Early Modern Women's Marginalia

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About the Collection

This collection is part of the research project: 'Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1530-1660'. This project aims to provide an ambitious new literary history of how early modern women read and wrote in the margins of their books, uncovering new texts, practices, writers, and readers across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading is a central mechanism through which the English Renaissance was instituted: a means by which the classical world reached the early modern subject and vernacular textual culture came to flourish. Evidence for how reading operated can be found in the traces readers left behind in their books, including marginal annotations.

These annotations provide not only crucial evidence of reading practice, but also an overlooked source of extraordinary writing. A world of textual activity can be found here: marks, signatures, requests for remembrance, short lyrics, devotional meditations, letters, and extended prose tracts teem in the margins of early modern books and manuscripts, in both scribal and print forms. The margin has emerged as one of the most significant new textual sites of the period, moving from the edges of scholarship to a place of central importance.

However, most scholarship in this field still focuses on men’s use of marginalia, overlooking hundreds of instances of marginal annotation by women. This project will provide the first comprehensive examination of how early modern women readers engaged with the margins of their books. It will radically expand our conception of what constituted early modern women’s writing and how it was circulated. It will also reevaluate, from a new perspective, our understanding of reading, writing, and book use in early modern England and disseminate its findings in new digital forms, bringing together materialist and digital humanities scholarship to create a digital archive enabling future research.  

Introductory FAQs

What is the aim of the project?

By consulting early modern holdings in libraries and archives across the world, this project aims to discover which books early modern women read or owned and how they engaged with those books. We know that male readers frequently annotated their books, but have far less information about the practices of women readers. We therefore hope to find evidence of women’s textual, social and cultural practices through the marginal traces they left on their books. The project is interested in patterns of female book ownership, inscription, annotation, as well as material uses of books such as drawing, record keeping, pen trials and handwriting practice.

Where can I read more about marginalia?

A good starting point would be our blog on the ANU CEMS (Centre of Early Modern Studies) website, here: https://earlymodernwomensmarginalia.cems.anu.edu.au.

Also worth a look is Martine van Elk’s Early Modern Female Book Ownership blog, found here: https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com.

How do we know marginalia is female-authored?

While any marginalia in an early modern book could conceivably be written by a woman, we can only attribute marginalia to a woman who we know owned the book. This is usually evidenced by way of a signature or in some cases a book-plate. It is very common to find signatures in early modern books, often in a formulations like ‘Jane Smith her booke’ or ‘Adam Smith his book’. Our project currently uses three levels of attribution certainty, called: Certain, Probable and Possible. In the case of ‘Jane Smith her booke’, the attribution is Certain. If there is other marginalia that is very clearly in the same handwriting, that would also be Certain.

If there is only one signature in a book—a woman’s signature—and the handwriting styles are not clearly different, we can attribute all the other marginalia in that book as ‘possibly’ or ‘probably’ by the woman listed. If the other annotations in the book are something non-textual, such as pen trials or underlining, then we would add it as a marginal mark but deem it Possible.

What is a mark of recording? Isn’t everything recording?

We use Mark of Recording to refer any textual mark that records information not related to the text. To our eyes these are marks that appear to have used the book as convenient paper stock for other, unrelated information. They are not distinguished from graffiti in that Marks of Recording carry textual information: e.g. the prices of goods, a list of important dates, a calculation, recipes etc.

How can I tell a doodle was done by a woman?

This is often difficult to tell. If there are many different signatures in the books by men and women, we would tend not to include a doodle unless there was evidence it was a female signatory who drew it — e.g. similar hand/ink, proximity of signature to the drawing.

Explainer (Agent, Book, Mark)

The agent is the woman involved in creating a marginal mark.

The mark is the instance of marginalia itself.

The book refers to the volume in which the marginalia is found.

Making of the Collection (Assembling the Library)

We sent a team of researchers to libraries across the world and used existing catalogue data to find annotated volumes, as well as pursuing a number of scholarly best-guesses

Discoveries/Findings

Every piece of marginalia is a discovery, but our project has yielded insights about what kinds of books women frequently annotate, about individual women’s libraries, and about the range of women’s reading practices.