Manuscript margins are a place where you can encounter all sorts of weird creatures. Birds, fishes, dogs and cats. But sometimes it happens that these inhabitants of the margin are there not just for decoration nor were there left behind by a pen of an idle scribe. Continue reading
Annotations in modern books are a phenomenon that often causes disapproval: we are not supposed to draw, doodle, underline or (even worse!) highlight in our books. We are (or at least I was) brought up with the idea that books are too valuable to do this; future readers will have to use these books, and they are not helped with our annotations or markings. But if we go back in time to the period of the handwritten book, this is completely different. Continue reading
Welcome to the WordPress Page of our research project: Marginal Scholarship. The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800-c. 1000). In this project, we try to understand the phenomenon of writing in the blank space of early medieval manuscripts — margins, space between the lines, and fly leaves. Continue reading