Every archive is unique. From the broad sweep of a legal deposit library to the idiosyncratic selections of an individual book collector, when it comes to repositories, it’s impossible to generalise. This has important consequences for marginalia and for identifying where one is likely to find it.
The Library of Early Modern Women’s Marginalia tracks more than a hundred repositories: from the Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand through National Trust houses to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. Only in the smallest of these archives has our primary team consulted all relevant printed books in our period (these are Merton College Library and Regent’s Park College in Oxford). We expect more books from more repositories to be added during the crowd-sourcing period.
Just as each book is unique, so too are the repositories that hold them. Due to the initial parameters of our project, the repositories we selected were primarily in university settings. Even there, however, collections vary. The Bodleian library, at Oxford University, is the fortunate legatee of many individual collectors, whose own interests and principles create pockets of abundance, as in the case of Richard Rawlinson’s 5205 bound manuscripts. Books in the Bodleian gifted by collectors tend to have moved through more hands before reaching the collection, and are therefore more likely to contain marginalia.
Conversely, similarly august institutions like the library at Merton College, Oxford, primarily acquired their early modern books at the time of their initial publication. This means that, if those volumes were thumbed and annotated it was by Merton students, dons, and scholars; as most Oxford and Cambridge colleges did not admit women until the twentieth century, these would have been men. As such it proves an unlikely port-of-call for women’s marginalia – and yet: there are still hidden gems at Merton whose existence poses fascinating questions about their origins and accession.
Some individual collections have specific focuses, like John Emmerson’s emphasis on Caroline England and the English Civil War period, now held in the State Library of Victoria. This repository has helped us to challenge the assumption that women did not typically annotate political texts or pamphlets; thanks to the Emmerson collection among others, we now have evidence to the contrary.
When it comes to repositories, nothing beats a thorough look, page-by-page. After all, that is the work that underpins most of the entries in this database. Nonetheless some generalisations are possible. Our project so far suggests it is more useful to consider an archive as containing a number of subsets based on means of accession. For example, it is useful to identify individual collectors, when books entered the collection, and their process of acquisition. (Of course, this information is not always available or reliable). Some collectors habitually replaced often annotated front-and back-boards and erased any historical traces; this habit once identified might be a sign to reprioritise your time in the archive. This habit appears common in the 19th century, which might guide researchers with limited time or resources. Conversely, rare book purchases in recent decades have come to recognise the historical value of unique annotations and tracking those purchases or purchasers can be a promising start. As with all archival research, persistence is key!
Whether governed by institutions, committees, or individual collectors, repositories tell a story. The story that the Library of Early Modern Women’s Marginalia sets out to tell is a new one: how early modern women used their books — and about where those books have ended up. We hope users of the Library will contribute their own findings to expand and enrich this evolving narrative [links to crowd-sourcing].
Jake Arthur