This chapter presents eleven epigrams (forty-nine dodecasyllables) copied in the margins of a number of manuscripts of Herodotus’ Histories, the most important being Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 70.6. The epigrams comment on the text of Herodotus next to which they appear, and thus can be characterized as verse scholia. These poems, which the author of this chapter has critically edited in a recent article, were known to scholars, but they had been misattributed to John Tzetzes. In fact, Tzetzes’ verse scholia on Herodotus survive in another manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 70.3), whereas our poems have more in common with the verse scholia on Diodorus Siculus in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, gr. 130. The authorial voice of Tzetzes and the attribution of the poems in Vat. gr. 130 to Niketas Choniates are investigated to help determine the context of composition of our verse scholia on Herodotus. On the basis of this comparison and other internal evidence, this chapter concludes that our eleven epigrams were first copied in the model of Laur. Plut. 70.6 at some point between 1204 and 1318, and probably before 1261.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

This chapter uses contemporary readers’ marks in anonymous English herbals to argue that Renaissance readers used printed texts as opportunities to record their own experiences of native plants and medical experiments, pushing back against a pervasive view of early herbal readers as credulous and unsophisticated. Printed books like The Grete Herball (1526), the first illustrated printed herbal in England, were the products of publishers who were evaluating the market for particular texts in print and who tested new affordances and marketing strategies on their readers as they published and republished old herbals. Some publishers, like Thomas Gibson, saw in their editions of the herbals an opportunity to endorse medical practitioners’ authority over the body.

Building on the previous chapter, the goal here is to summarize and explain to the reader the conventions followed by Byzantine illustrators when illuminating Gospel lectionaries, particularly focusing on initials, marginalia, and miniatures. The chapter explains how the formulaic opening lines of the Gospels were illustrated and what types of images were selected for the initials, all which stress the speech of Christ or the Evangelists. The chapter also articulates how these types of illustrations (initials, marginalia, and miniatures) operated differently from one another and were tasked with carrying different types of information for users. Defining the relatively strict and cohesive rules by which which scribes and illuminators played with the written text and images allows the reader to better appreciate diversions and exceptions that were complexly deployed to comment and reflect on the meaning of the text.

Using error as a method of looking at initials and marginalia, this chapter considers how artists and scribes went against expected word and image play in the manuscript to reflect on the process of reading and recitation – and the confusions and misunderstandings that could potentially ensue. By focusing on several case studies, the reader is walked through the various interpretations that marginalia and initials deployed and how these (at times conflicting) understandings were generatively put into question and undone by subtle variations in color and placement. The goal of this chapter is to show how illuminators worked alongside the text to generate an illustrative program that was surprising and complex in ways that demanded the concerted attention and focus of readers as they chanted the Gospel text.

Introduction to the Gospel lectionary, its illustration and usage in the Divine Liturgy, and how a consideration of ritual and sound unsettles expectations from iconography.

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.

Jonson’s folio collection, The Works of Benjamin Jonson (1616), represented an ambitious and ground-breaking attempt to preserve his plays, poems, and other writings for future generations to appreciate. Many copies of this monumental publication have indeed survived, some with extensive annotations, giving us a unique insight into Jonson’s early reception and early modern reading practices more broadly. Drawing on the remarkable collection of copies at the Huntington Library, this essay explores in detail a number that were extensively annotated in the 17th century. The investigation highlights how Jonson’s early readers ranged from university students to classical scholars to literary enthusiasts. It examines how these different kinds of engagement with Jonson’s Works relate both to his conceptions of the reader and to the attempts of his early admirers to shape his posthumous reputation. It shows how quickly and widely Jonson’s collection was recognised as a significant literary publication, and how unpredictable and diverse were the ways in which it would be read.

Chapter 3 focuses on Seneca’s De beneficiis, one of the most extensive and influential classical texts dealing with the idea of generosity. The chapter explores how this text was received in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, focusing on the manuscripts surviving from medieval England. The first part of the chapter explores what the surviving manuscripts can tell us about the reception of Seneca’s work, looking at the manuscript context, the way in which it was abbreviated and adapted and the marginal comments left behind by medieval readers. The second part of the chapter explores the way in which Seneca’s work was utilised in florilegia, collections of classical sayings. It concludes that the abbreviated manuscripts and the florilegia both indicate that over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Seneca’s work became increasingly widely available.