These 39 categories include broad thematic taxonomies of book type (political, religious, legal, meditational, medical, household, history, travel, leisure, literary, science, philosophy); overarching formal categories (poetry, drama) and more granular generic and sub-generic categories (sermon, biography, religious treatise, classical text, biography, commonplace book, sermon, polemic, romance, conduct book, meditation, letters, liturgy, reference, dictionary, essay, allegory, legacy, psalm book, prayer book, book of hours, dictionary, Bible, satire, prophecy, financial records, music, elegy, concordance, cookery). Books usually belong to more than one category (eg. religious, Bible). We also identify when annotated texts are female-authored and non-English. Our metadata also contains information about book size, and other bibliographic details such as place and date of publication that can be searched in combination with other metadata.
What kinds of books did early modern women most commonly mark? As we continue to add marginalia to the database, the visualisation below will change. However, this is a view of the 1384 books consulted to date according to book type, showing that religious books are have the most women’s marginalia, but that history, literary, conduct and commonplace books were also categories of book often marked by women:
We can also view the database through book size, showing that women marked smaller books far more frequently than large ones:
Viewing the book metadata by date provides evidence that the frequency of women’s marginalia increased throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the number of books printed increased and women’s literacy rates grew.
The search page of the library allows you to visualise your own facets of the database through views that can be customised to your research. If you are interested in ownership marks, for example, you can view ownership marks and book genre together, sorted (if you wish) by book genre and coloured by book size: