By far the most commonly encountered marginalia by early modern women in print and manuscript texts are marks of ownership, making up around 80% of the database.

These marks can take a surprising variety of forms. The simplest of such forms is signature. Women very often signed their name on the front pastedown, flyleaves or title page of books to denote ownership or possession. Such signatures often are located on a page with the signatures of other agents, names which can be crossed out to indicate a shift in circumstances surrounding the ownership of the book. Women also placed their names on title pages in ways that showed an interest in foregrounding their identities as book owners alongside the other categories of naming found there: author, editor, translator and publisher. They frequently placed their name under that of the author, copying the spacing and layout of the title page. Women also signed the covers of their books and the foredges.

Signatures were usually in the author’s hand and can be compared to other marginal annotations in a volume in order to make attributions. However, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century, as print writing manuals proliferated and calligraphy became a popular practice, women began to sign their books in ways that showcased the mastery of particular hands or imitated other book parts, such as frontispieces:

Women practised their signatures and writing their names, and part or full signatures as well as initials can often be found throughout a book. When located in the margins next to textual passages, such signatures can be evidence of reading, usually when initials mark a significant section of text for a reader. However, it is much more common to find signatures on the blank spaces in a book, singly or repeated in part or whole many times, which indicates the use of available paper to practice writing. Signatures immediately following the end of a text can be a declaration of reading, indicating that the text has been read to completion. End papers and blanks within books often contain partial signatures or signature practice among other marks such as letter practice, again indicating practices of book use rather than statements of ownership.

At the other end of the spectrum, signatures accompanied by the phrase “her book“ are the most emphatic statements of book ownership that we have. Around 20% of the signatures in the database are accompanied by this phrase. Other details accompanying these statements of book ownership include dates, places and even the price of the book; standalone signatures also can contain details of place and date, leading Jason Scott-Warren to associate them with graffiti, an early modern way of marking “I was here.”

Recent work in marginalia studies has expanded what the category consists of, to include traces of objects left in books, such as scissors and spectacles, pasted insertions, and even fragments of plant material woven into the surface of the page. Within the category of marginalia denoting ownership, pasted bookplates also can be thought of as marginalia. Early bookplates were usually armorial, but some, such as that of the book collector John Evelyn, were designed around his initials. Below is the armorial binding of Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent: a form of ownership mark that manipulates the materials of the book to stake her claim.

Rosalind Smith