Abstract
For those of us who study the books of times long past — in my case, from England, from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries — we are accustomed to thinking of our sources as the remnant of destruction. The books we study have been used by generations of readers, abused by iconoclasts, reformers and censors, and mistreated by the ebb and flow of esteem and literary fashions. Changing technologies of writing and language caused texts to become out-dated, curious, incomprehensible, rebound or abandoned; the survival rate of medieval English books is estimated to be around 2 to 5 per cent, although a book, if destroyed efficiently, leaves no traces and so this is guesswork.
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Notes
See Haig A. Bosmajian, Burning Books (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006)
See Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, Les manuscrits hébreux dans l’Angleterre médiévale: étude historique et paléographique (Paris: Peeters, 2003).
See Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968)
See Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 23–51
London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 632. See Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 158–60
For a conspectus of such marks, including potent examples of cancelled and excised text from the Middle Ages to the present day, see Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985)
Robin Alston, Books With Manuscript (London: British Library, 1994).
Seymour de Ricci, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, 3 vols. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1935–40), 3.56
Ralph Hanna, ‘The Index of Middle English Verse and the Huntington Library Collections: A Checklist of Addenda’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 74 (1980): 235–58
William Ringler, Bibliography and Index of English Verse in Manuscript 1501–1558 (London: Mansell, 1992), p. 224
William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 15.
H. J. Jackson, ‘“Marginal frivolities”: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote (eds), Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading (New Castle, DE and London: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), pp. 137–52
Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past & Present 129 (1990): 30–78
Stephen Orgel, ‘Margins of Truth’, in Andrew Murphy (ed.), The Renaissance Text: Theory, Editing, Textuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 91–107.
See David Pearson, Provenance Research in Book History (London: British Library, 1994), p. 16
Michael Camille, ‘Glossing the Flesh: Scopophilia and the Margins of the Medieval Book’, in David C. Greetham (ed.), The Margins of the Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), pp. 245–68
H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 14.
For stimulating discussions of the uses of marginalia in early reading, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 135–46
Sabrina Alcorn Baron, ‘Red Ink and Black Letter: Reading Early Modern Authority’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron (ed.), The Reader Revealed (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp. 19–29.
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© 2014 Anthony Bale
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Bale, A. (2014). Belligerent Literacy, Bookplates and Graffiti: Dorothy Helbarton’s Book. In: Partington, G., Smyth, A. (eds) Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367662_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367662_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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