Some readers may have had experiences like mine over the years: waggish colleagues, usually in the sciences, engineering, or the business school, will ask after learning that one's profession is medieval studies, "What's new in the Middle Ages?" The implicit joke is that nothing could possibly be new in medieval studies. After a few experiences of this sort, I learned to come back with a cheery and confident reply: "Why, prosopography is revolutionizing the field!" Over the years I changed the operative new thing to include gender studies, new criticism, ethnogenesis, textual communities, diagrams, the politics of dreaming, emotions, memory, communication, digitization, and even metal detectors. Others will remember additional new perspectives that have enriched our investigations of an essentially finite body of material. Now comes "scholarship on the edge," a new look at evidence in manuscripts that has been in plain sight, but not fully appreciated for what it can tell us about the interactions between medieval readers and their manuscript texts. The new evidence consists of annotations, technical signs, and a host of direct interventions in manuscripts that enable us to understand better than ever before what medieval readers were thinking, debating, learning, or just puzzling over. True, many scholars over the years have produced fine studies of marginal annotations, but what sets current work on "marginal scholarship" apart is its concentrated focus on practices of reading and writing and the development of an associated nomenclature and taxonomy to describe those practices. The credit for developing this new thing in medieval studies falls squarely on the Department for the History of Knowledge of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands which housed the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research-funded project, "Marginal Scholarship: The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800-c. 1000)" that Mariken Teeuwen directed from 2011 to 2016. The Annotated Book brings together twenty-six richly illustrated papers presented at a three-day conference in The Hague in June 2015. That the conference resulted in a volume the editors described as "considerably bulkier than we had anticipated" (2) testifies to the interest and richness of marginal scholarship. Given the focus of the research agenda, the essays in the collection cohere remarkably well. Each is original, deeply researched, and often provocative. And each one offers a model that one might apply to other topics, authors, or manuscripts. The Annotated Book is a pioneering collection that will be cited for years and, best of all, produce even more work. But, those meaty studies cannot possibly be reviewed in detail here. Titles and a pithy description of the essays will need to suffice for a sense of the range of topics and the variety of research strategies employed.
Section I, "Scholars and Their Books: Practices and Methods of Annotating," opens with Teeuwen's own "Voices from the Edge: Annotating Books in the Carolingian Period" (13-36), which describes the genesis of the project, the impact of the ready availability of digitized manuscripts, and the conceptual tools developed during the project to use annotations as sources for medieval intellectual life. Her essay describes in broad strokes the principal findings of the project's database of 353 manuscripts (https://www.marginalscholarship.nl; accessed September 24, 2018). Evina Steinová, who as a PhD student worked on the project, contributed "Technical Signs in Early Medieval Manuscripts Copied in Irish Minuscule" (37-85). [1] This study surveys 13 manuscripts written in Irish minuscule script to detect patterns in the use of technical signs (crosses; lege signs; quotation signs; chrismons; m- and T-shaped signs, etc.). She found that "early medieval Irish readers were vigorous users of technical signs" (65), that they used signs peculiar to their community, but that they also used Carolingian signs. Irish signs copied by Carolingian scribes in non-Irish manuscripts can point to Irish prototypes. Giorgia Vocino studied one of the Irish manuscripts in her "A Peregrinus's Vade Mecum: MS Bern 363 and the 'Circle of Sedulius Scottus'" (87-123). Also known as the "Bern Horace," this complex manuscript bears many different texts and many layers of annotations. Vocino's reading of the layout and notes suggests that much of the manuscript's contents and annotations derived from an earlier book connected to Sedulius Scottus, but that the scholar who owned it added his own observations to its margins, including references to Lorsch and Liège. In Vocino's view, the book is not a slavish imitation of an exemplar, but a copy that continued to evolve in the hands of its owner who not only consulted the book but designed and copied it as well. Warren Pezé used a known author as an important case study of how Carolingian scholars composed their works in his "The Making of the De praedestinatione of Ratramnus of Corbie (Including the Identification of a New Personal Manuscript)" (125-155). Ratramnus had a team of assistants follow his marginal instructions when they copied excerpts from earlier authorities. Fortunately, many of the manuscripts from which Ratramnus drew inspiration survive, enabling Pezé virtually to peer over Ratramnus's shoulder as he marked usque and usque hic or Nota as he read. That he used two systems of signaling excerpts speaks to Ratramnus's different compositional goals. The survival of manuscripts authors used when preparing their own works also allowed Giacomo Vignodelli, "The Making of a Tenth-Century Self-Commentary: The Glosses to Atto of Vercelli's Perpendiculum and Their Sources" (157-196), to vindicate nearly 2900 glosses to Atto's deliberately obscure work as the bishop's own and to demonstrate how integrated the three parts of Atto's composition are. In commenting on his own text, Atto drew on sources that link him to ninth-century intellectual traditions.
Section II, "Textual Scholarship by Means of Annotation," focuses on studies of "annotations added for a philological or text-critical purpose" (5). Franck Cinato, "The Earliest Anonymous Exposition of Priscian: Two Manuscripts and Their Glosses" (199-236), tackles the complicated history of Priscian glosses and seeks to date and trace the origins of the oldest set of glosses. Peeling back layers from two ninth-century glosses, Cinato identified glosses that go back to Priscian himself as well as others that may owe their origins to Cassiodorus's Vivarium or to Theodore and Hadrian's Canterbury school. A tantalizing find: someone who apparently knew Homer added Greek bits to the evolving and growing glossing tradition. Markus Schiegg, "Source Marks in Scholia: Evidence from an Early Medieval Gospel Manuscript" (237-261), provided an overview of intermittent modern scholarship on source marks and made the case for systematic attention to and analysis of these authorial additions to texts. Popularized by Bede, marginal references to Ambrose (AM), Augustine (AVG), Jerome (HI) and many others abound in manuscripts but were used idiosyncratically. The source marks in a heavily glossed gospel book yield rich insights into medieval practices of reading and writing. So do another kind of marks, entries written in Tironian notes, the Carolingian stenography. Martin Hellmann's "Tironische Tituli: Die Verwendung stenographischer Marginalien zur inhaltlichen Erschliessung von Texten des frühen Mittelalters" (263-283) shows how useful notes can be in gauging reader interaction with texts. Sometimes Tironian notes were mixed with Carolingian minuscule to memorialize a reader's reaction, other times a comment or summary of a text's content would be conveyed entirely in Tironian notes. It will come as no surprise that Tironian notes exhibit all the idiosyncrasies and variations of other forms of medieval practice. Such peculiarities make them valuable indicators of location and time. As mysterious as Tironian notes might be for most modern readers, glosses consisting of individual letters can be just as puzzling. Andreas Nievergelt's "Glossen aus einem einzigen Buchstaben" (285-304) suggests ways to decode cryptic single-letter glosses, as in the example of a dry-point a etched over the pe of tempestas. What could this mean? Nievergelt plausibly suggests that in a manuscript containing Old High German glosses, the a could point to an Old High German equivalent for tempestas. Individual letters also served to contract phrases, as happened in Latin with repetitive biblical phrases. Single letters might also have served mnemonic functions. Further analysis of examples of these sparse annotations will reveal more fully how they work. "Edition" in the title of Justin A. Stover's "Space as Paratext: Scribal Practice in the Medieval Edition of Ammianus Marcellinus" (305-321) is meant as an hommage to the scribes of the two surviving ninth-century manuscripts of Ammianus Marcellinus. Stover was interested in the frequent occurrence in both copies of blank spaces where their archetypes were defective. More than concessions to the limitations of the archetypes, their lacunae (calibrated to the lacunae they found) "give their readers additional information about the text they are reading, over and above what is contained in the words of the main text" (317). Stover's pioneering study considers other examples beyond the Ammianus manuscripts of the "widespread and systematic use" (319) of this paratextual feature of reading and writing manuscripts. Erik Kwakkel began his "The Margin as Editorial Space: Upgrading Dioscorides alphabeticus in Eleventh-Century Monte Cassino" (326-341) with an interesting gleaning from the Marginal Scholarship database (see link above): the 353 manuscripts in the database average marginal spaces that amount to 47% to 50% of the full page size (not counting intercolumnar space), that is, on average almost half the space on a page was available for annotations of all kinds (323). His study reveals that the marginal space in Leiden's copy of Dioscorides alphabeticus records a systematic attempt to correct its text. In this instance, the scribe used the require sign, the letter r, which usually meant to look something up or to check a reading, to indicate that in 192 places he tried to improve the text but could not. In eight places he noted that a different reading occurred in another manuscript of the text that was available to him. He also left lacunae in 30 spots where he detected flawed readings. This intensive work of correcting suggested to Kwakkel that the project was carried out under the supervision of Constantine the African (d. ante 1099), the renowned physician-translator and that the scribe was a member of Constantine's editorial team. Alberto Cevolini's contribution to the collection, "Making Notae for Scholarly Retrieval: A Franciscan Case Study" (343-367), adds an important theoretical perspective to the use of signs in reading and writing. Cevolini used Robert Grosseteste's (1175-1253) topical table of signs that he invented to index what he was reading in the margins of his books as his starting point. The bishop's table lists some 440 topics. To understand how it was used requires understanding medieval habits of reading, remembering, and managing knowledge that differ from modern habits. Indeed, Cevolini observed, "knowledge was not seen in the Middle Ages as an open-ended, unceasingly increasing universe of information but rather as a closed universe of subject matters" (364).
Section III, "Private Study and Classroom Reading," concentrates "on the relation between annotating practices and modes of studying or reading" (6) and, thus, explores some of the issues Cevolini raised. Sinéad O'Sullivan, "Reading and the Lemma in Early Medieval Textual Culture" (371-396), underscored how reading glossed manuscripts was "a kind of reading that was by nature slow, complex, open-ended, non-linear, fragmentary, multivalent, and requiring effort" (372). She pointed to examples where glosses were linked ambiguously to lemmata, where they ran into each other, or were stacked on top of each other. Even when isolated and presented on the printed page, they are virtually incomprehensible without O'Sullivan's careful unpacking of their intent. Rather than frustrating medieval readers, this glossing practice satisfied the goal of an interior reading that valued contemplation and concealment rather than speed and immediate comprehension. Silvia Ottaviano, "Reading between the Lines of Virgil's Early Medieval Manuscripts" (397-426), stepped back a bit from individual glosses to consider how annotations in Virgil manuscripts were laid out on the page and how they related to their specific text. One format presented the poet's text in one column with running comments alongside in one or two flanking columns. Another has the text accompanied by marginal glosses that are keyed to specific passages. Some Virgil manuscripts combine both the commented and glossed formats. Ottaviano also explored the origins of glosses. Comparing similar glosses from different manuscripts reveals how glosses travelled, were reworked, or had new materials added to them. In "Notker Labeo's Translation / Commentaries: Changing Form and Function over Time" (427-464), Anna Grotans considered the "remarkably unique" (434) format of Notker's (c. 950-1022) translations that combine Latin text, Old High German translations, and commentary combined in a continuous running text format instead of as marginal or interlinear glosses. Surviving manuscripts of these works are virtually pristine prompting the question of how they were used in the classroom. Grotans reminds us that teaching texts were remarkably fluid over time and that the surviving manuscripts of Notker's translations / commentaries may have been memorials put together after his death by his devoted successor, Ekkehart IV. In the case of Ademar of Chabannes (c. 989-1034), his teaching materials do survive as he used them. Ad van Els, "Transmitting Knowledge by Text and Illustration: The Case of MS Leiden, UB, VLO 15" (465-499), explores the many facets of one of Ademar's composite manuscripts containing both texts and drawings that the master used. Many texts cluster around the liberal arts, but there are also astrological, medical, and prognostic interests evident in the collection. Ademar continually collected and adapted his materials for teaching, thus providing modern researchers with important evidence of personal instruction. For how such teaching was conducted, Micol Long, "Monastic Practices of Shared Reading as Means of Learning" (501-528), pointed to reading as a social enterprise. Case studies from Gregory the Great, Cuthbert, and Ercanbertus illustrate how reading as learning involved give-and-take between teachers and students and how reading in this sense was cooperative (and often a prelude to written compositions) and highly personal. Reading linked monks in networks of common interests and friendships. A late tenth-/early eleventh-century manuscript, on the other hand, seems to be the product of solitary reflection and personal use. Paulina Taraskin, "Reading Horace alongside Other Classics: MS British Library, Harley 2724" (529-551), analyzes the sources for the scholia in the Harley codex.
Section IV, "Annotating Orthodox and Heterodox Knowledge," shifts emphasis to annotations in theological works. Irene van Renswoude, who was a post-doc researcher on the Marginal Scholarship project, considered the history of one technical sign in her "The Censor's Rod: Textual Criticism, Judgment, and Canon Formation in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages" (555-595). The obelus or dagger (†) inscribed sideways in a manuscript's margins was meant to censure or censor offending text. The symbol began life as an editorial mark popularized by Origen but was transformed into a stabbing sign signaling judgment about a text during the battles surrounding Jerome's scriptural translations. Luciana Cuppo's essay, "Text and Context: The Annotations in MS Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, XXII (20)" (597-620), considers the marginal notes and corrections in a neglected mid-sixth-century manuscript which she plausibly attributed to Eugippius's scriptorium at Naples. Her analysis detects the script of Cassiodorus of Vivarium in some of the notes and his theological concerns in others. Janneke Raaijmakers also focused on a single manuscript, this one from early ninth-century Lorsch. Her "Studying Jerome in a Carolingian Monastery" (621-646) concentrates on what monks thought about two pieces in the codex, Jerome's letter to Vigilantius and his Adversus Vigilantius, since both defended relic veneration at a time when this practice was under scrutiny in the Carolingian world. Surprisingly, the monks' many marks in ink and dry-point show little interest in relics. What caught their eyes were Jerome's rhetorical strategies, proverbs, bits of classical learning, and guidelines for textual criticism and ascetic practice. Working with manuscripts and their annotations often requires the keen and curious eyes of a patient detective, as Pierre Chambert-Protat, "Deux témoins d'Ambroise sur le Psaume 118 et leur ancêtre" (647-672), demonstrated when he completely rewrote the history of the relationship of MS Florence, BML, Plut. XIV. 21 and MS Paris, BNF, n.a.l. 1437 and the dating of the Florence manuscript (s. IX2/4 rather than s. XI). The role of Florus of Lyon in the Florence manuscript was crucial to understanding its importance in the tradition. Jesse Keskiaho, "The Annotation of Patristic Texts as Curatorial Activity? The Case of Marginalia to Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (673-704), analyzed paratextual features of 22 pre-tenth-century manuscripts of Augustine's work. Many of the marginalia, such as sub-chapter and chapter headings, paraphrases, content notes, and explanations seem intended to guide the readings of those who came after the annotator. Keskiaho's careful case study provides a useful model that should be extended to other works. Cinzia Grifoni's "Reading the Catholic Epistles: Glossing Practices in Early Medieval Wissembourg" (705-742) presents a detailed and perceptive study of Otfrid of Wissembourg's annotations in various ninth-century manuscripts from that monastery. Otfrid is widely known for his Evangelienbuch, so it is useful to have Grifoni's guide to his glossing, an activity that clearly engaged Otfrid's talents and energy. The biblical manuscripts he personally annotated were usually arranged in three columns with the biblical text occupying the middle column, leaving extensive space for annotations in the other two columns. Otfrid pulled most of his notes from an extensive roster of exegetes, including Josephus Scottus and Hrabanus Maurus. Grifoni suggests that Otfrid's annotations were meant primarily for private reflection and instruction. Patrizia Carmassi, "Theological Issues and Traces of Controversies in Manuscripts Transmitting Works of the Church Fathers" (743-764), explored two topics, paratextual features of manuscript texts intended to guide reading and marginal annotations that record contemporary concerns inspired by ancient patristic texts. Paratextual features, such as titles of works and illustrations accompanying Augustine's Contra Faustum and two of Jerome's polemical treatises predisposed readers to accept the authority of the fathers over that of their theological opponents. The twelfth-century codex bearing Jerome's works reveals in its margins a reader interested in adapting Jerome's views to contemporary concerns. Another reader was concerned about the material layout of its texts and provided aids to future readers. The Jerome manuscript belonged to the female community of Fischbeck in the diocese of Minden and thus presents The Annotated Book's only explicit evidence of female reading and writing. A seventh- or eighth-century Jerome manuscript from Corvey bears ninth-century notes demonstrating strong interest in heresy and heretics. Carmassi's research shows how the gap between a text's past and a reader's present was bridged "through practices of reading and book production" (763).
The collection comes to a fitting end with a charming autobiographical epilogue by the guest of honor at the 2015 gathering, David Ganz, "The Search for Glossed Clauses: An Autobiographical Account of a Corbie Study" (767-771), whose 1990 book on Corbie jumpstarted serious and systematic attention to scholarship in the margins. [2] He offered his reminiscence as "a reminder of how one worked before electronic and digital resources transformed the study of Carolingian manuscripts, a glimpse of the age of serendipity" (767), that is, just as marginal scholarship was becoming the next new thing.
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Notes:
1. Steinová completed her PhD with a landmark study, "Notam superponere studui: The Use of Technical Signs in the Early Middle Ages" (PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht, 2016).
2. Corbie in the Carolingian Renaissance (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990).