet’s lines to Romeo (“Sleep … brest”), the
reader also crosses out seven lines with a series of diagonal marks and
rewrites the final couplet, changing the spelling of a couple of words and
amending the misprinted “Fries” to “friers” (Figure 10.16). The bracket
that the reader has drawn around the “rest”-”brest” couplet seems to in-
dicate that the second line of the couplet should be restored, even though
it was swept up in the wholesale elimination of the ensuing six lines.84
The reassignment of “Parting is such sweet sorrow / That I shall say
goodnight til it be morrow” to Juliet makes sense given that she is the
one of the pair who has been repeating “good night” throughout the
scene to hold the eager Romeo at bay—“A thousand times good night.”
The emendation also affords each lover a rhymed couplet to complete
Figure 10.16 T he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. ee6v. Free Li-
their exchange. Not unsurprisingly, Q5 Juliet asserts closure with her
couplet but Romeo has to have the last word (complete with sexual in-
nuendo). F1 gives Romeo the “sorrow-morrow” couplet and then has
them sharing the “breast-rest” couplet. This works well enough, but the
reassignment of lines (based on Q5) better aligns with the abiding power
dynamic of the exchange.
As the previous example illustrates, the reader was interested in re-
moving perceived textual difficulties, but even in such cases, the changes
and suggestions demonstrate a keen attentiveness to dramatic situation.
He does this again in Romeo’s final speech, striking through four lines
so it approximates the state of the passage in Q5:
I will stay with thee,

And neuer from this Pallace of dym night
Depart againe: come lie thou in my armes,
Heere’s to thy health, where ere thou tumblesst in
O true Appothecarie!
Thy drugs are quicke. Thus with a kisse I die.
Depart againe; here, here will I remaine,
With Worms that are thy Chambermaides:
…
Heere’s to my Loue. O true Appothecary:
Thy drugs are quicke. Thus with a kisse I die.85
In Q5, however, the passage does not include the sentence: “come lie
thou in my armes / Heere’s to thy health,” which the reader left intact.
As such, this could be seen as a provisional emendation that allows for
both F1 and Q5 readings. As emended, Romeo does not drink the poi-
son twice (as the Folio text, perhaps in error, suggests), but he does em-
brace Juliet’s limp body and raises the vial to her “health,” signaling his
intent to drink. The “here, here” of the next unobscured line take on
different meaning than in Q5, where he has not yet embraced Juliet. The
physical embrace in the reader’s hybrid version gives Romeo momentary
pause and a desire to stay “here, here”—physically embracing Juliet’s
(so he thinks) decaying corpse. In Q5, Romeo says he’ll never “depart
againe” from “this palace of dim night”—the “here, here” is the place
where bodies decay. The reader’s version emphasizes the eroticism of
the moment for Romeo, whose ideal of love is more abstract and never
so seated in physical desire as Juliet’s. This hybrid also echoes Juliet’s
early entreaty to be hidden in a charnel house “[o]recouered quite” with
corpses rather than submit to family demands. Here, the reader seems to
play with interpretive possibility by producing a composite text that is
not F1 or Q5—it is both.
Besides removing these repeated lines and adding a possessive apos-
trophe, Reader A makes two other changes that do not match up exactly
with Q5. On sig. ff6r, he crosses out the “i” in “Countie” to make it
read “Counte,” a change also reflected in F2, F3, and F4. The use of
“County” as an honorific may have been obsolete at the time of the read-
er’s intervention. And his change of “same” to “sun” on sig. ee3v has
no retrievable textual precedent, even though it anticipates the editorial
tradition. While he deferred to Q5 in almost every other instance, exam-
ples like these show that he was not mechanically “correcting” the F1
text by a copy of Q5. In many cases—about 145 by my count—Reader
A chose not to change or suggest a change to the Folio text when Q5 of-
fered a different reading. Even though recovering his exact motivations
is impossible, he was clearly making active decisions about when to and
when not to intervene on the page.
One example illustrates particularly well this activity between Reader
A’s deferral to Q5 and his independent inclinations. Here, he endeavors
to regularize the meter of a hyper-metrical line: “Whiter then new snow
vpon a Rauens backe” (Figure 10.13).86 He has crossed out “new” and
the “vp” in “vpon” before subscribing a caret below the crossed out
half-word and rewriting “up” above it. The edited line—“Whiter then
snow upon a Rauens backe”—reflects Q4 and Q5, but the cancelling
and rewriting of “up” suggests that the reader changed his mind about
how to eliminate the extra beat. His initial thought was probably to pre-
serve “new” and change “vpon” to “on”—F2 makes this change, and
F3 and F4 repeat it—but Q5 advanced another solution, one the reader
preferred. So, he restored his initial cut by striking out “new” instead.
His treatment of meter here suggests that while his editorial process had
a basis in the copy text, it was not yoked to it.
Reader B’s transcription of the prologue on the page facing the be-
ginning of Romeo & Juliet demonstrates a similar indebtedness to the
quarto tradition. Apart from variant spellings and punctuation, the pro-
logue written into the Free Library’s F1 matches the prologue as printed
in Q2, Q3, Q4, and Q5 with two exceptions. Instead of reading “their
childrens end” as do all the quartos, line 11 of the reader’s transcrip-
tion reads “thire childrens death.” Because “death” appears two lines
above in approximately the same position, the reader’s use of the word
here could very well have been the result of an eye-slip. The more strik-
ing change affects the prologue’s title. Instead of following the quartos,
which all title the poem simply “Prologue,” the reader writes, “The
prologue to Juliet and Romeo.” The addition of the play’s title clarifies
that the transcribed passage does not belong to Titus Andronicus de-
spite being written on the last page of that play. Moreover, the inversion
of the protagonists’ names could mean that this reader wrote the pro-
logue into the book after having read the play—with the syntax of the
play’s final couplet still fresh in mind: “For neuer was a Storie of more
Wo, / Then this of Iuliet, and her Romeo.” It is tempting to interpret
the inversion of the title as the reader’s not-so-tacit acknowledgement
of Juliet’s priority.87 He would not be the only early modern reader to
transpose the lovers’ names. Under the title-page imprint of a copy of
Q4 at the Folger Shakespeare Library, an early reader has inscribed “Ju-
liet and Romeo.”88 A copy of Corona Charitatis (1626), also at the Fol-
ger, features two different versions of the play’s final couplet inscribed
on the blank verso of the final page.89 In a quarto verse miscellany
dating from the early seventeenth century held at Meisei University, a
reader has recorded Romeo’s speech (beginning “Oh shee doth teach
the torches to burne bright”) upon first seeing Juliet as well as the first
three lines of the sonnet they share (beginning “Yf I p[ro]fane w th my
unworthyest hand”) under the heading “In Juliett & Romeo.”90 In an
early print example, John Marston in his Scourge of Villanie (1598) ref-
erences the language of the play, calling it “pure Iuliat and Romeo.”91
The circulation of this alternate title demonstrates, just like Reader A’s
Q5-motivated emendations do, that different versions of the play—and,
by extension, of “Shakespeare”—were viable in the middle of the sev-
enteenth century.
•••
As the reference to the “supple[ment]” at the end of Horatio’s warning

suggests, Reader A’s engagement with the text of Hamlet also involved
a second text. Of the thirty-two provisional and decisive changes made
to that play in the course of his reading, twenty-eight have a basis in Q3
and Q4, while twenty-seven of these have a basis in Q5.92 The strik-
ing consistency across Q3–Q5 Hamlet in the passages corresponding
to the ones the reader emends in F1 makes it impossible on the basis of
collation alone to determine which quarto the reader consulted.93 But
he was clearly collating against the quarto tradition. The reference to
a “supple[ment]” could only mean that the reader had a copy of one of
these quartos to hand. If he wanted to seek out the extra lines, he could.
An enigma to anyone unfamiliar with the fact that the reader was col-
lating the Folio and quarto texts of the play, this annotation suggests
that the reader considered his Hamlet quarto a necessary adjunct to F1.
Given that the reader probably owned Q5 Romeo & Juliet, there is a
good chance that he also owned Q5 Hamlet. He could have bought both
quartos at the same time from Smethwick, who re-published both of
them in 1637 from his shop under the sign of the Dial in St. Dunstan’s
Churchyard, or in the decades following their publication, as the quartos
continued to be sold together.
Reader A corrects misprints, regularizes hypo- and hyper-metrical
lines of verse, and makes or suggests changes to the F1 Hamlet us-
ing quarto readings. For instance, he grapples with meter and textual
variance in Gertrude’s speech to Hamlet after the Ghost appears to him
in the queen’s closet:
Qu. Alas, how is’t with you?

That you bend your eye on vacancie,
And with their corporall ayre do hold discourse.94
The reader adds “doe” to the second line to turn tetrameter into pentam-
eter, a change that reflects all seventeenth-century quartos except Q1
(Figure 10.17). The next pair of changes (“their” to “th” and “corporall”
to “incorporall”) has the same basis in the quarto tradition. Not only
do these emendations preserve this line’s meter, but just like the reader’s
handling of the “snow upon a Rauens back” line in Romeo & Juliet,
they also show a negotiation between his own reading of the passage for
sense and an equally sensible reading supplied by his “supple[ment].” It
seems he initially crossed out “their” entirely in the third line, so that it
would read: “And with incorporall ayre do hold discourse.” Even though
the definite article is metrically unnecessary, the reader defers to his
quarto, crossing out the “eir” of “their” more vigorously, thus possibly
suggesting an intent to preserve the “th.”
Most of Reader A’s changes to the Folio text of Hamlet are more
straightforward than this one. For instance, he changes the final word of
“I haue heard, / The Cocke that is the Trumpet to the day” to “morn.”95
He substitutes “distill’d” for the Folio’s “bestil’d” in Horatio’s description
of Bernardo and Marcellus being reduced “Almost to Ielly” at the sight of
the Ghost.96 He suggests “intents” to replace “euents” in Hamlet’s “Be
thy euents wicked or charitable, / … / I will speak to thee.”97 And he pro-
poses “wicked tongue” in place of “idle tongue” in Hamlet’s rejoinder to
Figure 10.17 T he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. pp2r. Free Li-
his mother (Figure 10.18).98 All these provisional substitutions align F1
with Q2–Q5, and the three post-Restoration quartos.
Some of Reader A’s emendations do not reflect the Restoration quar-
tos and thus isolate Q3–Q5 as the most likely candidates for his “supple
[ment].” He changes Hamlet’s epithet about Claudius from “the blunt King”
to “the bloat King” in accordance with Q2–Q5’s “blowt king,” where the
Restoration quartos print a sanitized version of the line: “Let not the king
tempt you to bed again” (Figure 10.19). Similarly, the reader emends the
apparent compositorial misreading in Horatio’s reference to the “dreadful
Sonnet of the Cliffe” to “sommet,” a variant spelling for Q2–Q5’s “som-
net,” where the Restoration quartos opt for the unprecedented “border.”
Figure 10.18 T he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sigs. nn5r and nn6r.
But Reader A was not entirely constrained by the quarto. Again, there
are many changes he could have made but did not. There are also a hand-
ful of changes that have no basis in any extant text of the play, not even
Q1. One of these independent emendations can be found in the Ghost’s
revelatory speech to Hamlet at the end of the first act. Where the Ghost
recounts the poison possessing and curdling his blood with “a sodaine
vigour,” the reader suggests replacing “vigour” with “rigor.” The reader
makes the same kind of unaided provisional emendation in the so-called
closet scene when he describes his mother as bending towards vice:
Forgiue me this my Vertue,

For in the fatnesse of this pursie times,
Vertue it selfe, of Vice must pardon begge,
Yea courb, and woe, for leaue to do him good.99
The reader may have determined “courb” to be a compositorial error since

“-rb” looks similar to “-ch” in secretary hand (Figure 10.20). Although Lee
was adamant about the superiority of the reader’s suggestion, both “courb”
and “couch” make sense in the context of Hamlet’s complaint about Virtue
(i.e. Gertrude) having become enslaved to Vice (i.e. Claudius).100 Gertrude is
not only in the compromising position where she has to “woe” (or woo) the
king, says Hamlet, but she also has to “courb” (bend) to him or, as the Folio
reader would have it, “couch” (crouch, cower) in his shadow.
Reader A’s editorial autonomy in these two cases is characteristic
of his sporadic emendations to the texts of Folio-only plays. The most
striking example of such an intervention comes in the text of Measure
Figure 10.19 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. pp2r. Free Library
Figure 10.20 T
he Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. pp2r. Free Li-
for Measure, the play with the third highest concentration of manuscript
changes (seven in total), when Angelo warns Isabella that hidden beauty
elicits more attention than beauty openly exhibited:
Ang. Thus wisdom wishes to appeare most bright,

When it doth taxe it selfe: As these blacke Masques
Proclaime an en-shield beauty ten times louder
Then beauty could displaied.101
The Folio reader seems to have had some difficulty with the adjective
“en-shield,” offering “enshrin[d]” as an alternative (Figure 10.21). Writ-
ten in the margin, the word was cropped when the page was trimmed to
accommodate the book’s second, late seventeenth-century binding. All
Folio editions print “en-shield,” as do most modern editions, where it
is glossed as “shielded” or “concealed.” This is Shakespeare’s only use
of the word, and it is also the only usage recorded in the OED.102 The
reader’s suggestion of “enshrin[d]” preserves the idea of protection and
concealment suggested by “en-shield.” As such, his considered choice of
this word shows a very early instance of an editorial hand grappling with
an abstruse Shakespearean neologism.103
Many of Reader A’s interventions in plays other than Hamlet and Ro-
meo & Juliet address obvious errors, punctuation, and meter and could
easily have been made without recourse to another text. It is worth not-
ing, however, that he does make several substantive changes to the texts
of Folio-only plays that are found in later Folio editions. He amends
“periury” to “penury” in Measure for Measure,104 while in Coriolanus,
he modifies Cominius’ reference to Tarquin’s “Amazonian Shinne” to
read “chin.”105 F2 preserves “Shinne,” but F3 and F4 both print “chin.”
This is not to say that the reader necessarily consulted these editions but
rather that he was either familiar with these passages or perspicacious
enough to make sense of these lines. The emendations that fall into this
Figure 10.21 The Free Library of Philadelphia’s First Folio, sig. F5r. Free Library
category, though, are too few to support any other meaningful conclu-
sions about the reader’s method for making and suggesting changes to
the texts of other plays in the book. Many of these changes, including
the instance where he changes “Barlet” to “marlet” in the text of Mac-
beth, suggest that he was attentive to the sense, accuracy, and interpre-
tive possibility of the dialogue.
•••
The oft-neglected 1637 Shakespeare quartos made their mark—on this

seventeenth-century reader and, by extension, on the pages of his book.
But Reader A did not collate F1 against the quartos in the way we
might today—line by line, word by word, point by point. We should
not therefore imagine him reading folio and quarto side by side, shut-
tling his eyes back and forth between them and diligently “correcting”
the Folio against the later text. It is more likely that he reached for
his supplementum as a reference when particular passages caught his
attention. Many of his interventions are clustered in long speeches—
Juliet’s soliloquies, Romeo’s laments, and Friar L aurence’s counsels—
so it is possible that he consulted Q5 when his memory of these speeches
(from performance or from prior readings) did not wholly accord with
the Folio text. It is also possible that he consulted Q5 mainly to cross-
reference those passages that he intended to transcribe into a common-
place book.
Reader A’s extensive marginal brackets show, at the very least, an intent
to mark favorite or noteworthy passages and perhaps also to return to the
text to transcribe them for future consultation or study. The references
to Tottel’s Songes and Sonnettes and Purchas’ Pilgrimes not only suggest
his aspiration to study the text alongside other vernacular books but also
provide evidence that he did so with an eye to Shakespeare’s methods of
appropriation. In other words, this early reader recognized Shakespeare
as a borrower decades before Gerard Langbaine documented the “plagia-
ries” (i.e., sources) of Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights
for the first time.106 A similar interest in intertextual reading is also ev-
ident in the transcription of the song stanza at the end of Measure for
Measure as well as in the marking of songs throughout the volume. The
reader’s attentiveness to all the ways the F1 plays are composite texts
exposes not Shakespeare’s exceptionalism among other playwrights but
rather his fairly conventional practice of “patching” together material
from a variety of sources to make a play.107 Furthermore, the reader adds
material to the plays that might not even be by Shakespeare in the first
place: not only “new” (unauthorized) variants but also verse from other
playwrights. The stanza of the song that the reader adds to the final page
of Measure for Measure, after all, has been both attributed to Fletcher
and circulated in manuscript anonymously.108
This is not the Shakespeare of Leonard Digges’ poem in John Benson’s
1640 edition of the Poems which characterized everything Shakespeare
wrote a “pure, his owne … language exquisite.”109 The reader’s refer-
ences to Tottel, Purchas, and a textual “supple[ment]” also present a
different picture of “Shakespeare” than the one depicted in Anthony
Van Dyck’s famous portrait of John Suckling, in which Suckling holds
a copy of F1 or F2 open to Hamlet. In Van Dyck’s painting, the subject
leans against a rock inscribed with the Latin phrase Ne te quaesiveris
extra, or “Don’t seek outside yourself.”110 The motto suggests a closed
network between reader and Folio—and indeed the Folio itself as a
closed network—where the book contains everything Suckling needs to
participate in a learned, literary culture. In contrast to both Digges, who
insists on Shakespeare’s solitary genius, and Van Dyck’s portrait, which
presents the Folio itself as a self-sufficient proxy for that genius, Reader
A (and to some extent Reader B in supplying “The prologue to Juliet and
Romeo”) legitimates Shakespeare’s practice of borrowing as evidence of
his participation in a complex and often material network of vernacular
textual production. Not only does the Free Library F1 testify to Reader
A’s recognition that Shakespeare “sought outside” his own native capac-
ities to construct his plays, but as I have shown, it also demonstrates the
reader himself seeking outside Shakespeare’s proxy—“his Booke”—to
update, explore, and make the plays new. Reader A’s practice of selec-
tively collating his F
olio against post-Folio quartos suggests that these
later texts themselves operated as the guiding principles for his inter-
ventions—interventions that illuminate, but do not necessarily resolve,
both the textual and, crucially, the interpretive potential of key pas-
sages. While the Friar in F1 sees Romeo giving up on his happiness, the
reader’s collation of this passage opens up the possibility of a Romeo
who broods over it. F1 gives us a Juliet who anticipates her own sexual
pleasure in consummating her marriage; the reader suggests that she fo-
cus also on Romeo’s pleasure. In F1, Hamlet insults Claudius’ impotence
(“blunt king”) in contrast to the quarto-sanctioned reading, in which the
prince accuses his uncle of having an insatiable sexual appetite (“bloat
king”). Horatio in F1 supplies the image of Bernardo and Marcellus
struck motionless (“bestil’d”) with fear, while the reader imagines that
fear reduced (“distill’d”) them to trembling masses. These provisional
emendations show that the reader was not only reading closely enough
to be familiar with the fictive world of each play, but more importantly,
that he was stretching the bounds of those fictive worlds.
Given the reader’s capacity for making a handful of well-considered,
if textually unaided, emendations in other plays (“enshrin[d]” for “en-
shield” in Measure, for instance), why did he not pay more attention to
plays like Measure or Macbeth? Why did he dedicate so much ink to
Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet? While it is inviting to equate the read-
er’s particular interest in these two plays to their privileged place in the
Shakespearean canon, there is a much simpler explanation: the reader
left his heaviest mark on Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet because he had
access to distinct editions of these two plays (namely, the fifth quar-
tos). So, while he was capable of exercising some measure of editorial
autonomy, the disparity between the two plays he heavily annotated
and the rest suggests that the quartos—his supplementa—were indeed
one of the means by which he read his Folio. In this way, he took seri-
ously Q5 Romeo & Juliet’s claim to be “Newly corrected, augmented,
and amended” and set to work comparing this new and improved text
against his Folio text. He proceeded in similar fashion with Q5 Hamlet,
whose title page promised that the play had been “Newly imprinted and
inlarged, according to the true and perfect Copy last Printed.” Because
these claims had appeared first on the second editions of both plays
(1599 and 1604/1605) and on every subsequent quarto, their presence
on the title pages of Q5 Romeo & Juliet and Q5 Hamlet strike modern
critics as either hollow marketing ploys or stale hold-overs from previ-
ous editions. To Reader A, as certainly to lots of other readers who in-
vested in later quarto playbooks that made similar claims, such promises
were neither hollow nor stale. And as Reader A’s emendations show, the
quartos indeed fulfilled their title-page promise of containing playtexts
different from—and possibly even better than—the ones already in cir-
culation. Instead of seeking a textual history, then, this reader used his
book to record a glimpse of a textual present, in which Romeo & Juliet
and Hamlet were still (as they indeed still are) textually and interpre-
tively in flux.
Appendix: The FLP Folio Binding

In this appendix, I provide the technical bibliographical evidence for
dating the binding of the Free Library of Philadelphia copy of the First
Folio to the latter half of the seventeenth century. The red speckling
on the page edges supports this conclusion, since this coloring treat-
ment is characteristic of books bound in the late seventeenth century.111
According to the catalogue entry for this copy in Rasmussen and West’s
catalogue, the binding was done by someone who also did work for
Samuel Pepys. They cite Philippa Marks, the resident binding expert at
the British Library, who points out that the largest floral tool used to
decorate the top and bottom panels on the spine of the book corresponds
to a tool used to decorate the binding on Pepys’ manuscript “Lt Gradon’s
Collection of Naval Flags & Colors.”112 The manuscript was bound in
1686 by an unidentified binder. Marks also connected the tool to a bind-
ing on a copy of Charles Pora’s L’Amour reglé dating to 1682. In ad-
dition, the volute corner bracket used to decorate the spine of the Free
Library First Folio is almost identical to a tool also used on at least two
books bound by John Berresford for Pepys’ library—the Pynson Sarum
Missal (1520) and an illustrated roll depicting Henry VIII’s ships given
to Pepys by Charles II and cut up to be bound in 1690.113 Berresford
became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company in 1682 and presumably
worked until he disappeared from the company’s records in 1716. He
started taking commissions from Pepys as early as 1685, working for
him until Pepys’ death in 1703.114 The connection of the Free Library
First Folio to Berresford’s workshop would date its binding to sometime
between 1682 and 1716, when Berresford was active.
Of course, this dating is contingent on the exact same tool being used
to ornament the books in Pepys’ library and the spine of the Free Library
First Folio, and as David Pearson has cautioned, many of the smaller tools
used to decorate bindings in a given period “were replicated in numerous
virtually identical versions, so that many workshops would be simulta-
neously using tools that look very similar.”115 However, Pearson also
notes that particular tool designs can help in “assigning bindings to the
right time period irrespective of workshop identification”; or, as Mirjam
M. Foot explains, “Small tools, as impressed on bindings, turn up over
limited periods of time in specific locations.”116 Studies of seventeenth-
century bookbindings by Pearson, Foot, and Howard M. Nixon show
that a tool almost indistinguishable from the one used on the spine of
the Free Library First Folio was used on a number of magnificent bind-
ings attributed to the workshop of Samuel Mearne, a bookbinder who
supplied bindings to Charles II’s household as well as to royal chapels
and for ceremonies of the Order of the Garter.117 Nixon has dated the
earliest of these bindings to 1666.118 Former Folger Shakespeare Library
conservator Frank Mowery is doubtful that Mearne’s bindery could
have been responsible for the mediocre quality of the ornamentation on
the Free Library First Folio binding. However, even if neither the tool
used in Mearne’s bindery nor the nearly identical one used by Berresford
is the exact same tool used on the binding of the Free Library First Folio,
it is possible to say with some degree of confidence that this tool and its
variants started appearing on books sometime in the mid-1660s. This,
in turn, means that the Folio could have been rebound at least as early
as 1666, a date that accords with the late Philadelphia-based conserva-
tor and bookbinding expert Willman Spawn’s independent estimate of
1670.119 If this is the case, then the manuscript notes could very well
have been made at some point before the Restoration or in the decade
after Charles II reclaimed the throne.
Notes
I would like to thank Peter Stallybrass, Zachary Lesser, Eric Rasmussen, and
Adam G. Hooks for feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. I am also deeply
grateful to the librarians at the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book
Department for their assistance and patience during my research.
1 Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies London: 1623, sig. Oo1r.
Hereafter this book will be referred to as FLPF1.
2 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet [Q5], sig. C3r.
3 Sherman, Used Books, xvi.
4 Massai, Shakespeare, 14. My own survey of 1,300+ early modern play-
books at the Folger Shakespeare Library supports Massai’s findings. On
selective reading of the First Folio, see Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First
Folio, 132.
5 No recent study of F1 has shown a reader to be collating the apparently
“perfected” Folio texts against other editions. See Smith, Shakespeare’s
First Folio and The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio. See also Mayer,
“Annotating and Transcribing;” “Early Buyers and Readers;” “First Folio
Readers’ Marks;” “Rewriting Shakespeare;” and “The Saint-Omer First
Folio.”
6 Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet [Q5], [t.p.]; and The Trag-
edy of Hamlet [Q5], [t.p.]. On play-patching, see Tiffany Stern, Documents
of Performance.
7 Lee, An Undescribed Copy, 267.
8 West, The Shakespeare First Folio, 235. The copy is listed as #179 in West’s
census.
9 The auction was handled by Christie, Manson, & Woods in their rooms
on St. James Square, London; the auction lot number for the Folio was
309. See Catalogue of the Library of the Lord Revelstoke, 26. According
to West, a note in Maggs’s copy of Sidney Lee’s Census refers to the sale:
“[Rare books dealer Bernard] Quaritch valued Folio at £1,100 but sent a
commis[ion] of £1,000 to sale. His agent bid up to £1,700 to punish his
opponent” (The Shakespeare First Folio, 235).
10 Lee, “Undescribed Copy,” 267. See also Lee, Shakespeares Comedies,
histories, & tragedies.
11 Rosenbach dates the sale to 1905 (Books and Bidders, 87), while Maggs’s
copy of Lee’s Census dates it to July 1908. See West, The Shakespeare First
Folio, 235.
12 Lee, “Notes and Additions to the Census of Copies of the Shakespeare First
Folio.” The Library 26 (1906): 119–120.
13 Lee, Notes and Additions, 119–120.
14 According to Lee, the First Folio, “apart from the pecuniary value now
attaching to it, possesses numerous points of first-rate interest,” including
the manuscript notes (“Undescribed Copy,” 267).
15 Rosenbach, Description, 16. Widener is thought to have paid $60,000 for
the Perry set of folios (Wolf and Fleming, Rosenbach, 115).
16 Their grandfather P.A.B. Widener had served on the first board of trustees
of the Free Library, and their father was also a trustee from 1916 to 1942,
a year before he died.
17 Rosenbach, Description, 8. Rosenbach refers here to The Plays and Po-
ems of William Shakespeare, 8 vols. (Philadelphia: Bioren & Madan,
1795–1796).
18 The number of emendations excludes annotations (references to other texts
and the lone gloss in Timon of Athens) as well as the marginal brackets. It
does, however, account for the addition of “missing” text, such as the sec-
ond stanza of the song from Measure for Measure and the prologue from
Romeo & Juliet. If more than one change has been made to a particular line
or sentence, I have counted each change as a separate emendation. Even if I
had calculated emendations in a given line or sentence as one emendation,
my count would still have come in much higher than Lee’s estimate of 40.
19 FLPF1, sigs. Pp5r and A5r. In “Some Undescribed Copies,” Lee called these
notes “the earliest experimentation in literary illustration of Shakespeare’s
work that have yet been discovered” (168). I discuss the exact editions of
the titles referenced by the reader in more detail below.
20 It is tempting to explain the lack of interest in these plays as a symptom of
their status on the fringes of the corpus—products of multiple hands and
therefore not entirely “Shakespearean.”
21 There are so many marked passages in the book that Eric Rasmussen and An-
thony James West opted to record these marks only through 2 Henry IV in the
entry for this copy of the First Folio in The Shakespeare First Folios, 721–725.
22 See sigs. A2v, A2r, A3r, B1r, F1r, and V3r. These phrases often appear at
the beginning or the end of a loosely bracketed passage of text and could
serve the purpose of isolating a portion of the passage for commonplacing.
23 Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267. Besides Lee’s analysis of the manuscript in-
tervention in his piece for The Athenæum, Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan
Hsy are the only two scholars I am aware of who have attempted to make
sense of the notes. Stallybrass has shared his findings with me in conver-
sation, while Hsy wrote a seminar paper about the manuscript notes (“An
Analysis of Marginalia”). Hsy also was unable to see a “discernable pat-
tern” in the bracketing (“Analysis,” 7).
24 28 of the 603 marked passages are songs, parts of songs, or standalone
poems.
25 Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267. Lee does not assign the marginal brackets to
either “pen.”
26 Bailey in Rasmussen and West, Descriptive Catalogue, 722. According to
Bailey, the instance of bracketing in dark-brown ink occurs on sig. v3v.
27 FLPF1, sig. ee3v.
28 Ibid., sigs. D1r–v.
29 I use male pronouns for both readers for ease of comprehension, with the
caveat that either reader could have been a woman.
30 Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267. Here, Lee provides no specific evidence for
his dating of the notes.
31 Rasmussen and West, Descriptive Catalogue, 721.
32 If the Belleroches acquired the book after coming to England in the mid-
1680s, then it could be that they were responsible for its current binding.
The timing of their relocation and the binding correspond, as I discuss at
more length below.
33 Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267.
34 Other copies with all their original leaves present include West 1, 2, 4, 12,
13, 14, 19, 21, 24, 37, 43, 50, 53, 54, 58, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 80,
126, 127, 130, 133, 143, 147, 150, 151, 154, 157, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167,
170, 171, 172, 175, 145, 178, 181, 183, 194, 196, 197, 201, and 216 (West,
The Shakespeare First Folio).
35 Lee thought it dated from “the last years” of the century (Undescribed
Copy, 267).
36 FLPF1, sig. G6v; see also sigs. D1r–v; F5r; G3v; and pp2r.
37 Rosenbach, Description, 16. Rosenbach wrote this pamphlet to commem-
orate the Widener family’s donation of the books to the Free Library. West
replicated the claim that the book was “in the original calf binding” in The
Shakespeare First Folios, 234–5.
38 FLPF1, sig. pp5r.
39 A version of this song appears on folio 72r in the 1557, 1559, 1565, 1567,
and 1574 editions of Songes and Sonnettes (STC 13862, STC 13863, STC
13864, STC 13865, STC 13866).
40 FLPF1, sig. A5r.
41 Purchas, Pvrchas His Pilgrimes, sig. C6r.
42 Fletcher, The Bloody Brother (1639), sig. H4v. The stanza appeared again
with variants closer to the FLPF1 reader’s transcript in Q2 (1640), sigs.
I2r-v.
43 Shakespeare, Poems (1640), sig. K6r.
44 Benson’s edition reads: “But my poore heart first set free.”
45 For all known appearances of this song including in FLPF1, see Beal,
“Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher,” CELM, 15–26.
46 MS Eng. Poet. F. 27 (Bodleian Library Oxford), 66–7. This manuscript is
dated 1638 in two places.
47 Lee, Undescribed Copy.
48 West, The Shakespeare First Folio, 234.
49 Rasmussen and West, Descriptive Catalogue, 721–5.
50 Massai, Shakespeare, 6.
51 See Lee, Undescribed Copies, 174.
52 Rowe, “To his Grace, The Duke of Somerset,” sig. A2v; Capell, Introduc-
tion, 20.
53 Pope, preface to The Works of Shakespear, xxii.
54 Rowe wrote that he was striving to “restor[e] this Work to the Exactness
of the Author’s Original Manuscripts” (“To his Grace,” sig. A2r); Pope, to
“restore the corrupted sense of the Author” (The Works of Shakespear, sig.
xxiii); Louis Theobald, to “Restor[e] the genuine Readings” (The Works
of Shakespeare, xl); and Capell, to access “that fair country the Poet’s real
habitation” (Mr William Shakespeare, 20).
55 de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, 52.
56 Malone, The plays and poems, xviii.
57 Lee thought the emendations were “aimed at removing obscurities of
phrase and typographical confusions,” although he admits: “Occasion-
ally comment of a more ambitious literary character is attempted. Once or
twice an effort is made to improve the meter” (Undiscovered Copy, 267).
He suggests Q4 as a possible source text for one of the emendations—the
suggested replacement of “I” with “he” in Juliet’s phrase “When I shall
die.” I discuss this change at more length below.
58 Lee’s conjecture that the reader used his own judgment to amend the
text is in line with some more recent assessments of readers’ marks in
printed plays. Fredson Bowers believed that variants in the second folio of
Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedies and Tragedies (1679) were based on
“educated guesses,” and Robert K. Turner has suggested that the changes
made to one of the plays in that volume (A Wife for a Month) were not
“beyond the capacity of a thoughtful reader” (quoted in Massai, Shake-
speare, 11).
59 I am not including in this tally Reader B’s addition of the prologue or cor-
rection of the misprinted s in “scattered” on sig. gg1r.
60 R. Carter Hailey’s dates this quarto in “The Dating Game.” Two emenda-
tions on sig. ff6r (“thy” for “the” and “cure” for “care”) eliminate Q4 as
the text the reader used for collation. I discuss these emendations in detail
below.
61 Arber, A Transcript, I:50 and 52.
62 Howel, General History, sig. 5V2v.
63 Massai, Shakespeare, 179. (Massai does not discuss Q5.)
64 Massai, Shakespeare, 141. Matthew Black and Matthias Shaaber identified
114 changes between the F1 and F2 texts of Romeo & Juliet, the most in
any play (Shakespeare’s Seventeenth-Century Editors).
65 West, The Shakespeare First Folio, 31; Emma Smith, “The Bodleian’s First
Folio.” On dating the wear on the pages of Romeo & Juliet to the seven-
teenth century, see “Arch. G c.7.” For a discussion of readerly interest in
different plays, see Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 173–5.
66 For example, the Arden3 does not include Q5 in collations. According to my
own collation of the FLP First Folio Romeo & Juliet with Q5, the reader deferred
to Q5 about 20% of the time. This kind of selective intervention—“dipping
in and out”—is not unusual for readers who left marks in copies of the First
Folio (Emma Smith, Shakespeare’s First Folio, 132).
67 FLPF1, sig. ff3r.
68 All three use the variant spelling “agill.”
69 FLPF1, sig. gg1v.
70 Ibid., sig. ff6r.
71 His substitution of “shroud” for the second instance of “graue” follows
Q4 and Q5 only. In Q2 (sig. I3r) and Q3 (sig. I3r), the line is truncated
metrically: “And hide me with a dead man in his.” The line is completely
different, although metrically regular, in Q1: “Or lay me in tombe with one
new dead” (sig. H3r).
73 Ibid., sig. ff6v.
75 The reader cannot be working against Q1 because they make or suggest
changes to a number of other lines that simply do not have analogs in this
earliest text of the play. Additionally, every emendation that matches Q1
also matches Q5. Q5 was probably set from an annotated printed text of
Q4, and the correspondence between this line in Q1 and Q5 suggests that
the editor responsible for preparing copy for the printing of Q5 might also
have been able to reference Q1 in the process. Lynette Hunter has argued
that the texts of Q3 and Q4 were prepared with “substantial recourse” to
Q1, thus explaining why there are often correspondences between these
later quartos and Q1 but not always Q2. See Hunter, “Romeo and Juliet.”
See also Lukas Erne, Introduction, 43.
77 The reader’s changes do not often agree with Q2, making it unlikely that
he was consulting this particular quarto.
78 This “major crux” has led to all sorts of conjecture, even though “many”
and “palie” both make sense. See 2 Henry the Sixth for “palie lips” (sig.
n3v). Leon Kellner suggested “wany” (as in, pale) which has been adopted
in most editions since 1925. McKerrow’s papers suggest his preference for
“very.” See Taylor, Inventing Shakespeare, 29.
80 “He” is used for the first time in Q4.
81 FLPF1, sig. ff4v.
82 Emma Smith expresses surprise that readers of other Folios who make
changes to the text of Romeo & Juliet do not fix this infelicity (Shake-
speare’s First Folio, 157).
83 FLPF1, sig. ee6v.
84 Unlike the following six lines, the second line of the couplet is also not
repeated in the Friar’s speech at the beginning of the next scene.
85 FLPF1, sig. gg2r.
87 The privileging of Juliet here reflects René Weis’ recent assessment of Ju-
liet’s centrality to the play in his introduction to the new Arden Third Se-
ries edition of the play.
88 STC 22325a (Folger Shakespeare Library).
89 STC 22466 copy 3 (Folger Shakespeare Library), sig. G3v.
90 Beal, CELM, “Meisei University: MR 0799,” 56.
91 Marston, Villanie, sig. H4r.
92 The four changes that do not derive from any of these quartos have no basis
in any other seventeenth-century edition of the play, including the late-century
“actors’ quartos” (AQ1, AQ2, AQ3).
93 Twenty-four of the twenty-nine changes have a basis in Q2. Hsy conjec-
tured that the reader might have been working from Q2, while Bailey’s de-
scription of the annotations in the Descriptive Catalogue (Rasmussen and
West) suggests that at least one of the changes (“Politician” to “Pelican” on
sig. pp3v) might have derived from Q2.
94 FLPF1, sig. pp2r.
95 Ibid., sig. nn5r.
96 Ibid., sig. nn6r.
97 Ibid., sig. oo1r.
98 Ibid., sig. pp1v.
99 Ibid., sig. pp2r.
100 Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267. Lee’s preference for the reader’s suggestion is
based on his observation that “courb” and its variant spellings are “never
used elsewhere by Shakespeare in any like sense.”
101 FLPF1, sig. F5r.
102 See Lee, Undescribed Copy, 267.
103 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors also fumbled over the idea of
“an en-shield beauty,” suggesting “in-shell’d” or “enshell’d” as possible
alternatives. See “Measure for Measure,” in The Plays of William Shake-
speare (1685), 68n2. “In-shell’d” was the variant J. Payne Collier offered in
his forged annotations. See Notes and Emendations, 46.
104 FLPF1, sig. G6r.
105 Ibid., sig. aa6r.
106 Langbaine, Momus Tirumphans, sigs. C3r–v.
107 See Stern, introduction to Documents of Performance.
108 Fletcher, Rollo, Duke of Normandy, 105–6.
109 Digges, Master William Shakespeare, 418–20.
110 Anthony Van Dyck, Sir John Suckling, oil on canvas, 1632. The Frick
Collection, New York, NY. See Lesser and Stallybrass’ discussion of this
motto in First Literary Hamlet, 419–20.
111 Pearson, Bookbinding, 112 and Col.pl.9.1. Pearson explains that “a red or
red and black sprinkle” became the “standard option for run of the mill
work” in the second half of the seventeenth century.
112 Eric Rasmussen, personal correspondence with the author, December
2012.
113 Nixon, ed., Catalogue, Plate 22 and “Rubbings.”
114 Records show that Berresford attended Pepys’ funeral and received a
mourning ring to mark the occasion (Nixon, “Introduction,” in Catalogue,
xxiii).
115 Pearson, Bookbinding, 117–18. Upon studying photographs of the gold-
tooled binding, former Folger Shakespeare Library conservator Frank
Mowery said it would be difficult to attribute the Free Library First Folio
binding to a particular bindery precisely because some version of the volute
corner bracket used to decorate the spine was probably used by a num-
ber of workshops in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth- centuries
(personal conversation, July 19, 2012).
116 Pearson, Bookbinding, 118; Foot, Bookbinding Research, 13–29, esp. 15.
117 The tool appears on the Mearne bindings of at least three sets of Bibles
and prayer books, two of which were inscribed to the king. See Nixon,
Restoration Bindings, Plates 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, and 29. Mearne’s bindings
of several MS Statutes of the Order of the Garter also display this tool (see
Plates 31–33).
118 Mearne ran his bindery until his death in 1683, when his son Charles inher-
ited the job of royal bookbinder. See Foot, “Mearne, Samuel (1624–1683).”
119 Peter Stallybrass, personal conversation, April 2008. According to Stally-
brass, Spawn examined the book in person before he passed away in 2010.
Rasmussen and West’s team also cite Spawn dating the binding to the eigh-
teenth century.
11 Early Modern Marginalia
and #earlymoderntwitter
Sjoerd Levelt
Early Modern Twitter-storms

‘A most learned Dutch author hath maintained that birds doe speake and
converse one with another.’1 Throughout the early modern period, it was
widely known that birds have voices, and The Parliament of Fowls, Chau-
cer’s great creation, reconvened at irregular intervals.2 The cacophony of
tweets could lead to true Twitter-storms, and violent battles of birds were
regularly reported,3 even sung about.4 Different birds were known to
comment on affairs in ways characteristic to their own species,5 and while
many concerned themselves primarily with erotic subjects6 —some voy-
euristically commenting on the frolicking of young couples in London7—
others even addressed the practicalities of government in their tweets.8
In an observation which also applies to early modern marginalia, me-
dievalist Dorothy Kim has noted that
[i]f the medieval manuscript is a recording medium that allows schol-

ar[s] now to see the conversations and connected marginal glosses of
individual readers, then Twitter is the digital medium that replicates
this practice the most but with comments all the time and in real
time for individual thinkers.9
Like early modern marginalia, tweets are used to engage with text in a
plethora of ways: to annotate, explain, comment, cross-reference, call
attention, memorize, disparage, satirize, ridicule, praise, translate, sum-
marize, etc.—and to make apparently entirely extraneous, sometimes
unintelligible, comments. Twitter is used by scholars in Early Modern
Studies to comment on, relate to, teach and examine the sources they
study, and to establish communities of readers, as well as communities
of learning.10 The generic links to other types of writing which we see
in early modern marginalia is mirrored by the ways in which #early-
moderntwitter communicates with other scholarly disciplines as well as
other fields of knowledge, including current events, sports, entertain-
ment and gossip), within a knowledge ecosystem of various interrelated
media, including other social media such as Facebook, Instagram, but
also (increasingly online) traditional publishing. This paper will survey
Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter 235
Figure 11.1 A small doodle of a bird, in the margin between woodcuts of an

early printed book, tweeted with the hashtag #MarginaliaMonday.
both the approaches to early modern marginalia on Twitter, and Twitter

as a location of annotation of early modern texts (Figure 11.1).
Networked Scholarship
Twitter has become a prominent location for networked scholarship, by
which is meant scholars’ “use of participatory technologies and online
social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and
further their scholarship.”11 Networks of scholars, and non-scholars,
regularly coalesce around common interests. Such coalescence can be
driven by a hashtag—a word or phrase (written together) preceded by
236 Sjoerd Levelt
a ‘#’—which allows for easy searching of all tweets using that tag, and
for real time following of the conversations using it. Thus, for example,
the hashtag #marginaliamonday, started by Annotated Books Online
(@AboBooks), a digital archive of early modern annotated books (www.
annotatedbooksonline.com), has become a space on Twitter where
scholars and rare books librarians share examples of marginal annota-
tions they encounter during their research and cataloguing (Figure 11.2).
I myself started #flyleaffriday, which has become a hashtag with which
academics, librarians, and occasionally collectors, share images of flyleaves
and other parts of book bindings, forming a semi-continuous conversation
about flyleaves and how they connect to our research interests. Through
Figure 11.2 T
weets, one from a rare books librarian (top), and one from a re-
searcher involved in coding of digitized early modern marginalia,
using the hashtag #marginaliamonday.12
hashtag use, networked scholarship can also serve community-building
purposes, based around shared interests. By the non-symmetrical nature
of its connections (i.e., where connections between two users are not nec-
essarily reciprocal), by the connectivity that hashtags provide, and by the
wide dissemination individual posts can receive through retweets (the
sharing of a tweet by someone else among one’s followers), Twitter en-
courages new connections between users who would perhaps less quickly
connect in more confining, more walled-off social environments. It also
encourages conversations between scholars in different disciplines (history
and literature; early modern and medieval) as well as between historical
scholars, librarians, and the wider public. This has impact on scholarship,
too: the labor of librarians, for example, has become much more visible
to many scholars who reap its benefits, but would have previously done so
without being immediately aware of the support structures that provide
those benefits. Live tweeting has become a regular occurrence at human-
ities conferences and seminars, where it is used as a medium to involve
people who are not physically present in ongoing dialogues. Thus, a con-
ference Twitter feed allows for the discussion of the subject of the confer-
ence to reach beyond the confines of the lecture room and the conference
venue. Responses to one’s tweets, in the form of retweets and ‘likes,’ as
well as tweeted responses, provide instant feedback on user’s activities of a
kind that scholarship published in traditional media (e.g., journal articles
and monographs) rarely instigates. Rather than having to wait for that one
review, or that elusive citation, tweets are instantly responded to, and by
fellow academics as well as non-academic viewers, or not at all.
Some hashtags provide a connection for large constituencies—such as
#twitterstorians, a catch-all for anyone, but particularly scholars, with
a historical interest—while others are much more specific. Significant
hashtags around which users with an interest in early modern studies con-
nect in particular are, for example, #earlymoderntwitter, #nuntastic, and
#recusantsbaby. Such more specialized hashtags, often originally stemming
from seminars or conference sessions, as in the case of the last mentioned,
can be used to bring sources, resources, and conversations to the attention
of interested colleagues; #ShakeRace, for example, functions as an alert to,
as well as lasting archive of, online resources and conversations about race
and Shakespeare. Like a manicule, the pointing hands found in the margins
of so many medieval and early modern books, and any other “nota” sign,
the hashtag serves to call attention to relevant information—and like the
manicule also serves memorization and information retrieval purposes:13
the hashtag both immediately highlights, and makes it possible to find back
relevant information and discussions at a later date (Figure 11.3).
Academic Support
Hashtag-based communities can also provide support networks: #amwrit-
ing, #deadlineexchange and #writingaccountability all provide support for
238 Sjoerd Levelt
Figure 11.3 T
weet of an image of pen trials on a pastedown in a binding, in-
cluding a series of manicules, tweeted with hashtag #manicule.
academic labor, while #PhDchat and #ECRchat have developed into ac-
tive discussion and support fora for doctoral students and early career re-
searchers in all disciplines. Indeed, Twitter is regularly used as an extended
academic support network. Speaking from my own experience, this has
been particularly important for me when I was working, when I first joined
Twitter, as a researcher away from my academic base—meaning I could
not benefit from regular face-to-face conversations with my colleagues—
and, more recently, as a scholar in Turkey whose academic network due
to disciplinary reasons is primary focused on the United Kingdom (and
secondarily on the United States and the Netherlands).
Figure 11.4 Tweet with a request for help transcribing a word in an eighteenth-
century document.
Through Twitter, it is possible to reach a large group of people quickly;

for this reason, the medium can be particularly useful for seeking help
with small queries. Thus, for example, scholars transcribing early mod-
ern manuscripts regularly take to Twitter to ask for help with words they
are uncertain about how to decipher (Figure 11.4).
Like a virtual chat at the coffee machine, Twitter can also facilitate brain-
storming about aspects of our work. For this article, for example, I asked
my colleagues on Twitter whether they would add to the categories I was
planning to include as uses of Twitter in the context of early modern stud-
ies, and for suggestions of good accounts to give as examples for the vari-
ous categories. Their responses—too many to thank individually, but many
of them can be found on the hashtags #medievaltwitter and #earlymod-
erntwitter—led me to refine some of my thinking, and added some useful
resources. Finally, Twitter also facilitates access to resources to which ac-
cess is restricted—for example, sometimes using the hashtag #icanhazpdf,
but more commonly in a question posed to their followers, scholars can ask
whether any of their contacts can provide them with digital copies of jour-
nal articles or book chapters which their own institution does not provide
access to. In the case of scholars without institutional context, this kind of
240 Sjoerd Levelt
access to scholarship can be a lifeline, while avoiding breaching copyright
and publisher’s restrictions on sharing published articles.14
#twitterendipity
The facilitation of scholarship via Twitter is often serendipitous. Once,
while studying an early printed chronicle in the Bodleian Library, I came
across a burn mark in the margin. I took a photograph, and tweeted
it. The tweet attracted some attention, and looking at the page again,
I noticed the burn mark was adjacent to a passage which mentioned a
fire, reading “he was compelled by fire and smoke.”15 I tweeted a second
photograph. My tweets were noticed by Richard Fitch (@tudorcook), in-
terpretation co-coordinator for the Historic Kitchens at Hampton Court
Palace, who decided to attempt to recreate the burn mark, to see if he
could establish by what kind of flame it had been produced. His experi-
ments established that the burn mark could only have been made, not by
a candle falling onto the book, but by the book being held over a flame—
that is, deliberately.16 This led Bob McLean, of the Glasgow University
Library, to describe it as “a very knowing fiery manicule.” (Figure 11.5).
The fact that one’s Twitter stream contains a constant mix of often
unrelated subjects can also lead to a specific type of serendipity, which
has been branded #twitterendipity: the juxtaposition of tweets from un-
related fields of discourse (e.g., current television and seventeenth-century
literature; or medieval archaeology and today’s lunch) which appear in
one’s timeline as if they are communicating with each other. Such coinci-
dences can be very striking, but the most remarkable ones also serve as a
good reminder of an underlying dynamic: seeing one’s own and one’s col-
leagues’ academic work contextualized in a stream of information cover-
ing a whole range of human experience, including current events, arts and
media, personal reports of daily life, entertainment, political activism,
jokes and satire, and the work of academics and scientists in fields other
than one’s own, inevitably leads to the boundaries between those differ-
ent categories of text and knowledge becoming blurred (Figure 11.6).
This dynamic transforms our own scholarship to something more con-
sciously connected to those other discourses. It makes us more aware
of, and can make us more comfortable with, the place of anachronism
in developing historical understanding, and facilitate an attitude more
amenable to the drive to connect to wider audiences, too. It leads to more
urgent thinking on how to present the results of research in such a way as
to appeal to those different audiences, and to more conscious thinking on
how the early modern and the present are (and can be made) conversant.17
Hashtag Activism
Social media also serves as a platform for (political) campaigning.18 Such
campaigns lead to vibrant discussions, both on and off Twitter, where
Figure 11.5 (a): Tweet about a burn mark in Higden’s Polychronicon, London:
Peter Treveris, 1527 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, S.Seld. d.35, fol.
298); (b): Similar burn mark reproduced on modern paper, in re-
sponse to the tweet.
(a)
(b)
Figure 11.6 ( a): Tweets appearing above each other in a timeline. Report of an ar-
chaeological find in a potato field juxtaposed with a T hompson folk-
literature motif classification randomly tweeted by @MythologyBot.
(b): Tweets appearing above each other in a timeline. Short h umorous
exchange about a blurred picture presented as “what I look like
right now,” juxtaposed with a tweet from @GettyMuseum about
self-portraiture.
the latter often serves as the facilitating medium. The conversations are
generally linked through the use of hashtags. Such campaigns can touch
early modern studies directly. Thus, for example, when, following the sale
of independent humanities and social sciences publisher Ashgate Publish-
ing—a particularly important list for Early Modern studies—to multina-
tional publishing and events company Informa PLC, in November 2015,
an announcement was made that Ashgate’s North America offices were
to be closed, and its staff would cease to represent the press, academics,
many with relations with Ashgate’s editors spanning years, started an on-
line petition to urge Taylor & Francis, the academic publishing division
of Informa, to reverse course. By December 1st, the petition was signed
by more than 7,000 people. While ultimately unsuccessful in its aim, the
campaign, carried out on Twitter using hashtag #SaveAshgate, did gain
media attention in the higher education press,19 led to scholarly societ-
ies adding their voice, 20 and succeeded in channeling discussions about
academic publishing, involving scholars from various fields, in blogs, 21
on Facebook pages, 22 in comments sections, and, especially, on Twitter
itself. And besides these collateral benefits, such hashtag activism some-
times is successful in achieving its immediate ends: the hashtags #ex-
amhowlers and #myownexamhowlers, started in response to the Times
Higher Education’s yearly “exam howlers competition,” a call for lec-
turers to submit the ‘funny’ errors made by their students in exams, may
have been decisive in the disappearance of the feature in 2016. #Stopthe-
DarkAges moved English Heritage to stop using the term ‘Dark Ages’ in
its literature. Like the erasure of certain subjects in early modern books,
such annotation of our surroundings via Twitter can have real life causes
as well as real life effects. There is no divide between “virtual”/“online”
and “the real world,” in the same way that there was never a divide be-
tween the printed page and its handwritten annotations (Figure 11.7).
#SaveWarburg raised awareness in the scholarly community about a
potential threat to the management of the Warburg Institute Library,
leading to a petition signed by more than twenty thousand. Following
the announcement of the scrapping of art history A-levels in England, a
high-profile campaign, including activism under the hashtag #WhyArt
HistoryMatters, succeeded in having the policy reversed. 23
Such campaigns can also become part of conversations among histor-
ical scholars themselves; such, for example, was the case when during
the campaign for holding a referendum about the United Kingdom’s
membership of the European Union, a group materialized calling it-
self “Historians for Britain,”24 campaigning for a renegotiated rela-
tionship between the UK and the EU—and part of Matthew Elliott’s
campaign Business for Britain, which later morphed into Vote Leave,
the official campaign for a ‘leave’ vote, of which Elliott became chief
244 Sjoerd Levelt
Figure 11.7 T
weet showing repeated deletions of the word ‘pope’ in an English
printed chronicle from 1510 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Antiq.d.E.19).
executive. The first public statement of “Historians for Britain”25 was

quickly answered by an open letter, signed by over a hundred scholars,
a significant proportion of whom were in the field of Early Modern
Studies. 26 The letter resulted from contacts initially forged on Twitter,
and from conversations carried out there, on Facebook, and in private
conversation both online and offline. A blog, “Historians for History”
(historiansforhistory.wordpress.com), likewise evolving out of this mo-
bilization (initially appropriating the original group’s name as #histo-
riansforbritain, later also taking the title of the most prominent open
letter in answer, #foginchannel) is still an active platform for the discus-
sion of public history. Twitter is a medium not only for the annotation
of the texts we study but for our discipline itself. How the wider media
ecosystem of which Twitter can steer or limit such annotation—in part
by making it possible to transgress traditional borders of the audiences
of academic discourse—was shown in the context of ongoing discus-
sions of the relation between white supremacy and Medieval Studies
taking place on various media, among which prominently Twitter, via
#medievaltwitter. In September 2017, Rachel Fulton Brown, associate
professor at the University of Chicago, repeatedly brought the anti-racist
work of Dorothy Kim, assistant professor at Vassar College, to the at-
tention of Milo Yiannopoulos, blogger and former Breitbart editor, who
has been permanently banned from Twitter for inciting harassment of
other users, but has millions of followers on Facebook. The re-blogging
of Brown’s attack on Kim on Yiannopoulos’ own website predictably
led to severe online harassment of Kim, including rape threats. 27
Outreach
A specific type of online scholarship, making the most of Twitter’s po-
tential to reach new and different audiences, is social scholarship, spe-
cifically aimed at sharing the fruits of scholarship, often beyond the
walls of the university. 28 Aimed at broadening access, this scholarship
explores the possibilities of various social media to lower the thresh-
old of access to the products of academic research, and, to some ex-
tent, to participate in it. Such uses of Twitter include academic projects
which seek volunteers’ help, for example for transcription or translation
projects—such as Marine Lives (@marinelives), Shakespeare’s World (@
shaxworld) and Transcribe Bentham (@transcribentham)—which use
Twitter as a platform to recruit volunteers and to report on their prog-
ress. The project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (@6Bacon), a digital re-
construction of the early modern social network, calls for scholars to
add to and revise their data. In other cases, the communication is not
specifically aimed at recruiting volunteers, but outreach still entails a
desire to instigate conversations. Individuals, ranging from the estab-
lished, such as John Overholt (@john_overholt), curator of early modern
books and manuscripts at Houghton Library, to the independent, like
Rebecca Rideal (@RebeccaRideal), PhD candidate, author, and founder/
editor of The History Vault (http://www.thehistoryvault.co.uk); proj-
ects, such as Before Shakespeare (@B4Shakes) and the Digital Caven-
dish Project (@DigiCavendish); institutions like the Folger Shakespeare
Library (@FolgerLibrary, @FolgerResearch) and the Bodleian Library (@
bodleianlibs), all have taken to Twitter as part of their mission to reach
out to audiences within and beyond the academy, sharing their findings,
images of objects from their collections, and actively engaging with peo-
ple’s responses to their output.
The popularity of historical images on Twitter has also attracted
business interest, some of the most prominent of which has raised con-
cerns among scholars: accounts such as History in Pictures (@historyin-
pix), for example, tweet historical images with little or no information
about their provenance, and regularly with erroneous descriptions.
246 Sjoerd Levelt
Such proliferation of unsourced images can lead to difficulties tracing
factually accurate historical information online, and thus to real obsta-
cles to historical research. 29 Similarly, parody accounts like Medieval
Reactions (@medievalreacts) spread images of historical artworks with
no reference to their source—leaving their followers unaware of the
institutions which preserve the objects and have made the images digi-
tally available, at great cost. The approach such accounts take to intel-
lectual property, accuracy, as well as courtesy are strongly reminiscent
of the practices of the more unscrupulous of early modern printers.
Moreover, users are often unaware that such accounts regularly tweet
series of advertisements to all their followers—their way of monetizing
their business—which they subsequently, after a time lapse, delete, so
as not to show new viewers that this is their business model.
Historical Authors
Another category of accounts combining historical interest, entertainment,
and current events, is the historical ‘sockpuppet’—an impersonation of a
historical figure: William Shakespeare (@Shakespeare), Geoffrey Chaucer
(@LeVostreGC), and the appropriately multilingual Marie Guise-Lorraine
(@Marie_Guise) all have their own voices on Twitter—some more, some
less convincingly ‘in character’—voicing these historical personages’
observations not only on historical, but also current events. They pro-
vide a mix of irreverence and homage, historical awareness and creative
anachronism, and a new way for their creators to engage with interested
audiences, perhaps most akin to the Petrarchan letters to classical authors,
or the appearance of Virgil as a character in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Accounts tweeting short quotes from historical authors’ works, such
as @DesideriErasmus, an account run by the Erasmus Center for Early
Modern Studies in Rotterdam, which tweets aphorisms of Erasmus, reg-
ularly choose selections of texts to respond to current events—thus using
the early modern text to comment on present day concerns—even if not
ventriloquizing like the sockpuppet accounts (Figure 11.8).
Other accounts tweeting historical works are situated in time not by
such direct engagement with current events, but by parallelism: thus Ben
Figure 11.8
A tweet from Desiderius Erasmus (@DesideriErasmus), selected
from his Education of a Prince, tweeted on the day of the inaugu-
ration of President Donald Trump.
Jonson Walking (@BenJonsonsWalk) re-told Ben Jonson’s 1618 walk to
Scotland following the dates of the original account, 30 and internet de-
signer Phil Gyford set up an account (@samuelpepys) which tweets ex-
cerpts from the diaries of Samuel Pepys in real time (Figure 11.9).
Followers engage with their tweets, and thus these early modern
works, in a range of ways: their responses are emotive, critical, facetious;
they focus on history, topography, and personal matters. The responses
become a diverse and varied annotation of the early modern text.
Figure 11.9 Tweets from @samuelpepys, with responses from followers.

248 Sjoerd Levelt
Annotation
Accounts also exist which tweet entire works, in automated fashion—
themselves providing no further engagement with the text, just churning
out bits of the text, either consecutively or in random order, at regular
intervals. The account @gondibot, for example, tweets William Dav-
enant’s Gondibert in no particular order. Other accounts provide texts
in full, in proper order: a set of twelve accounts churn out all the lines of
the twelve books of Milton’s Paradise Lost concurrently. 31 The tweets
from such accounts themselves can become a focus for annotation: fol-
lowers retweet and respond to the texts, and conversations ensue; such
annotation can take place on Twitter itself but also on other, linked me-
dia.32 Twitter streams churning out texts can also become commentary
in and of themselves—in a fascinating experiment, @EnglishPlymUni
is tweeting a mashup, sequentially, of phrases from Milton’s Paradise
Lost and Woolf’s The Waves, leading to regular serendipitous clashes
between the two texts (Figure 11.10).
Not only the tweeting of text, but also annotation itself can be au-
tomated: Vimala C. Pasupathi (@exhaust_fumes) created the ‘bot’
NotShaxButFletcher (@TwasFletcher), a Twitter account which automat-
ically rewrote, and then retweeted, others’ tweets about Shakespeare,
replacing his name with John Fletcher’s (or, for example, ‘Shax’ with
‘Fletch’), or the names of Shakespeare’s plays with those by Fletcher.
The aim was to explore what would happen if Shakespeare was replaced
with his now less well-known collaborator.33 The bot, as well as some
responses to it, became an astute commentary on the dominance of one
single author on our perception of early modern English literature.
Figure 11.10 T
weets from @EnglishPlymUni, using hashtag #miltonwoolfpara-
disewaves, juxtaposing fragments from Milton’s Paradise Lost and
Woolf’s The Waves.
Social scholarship can take a form akin to annotations, where schol-
ars annotate ‘text’ for different audiences—for example, the live anno-
tation via Twitter of the television series Wolf Hall on its debut at BBC
television, by Catherine Fletcher (@cath_fletcher), who worked as histor-
ical adviser for the series, Joanne Paul (@joanne_paul_), Kate Maltby (@
katemaltby), and many others, 34 using the hashtag # WolfHall, glossed
the series and the historical information underpinning it like an early
modern chronicle, elaborately annotated by various hands (with the
difference that now, all annotators see each other’s contributions, live,
while in the early modern situation, only later annotators would be able
to see earlier annotator’s notes). Such annotations can be aimed at wide
audiences, such as #WolfHall’s, or at more specifically targeted academic
audiences, such as appears to have been the case with H olger Syme’s (@
literasyme) tweeted reading of Brian Vickers’ book The One King Lear,
using hashtag #1Lear, 35 which was reminiscent of a furious early mod-
ern annotator complaining of—but also, apparently, titillated by—the
baseless lies and fables they encounter on their reading (Figure 11.11).
(b)
(a)
Figure 11.11 (a): Tweets from Holger Syme’s live tweeted reading of Brian Vickers’
The One King Lear. (b): Tweet showing an early modern manuscript
response to a printed Dutch medieval chronicle (Oxford, Bodleian
Library, H 1.8 Art.Seld.): ‘Oh God, how can the world have been so
blinded?’
250 Sjoerd Levelt
Syme’s live tweeting of his reading of Vickers showed a convincing
new model for electronic annotation, which, due to the limitations of the
electronic book, is detached from the physical (or even digital) object,
but not any less engaged with its text, and because of its detachment
from the book, able to reach a much larger audience (and even an in-
censed response from the author).36
Other instances of tweeted annotation start out as private endeav-
ors, with no particular audience in mind—thus, for example, I started
tweeting my reading of Camden’s Britannia, with hashtag #doombrit-
ain, mostly to ensure I would be shamed in completing my reading.
Over time it became, however, a fascinating experience in which the
different regions which Britannia moved through attracted interested
Twitter users from those regions, who would add their own anno-
tations to mine. These annotations were often as informative as the
ones found in, for example, John Selden’s annotations to his copies
of Camden’s Britannia; like Selden, Twitter users cross-reference in-
formation within Camden’s work, referring to external sources for
further information and critiquing C amden’s scholarship as well as
supporting it.
As with early modern annotation, tweeted annotation will always be
conscious of its context and potential audiences. Linguistic choice in
early modern annotation—Latin annotation of vernacular text, or mul-
tilingual annotation in response to subject matter—is also mirrored on
Twitter: like Emmanuel van Meteren, whose annotation of a Middle
Dutch chronicle alternated between Dutch and English depending the
subject matter, I myself alternate between English and Dutch depend-
ing on the audience I seek for individual tweets (see Figure 11.12).
Like early modern annotation, where sometimes there seems to be no
discernible connection between the written text and its context, Twitter
annotation, too, can occasionally veer into the apparently disconnected.
For personal Twitter accounts, it is usual for the user to find their own
balance between scholarly and non-academic, non-work-related tweets.
But even accounts of projects and institutions, even the most clearly fo-
cused, can occasionally publish apparently entirely unrelated tweets—
sometimes accidentally, as when a user erroneously tweets using the
project account rather than their private account.
Pedagogy
Like students’ annotations of early printed books, tweeting is also used
as a technology in the classroom, both in secondary and higher educa-
tion. One such use is the assignment to write tweets based on a course
text; such an assignment can help students to identify the perspective of
various characters in a text, explore a text’s humor and other subtleties,
Figure 11.12 (a): Tweet about bilingual annotation, showing Emmanuel van
Meteren’s English annotations to Jan van Naaldwijk’s Dutch
chronicle of Holland (London, British Library, MS Cotton Tibe-
rius C IV); (b): tweet asking ‘why does it all have to be in English
again’.
and provide a medium for creative engagement with literary or historical

sources. Students can be asked to tweet ‘as’ one of the characters in the
text—this is now a common form of engagement with, for example,
Shakespeare’s plays in the classroom. 37 The very strict modal features of
the medium—the constraints posed by the 140-character limit, for ex-
ample, 38 and the creative opportunities offered by hashtag—make this
assignment particularly suitable for exploring how a specific medium
constrains as well as provides particular opportunities for engagement
with texts. The students’ tweets become an annotation of the course
text, and can then be used as the basis of further discussion (see Figure
11.13). Such discussion, too, can take place on Twitter—instead of, say,
an online message board.39
252 Sjoerd Levelt
Figure 11.13 T
weet showing an early modern medical student’s annotation to
a printed text.
Medieval, Early Modern, #earlymoderntwitter

Premodern ‘lewed folk,’ in spite of their presumed illiteracy, neverthe-
less had daily access to writing, both through various forms of literacy
which did not conform to the medieval category of the ‘literatus,’ and
through mediated reporting in circumstances of performed reading, or
through the help of paid scribes, preachers, and other acquaintances.40
Similarly, while the penetration of Twitter falls much behind those of
some other social media, such as Facebook, many more have access
through mediated channels—from Buzzfeed lists, to Reddit threads, to
Facebook reposts to embedded tweets on news websites to newspaper
articles.
Marginalia themselves originated as part of systems of writing which
were consciously developed over time as a result of the balancing be-
tween the various interests of authors, book producers, and readers,
over how the internal organization of texts could be displayed on the
page.41 The way in which Twitter has developed over time, engineered
as a tool to annotate daily reality, in large part by, or in response to the
demands of, its users—the invention of the hashtag by early users, and
its adoption by the company being a good example—interestingly mir-
rors, concentrated in a few short years, such development. However, in
the case of Twitter, ultimately all fundamental developments depended
on their adoption by the corporate entity rather than merely by recog-
nition as convention by producers and users of text alike.42 The relation
between users and the company, however, is often fraught, particularly
where the interpretation of the medium’s various functionalities is con-
cerned.43 Similarly, the functionality of the marginal annotation was
not always clear-cut: the gloss as a product of the authorial process and
of the reading process, for example, were always in an uneasy relation,
and medieval marginalia, even those added by readers of a text in one
particular manuscript, could, over the course of the transmission of a
text, become considered part of the text; a gloss included into the main
text column in later versions of the text.44 Text originally planned as
marginal notes could also be relocated into the text column, and start
functioning as chapter headers—as in the case of several manuscripts
of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.45 Responses to a text could become
part of the text itself. Such relocations of medieval marginalia challenge
a simple classification of marginal notes as either part of the text, or
readers’ responses. The adaptation of marginalia in print culture led,
to some extent, to a more pronounced and certainly more visible bifur-
cation of marginal annotation, if perhaps more in the scholarship—the
handwritten marginalia of William H. Sherman’s Used Books versus
the printed ones of William W. E. Slights’ Managing Readers—than
in actual practice, where the two have a more symbiotic relationship.
The printed notes are often the product of authors who were prolific
annotators themselves, such as John Selden, whose heavily annotated
“illustrations” to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion were the product of
research which itself involved heavy annotation of books owned by
Selden himself (Figure 11.14).
Annotation can also be the record of a form of time travel: early
modern annotations to medieval books and texts often bear witness to
active, often emotive engagement with the past—the annotation itself
dragging the past into the present of the annotator. The early modern
antiquarian historian adding manicules or nota signs, cross-references,
and historical information to an early printed medieval chronicle, and
the Protestant reader diligently carrying out the order to expunge ref-
erences to popes from prayer books, each updated the books at their
hands to suit their own times and contexts. Similarly, a radical reclaim-
ing of historical text to twenty-first-century contexts occurs in Twitter
annotations of medieval and early modern books. The advent of Twitter
and other social media has coincided with the advent of high resolution
digital photography of medieval manuscripts and early printed books,
and with the adaptation of Creative Commons licenses by libraries and
museums. This is allowing new re-appropriations of medieval and early
modern text to occur in digital contexts.
Ultimately, however, early modern marginalia were not #earlymod-
erntwitter. The absence of immediate worldwide reach, the absence
of an NYSE-listed company controlling the medium, the absence of
254 Sjoerd Levelt
Figure 11.14 M
arginal note to the table of contents of Poly-Olbion (1613).
Stanford Libraries, David Rumsey Historical Map Collection,
12180. Published under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
automation, bot networks, and spam, all make the blank spaces of the
manuscript or early printed page a very different carrier of information.
The allegorical space of a bird, throughout the early modern period, re-
mained occupied by birds themselves: “Men speak the language of Men,
Birds of Birds.”46
Notes
1 John Stafford, in [Fuller], Ornithologie, sig. A2r.
2 See Andrew, Two Early Renaissance Bird Poems.
3 A True Relation of the Prodigious Battle of Birds.
4 A Battell of Birds Most Strangly Fought in Ireland; The Frenchmens Won-
der, or, The Battle of the Birds.
5 [Fuller], Ornithologie.
6 The Birds Harmony.
7 H., The Birds Noats on May Day Last.
8 The Pleasant History of Cawwood the Rook, or, The Assembly of Birds.
9 Kim, #medievaltwitter.
10 For medieval communities of learning, and the role of texts and written
communication in their development, see, e.g., Mews and Crossley, Com-
munities of Learning Networks.
11 Veletsianos and Kimmons, Networked Participatory Scholarship, 768.
12 Permission for reproduction of all tweets included in this article was sought,
in most cases granted, and in none denied.
13 Sherman, Used Books, 25–52; see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 135–
52, for the role of notae in memorization and heuristics.
14 Science Direct, for example, explicitly allows the sharing of its content by
affiliates of subscribing institutions: http://help.sciencedirect.com/Content/
sharing_pubs.htm.
15 Higden, Polychronicon. London: Peter Treveris, 1527, Bodleian Library (S.Seld.
d.35, fol. 298).
16 Tweet by Robert MacLean (@bob_maclean): https://twitter.com/bob_maclean/
status/529989657518669824, 5 November 2014.
17 I am grateful to Vimala C. Pasupathi (@Exhaust_Fumes) for this formulation.
18 See prominently Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas.
19 Jaschik, Concerns Over Ashgate Publishing's Future; Kolowich, In Fight
Over Academic Publishing House.
20 E.g., statement from the Byzantine Studies Association of America, https://
drive.google.com/file/d/0BxpHDrS-z5XYZTFDYThGNnpZbVE/view;
from the College Art Association: www collegeart.org/advocacy/2015/12/01/
caa-president-dewitt-godfrey-releases-statement-on-ashgate-acquisition/.
21 E.g., Kennedy, #SaveAshgate, from All of Us.
22 www.facebook.com/SaveAshgatePublishing/
23 Weale, Art History A-Level Saved after High-Profile Campaign.
24 Historians for Britain’s website, historiansforbritain.org, is now mostly de-
funct, but it is archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20160224115252/http://
historiansforbritain.org/. While maintaining on its website that it did not cam-
paign for the UK to leave the European Union, Historians for Britain later
shared its office and telephone number with the official Vote Leave campaign.
Matthew Elliott described the history of Business for Britain in: How Business
for Britain Helped Change the Course of History in Three Short Years.
25 Abulafia, The ‘Historians for Britain’ Campaign.
26 Andress et al., Fog in Channel, Historians Isolated.
27 See Van Norden, What’s With Nazis And Knights? and Dr. Virago, How to
Signal That You’re a Bully.
28 See Veletsianos, Social Media in Academia, 6–16.
29 Werner, It’s History, Not a Viral Feed.
30 www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/ben-jonsons-walk/.
31 Reid, Milton Bot Flock: Tweeting John Milton's Paradise Lost in Perpetuity.
32 E.g., Reid, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I: Annotated.
33 See Pasupathi, #NotShaxButFletch.
34 See Fletcher, Wolf Hall Ep 1 - Some Top Live History Tweets.
35 See Symes, Syme on Vickers, The One King Lear, Preface.
36 Reisz, Shakespeare Scholar Vents 500-tweet ‘Bitterly Sarcastic’ Attack on Book.
37 See, e.g., the Hamlet Twitter assignment of Sarah Mulhern Gross (@the
readingzone): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zRK3yFNbujTkWVlrl
O4ftejWjibthKkr-pb-jbQ3sPM/edit?usp=sharing, and my Iliad Twitter as-
signment: Levelt, #Iliad.
38 This has, since the writing of this chapter, been extended to 280 characters,
but, as I point out to students, pre-modern literature long predates that change.
39 Ullyot, English 205: The Twitter Assignment.
40 The development of different forms of literacy among the laity are discussed
by Malcolm B. Parkes in, The Literacy of the Laity; Scribes, Scripts and
Readers, 275–97; McKitterick, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval
Europe.
41 Parkes, The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the
Development of the Book; Scribes, Scripts and Readers, 35–70.
42 See for the development of Twitter’s features, e.g., Dredge, Twitter Changes;
for its corporate history, Bilton, Hatching Twitter.
256 Sjoerd Levelt
43 A good example is the disagreement between the company and its users
over the significance of the ‘favourite’ function, as exposed when Twitter
changed the star button into a heart button: Meyer, Twitter Unfaves Itself.
4 4 See for an example Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly, 44; sometimes such
incorporations made the text unintelligible: Bammesberger, Hidden Glosses
in Manuscripts of Old English Poetry, 45–6.
45 See Echard, Glossing Gower, 237–56.
46 [Fuller], Ornithologie, sig. B3v.
12 Afterword
Alan Stewart
Toward the end of the “Preface” of his 2006 monograph Used Books –
the landmark work on early modern marginalia cited by almost all
the contributors to this excellent collection – William S herman re-
counts a long-running “mystery” that was solved only as the book
“was in its final stages.” He had encountered at the Huntington
L ibrary a “heavily annotated copy” of Cardinal William Allen’s 1584
A true, sincere, and modest defense of English Catholics that suffer
for their faith both at home and abroad. The patriotic, “vehemently
Protestant” commentary of the marginalia – and most notably “the
striking hands with sharply pointing fingers” – stayed in Sherman’s
mind, prompting “a spark of recognition” when he encountered them
again in a Folger Shakespeare Library manuscript from 1587, entitled
“The examination of Jesuits and Seminary priests.” But the person re-
sponsible for these marginalia remained a mystery, until, on a return
visit to the Huntington in 2005, Sherman found a note by another
reader, Frank Brownlow, explaining that the marginalia were “in
the hand – and spelling – of Richard Topcliffe, pursuivant, torturer,
Queen’s servant, &c.”1 This reminder in turn prompted Sherman’s
fellow Huntington reader, historian Alexandra Walsham, to recall “a
haunting passage in J. E. Neale’s Elizabeth I and her Parliaments”
regarding
that curious, sadistic gentleman, Richard Topcliffe; a man of birth,

education and religious zeal, who revelled in his official task of tor-
turing 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, Clem-
ent VII.” “The viper”; “the villain”; “the bastard”; “I wished that I
had this Doctor in Westminster Hall without weapon, and the au-
thor of this book in St. John’s Wood with my two-handed sword”:
these are samples of his private exuberance. 2
258 Alan Stewart
As a result of this identification, Sherman writes,
What had earlier struck me as witty rebuttals, artful manicules, and

quaint red threads took on a sinister edge as I imagined the notori-
ous Topcliffe torturing Elizabethan Catholics, marking their argu-
ments with his accusing fingers, and perforating their pages with
needles trailing crimson strings. 3
This prefatory anecdote is produced to solve one of what Sherman calls

“the ‘thousand little mysteries’ contained in Renaissance books.”4 But
it is, I would argue, much more than that. In Sherman’s recognition of
an individual’s marginal notes in documents thousands of miles apart,
it speaks to the phenomenon of what Adam Smyth in his chapter calls
the “alert serendipity” that is, perforce, “the governing mood of most
early book use research.”5 But the encounter with Richard Topcliffe also
speaks to the affective qualities of marginalia – in creating for Sherman
a characterful Topcliffe but also in creating a new community invested
in Topcliffe’s writings – not just Sherman, but Brownlow, Walsham, and
Neale, and, as we shall see, several scholars beyond them.
As Katherine Acheson astutely notes in her Introduction, the first gen-
eration of early modern marginalia studies – spurred by Lisa Jardine
and Anthony Grafton’s 1990 article, “Studied for Action: How Gabriel
Harvey Found his Livy”6 – was interested in the history of reading
not as a way to reconstruct individual subjectivity, but as “social and
intellectual collaboration.”7 In this tradition, in his first book on the
sixteenth-century magus, scholar and “exceptional annotator” John
Dee, Sherman was at pains to point out the sheer dullness of most of his
subject’s marginalia: “The tools that Dee (and his contemporaries) used
to digest texts and make them useful lack, for the most part, the per-
sonal, creative, and emotional intensity that modern readers have some
to look for in engagements with texts.”8 In Acheson’s account, a second
wave of marginalia studies, typified by Sherman’s Used Books, focused
on the material features of the book. And yet, despite their supposed
moves away from the personal, both these waves continued to elevate
the individual reader-writer, be it Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, Margaret
Hoby, or Anne Clifford. There is an irony here: as Adam Smyth notes,
“the history of reading, as a field, has often been organized around bi-
ography precisely at a time when early modern studies more generally
has been moving away from the individual as the unit of cultural analy-
sis”9 – to the point where, as Jason Scott-Warren has argued elsewhere,
early modern printed books, thanks to their marginalia, have become
“vehicles for many kinds of life-writing.”10
The essays in this volume reflect the mixed state of play in early
modern marginalia studies. Some seek to track the reading practices
of an individual – as Georgianna Ziegler does with Anne Clifford,
Afterword 259
Jason Scott-Warren with the cut-and-paster Robert Nicolson, and –
albeit stretching the individual to a marital unit – Emma Smith with
Thomas and Isabella Hervey. Some use a more expansive approach to
identify the habits of groups of readers: Acheson tracks the architec-
ture of women’s reading, Elizabeth Patton illuminates the marks of
readers of early Tudor books of hours, while Austen Saunders surveys
clergymen’s subscribed copies of the Church of England’s T hirty-Nine
Articles. In their pursuit of the material book, some eschew tradi-
tional margin-writing altogether: Joshua Calhoun investigates the
sizing of paper to facilitate marginal annotation, while Adam Smyth
studies the marks or remnants of objects (flowers, glasses, etc.) left
in books. Others explore marginalia within diverse modes of reading
and writing: Claire Bourne investigates the collation practices by early
readers of Shakespeare’s First Folio, while Harriet Archer relates the
reading and writing practices of John Higgins to marginalia as a rhe-
torical method, and S joerd Levelt considers how Twitter shapes the
scholarship surrounding marginalia.
But despite their meticulous adherence to the materiality of marginalia
and other forms of “book use,” many of the contributors – like Sherman
with Topcliffe – betray the possibilities of being swayed by the affective
possibilities of marginalia. In her Introduction, Acheson finds in her grand-
mother’s marginalia not only “her relationship to the book itself” but also
“a fine display of her character.”11 In dealing with subjects of whose char-
acter they have no personal knowledge, most contributors are necessarily
more circumspect, but the impulse to ascribe a character to the writer
of marginalia is powerful. Jason Scott-Warren suggests that his subject,
Robert Nicolson, “proudly” adds a reference to himself, “a rabbit pulled
out of a hat.”12 Elizabeth Patton suggests that one “awkwardly sprawling
secretary hand” is “possibly that of a young student, or perhaps, that of
a woman not formally trained.”13 Even Adam Smyth speculates about a
characterful impetus behind the traces left in books by objects: “readers
seem often to have felt … [an] aesthetic impulse to make the flower (or the
pointing finger) a vivid, humorous or spectacular intervention.”14
Perhaps the most sustained attempt to deal with the affective possi-
bilities of marginalia comes from Emma Smith, who analyses the books
owned and used by Thomas and Isabella Hervey for their “affective
significance,” their “emotional freight,” their “affective investments;”
moreover, she admits her own investment in such a project, that “The
impulse to reconstruct this library is in part a sentimental one.”15 It
is this cross-period impulse that concerns me here. As Acheson notes,
“The life-writing that we find in the margins of early modern books is
distinctly eccentric in that it reaches out from the self and seeks attach-
ment to institutions, values, and communities through inscription.”16
That reaching out, as she argues, extends beyond the communities of
the early modern period, and makes new communities today. Reading
260 Alan Stewart
allows “for each user to express his or her experience of the moment, to
become integrated with the object, the narrative, and the characters, to
relate not only to the text and book themselves, but to future readers.”17
I returned to Sherman’s 2006 preface recently when I, too, had come
under the spell of Richard Topcliffe’s unsettling marginalia – when I be-
came the latest of its “future readers.” Examining a manuscript copy of
Nicholas Harpsfield’s life of Sir Thomas More, now at Emmanuel Col-
lege, Cambridge, I found – again, from an annotation – that the book
had been “fovnde by Rich: Topclyff” during a raid on Greenstreet, a
Catholic safe-house to the east of London on 13 April 1582. The volume
is now covered in marginalia, as its new owner reacted with a mix-
ture of anger and contempt to Harpsfield’s hagiography. When More
reads Augustine’s City of God in the church of St Laurence in London,
Topcliffe protests, “Master More a Lay man, to reade in the Church!”
When More exclaims “by our Ladye, for my part,” Topcliffe mock-
congratulates him: “well sworn sir;” and when More’s wife says “by
God goe forwarde,” Topcliffe gleefully notes “Then Sr Tho: Mores wife
could sweare too!” A reference to “this worthy man [More], of whose
storye we be in hande” prompts an angry “All traytors!” When Harps-
field writes that “I suppose verilye he [More] was of himselfe very vn-
willing to take vpon him” the office of Lord Chancellor, Topcliffe is not
convinced: “So doe not I.” When Harpsfield tells of how More “would
goe to the Churche and be confessed,” Topcliffe retorts, “He had better
have gone to bed in prayer!” A rare moment of approbation – and black
humor – is prompted by the revelation that More mortified his body by
self-flagellation: “Whipp on! & smart enough.”18
Sensing that this attack seemed personal, I was keen to find out more
about the relationships between Topcliffe and Harpsfield – and a G oogle
search (I’m not ashamed to admit it) turned up a 2013 Notes and Que-
ries article by Thomas Merriam that dealt with Topcliffe’s marginalia
in a copy of a book that was heavily indebted to Topcliffe’s writings:
Girolamo Pollini’s book L’historia ecclesiastica della rivoluzion d’Ing-
hilterra (Rome, 1594).19 That title was familiar to me – for in a footnote
to his discussion of Topcliffe, Sherman quotes Neale’s footnote identi-
fying this as the volume with marginalia, and revealing that the same
volume was “now belonging to Professor Gordon of Reading Univer-
sity, who most kindly allowed me to see it”20 – presumably the Renais-
sance scholar D.J. Gordon, who in the 1950s was in Reading’s English
department. However, Merriam revealed that the Pollini book was in
the University of Exeter’s Special Collections, where it had been de-
posited in 1997 on the death of a later owner, the All Souls’ historian
A. L. Rowse:21 in 1981 Rowse had mentioned in print that the volume
was “in my possession,”22 and six years later he published an essay on
Topcliffe largely based on the book’s marginalia. 23 Just as Sherman had
been alerted to Topcliffe’s identity by Frank Brownlow, so Merriam was
Afterword 261
“indebted to Professor Frank Brownlow for alerting me to the existence
of the volume.”24 And so, lured by what I knew of its marginalia as se-
lectively quoted in their publications by Rowse and Merriam, I headed
off to Exeter to view the book myself.
It was worth the journey. Some 88 pages of the book boast annota-
tions by Topcliffe, some quite extensive. 25 Many trace Pollini’s materials
back to Harpsfield, and to the period when he was incarcerated in the
Fleet and Marshalsea prisons with various recusants (“Ohe rabell of tra-
tours”).26 Some notes self-servingly celebrate Topcliffe’s apprehending
of printer William Carter, and his seizing of various English-language
Catholic manuscripts, 27 which can perhaps be summed up by this one
annotation, against the section in Pollini’s book dealing with Harpsfield:
owt of this doctor Nicolass Harpesfildes Englishe written Booke All

the veanom & poysonne matter within this Booke dot[h?] Springe
to his Imortall shayme And to the Everlasting reporatche [reproach]
of Carnall Allen [i.e. Cardinal Willliam Allen] the Basterde or the
Basterds whelppe. 28
But Topcliffe also provides some grotesque autobiographical vignettes,

including the following childhood memory of the 1536 Pilgrimage of
Grace:
And I did See great abhominacyon in an Abbey to the which my

father did send me for refuidge in this first Rebellyon. And I did
asuridly heare of the heads and boddyes of dead Childerne that were
founde Bvried in the flowers of the Chambers of Nvnnes yea in Sume
one Nunnes Chamber 5: or 6: heads of Chylderne: And I can proove
That ther was great abhominacyon vsed in those Monestaryes, &c.
That A Vicar of a towne cawlled Stixwolde in Lincolnshyr did
Gett three Nvnnes with childe in a Short tyme, for the whiche of-
fences Boathe Those :3: Nvnnes, & that vicar were pvnished As
that Chapter Bookes at the Svbpressyon of three Abbeas did mayke
Mencyon, & I my self have seene the vicar at Stixwolde who Culde
Not deny it to bee trew.
For good measure, he then signs his statement: “Ric: Topclyffe.”29

Beyond its Topcliffean attractions, however, the volume now bears the
traces of its more recent travels. Tipped into the front (another object in
a book) is a brief note that records Neale’s borrowing of the book, dated
20 November 1953:
Dear Professor Gordon

I want to thank you very warmly indeed for your great kindness in
lending your ‘Topcliffe’ volume. What a treasure it is & how I envy
262 Alan Stewart
your good fortune in finding it! I don’t know that one could find a
better portrait of friend Topcliffe than in his marginal comments
here. I wish it was my book, to nurse & chuckle over!
I have copied a number of his commentts. {sic} Some of them
add to our knowledge of his life & will help our parliamentary
biography of him.
Thank you once more for the great pleasure you have
given me.
Yours sincerely,
J. E. Neale30
While Neale values the marginalia for their contribution to “our knowl-
edge of his life,” its primary value is to bring its author’s character to
life, to provide an unimprovable “portrait.” One is struck by the odd
pleasure that Neale finds in Topcliffe’s often vicious notes: he is “friend
Topcliffe,” to be “chuckle[d] over” and “nurse[d]” – like a fine Scotch, or
like a baby? In print, as we’ve seen, Neale is cooler, noting in the margi-
nalia a “strange character” of “private exuberance,” but even he cannot
resist designating him as a “curious, sadistic gentleman” who “revelled”
in torture.31
The information from the marginal comments did indeed make its
way into “our parliamentary biography” of Topcliffe: the entry in the
History of Parliament Trust’s House of Commons 1559–1601, pub-
lished in 1981. Penned by the redoubtable Tudor historian S. T. Bindoff,
the entry is the usual dry-as-dust facts-and-figures account – until the
marginalia are mentioned:
The gravamen of the indictment of Topcliffe is that he displayed an

unmistakable and nauseating relish in the performance of his duties.
On this the verdict of contemporaries is amply borne out by the ev-
idence of his many letters and by the marginalia preserved in one of
his books. It was, and is, easy to believe any evil of such a man; and
to reflect that some of the worst accusations—among them that he
reserved his most hideous tortures for infliction in his own house—
rest upon fragile evidence is not to excuse him. Nor is there much
profit in speculating on the influences which went to his making,
although his early loss of both parents, the impact of rebellion upon
his infant awareness, and perhaps some marital misfortunes might
enter into the reckoning.32
Here, Topcliffe’s marginalia become evidence of his “unmistakable and

nauseating relish” for torture – and the excuse for what must be a quite
rare instance of pop psychology in the House of Commons volumes.
For his part, A. L. Rowse used the Pollini book to reveal what he
called (in an essay of the same title) “The Truth about Topcliffe.” Not
Afterword 263
only does Topcliffe provide “valuable information about himself and
others, in his annotations to Pollini’s book”33 but “[h]is marginalia,” he
asserts, “give us an intimate insight into his own mind and point of view,
hitherto reported on only by his enemies.”34 The Pollini book provoked
an intense response: “Topcliffe, who was easily roused to anger, was
infuriated by its libels and lies;”35 when he comments on the English
Catholic writers who had compiled the materials on which Pollini based
his book as “O rabble of traitors.” According to Rowse, “one sees some-
thing of his temper:”36 “We see that Topcliffe had a vehement way of
writing and speaking – but he was a North Countryman himself, rough
and aggressive, liable to outbursts of rudeness, always ready to stand up
for his own rights, persistent and tenacious.”37 From the marginalia, and
“his beautiful signature,” Rowse comes to admires Topcliffe and makes
a case for his rehabilitation: “Topcliffe has had a uniformly bad press;
but there is always something to be said on the other side.”38 These notes
provide “an authentic and vivid revelation of the temper of the time on
both sides. They [Catholics and Protestants] were at war, and his was a
war mentality;”39 it was “the regular thing for Elizabethan judges … to
bully their prisoners;”40 Topcliffe merely “operated under orders” but
“does not seem to have received much in the way of thanks for his ar-
dent service.”41 In short, in Elizabethan England “Torture was applied
in cases of treason against the state; our own age can hardly regard itself
as any better when we remember Auschwitz and Dachau and Belsen,
or the atrocities of Stalin”42 – a bizarre apologia for Elizabethan tor-
ture that sets the bar horrifically low. Rowse has not only constructed a
character for Topcliffe from his marginalia: he has then used that rough,
aggressive, rude, persistent, tenacious character to argue for Topcliffe’s
right-minded assiduity in an official cause.
Topcliffe’s marginalia in this book by Pollini have thus fascinated re-
cent generations of historians and literary scholars – not just because
they give the reaction of a top government employee to a controversial re-
ligious text, but because they conjure up a vivid, characterful presence –
or rather, presences plural, because Sherman’s sinister torturer is not
Rowse’s ardent order-following servant, nor Neale’s indulged “friend
Topcliffe.” Beyond that, these marginalia-bred characters produce
strong affective reactions in modern readers – strong enough that those
readers circulate the experience: Gordon buys the Pollini book, G ordon
lends the book to Neale, Neale publishes on the marginalia, Neale
shares his notes with Bindoff, Rowse buys the book, Rowse publishes on
the marginalia, Walsham recalls Neale’s work and shares it with Sher-
man,43 Brownlow establishes himself as an authority on Topcliffe44 and
identifies the annotations for Sherman and Merriam, Merriam’s article
tips off Stewart.
And the sharing goes on. As I was checking proofs of this book, I hap-
pened to meet up with Bill Sherman, and mentioned this “Afterword;”
264 Alan Stewart
he told me that by coincidence he’d just been sent a forthcoming arti-
cle on Topcliffe’s marginalia by Mark Rankin. When I contacted him,
Rankin shared a story, similar to mine, of serendipitous encounters with
fellow scholars that had alerted him to yet more Topcliffe marginalia in
volumes at Yale’s Beinecke Library, at Ushaw College, at Durham – and
that has allowed him to produce the most substantial work to date on
Topcliffe’s compelling marginalia.45
We might see this as essentially a “social scholarship,” as Sjoerd Levelt
dubs it in his chapter, but one firmly anchored in the pen-and-paper,
personal contact, pre- “earlymoderntwitter” generation. One can only
guess at the speeded-up “networked scholarship” that will result when
“alert serendipity” is fully replaced by “twitterendipity.”46 Something
beyond even the “eccentric” life-writing that Acheson identifies, Top-
cliffe’s marginalia perhaps signal the way for a third wave of early mod-
ern marginalia studies, implicit in many of the contributions here: one
that fully embraces the affective pull of marginalia that seduce us into
producing early modern characters to people our scholarship – and to
cement new communities.
Notes
1 Sherman, Used Books, xvii–xviii, citing Allen, A true, sincere, and mod-
est defence of English Catholics, with Topcliffe’s annotations (Huntington
RB60060), and “The examination of Jesuits and seminary priests,” with
Topcliffe’s annotations (Folger MS K.b.1).
2 Sherman, Used Books, xviii, quoting Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parlia-
ments 1584–1601, 153.
3 Sherman, Used Books, xx.
4 Ibid., xvi.
6 Jardine and Grafton, “Studied for Action.”
8 Sherman, John Dee, 80–81.
10 Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti”, 380.
13 Patton, this volume, 106.
15 Smith, this volume, 168.
17 Ibid., 2.
18 Harpsfield, “The life of Sir Thomas More,” Emmanuel College Library,
Cambridge, MS 76, fos. 1r –57r, at 2r, 9v, 25v, 10v, 14r, 18r, 18v. See Stewart,
The Oxford History of Life-Writing, vol. 2, Early Modern, ch. 1.
19 Merriam, 408.
20 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601, 153 n.2.
21 Merriam, “Unremarked Evidence,” 408.
22 Rowse, Review of Wernham ed., List and Analysis of State Papers, 142.
Afterword 265
23 Rowse, “The Truth about Topcliffe.”
24 Merriam, 408.
25 Pollini, L’historia ecclesiastica della rivoluzion d’Inghilterra, with Richard
Topcliffe's annotations, University of Exeter Library Special Collections,
ROWSE/POL.
26 Exeter, ROWSE/POL, b3r.
27 Exeter, ROWSE/POL, B3v, B4r, 2N8r, 2T5v, 2T6r, 3D1r, 3F3v.
28 Exeter, ROWSE/POL, 2D4r.
29 Exeter, ROWSE/POL, K7v.
30 Neale to Gordon, 20 November 1953; in Exeter, ROWSE/POL.
31 Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1584–1601, 153.
32 Bindoff, “Topcliffe, Richard (1531–1604), of Somerby, Lincs. and
Westminster.”
33 Rowse, “The Truth about Topcliffe,”185.
34 Ibid., 181.
35 Ibid., 192.
36 Ibid., 186.
37 Ibid., 186–87.
38 Ibid., 181.
39 Ibid., 192.
40 Ibid., 187.
41 Ibid., 199.
42 Ibid., 186–87.
43 And also with Patrick Collinson, I discover: see Collinson, “The politics of
religion and the religion of politics in Elizabethan England,” 84 and 84 n.53:
“I owe this reference [to Topcliffe’s annotated copy of Allen’s Defence] to
Alex Walsham.” Collinson also cites Neale’s discussion.
4 4 See Brownlow, “Richard Topcliffe: Elizabeth’s enforcer and the repre-
sentation of power in King Lear,” which does not, however, address the
marginalia.
45 Rankin, “Richard Topcliffe and the Book Culture of the Elizabethan Cath-
olic Underground;” e-mail communication with author, November 8, 2018.
46 Levelt, this volume, 240.
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Index
Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures and page numbers followed by ‘n’
refer to endnotes.
Abcedarium (Howlet) 175–6, 183, Antiquitates Vulgares (Bourne) 77

184, 193n56 Antony and Cleopatra
ABC for Book Collectors (Carter & (Shakespeare) 198
Barker) 20 Apple iPad 15
Acheson, Katherine 33n60, 147, 258, Apple iPhone 15
259, 264 Arcadia (Sidney) 3, 57, 61, 88n27, 139
Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 58, Archer, Harriet 9–11, 140, 152n27, 259
61, 63 Argenis (Barclay) 158
Act of Supremacy (1534) 111 Art de faire le papier (Lalande) 21, 24
“Ad Horam Completorii” 96 De L’art de Parler 166
“Ad Matutinum Precatio” 96 Art of English Poesy (Puttenham) 59
Aeneid (Virgil) 54, 156, 162 Ashe, Katherine 167
Ahl, Frederick 38, 49n30 The Athenæum 206, 229n23
Alberti, Leon 59, 68n30 Aubrey, John 54
Alexiad (Comnena) 147, 154n81 Augustine 59–60, 158
Allott, Robert (England’s Austin, J. L. 71
Parnassus) 181 Autobiography in Early Modern
“The Altar” (Herbert) 72 England (Smyth) 156
Aluearie or Triple Dictionarie
(Baret) 185 Bacon, Anne Cooke 76
Amazon Kindle 15, 16 Bacon, Nathanial 167
#amwriting 237–8 Bacon, William 122
Angliae Notitia; or the Present State Bailey, Donald 201, 229n26, 232n92
of England (Chamberlain) 161, 165 Baldwin, William: The Last Part of
animal sizing 21, 22, 24, 29; failure the Mirror for Magistrates 178;
of 27 A Mirror for Magistrates 9–10,
Annotated Books Online 236 175–83, 190
annotations 16; flowers as 54; Baret, John 185, 186
handwritten 51; lack of 17; Barlow, Thomas 58
marginal 63–6; Nicolson, Robert Barnes & Noble Nook 15
37; Twitter 248–50, 248, 249, Bartholomaeus, Anglicus 52
251, 252–4 Baxter, Richard 158
An Answere to Master William Beal, Peter 24, 33n48
Perkins, Concerning Christs Becket, Thomas 93, 95, 98, 104
Descension into Hell (Higgins) 176, Before Shakespeare 245
188–91 Behn, Aphra 85
Anti-Coton (1611) 169 Ben Jonson Walking 246
292 Index
Benson, John 205, 225, 230n43 Britain (Camden) 158
Bergeron, David M. 15 Britannia (Camden) 182, 250
Berresford, John 226, 227, 232n113 The British Library Guide to Printing
Beuther, Michael 44, 50n49 (Twyman) 19
Beze [de Bèze], Theodore 77, 78, Bromflet, Henry de 145
88n29, 190 Brown, Bill 54
Bible 74, 77, 79, 79–81, 81, Browne, Thomas 2, 158
87n16, 119 Burscough, John 118, 126
Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Busby, Abigail 125–6
Introduction (Tanselle) 24, 33n49 Bydell, John 106, 110, 114n40,
Bibliography and the Sociology of 114n42
Texts (McKenzie) 34n64
Bidwell, John 20, 21, 32n38 Calhoun, Joshua 5, 88n34, 259
Bisby, Nathaniel 126 Camden (Britannia) 182
Blackwood’s Magazine (1819) 2 Capell, Edward 206
Blazing World (Cavendish) 84 Cardiff University Special
Blenerhasset, Thomas: Second Part of Collections 52
the Mirror for Magistrates 178, 179 Cary, Lucius 125
The Bloody Brother (Fletcher) Castang, Henri 1
205, 207 Cavendish, Margaret 84, 85
Boccaccio, Giovanni 179 de Certeau, Michel 11n8, 65, 69n50
Boggis, Elizabeth 28, 33n60, 80–2 Chamberlain, Edward 161
Bookbinding (Pearson) 232n110, Chan, Mary 143, 153n49
232n114 “Charta bibula” 19
The Book in the Renaissance Chartier, Roger 15, 65, 69n50
(Pettegree) 31n18 Chaucer, Geoffrey 152n24, 246; The
Book of Common Prayer 74, 77, 79, Book of the Duchess 139; The
115, 119, 123, 158, 162 Parliament of Fowls 234
Book of Hours, 94; readers’ marks Chaundler, Thomas 116
in 93–4, 111, 111n2, 113n32; Christian Religion Substantially
erasures/cancellations 95, 98; Treatised 54
Goodly Prymer 106–11, 107, 108, Chronicles (Holinshed) 171
110; marginal prayer sequences Chronologie des Estats Generaux
96–7; Regnault’s Horae 97–105, (1615) 169
111; 1512 Vostre Book of Hours “chronotopic” marking 139
95–7, 109 Church of England 115, 119, 120,
Book of Martyrs (Foxe) 61 123, 129 see also Thirty-Nine
The Book of the Duchess Articles
(Chaucer) 139 “The Church-Porch” (Herbert) 72
Book Use, Book Theory: 1500–1700 Churchyard, Thomas: Huloets
(Mazzio) 3 Dictionarie 186, 193n62
Bourne, Henry 77 Civitates orbis terrarum (Braun) 42
Bowers, Fredson 230n57 Clapham, Henoch 74, 75, 88n19
Boyle, Robert 159, 164 Clifford, Anne 70–2, 86, 153n33,
Bracton, Henry de 144, 147 180; autobiographical writings and
Branche, John 36, 40 architectural pursuits 143–4; diaries
Braybrooke, James 101, 103–4 137, 138; Domina 147; early life
Brayman [Hackel], Heidi 3, 15–16, of 134–6; Great Books (of Record)
30, 67n9, 68n21, 68n40, 69n54, 83, 141, 143, 145, 149, 154n71; Great
88n27, 89n43, 137, 152n2, 152n10, Picture 71, 148, 149; inheritance
152n12, 152n18, 152n24, 166, of titles 142–4, 146; inscription on
172n27, 172n29 title page of Selden 135, 138–9;
Briefe of the Bibles history (Clapham) interest in Selden 134, 136; Kendal
74, 75 Diary of 1649 144; “matriarchivist”
Index 293
142–51; Memoir of 1603 146; A Dialogue Betwene a Knyght and a
“reading” concept 137–9; and Clerke 42–3
Selden 136; and Titles of Honor Dictionary (Johnson) 67
134, 136, 139; “transactional Dictionary of English Manuscript
reading” 138 Terminology: 1450 to 2000
Clifford, George 134 (Beal) 24
Clifford, Margaret 134–6 Digges, Leonard 225, 232n108
Cochrane, Lydia G. 15 Digital Cavendish Project 245
Cocker, Edward 4, 77 The Doctrine of the Bible 74
Coke, Edward 147, 159 Dodecameron 46–7
Coleridge’s marginalia 2 Dodsworth, Roger 141, 147–8
Comedies and Tragedies (Fletcher) Donne, John 70, 159, 169
230n57 Drummond, William 58, 68n27
A Commemoration (Phillips) 36 Drury, Anne Bacon 70
Comnena, Anna 147 Duffy, Eamon 93, 112n3, 112n13,
Compleat Angler (Walton) 67 113n21, 113n22, 113n28
Confessions (Augustine) 59 Dunn, Kevin 177, 184, 192n8,
Cordier, Mathurin 26, 33n53 193n50
Coriolanus 223 Durham library: Itinerary (1617)
Cormack, Bradin 3, 88n27 169; Thomas and Isabella Hervey’s
Corona Charitatis 219 books 170
The Court and Character of King Dyson, Humphrey 106, 114n45
James (Weldon) 139
Cowley, Abraham 54, 156, 159, e-annotations 17, 31n12
172n7 #earlymoderntwitter 10, 234, 237,
Crawford, Julie 69n44, 141 239, 253
Cromwell, Thomas 43, 106, early reformed primers 105–11
114n38 e-books: lack of annotation 17;
Crooke, Helkiah 138, 152n14 margin-marking readers of 16,
Cultural Graphology (Fleming) 4 18; versus printed books 16; rise
Cymbeline (Shakespeare) 53–4 of 15
#ECRchat 238
Daily Devotions 162 Edict of Nantes 197
Dane, Joseph A. 24, 33n50 Eikon Basilike 163, 165
Daniel, Samuel 38, 136, 148 elegies 35–40
The Dating Game 230n59 Eliot, George 55
Davenant, William 159, 248 Elizabethan Puritan Movement
Davenport, John 119 132n14
David, King 26, 109 Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments
Davids hainous sinne (Fuller) 26 1584–1601 (Neale) 257–8,
Davis, Natalie Zemon 83, 88n21, 260–3
89n41, 133n42 Encyclopédie (d’Alembert & Diderot)
#deadlineexchange 237–8 24, 25
Dekker, Thomas 169 England: pre-reformation years in
Dent, Arthur (Plaine Man’s Path-Way 94–7
to Heaven) 190 Englands Glory: Or an Exact
De partibus aedium (Grapaldo) 20 Catalogue of the Lords of his
De Proprietatibus Rerum (Mitchner) Maiesties most Honourable Privy
31n27 Councel 162, 171
Derrida, Jacques 4, 73, 87n15, England’s Parnassus (Allott) 181
153n42 The English Catechisme Explained
Descartes, René 159 (Mayer) 78
Descriptive Catalogue (Rasmussen & English paper makers 20
West) 206, 229n26, 232n92 Ephemeris historica (Beuther) 44
294 Index
Epicedium (Hervey) 36, 37 Franklin, Ruth 30n8
episcopal visitation 120, 133n19 Free Library of Philadelphia (FLP)
Epitaph, An (P.) 36 195; First Folio 198, 199, 201, 204,
Erasmus, Desiderius 76, 88n23, 158, 205, 209, 216, 220–3, 226, 227
159, 177, 184, 246, 246 Freeling, Nicolas 1, 11n1
Erler, Mary 94, 112n5, 112n8, Friedman, Alice T. 151, 154n96
114n37, 114n42 Frye, Susan 138, 152n16, 152n17
Essays (Montaigne) 148, 149 Fuller, John 123
Euclid 159 Fuller, Thomas 26, 76, 165; Davids
#examhowlers 243 hainous sinne 26, 33n56; The
Exposition of the Symbole or Creed of History of the Holy War 165
the Apostles (Perkins) 188
“Exposition on the 51st Psalm” 108–9 Gallantry-A-la-mode 167
Gaskell, Philip 20, 32n29
Faber, Johannes 96, 112n15 Gassendi, Pierre 68n30, 159
Facebook 252 gelatin sizing 18, 19
Falkland, Henry Cary 27, 33n58 Genest, Jean 169
Falkland, Viscount 125 Gesta Romanorum 158
Fall of Princes (Lydgate) 179, 180 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 57
Fanshawe, Richard 159 Gitelman, Lisa 31n12, 155, 172n3
Farmer, Alan B. 159, 172n16 Glasses Apostle (Conrad von Soest’s
Felch, Susan 111, 112n5, 112n17, painting) 57
114n59 Goldberg, Jonathan 73, 87n14,
Ferrar, Virginia 159 172n21
Fielding, Henry 170 Goldie, Mark 125
The First Part of the Diall of Days Goodly Prymer in Englyshe 106–11,
(Lloyd) 43–4, 45 107, 108, 110
First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates Google Books 16, 30n5, 33n52
(Higgins) 175, 178, 180 Gournay, Marie de 148
Fitzherbert, Anthony 147 Grafton, Anthony 2, 3, 9, 11n4,
Fleming, Abraham 42 12n10, 12n32, 15, 64–6, 67n1,
Fleming, Juliet 3, 4, 5, 11, 12n11, 35, 69n48, 69n54, 82, 137, 152n12,
39, 42, 48n2, 70, 164 180, 192, 192n7, 258, 264n6
Fletcher, Catherine 249 Granados Devotion: Exactly teaching
Fletcher, John 166, 205, 207, 224, how a man may truely dedicate and
230n57, 248 devote himselfe unto God 166
Florio, John 20, 32n30, 148, 167 Grapaldo, Francesco Maria 20
Flowers, or, Eloquent Phrases of the Grotius, Hugo 158
Latine Speech, Gathered out of the Gunning, Peter 165
Sixe Comedies of Terence (Higgins)
176, 187 Hagley Hall 170
#flyleaffriday 236–7 Hailey, R. Carter 207, 230n59
Folger Shakespeare Library 28, 35, Hakluyt, Richard 39, 40, 46, 49n35,
55, 95, 134, 219, 227, 228n4, 49n40
232n114, 245 Hall, Edward 58
Foot, Mirjam M. 227, 233n115, Hall, Joseph 159, 162
233n117 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 195–7, 203,
Foucault, Michel 82, 83, 89n39, 206–8, 226
89n42 Hammond, Henry 158–60, 162, 164
Foxe: Actes and Monuments 58, 61, Hammons, Pamela S. 73, 88n17
63; Book of Martyrs 61 Hampden, John 121
Foxe, John 43, 58, 61, 63, 68n27, Hampton, Timothy 179, 192n19,
147, 159 192n21, 192n31
Index 295
Harpsfield, Nicholas (“The life of Sir heterotopias 82
Thomas More”) 260, 261, 264n18 Higgins, John 140, 175–8, 192n6,
Harvey, Gabriel 2, 3, 9, 12n10, 15, 82, 192n32, 192n35, 193n52, 193n62,
137, 138, 176, 192, 258 194n67, 194n97, 259; An Answere
Harvey, Richard 26, 33n57 to Master William Perkins,
hashtag 240, 243–4, 244; #amwriting Concerning Christs Descension
237–8; #deadlineexchange 237–8; into Hell 188–91; Churchyard,
#earlymoderntwitter 10, 234, Thomas 186; First Part of the
237, 239, 253; #ECRchat 238; Mirror for Magistrates 175, 178;
#examhowlers 243; #flyleaffriday Huloets Dictionarie 183–8; A
236–7; #marginaliamonday 235, Mirror for Magistrates 178–83; The
236, 236; #myownexamhowlers Nomenclator 187–8
243; #PhDchat 238; #SaveWarburg The History of the Holy War
243; #StoptheDarkAges 243; (Fuller) 165
#twitterendipity 240, 241, Hobbes, Thomas 159
242; #twitterstorians 237; Hoby, Margaret 138, 166, 258
#WhyArtHistoryMatters 243; Holbein, Hans 58
#writingaccountability 237–8 Holinshed, Raphael 159, 171
The Hearts Ease, or A Remedy Horae (Regnault) 93–4, 97–105, 111
Against All Troubles (Patrick) 155, Hore Beatissime virginis marie ad
163, 167 legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie
Hellinga, Lotte 21, 32n40 ritum 99, 100, 102–4, 113n21
Hendrik Conscience Library collection Hore presentes ad vsum Sarum 95
55, 56 House of Commons 1559–1601 262
Henry IV Part I (Shakespeare’s play) Howlet, Richard (Abcedarium) 175–6,
61, 229n21 183, 184
Henry VI 145, 198 Hsy, Jonathan 229n23, 232n92
Henry VIII 50n47, 93, 98, 101, 145, Huloets Dictionarie 176, 183–8
154n71, 201, 227 Hungers prevention: or, The whole
Herbert, George 72, 158, 159, 169 art of fovvling by water and land
Herbert, Philip 134 (Markham) 159
Herbert, William 136 Hunter, Dard 20–2, 31n27, 32n31
Herrick, Robert 65, 69n53 Hunter, Lynette 231n74
Herringman, Henry 208 Hutten, Leonard 122, 126, 133n33
Hervey, John 155, 156, 164, 165, 168, Hyde, Edward 125
170, 172n7 Hynd, George 120
Hervey, Isabella (May) 8–9, 171, 259;
books 166–8; death of 155, 156, I Ching 54
158, 162; Thomas and 156–8 (see The iewell house of art and nature
also Library of Thomas and Isabella (Plat) 23, 32n45
Hervey) Imberdis, Jean 20, 21, 23, 32n32,
Hervey, Kezia 165 32n37
Hervey’s library 9 see also Library of Incipit prohemium de proprietatibus
Thomas and Isabella Hervey rerum fratris Bartholomei Anglici
Hervey, Sydenham 157–8 de ordine fratrum minorum
Hervey, Thomas 155, 160, 162, 165, (Bartholomaeus) 52
167, 168, 171, 259; books 158–60; Institutes (Calvin) 160, 161
and Isabella 156–8; letters 157–8; An Institution of General History 208
professional ambitions 156 see also Instrucion of a Christen Woman
Library of Thomas and Isabella (Vives) 83
Hervey Introduction to a Devout Life
Hervey, William 36–7, 156, 160, 164, (Sales) 139
165, 168, 169 Iob Expounded (Beze) 77, 78
296 Index
Iser, Wolfgang 177, 179, 192n11 L’historia ecclesiastica della rivoluzion
Isham, Elizabeth 138, 166 d’Inghilterra (Pollini) 260–3
Library of Thomas and Isabella
Jackson, Heather 2, 64, 66, 69n43 Hervey: annual elegies 157, 158;
Jardine, Lisa 2, 3, 9, 12n32, 15, 63, Hervey collection 155–6, 158–60,
65, 66, 67n1, 69n48, 69n54, 82, 166; at Ickworth 155, 155, 158,
137, 138, 152n12, 152n13, 192, 158, 160–3, 160–3, 171; Isabella’s
192n7, 258, 264n6 books 166–8; Isabella’s death
Jeake, Samuel 158 155, 156, 158, 162; Little Gidding
Jemmat, William 127 Harmony 159; marks/signs of
Jermyn, Susan 156 reading 160–2; religious books
John, Adrian 15 161–2; signatures 156, 160, 163;
John Dee: The Politics of Reading and “Tho: & Isabella” 163–6; Thomas’s
Writing in the English Renaissance inscription 156, 160, 163
(Sherman) 3, 15, 49n34, 49n41, “The life of Sir Thomas More”
264n8 (Harpsfield) 260, 261
John Overholt 245 Lilly, Joseph 169
Johnson, Samuel 67 Lingua: or, The combate of the tongue
Jonson, Ben 54, 59, 72, 136, 148–9, (Tomkis) 58
150, 154n93, 159, 247 Lipsius, Justus 147, 160
Jugge, Richard 72 Literary Remains (Coleridge) 64
Little Gidding Harmony 159
Kellner, Leon 231n77 Little Office of the Virgin 94, 98, 106
Kim, Dorothy 234, 245 Lloyd, Lodowick 43–4, 45, 46, 50n48
The King James Bible 15 Love’s Labors’ Lost (Shakespeare) 208
Kistow, Robert 101, 103–4 “Lt Gradon’s Collection of Naval
Knight, Jeffrey Todd 12n11, 140, 178 Flags & Colors” (Pepys) 226
Knight, Leah 70 Luigi di Granata 57
Lydgate, John (Fall of Princes) 179, 180
La Graunde Abridgement 147 Lyttelton, George 170
Lalande, Joseph Jérôme de 20–1, 24,
32n36 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 224
L’Amour reglé (Pora) 226 MacGeorge, Bernard Buchanan
Langbaine, Gerard 224, 232n105 198, 203
Langland, William 159 Machiavelli 159, 164, 169
Larson, Katherine 84, 89n47, 89n48 McKenzie, D. F. 34n64
The Last Part of the Mirror for McKitterick, David 167, 172n30,
Magistrates (Baldwin) 178 255n40
Latin dialogues, Cordier’s Magnusson, Lynne 76
translation 26 Malone, Edmond 207, 230n55
law books 24 Manguel, Alberto 58, 68n26
Lee, Sidney 68n27, 198, 201–4, 206, Manners, Elizabeth 109–11
207, 222, 228n10, 228n12, 228n14, Manners, Katherine 146
228n19, 229n23, 229n25, 229n29, Mansell, Francis 126
229n34, 230n56, 230n57, 232n99 #marginaliamonday 235, 236, 236
Le Roman de la rose 57 “The Marginal Obsession with
Les Oeuvres de Charles Loyseau Marginalia” (O’Connell) 30n7
55, 56 The Mariage Night (Falkland) 27
Lesser, Zachary 49n38, 159, Marine Lives 245
172n16, 227 Markham, Gervase 159
Levelt, Sjoerd 10, 72, 255n37, Marks, Philippa 226
259, 264 Marshall, William 93, 94, 106, 109,
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 86, 151n2 110, 111, 114n40, 114n42, 114n44
Index 297
Marston, John 219, 232n90 New York, postscript 171
Martin Marprelate Controversy 26 Nicolay, Nicolas de 39, 40
Martyn, Richard 208 Nicolson, Robert 5, 35–48, 42,
Mary Tudor 147 45, 49n22, 50n54, 50n61, 141,
Matchinske, Megan 72, 87n8, 152n2 153n32, 259
“matriarchivist” 142–51 The Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh
Mayer, John 78, 88n30, 228n5 Books of Mr Jeremiah Burroughs
May, Humphrey 157 (Burroughs) 55, 57
Mazzio, Carla 3, 68n25, 88n27 The Nomenclator, or, Remembrancer
Meakin, Heather 70 of Adrianus Junius (Higgins) 176,
Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) 187–8
197, 198, 203, 205–6, 222–4, Norden, John 38, 49n26
228n18 Northward Ho (Dekker) 159, 169
Mede, Joseph 158 Not as Far as Velma (Freeling) 1
Medieval Reactions 246 NotShaxButFletcher 248
Meres, Frances 165 The Nuremberg Chronicle 61
The Merry Wives of Windsor
(Shakespeare) 27, 33n59, 61 O’Connell, Mark 16, 30n7
The Mill on the Floss (Eliot) 55 Officium Beate Marie Virginis ad
A Mirror for Magistrates (Baldwin) vsum Sarum 96, 97
175–83, 190 “Of Other Spaces” (Foucault &
Mitchner, Robert W. 31n27 Miskowiec) 82
Mitsuo Kodama 170 Of Schisme (Hammond) 162
Molekamp, Femke 80, 83, 87n16 oil-based (printing) ink 21, 23
Monodia (Sylvester) 36 The Order of Books (Chartier) 15
Montaigne, Michel de 148, 149, L’ordre des livres see The Order of
152n17, 154n90, 159, 169 Books (Chartier)
Morals by Way of Abstract Orgel, Stephen 3, 11n5, 12n26, 64,
(Seneca) 165 67n1, 133n28, 139, 151–2n2, 178,
More, Henry 158 179, 180, 192n2, 192n12, 192n20,
Morley, George 125, 127 192n24, 192n25
Morris, William 169 Oroonoko (Behn) 85
Mosley, James 21, 32n39 Owen, John 158
Mowery, Frank 227, 232n114
Mr William Shakespeares Pages Project 16
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies Paper Knowledge (Gitelman) 31n12
(Shakespeare) 160 papermakers 20–2
Myers, Anne 143–4, 152n2 papermaking process 19–21
#myownexamhowlers 243 “paper trials” 26
Papyrus sive ars conficiendae papyri
Narveson, Kate 7 (Imberdis) 20, 23
The Nature of the Book (John) 15 Paradise Lost (Milton) 248
The Navigations, Perigrinations Paraphrasis (Erasmus) 76
and Voyages, Made into Turkie Parker, Samuel 126
(Nicolay) 39, 40 Parkinson, John 52, 67n7
Neale, J. E.: Elizabeth I and Her The Parliament of Fowls
Parliaments 1584–1601 257–8, (Chaucer) 234
260–3, 264n2, 264n20, 265n43 Parry, Graham 141, 153n34
networked scholarship, Twitter 235–7, Il Pastor Fido (Guarini) 159
236, 238 Patrick, Symon 155
Neville, Ralfe de 145, 146 Patterson, W. B. 189
Newby Bible 28, 80, 88n27 Patton, Elizabeth 7, 259
Newton, Thomas 187 Pauline Epistles 60
298 Index
Pearson, David 158, 166, 172n15, Rainbow, Edward 70–1, 154n98
172n28, 172n31, 227, 232n110, Rasmussen, Eric 68n21, 201–3, 206,
232n114, 233n115 226, 227, 229n21, 229n26, 229n30,
Peck, Linda Levy 151, 153n62 230n48, 232n92, 232n111,
Pensive Man’s Practice (Norden) 38 233n118
Pepys, Samuel 157, 158, 226–7, Rawlinson, Richard 115
232n113, 247 reading 66; concept 137–9;
Peregrine Pickle (Smollet) 170 discontinuous 80; goal-orientated
Perkins, William: Exposition of the 65; marks/signs of 160–2;
Symbole or Creed of the Apostles overlooking 139; pragmatic 138;
176, 188–91, 194n81 transactional 138
Petri Gassendi Diniensis Ecclesiæ Reading and Writing in Shakespeare
præpositi et in academia Parisiensi (Bergeron) 15
Matheseos Regii Professoris “reading in” process 58, 93, 115,
Opera omnia in sex tomos diuisa 118–20, 125
(Gassendi) 59 Reading Material in Early Modern
Pettegree, Andrew 18, 19, 31n18, England: Print, Gender, and
114n43 Literacy (Brayman Hackel) 3,
Peyton, Thomas 166 15–16, 30n5
#PhDchat 238 Rechford, William 125–6
Phillips, John 36, 48n7 Record, Robert 4
Piers Plowman (Langland) 159 A Registre of Hystories 42
Pigouchet, Philippe 94 Regnault, François 93, 94, 97, 98,
Pilgrimes (Purchas) 198, 203–4, 224 100, 101, 105, 106, 111, 113n21,
Plaine Man’s Path-Way to Heaven 113n22, 113n24, 113n28
(Dent) 190 “The Renaissance Collage” 35
Plaine Perceuall (Harvey) 26 Renaissance readers 17, 27
Plat, Hugh 23–4, 32n45 Resolutions and decisions of divers
Poems (Shakespeare) 205, 225 practicall cases of conscience
“Poesy and the Arts” 159 (Hall) 162
Pollini, Girolamo (L’historia “rich esthetic vocabulary” 24
ecclesiastica della rivoluzion Rochester Institute of Technology
d’Inghilterra) 260–3, 264n25 site 24
Pope, Alexander 170, 206, 230n53 Rocket eBook Reader 15
Portrait of the Businessman Georg Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare) 196,
Giesze (Holbein painting) 58 197, 202, 206–15, 226, 228n18
A Practical Catechism (Hammond) 160 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 85
The Practical Christian (Sherlock) 162 Rosenbach, A. S. W. 198, 203,
Praxis medicinae universalis 41, 42, 42 228n11, 228n15, 228n17, 229n36
prayer books 93 Routh, Martin Joseph 170
Precationes Christiana 112n15 Rowe, Nicholas 206, 230n51, 230n53
pre-reformation years, in England Rowland, Maurice 127, 132n6
94–7 Rowse, A. L. 260–3, 264n22, 265n23,
Preston, John 26, 33n55 265n33
Price, John 127 Russell, Francis 134
Princeton University Press 2 Ryrie, Alec 106–7, 110, 114n48
Principall Navigations (Hakluyt) 39
Project Gutenberg 15 Sackville, Richard 6, 86, 134, 180
A Prymer in Englyshe 106 see also Saint Jerome in His Study
Goodly Prymer in Englyshe (Ghirlandaio’s painting) 57
Puttenham, George 59 The Saints Submission and Sathans
Overthrow (Preston) 26
Queen Elizabeth 147 Sales, Francis de 139
Index 299
Sarum Missal 226–7 178, 197, 257, 258; John Dee: The
Saunders, Austen 8, 93, 259 Politics of Reading and Writing
Savage, Lucie 101, 111 in the English Renaissance 3, 15;
#SaveWarburg 243 Used Books: Marking Readers in
Savonarola, Girolamo 108–9, 114n53, Renaissance England 3, 31n13, 178,
114n54 257, 258
Scheemakers, Peter 170 The Ship of Fools 169
Schmitt, Erik 16, 30n9, 30–1n10 Short Title Catalog (STC) books 17
Schurink, Fred 3, 66n4, 69n44, Sidney, Philip 3, 57, 61, 67n9, 68n27,
69n54, 192n7 139, 160, 176, 179, 198, 228n9 see
scissor marks 61–7 also Arcadia (Sidney)
Scott-Warren, Jason 3, 5, 6, 11n6, Simonova, Natasha 175, 179, 192n3,
69n52, 72, 75, 87n9, 93, 139, 141, 192n17
152n22, 153n32, 156, 164, 258, 259 Sir John Suckling (Van Dyck)
Scourge of Villanie (Marston) 219 232n109
The Seasons (Thomson) 170 Six Degrees of Francis Bacon 245
Second Part of the Mirror for sizing 18; animal 21, 22, 24, 29; as
Magistrates (Blenerhasset) 178, 179 “art” 23; European sizing process
Sedgwick, George 136–7 20; gelatin 18, 19; raw material for
Selden, John 8, 72, 87n12, 134–51, 20; and sinking 27
151n1, 250, 253; and Jonson, Ben sizing room: illustration of 24, 25; as
148–9 see also Titles of Honor “slaughter house” 20
(Selden) Sledd, James 184, 193n52, 193n53
Seneca 159, 165 Slights, William W. E. 54, 67n12,
Shagan, Ethan 105, 114n37 87n13, 179, 188–9, 192n22,
The Shakespeare First Folio (West) 194n89, 253
230n64 Smallwood, Matthew 122, 132n8
Shakespeare’s World 245 Smethwick, John 10, 196, 207,
Shakespeare, William 228n19, 208, 219
228n19; Antony and Cleopatra Smith, Emma 8, 9, 88n20, 228n4,
198; Cymbeline 53–4; Hamlet 228n5, 230n64, 231n81, 259
195–7, 203, 206–8, 226; Henry IV Smith, Helen 11n7, 68n33, 86, 89n46,
Part I 61; Love’s Labors’ Lost 208; 138, 152n14
Measure for Measure 197, 198, Smyth, Adam 4–6, 12n10, 12n11,
203, 205–6, 222–4, 228n18; The 68n38, 72, 75, 149, 154n92, 156,
Merry Wives of Windsor 27, 33n59, 258, 259
61; Mr William Shakespeares Snook, Edith 3
Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies SoftBook Reader 15
160; Poems 205, 225; Romeo & Songes and Sonnettes (Haward &
Juliet 196, 197, 202, 206–15, 226, Surrey) 198, 203, 204, 224
228n18; sonnets 55; The Tempest Sony Bookman 15
161; Timon of Athens 198; Titus Sony Reader 15
Andronicus 197, 198, 202, 202, sortes Virginilianae 54
218; The Tragedie of Romeo and Spawn, Willman 227, 233n118
Juliet 228n6; The Tragedy of spectacle marks 55–60
Hamlet 228n6; Venus and Adonis Spenser, Edmund: Shepheardes
35; Works 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62 Calender 175, 176
Sheldon, Gilbert 125 Stafford, Anthony 6, 86
Shepheardes Calender (Spenser) 175 Stafford’s Niobe: or His age of teares
Sheppard, Thomas 121 (Stafford) 86
Sherlock, Richard 162, 172n19 Stallybrass, Peter 30, 31n18, 50n62,
Sherman, William H. 17–18, 39, 80, 227, 229n23, 232n109,
40, 65, 83, 87n16, 138, 140, 142, 233n118
300 Index
Starnes, D. T. 184, 193n48 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 197,
Stationers’ Company 227 198, 202, 202, 218
Stationers’ Register 207–8 “To His Honord Friend Mr. John
Stemma Sacrum (1660) 169 Selden” (Jonson) 148
Stoddard, Roger 51 Tom Jones (Fielding) 170
Stone, Lawrence 154n65 Tomkis, Thomas 58, 68n25
Stonley, Richard 35–6, 48n3 “The Tools of Early Printers” (De
#StoptheDarkAges 243 Vinne) 22
Stradling, George 125 The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet
Stretton, Tim 141, 153n31 (Shakespeare) 228n6
“‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel The Tragedy of Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Harvey Read His Livy” (Jardine & 228n6
Grafton) 15 Transcribe Bentham 245
Suckling, John 225 Trepass Bible 77, 79, 82, 88n27
Sunderland Library 169 Trepass, Mary 79–80, 82, 83, 87, 88
Suzuki, Mihoko 71, 152n2 Trepass, Michael 77
Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon) 158 Turner, Robert K. 230n57
Sylvester, Josuah 36–8, 46, 50n55 Twitter 234–5, 235; academic support
237–40, 239; annotation 248–50,
Tanselle, G. Thomas 24, 30n8, 33n49 248, 249, 251, 251, 252–3; hashtag
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 160, 240, 243–4, 244; historical authors
198, 203 246, 246, 247; marginalia 252;
The Temple (Herbert) 72, 158, 159 networked scholarship 235–7, 236,
terminus ad quem 203 238; outreach 245–6; pedagogy
Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater of 250–2, 252; #twitterendipity 240,
Plants (Parkinson) 52 241, 242
Thirty-Nine Articles 115, 124, 128, #twitterstorians 237
132n1; cascading and weeding out The Two Gentlemen of Verona
processes 118, 125; conforming 202, 203
and non-conforming ministers
124; Davenport, John 119; Udall, Nicholas (Flowers, or, Eloquent
memorandum 116; printed books Phrases of the Latine Speech,
121–2; reading and assenting Gathered out of the Sixe Comedies
118–21; royal arms 128; subscribed of Terence) 9, 176
copies of 116–17, 119–23, 126, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre
128–31; 1571 Act 117, 118; 1662 Families of Lancastre and Yorke
Act 117–18, 132n14; visitation (Hall) 58
articles 120, 123, 133n19; witnesses Used Books: Marking Readers in
125–6 Renaissance England (Sherman) 3,
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library 31n13, 178, 257, 258
52, 53 Ussher, James 158
Thomson, James 170
Throckmorton, Arthur 167 Van Dyck, Anthony 225, 232n109
Timon of Athens (Shakespeare) 198 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare) 35
Titles of Honor (Selden) 72, 134; Vine, Angus 182, 192n18, 193n41
Anne Rochford (Boleyn) 145, 145– De Vinne, Theodore 22, 32n42
6; annotations on 137; Clifford’s Virgil 54, 162
inscription on 135, 138–9; “Virgilian lots” 54
Clifford’s interest in (see Clifford, visitation articles 120, 123, 133n19
Anne); “immediately Created in Vostre Book of Hours 95–7, 109
Women” 145; mention of Ben Vostre, Simon 93–7, 105, 113n19
Jonson 148–9, 150; “Of Feminine Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil.
Titles” 143–5; possession concept Hormani Caesariburgensis
145; Preface 142, 148 (Horman) 19
Index 301
Wakelin, Daniel 181, 192n34 Withals, John 184, 193n55, 193n56;
Wall, Wendy 89n46 Dictionarie 185
Walton, Izaak 67 Women, Reading, and the Cultural
“waterleaf” 19 Politics of Early Modern England
Watkinson, William 68n19, 139 (Snook) 3
Webster, Richard 178 Wood, Anthony 58, 61, 228n9
Weldon, Anthony 139 Woolf, Virginia 85, 248
West, Anthony James 68n21, 172n1, Works (Shakespeare) 52, 53, 55, 57,
172n37, 201–3, 206, 228n9, 58, 61, 62
229n21 Wotton, Henry 138
What Is a Book? The Study of Early Wright, Nancy 143, 153n49
Printed Books (Dane) 24, 33n50 #writingaccountability 237–8
Whitney, Isabella 84, 85 Writing Matter (Goldberg) 73
#WhyArtHistoryMatters 243 “Written with a Diamond on
Widener, Joseph E. 198 Her Window at Woodstock”
Widener, P.A.B. 228n16 (Elizabeth I) 70
Wilde, John 121 “Wyll and Testament” (Whitney) 84
William of Ockham 43
Williamson, George C. 86, 89n58, Ziegler, Georgianna 8, 12n26, 87n12,
151n2, 152n7, 152n20, 153n29 88n18, 88n36, 113n32, 258
Wilmshurst, Rhea 2 Zwicker, Steven N. 4, 11n8
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Early Modern English Marginalia - Katherine Acheson (Ed)

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Early Modern English Marginalia - Katherine Acheson (Ed)

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Marginalia in early modern and medieval texts – printed, handwrit-

Katherine Acheson is Professor of English Language and Literature and

Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England

Singing the News

Text, Food And The Early Modern Reader

Reading Drama in Tudor England

Early Modern English Marginalia

For more information on this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

ISBN: 978-0-415-41885-0 (hbk)

List of Figures vii

Introduction: Marginalia, Reading, and Writing 1

1 Reading Habits and Reading Habitats; or, toward an

2 Cut-and-Paste Bookmaking: The Private/Public Agency

3 Book Marks: Object Traces in Early Modern Books 51

4 The Occupation of the Margins: Writing, Space, and

5 Praying in the Margins across the Reformation: Readers’

7 Lady Anne Clifford Reads John Selden 134

8 Marital Marginalia: The Seventeenth-Century Library of

9 Studied for Redaction? Reading and Writing in the

10 Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as

11 Early Modern Marginalia and #earlymoderntwitter 234

1.1 Depiction of the sizing room, a crucial space in

I am grateful to the contributors to the volume for their brilliant essays

Katherine Acheson is Professor of English and Associate Dean for

This passage is full of Freeling’s dry, concise, but rich characterization,

Jardine and Grafton used marginalia as unique and privileged evidence of

To read with pen in hand underscoring or otherwise marking mem-

All of the emphasized terms in this passage (emphasis I added) describe

one, the space of ownership, a complex field in which genealogy

new mastery of modes of analysis – of text, self, and world – that

The life-writing that we find in the margins of early modern books is

Contrary to its popular associations of permanence and fixity, any

The Hervey’s library, then, gives us an example of how the autobiogra-

1 By the year 2030, makers of e-readers have used haptic feedback

To assume a lack of readerly interest in annotation in the early days

John Bidwell, writing about seventeenth-century English paper makers,

In an examination of more than a hundred different volumes of

De Vinne’s late-nineteenth-century scholarship and Hunter’s mid-

Shaken by hand, it does not limply sag,

As Plat’s advice reveals, “Sink” or “sinking” was a contemporary term

And in Davids hainous sinne (1631), Thomas Fuller imagines King

A Fair young Lady and Widow, is

In the Duke’s opinion, a young widow may be pre-creased and pre-

Hervey offers the following account of her marriage to John Branche:

Then was she grafted in a worthie stemme,

Here is Sylvester, doing something similar, but with the aforementioned

But boughes & Branches, shrubs, & Cedars tall

The conceit of Dame Helen as a branch might be thought rather in­

And though the stocke, the Branch, the blossom sweete

when you have drawn all your tear-springs drie;

Such information as this, which might (just conceivably) be useful to the

Figure 2.2 Nicolson’s pasted and manuscript additions to Christof Wirsung,

O! would in Surrey mor such men were found;

But for all the flat-footedness of the writing, Nicolson’s manuscript

This is a comparative history focused on the powerful and on rituals

The noble Ladie ELIZABETH Mannors (Baroness Ross) sole daugh-

Figure 3.1 Shakespeare’s Works (1623), by permission of the Thomas Fisher

I write the “place” where Cymbeline speaks quite deliberately: one

that I forgot my spectacles, I left them in the 349. page of Halls

Memoria not only remembers he has forgotten his spectacles; he also

We can cautiously revise, then, my earlier note that histories of read-

serve to encourage in critics an interpretative humility: if such a stable

which he determines to be more precious than Rubies, these were

The conceit of Dame Helen as a branch might be thought rather in

Figure 2.2 Nicolson’s pasted and manuscript additions to Christof Wirsung,

Figure 3.1 Shakespeare’s Works (1623), by permission of the Thomas Fisher

fficium Beate Marie Virginis ad vsum Sarum (Vostre, 1512),

Figure 5.8 Hore beatissime virginis marie ad legitimum Sarisburiensis ecclesie

goodly prymer in englyshe (London, 1538), Folger STC 15998,

Figure 8.1 T homas Hervey’s inscription marking Isabella’s death, on a copy