CFP: “The State of the Margins,” Panel for RSA 2020 in Philadelphia, April 2-4

What is the state of the margins these days? Thirty years after Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine published on Gabriel Harvey and his Livy, the study of reader marks and marginalia in printed books and manuscripts has delivered insights on reading practice, on the history of scholarship and collecting, on literacy and scribal production.

New digital platforms like The Archaeology of Reading (archaeologyofreading.org) offer scholars new ways to track and categorize reader marks across multiple volumes and multiple geographies. Central to these studies and new initiatives is the premise that reader marks offer tangible historical evidence of how readers made sense of knowledge in the past and brought this knowledge to bear on their own present. Yet, in large part, the Renaissance-era reader marks and marginalia found in late medieval and early modern printed books and manuscripts are scant and scattered sources of information.  Though exceptional readers like Gabriel Harvey left maps of their intellectual worlds within the pages of their books, most readers were more inclined to add a mark of approbation, a signature, a snippet of correspondence, or a date. What do these reader marks offer the historian or literary critic? What can we learn about readership and book use by attending to practical, ambiguous, or amateur marginalia?

This panel invites papers that propose new ways to imagine the study of reader marks and marginalia thirty years on from Grafton and Jardine. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:

neglected categories of readers, like women or children;
scholarship that theorizes marginality and marginalia as interconnected concepts;
critical inquiry into what makes a notation marginal or central to a text or analysis;
considerations of the relationship between reading and using a book;
examination of annotation or marks on non-book objects.
Please submit your paper proposal by 15 July 2019 to Melissa Reynolds (mbr5@princeton.edu) and Sarah Wilma Watson (swatson@haverford.edu). Each proposal must include the following:
Name & institutional affiliation (if applicable)
​​​​​​​E-mail address
Paper title
Abstract (150-word maximum)
3 keywords
A brief, non-narrative CV (150-word maximum)
Please note that the RSA word count limits are very strict; exceeding these will cause the system to reject your paper proposal.