Folger Deep Dives: Memory, marginalia, and the art of reading, V.b.32 and beyond

While visiting the Folger Shakespeare Library during the summer of 2016, I encountered a 14th century copy of Aristotle’s Physica, V.b.32 (ca. 1300), now fully digitized thanks to the OPenn project ¹. This text is remarkable, not (or not only) because of its content, age, or rarity but because of the way early readers marked it: the margins contain familiar readers’ marks, such as annotations and manicules, but they also contain small, skillfully and intricately drawn images of dogs, pigs, fish, snakes, and even full human bodies and faces.

Scholars have studied the marginalia of individual authors like Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, and Ben Jonson to better understand their reading habits and creative processes.² Others have studied the countless marks made by anonymous readers to understand how the average reader read their books and how reading practices changed over time.³ The marginalia in V.b.32 belong to a special class of readers’ marks that raise questions about how premodern readers’ relationship to the text may have differed from our own: why would readers leave images or drawings in the margins—what function did they serve? What, if any, relationship do the drawings have to the content of the text? When did readers stop marking their texts with marginal images, and why?

The medieval book historian, Mary Carruthers, has analyzed marginal images like these in manuscripts from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and has argued that they are not just doodles. In fact, these readers’ marks, which are exquisitely detailed and skillfully drawn, are memory devices.⁴ Historical evidence suggests that many readers memorized the texts they read, in whole or in part. Before the introduction of printed texts, books were too expensive to own privately and reading was a communal activity. Techniques for remembering what one read, given limited access, were key. Such techniques were originally described by classical authors like Cicero and Quintilian. Their works on oratory recommended that rhetoricians use an architectural space—often called a “memory palace” today—to organize and remember parts of a speech in the right order. These techniques became more advanced over time, and methods designed for public speaking transformed during the medieval period into methods of reading. Among the techniques developed to facilitate memorization directly from the page were the creation of small images to help make the page distinct in memory. Instead of flipping back to find a passage, early readers relied on memory to visualize it. At least two readers annotated V.b.32 and one of them left the kinds of detailed, visual images that readers of the late medieval period used as part of their artificial memory practices.

In a survey of over fifty rare books and manuscripts, I discovered that readers continued using these techniques for marking their texts well into the fifteenth, and even sixteenth centuries. Many early printed texts—known as incunabula or incunables—retain design elements of medieval manuscripts, as book historians have noted. But readers, too, continued to mark their printed texts much as they had manuscripts: INC P722 (1481), a late fifteenth-century printed edition of Pliny’s Natural History, contains many readers’ marks, including snakes, manicules, and decorative brackets, and even human faces. INC S334 (1478) is another incunable that has been hand-illuminated in red and blue. A reader has drawn faces in the counters of several large capitals. INC G25 (1486) has two faces drawn in the margins, in addition to several elegantly drawn manicules and other symbols. INC H157 (1488) has several figurative brackets—the reader has drawn lines around the passage to-be-marked and turned the brackets in the margin into faces, each one distinct. INC B683 (1491) has one of the more bizarre iterations of this practice—a reader has drawn a manicule holding a tree branch, but instead of leaves, small heads with faces are growing on it. More faces can be found in PA6791 .V6 1502 Cage (1502) and STC 17109 c.1 (1505). Many of these marginalia are noted in the Folger’s catalogue as in an “early hand,” but it is hard to date them with precision. Although I cannot say whether they were made before a certain date, we know they were made after the date of publication, which means that these holdings all post-date the manuscripts that Mary Carruthers has studied and are excellent examples of how readers continued to use the practices she describes even after the advent of print and increasing popularity of the commonplace book.

INC P722 is of special interest to me, both because of the wonderful and weird faces peering out from the edges of the text but also because the Huntington Library has a copy of a similar text—Solinus’ De situ et memorabilibus orbis capitula (1473)—with beautifully and skillfully drawn marginal images. These two incunabula offer scholars a useful pairing for comparison: both date to within a decade of each other—Folger INC P722 to 1481 and Huntington 104035 to 1473; both contain manuscript reader’s marks; both are natural histories, in whole or in part; and both are printed. What distinguishes them is that the images in the Huntington’s text bear a semantic relationship to the content of text—that is, the images depict what the text describes. The image of a “bonacus,” for example—a fantastical beast with the body of a horse, horns of a ram, and which “saves itself by running away, meanwhile emitting a trail of dung that sometimes covers a distance of as much as three furlongs, contact with which scorches pursuers like a sort of fire” as Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History (see LCL 353: 33)—appears in the bottom margin of the page just below this description, accompanied by a marginal note labeled “Bonacus.”⁵ The Folger text, by contrast uses marginal images in ways that do not have any semantic relationship to the text. In this respect, the Folger’s INC P722 is typical—the Huntington’s 104035 is an odd rarity.

Drawings and images do gradually disappear from the margins of books, although manicules, trefoils, and decorative brackets persist much longer than faces, animals, and human figures. Why did readers stop marking their texts with images? Ann Moss has argued that commonplace books gradually replaced the art of memory—she documents a shift away from memorization and toward reference as the predominant information management tool. The loci or places of memory gave way to the loci communes of the Renaissance commonplace book, and with them the marginal memory images of earlier readers.⁶ My own research into the relationship between marginal images in early books, the art of memory, and commonplacing aims to give a more definitive answer to this and other questions about strange and wonderful marginalia in the Folger collections.