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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.
A good starting point would be our blog on the ANU CEMS (Centre of Early Modern Studies) website. Also worth a look is Martine van Elk’s Early Modern Female Book Ownership blog.
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.
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 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.
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.