ABSTRACT
Books are designed to arrive in the hands of a reader. Having examined various aspects of knowledge presentation by book producers in the previous chapters, we will now turn to early modern readers, to investigate how they engaged with illustrated books on medicine and astrology. What do the marks that readers left behind tell us about their purposes and interests, and what did they do with the images? What do we know about the identity of these readers? This chapter analyses owners’ marks, annotations, and other traces of use from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discusses the value and the limits of this type of source for reconstructing early modern reading practices. The analysis reveals how readers customised their books through interventions in texts, images, and in the book as a three-dimensional object.
