ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, work on early modern literature has been animated by a number of influential studies of handwritten annotations in books, works that take as their subject the manicules, the underlinings, the trefoils, the disputatious hecklings that light up many early modern pages. 1 Indeed, such has been the influence of this area of study that questions about the reception of texts via the category of the historical reader have become one of the dominant ways of responding to early modern texts, enacted at all levels of study, from undergraduate essays to scholarly monographs. But like all active fields of enquiry, work in this field is also characterized by a number of unresolved questions and problems, and I hope in this chapter to bring some of these to the critical surface. The subject of this chapter is not handwritten annotations but the marks or remnants of objects left in books, the subject of little sustained scholarly discussion, except for a suggestive but brief exhibition catalogue by Roger Stoddard in 1985. 2 As I hope to show, thinking about these beguiling but also unyielding traces can help us approach the larger field of book annotations afresh. The troubling status of object marks can help clarify some of the assumptions that have underpinned work on marginalia more generally.
