Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England

By William H. Sherman

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition.

William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers.

Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present.

This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Nov 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9780812203448

Book preview

Used Books

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

Roger Chartier

Joan DeJean

Joseph Farrell

Anthony Grafton

Janice Radway

Peter Stallybrass

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Used Books

Marking Readers in Renaissance England

WILLIAM H. SHERMAN

Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4043-6

ISBN-10: 0-8122-4043-X

For Claire, my ideal reader

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

PART I. OF MARKS AND METHODS

1. Introduction: Used Books

2. : Toward a History of the Manicule

3. Reading the Matriarchive

PART II. READING AND RELIGION

4. The Book thus put in every vulgar hand: Marking the Bible

5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

PART III. REMARKABLE READERS

6. John Dee’s Columbian Encounter

7. Sir Julius Caesar’s Search Engine

PART IV. RENAISSANCE READERS AND MODERN COLLECTORS

8. Dirty Books? Attitudes Toward Readers’ Marks

Afterword: The Future of Past Readers

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Preface

In 1985, Roger Stoddard published his seminal catalogue, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained, and his opening sentences set an agenda that has challenged a generation of scholars, librarians, conservators, and collectors: When we handle books sensitively, observing them closely so as to learn as much as we can from them, we discover a thousand little mysteries. . . . In and around, beneath and across them we may find traces . . . that could teach us a lot if we could make them out.¹ Over the last two decades, students from across the humanities and information sciences have been increasingly concerned with making out, and making sense of, the mysterious marks that get left behind in books as and after they are produced.² Stoddard’s book coincided with—and to some extent helped to initiate—a new phase in the history of reading as a proper discipline (or interdiscipline), in which readers’ marks featured as a general source of evidence for a wide range of practices, moving well beyond the traditional interest in erudite commentary and the narrow search for the signatures and source materials of famous writers.³

My own work in this field began with a famous (or rather infamous) reader, the Elizabethan polymath John Dee.⁴ In studying Dee’s massive library and the active uses to which he put it, I worked very closely with one particular category of readers’ marks: manuscript marginalia, or notes written in the margins and other blank spaces of texts. My project on Dee has taken its place in what is now a substantial series of case studies: these have been devoted either to the marginalia and related notes produced by individual readers (including Gabriel Harvey, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, William Blount, William Drake, Michel de Montaigne, Johannes Kepler, and Guillaume Budé)⁵ or to the notes by different readers in multiple copies of a single text (Heidi Brayman Hackel has devoted a chapter to the readers’ marks in 151 copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, and Heather Jackson to the marginalia in 386 copies of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, while Owen Gingerich has published a best-selling book on his thirty-year hunt for annotations in all of the 600 surviving copies of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus).⁶ But there has been a pressing need for bigger pictures and broader brush-strokes. Jonathan Rose’s frustrations are typical among recent reviewers of work in this field:

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

While this book makes no claim to a disciplinary epiphany, it is the product of many eureka moments; and the isolated traces upon which it rests do yield some larger patterns and a more systematic sense of how a wider group of readers used a wider range of books than in previous accounts of pre-modern marginalia.

In pursuit of a preliminary database for such an overview, I carried out a reasonably comprehensive survey of one of the world’s major repositories of English Renaissance books—the more than 7,500 volumes printed between 1475 and 1640 that make up the so-called STC collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.⁸ I searched for traces left behind by early readers and, while I tried to take note of the presence of owners’ signatures and of nonverbal markings, I was primarily concerned with more substantial annotations.⁹ I have since conducted a similar study of the much smaller but no less interesting collection of books and manuscripts created by Archbishop Matthew Parker and bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (where it is now housed in the library bearing his name); and I have followed up these systematic surveys with smaller-scale studies of other readers and materials in a number of collections on both sides of the Atlantic.

Like other scholars who have caught the marginalia bug, I have been astonished by the sheer volume of notes produced by early readers. More than one in five of the Huntington’s early printed books preserve the notes of early readers (and for certain subjects and in certain decades the proportion is far higher), and the annotations in many books from the Rosenthal collection are so thorough they threaten to overwhelm the text: one extraordinary copy of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, printed in Leipzig circa 1500, has some 59,600 words of annotation on its 68 pages; and the nearly 50,000 words of marginalia in a 1516 Bible are limited to only 41 pages (producing a tally of more than 1,200 manuscript words per page), where they are often found piled three or four deep between lines of the printed text.¹⁰ I have been equally astonished by the variety of techniques, habits, and interests they document, and if I manage to convey even part of that variety in the chapters that follow then I will consider this book a success. These notes represent a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers that we have only begun to explore, and it is the primary purpose of this book to make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to new and experienced scholars alike.

Anyone who turns to marginalia with high hopes of easy answers quickly discovers that the evidence they contain turns out to be (if not always thin, scattered, and ambiguous) peculiarly difficult to locate, decipher, and interpret. As this book took shape I found myself not only gathering stories about specific readers and readings but also grappling with a series of methodological problems—and throughout this book I will keep one eye on what we can learn from readers’ marks and another on what we need to learn, unlearn, and relearn in order to do so. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 1, part of the problem lies in the very terms traditionally used to define this area of study, and that is why I have (somewhat perversely) avoided the words marginalia and reading in my title—even though this is a study of both of those things. These terms tend to bring with them a set of modern cultural assumptions and disciplinary tools that do not fit well with the evidence that survives from the pre-modern archive. The largely literary and mostly modern framework that has allowed Heather Jackson to write brilliantly about marginalia in the best general book on the subject defines these readers’ notes as witty, personal, and directly responsive to the text.¹¹ But the notes produced by Renaissance readers are both disappointing in these terms and unexpectedly rich in others. Literary texts turned out (on the whole) to be annotated far less frequently than those used by the period’s lawyers and far less wittily than those involved in the period’s religious controversies. Renaissance readers tended to be more systematic and less psychologically revealing than post-Romantic readers. And a large percentage of the notes produced by readers had no obvious connection with the text they accompanied—but nonetheless testified to the place of that book in the reader’s social life, family history, professional practices, political commitments, and devotional rituals.¹²

As for reading, I have come—like Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio—to prefer the language of use.¹³ And, like them, I have taken my cue from Renaissance texts such as Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems, which features a poetic lesson dedicated to the Cambridge scholar Andrew Perne under the motto, Usus libri, non lectio prudentes facit [The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise] (Figure 1):

The volumes great, who so doth still peruse,

And dailie turnes, and gazeth on the same,

If that the fruicte thereof, he do not vse,

He reapes but toile, and never gaineth fame:

First reade, then marke, then practise that is good,

For without use, we drinke but LETHE flood.¹⁴

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

I am partly acknowledging the fact that not all of the uses to which books can be put should be described as reading. I am also trying to avoid that word’s associations with particular protocols and etiquettes—including privacy, linearity, and cleanliness. I am endorsing Stoddard’s suggestion that textual scholars must also be anthropologists and archaeologists, putting books alongside the other objects that can help us to reconstruct the material, mental, and cultural worlds of our forebears: traces of wear can tell us how artifacts were used by human beings. Books no less than tools, apparel, and habitats can show signs of wear, but their markings can be far more eloquent of manufacturing processes, specific of provenance, telling of human relations, and suggestive of human thought.¹⁵ And, finally, I am attempting to take us closer to the Renaissance period’s own surprisingly rich vocabulary for book use (in which the word use is itself crucial—as Whitney’s emblem suggests and as we shall see in virtually every chapter below).

One of Gabriel Harvey’s elaborate and self-reflexive marginal notes in his copy of Peter Ramus’s Œconomia will suffice to suggest that modern readers and scholars of reading have lost some of the scope and sophistication of the Renaissance period’s framework (linguistic, conceptual, and technical) for using books:

This whole booke, written & printed, of continual & perpetual use: & therefore continually, and perpetually to be meditated, practiced, and incorporated into my boddy, & sowle.

In A serious & practicable Studdy, better any on[e] chapter, perfectly & thorowghly digested, for praesent practis, as occasion shall requier: then A whole volume, greedily deuowrid, & rawly concoctid. . . .

No sufficient, or hable furniture, gotten by unperfect posting, or superficial overrunning: or halfelearning: but by perpetual meditations, repetitions, recognitions, recapitulations, reiterations, and ostentations of most practicable points, sounde and deepe imprinting as well in ye memory, as in the understanding: for praegnant & curious reddines, at euery le[a]st occasion. Every Rule of value, and euery poynt of vse, woold be continually recognised, and perpetually eternised in your witt, & memory.¹⁶

The Elizabethans evidently had as many words for reading as the proverbial Eskimo has for snow.

In an essay on reading practices in ancient Greece, Simon Goldhill has called for a Literary History without Literature. He objects to the destructive poverty of the category of ‘literature’ for the way in which the critical engagement with language production and consumption functions in the ancient world. The establishment of the sphere of the literary with its various exclusions does not merely distort the interconnections between the texts of poetry, say, and the other textual productions of the ancient world, but also thoroughly twists the connections between those texts and the culture in which and for which they were produced.¹⁷ To the extent that the same can be said for reading, perhaps it is time to call for a history of reading without reading?

The definition of reading—and the range of agents and activities it has been used to describe—has, at any rate, progressively narrowed since the word entered the English language. The Teutonic root word raedan’s primary senses of deliberating, advising, and governing have all fallen away, as have most of the meanings of the Latin verb legere—the source of many English words related to reading, such as lecture, lesson, and legend. Legere originally referred to a broad cluster of activities involving observing and pursuing, in which the taking in of texts was neither the earliest nor the most dominant meaning; and many of the mental and physical activities it covered—including gathering, choosing, overhearing, stealing, wandering, and tracking—now survive only in specialized applications or metaphorical associations (some of which are reactivated in Michel de Certeau’s suggestive essay Reading as Poaching).¹⁸

The marks left behind by Harvey, and the words he used to describe the practices that generated them, bear eloquent witness to the fact that, while there are some basic continuities in the ways in which people process texts, almost every aspect of reading has undergone profound historical transformations as we have moved from a culture in which readers take hold of texts for specific purposes to one in which texts generally take hold of readers who may not be looking for anything beyond a good read. Who is allowed to read and how are they trained to read? Using which techniques and tools? What forms do texts take and through which parts of the body are they meant to be experienced? What kinds of texts are available to what kinds of readers and how do they gain access to them? Which spaces are appropriate for reading and which are inappropriate? The answers to these questions vary from context to context, and the conditions and practices that we have come to associate with reading turn out to be far from universal.

Historians of books and readers have uncovered a series of general developments that mark significant changes in what is possible and (to some extent) what is normal for readers to do. They are usually formulated as from . . . to narratives and sometimes characterized as revolutions, but they should not be seen as absolute rules governing all reading at a given time or place, or as immediate and unidirectional shifts. As Roger Chartier has forcefully and repeatedly argued, these factors always constrain but never completely determine the responses of specific readers to specific texts.¹⁹ They are better approached, therefore, as a set of mental, material, and spatial parameters within which specific acts of reading can be placed. This study contains lesson after lesson on the ineluctable specificity of readers and readings, and it is this (I would suggest) rather than the fragmentary nature of the evidence that makes marginalia resistant to grand theories and master narratives. Readers’ marks are better at providing examples (and still better at providing counterexamples) than general rules; but if we cast our net widely they can reveal both large-scale patterns of use and extraordinary encounters of individuals and their books. The former can correct some of our most deep-seated assumptions about reading and readers. And the latter, if we are patient and lucky, can help us to solve some of the thousand little mysteries contained in Renaissance books.

One such mystery was posed by one of the very first books I examined in the survey that began this book, and it was not solved until I returned to it more than a decade later, as the book was in its final stages—and it will serve as an emblem for the signs of life (and death) in the margins it sets out to explore. In 1583, William Cecil (Lord Burghley) published an official defense of the execution of Edmund Campion and other Catholics in 1581: it was entitled The Execution of Justice in England and its argument was captured in its running title, Execution for treason, and not for religion.²⁰ In 1584, Cardinal William Allen wrote a point-by-point rebuttal on behalf of the English Catholic community: it was entitled A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics That Suffer for Their Faith Both at Home and Abroad Against a False, Seditious and Slanderous Libel entitled The Execution of Justice in England.²¹ Although the mere possession of this text was grounds for imprisonment (and its distribution for execution), a heavily annotated copy survives at the Huntington Library (Figure 2). The annotator was careful to record a patriotic disclaimer on the title page: To be redd & vsed for ye Service of God, Q Elizabethe, & the peace of Englande, & for No other purpose, Or Cause. He also subjected the book to a point-by-point rebuttal on behalf (once again) of the English Crown: he began by adding a subversive preface to the title, "A false, sediccoos, & immodest offense: sett ovt by English traytors abroade (& svmme at home) Groaning for the Gallows, vnder Collor & Shaddowe off [A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense . . .]." There are vehemently Protestant notes throughout the text, and wherever such a note is found it is marked by a red silk thread that has been sewn through the margins: while tabs and threads were often inserted in medieval manuscripts to serve as finding aids for new sections of the text, this is the only place I have seen them used to help a reader find his way back to his own marginalia (Figure 3).

But who was that reader? This book passed to the Huntington as part of the Bridgewater Collection—which suggested that it once belonged to Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere. And since the notes were consistent with Egerton’s role as Queen Elizabeth’s solicitor general, I assumed they were produced by him. But the striking hands with sharply pointing fingers (what I will call manicules in Chapter 2 below) drawn in the margin next to roughly half of the notes stayed in my mind, and they ignited a spark of recognition as I saw them again in a manuscript account of The examination of Jesuits and Seminary priests from 1587, exhibited at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2004—which also featured a grisly sketch of a gallows in the margin next to the name of a prisoner marked for death.²² And when I again called up the Huntington’s copy of Allen’s book during a visit in the spring of 2005, I found a new note by a recent reader, Frank Brownlow, explaining that the marginalia were not by Egerton but rather in the hand—and spelling—of Richard Topcliffe, pursuivant, torturer, Queen’s servant, &c. And this in turn reminded Alexandra Walsham (with whom I was examining the book) of a haunting passage in J. E. Neale’s Elizabeth I and her Parliaments concerning

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

that curious, sadistic gentleman, Richard Topcliffe; a man of birth, education and religious zeal, who revelled in his official task of torturing Catholics. His strange character remains portrayed for us in marginal comments written in his copy of an Italian history of the English Reformation, where from time to time he drew pictures of gallows, for the author and William Allen and for his Pope, Clement VII, The viper; the villain; the bastard; I wished that I had this Doctor in Westminster Hall without weapon, and the author of this book in St. John’s Wood with my two-handed sword: these are samples of his private exuberance.²³

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

What had earlier struck me as witty rebuttals, artful manicules, and quaint red threads took on a sinister edge as I imagined the notorious Topcliffe torturing Elizabethan Catholics, marking their arguments with his accusing fingers, and perforating their pages with needles trailing crimson strings.

I will close this preface by making some suggestions for using this particular book. Readers who have a general interest in the history of books and reading, and those who have not yet read or thought much about the subject of marginalia, may want to turn to the last chapter (Chapter 8) first: it provides a more accessible introduction to the range of possible investments in the topic than the more specialized survey offered by my opening chapter, and it poses more sharply the complex question of our own attitudes toward writing in books. Readers coming from specific corners of Renaissance studies may want to enter the book via the chapter that most closely engages with their interests—Chapter 2 for books, bodies, and symbols; Chapter 3 for women, memory, and household management; Chapters 4 and 5 for reading and religion; Chapter 6 for navigation and exploration; and Chapter 7 for politics and law. If my research on readers’ marks has taught me anything, however, it is that you will do what you want or need to do, regardless of my attempts to inform or control you.

Bookes receiue their doome according to the Readers capacity.

—Classical aphorism (Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli), as rendered in the preface To the Reader in William Camden’s Britain (1610)

. . . the human hand finds it very hard to give up the elusive possession of sense. . . . something is at work to restore life to inert inscription.

—Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant (1999)

Part I

Of Marks and Methods

Chapter 1

Introduction: Used Books

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

How to Read a Book, Circa 1600

Taking note was often a matter of making notes; and Renaissance readers were not only allowed to write notes in and on their books, they were taught to do so in school.² Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia (quoted in my preface above) describe the active practices used by one of the period’s most advanced scholars in marking the texts he deemed useful. But from John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), one of the period’s most influential handbooks for teaching young students to read and write, it is clear that the same methods—and the language used to describe them—were introduced at an early age:

difficult words, or matters of speciall obseruation, [which] they doe reade in any Author, [should] be marked out; I meane all such words or things as eyther are hard to them in the learning of them, or which are of some speciall excellency, or vse. . . . For the marking of them, to doe it with little lines vnder them, or aboue them, or against such partes of the word wherein the difficulty lieth, or by some prickes, or whatsoeuer letter or marke may best helpe to cal the knowledge of the thing to remembrance. . . . To doe this, to the end that they may oft-times reade ouer these, or examine and meditate of them more seriously, vntill that they be as perfect in them, as in any of the rest of their bookes: for hauing these then haue they all.³

When working with Latin texts, Brinsley suggests that beginning readers should take the time to "note the Declension with a d, ouer the head, and a figure signifying which Declension, The Coniugation with a c, and a figure, and so on. As they proceede to higher fourmes, Brinsley continues, they should marke onely those [things] which haue most difficulty, as Notations, Deriuations, figuratiue Constructions, Tropes, Figures, and the like: and what they feare they cannot remember by a marke, cause them to write those in the Margent in a fine hand, or in some little booke." These blank notebooks could also be used for compiling glossaries of difficult Latin words,⁴ as well as for digesting sermons.⁵

The reason for all this methodical marking—what a printed marginal note signals as The ends of marking their bookes—was that the students shall keepe their Authours, which they haue learned (140–41). Such annotations are, then, first and foremost an aid to the memory, which is the reason that you shall [find] the choysest bookes of most great learned men, & the most notablest students, all marked through thus (46). But in Brinsley’s teaching, the knowledge stored up is not just to be kept in mind but put into use: "Legere & non intellegere negligere est. To read and not to vnderstand what wee read, or not to know how to make vse of it, is nothing else but a neglect of all good learning, and a meere abuse of the means & helps to attaine the same (42). As in Whitney’s emblem on the scholar Andrew Perne (whose motto reminds us that The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise"), reading is just part of the process that makes for fruitful interaction with books. Only with marking and practice can books lead us to the kind of understanding needed to make them speak to our present needs.

Appropriately enough, the Huntington Library’s copy of this text has been carefully marked by someone named Thomas Barney. In preparing for his own work in the Renaissance classroom, Barney puts Brinsley’s annotational precepts into action. In the book’s cramped margins, he either summarizes Brinsley’s teaching or expands upon it: for instance, next to Brinsley’s definition of the phrase (147), Barney writes, a phrase is nothing ells but an apt and fitt composeinge and connectinge of words for elegancie and sweettnes of methode or stylle: that it maie be like Orpheus harpe to moue or rauish ye hearers or readers, and next to Brinsley’s first use of the word gloss (176), Barney enters a gloss of his own, a greco. it signifieth a tongue, alsoe an exposition of a darke speech. And he uses the blank flyleaves to distill Brinsley’s scattered advice on a number of subjects, including the best methods for translatinge into latine, the chief differences between transitive and intransitive verbs, and the most useful texts for teaching young readers, writers, and speakers: "Tullies sentences to teach schollars to make latine

Reviews for Used Books

[rheaphine · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sherman's book is engaging and information-dense. The organization is clear and logical. Sherman's theoretical and methodological frameworks are discussed and made somewhat transparent; he does not leave the reader guessing about his work's placement in the field. His notes are generous and extremely helpful, especially for those readers who intend to access the many works he discusses. He gives shelf marks and locations for all items in his notes and repeats this information (by location and format) in his bibliography. Especially of late I've been reading heavily about book and reading history, with a focus on the early modern period in England. While I am familiar with many of the names and works mentioned, I still learned a number of surprising and interesting things. Sherman spends a good amount of time on the pointing hand/finger used by annotators. He makes it clear that this is not a topic generally treated in other works, but points to other works that mention it, even if they don't go into great detail.Sherman is certainly a very aware and conscientious researcher and writer. He is sensitive to the gendered nature of much historical work. He has an entire chapter devoted to women reader/annotators. When discussing anonymous annotators, Sherman is careful in one instance to stop and "unpack" his use of masculine pronouns (p. 96). Unfortunately, this is inconsistent. Later, in another discussion of a different anonymous annotator, Sherman is not so transparent (p. 152). This was disappointing to me; I could not find any mention of why Sherman assumed (?) this writer to be male. Sherman also has a tendency to both assert the inability to discover intentionality and yet ascribe intention to a particular mark or comment (cf. p. 77--Eliz I and crossing out). This happens throughout the text, but never excessively. More transparency would be helpful here--if there is something in the work with which he is interacting that suggests intention (heavier ink, etc.) that would be both interesting and helpful to this overall argument about the slipperiness of work with marginalia.Overall, I found myself annotating Sherman's book as I went. Before I finished it, I was looking forward to re-reading it. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in marginalia, early reading, commonplace books, responses to the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, women readers, John Dee, and early systems used for marking books. Sherman covers a wide range of topics but manages to keep his focus and point the reader to other work that complements and extends his own.This book is part of the University of Pennsylvania Press Material Texts series; I looked at the complete series list and would recommend going there after (or before or while) reading Sherman.