Early Modern Women's Marginalia

The Early Modern Women’s Marginalia Library is a database of the marks that Anglophone women made in printed books between 1530 and 1680, drawing from over a hundred repositories across the world. It presents the data from a wider project exploring, at scale, how early modern women engaged with the margins of books. What kind of marginal marks did they make most frequently? What hands did they use? Where did they position their marginalia within the material book and to what purposes? What kinds of books were most frequently annotated?

Bringing together details about the agents, the marginalia, and the books they marked, the database encourages users to explore the rich world of early modern women’s marginalia through individual instances, larger categories, and aggregated views, opening up this corpus for further research and analysis.

Items you would like to explore further can be added to a shelf in your own digital library: Your Collection. Each item can then be viewed with all the metadata about mark, book and agent at once, alongside images of the marginalia where available.