1 Handwritten marginalia lie beyond the scope of the present essay. One of the most complete considerations of the subject with reference to a single English Renaissance author is Stern, Virginia F., Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar. Whereas such studies can provide a fascinating glimpse into the private workings of a diligent contemporary reader's mind, the analysis of printed marginalia provides unusual indications of how authors and editors presented a variety of texts to their particular reading audiences.

2 For a general but concise account of the social and technical developments that shaped early printed books see Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 I have consulted somewhere in the neighborhood of 1600 volumes that are listed in the Short Title Catalogue of Books of Printed in England, 1475-1640 (hereafter, STC), with special attention to Elizabethan and Jacobean books. The staff of the Henry E. Huntington Library have been especially helpful in giving me easy access to large numbers of books. Among the Huntington readers who have generously steered me toward choice bits of marginalia are Jackson Boswell, Elizabeth Donno, Thomas Luxon, James Ridell, William Ringler, and Paul Stevens.

4 For an overview of the history of Bible translation and commentary in the period see Greenslade, S. L., ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chaps. 2 and 4.

5 A systematic search of approximately 800 folio STC volumes in the Huntington revealed that nearly 80% contained some form of marginalia, whereas only about 40% of the smaller format books I looked at were marginated.

6 While E. K.'s glosses, grouped at the end of each of the twelve eclogues, are not marginalia in the strict sense of being side-notes, they engage with Spenser's text in many of the same ways that marginalia do.

7 This arrangement was established injonson's holograph of the masque, a page of which is reproduced in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben Jonson, n vols. (Oxford, 1925-1952), facing 7:290. Susan Musgrove uses the window ofjonson's marginalia in the Masque of Queenes to observe “the creative artist join[ing] hands with the scrupulous craftsman of the stage.” See “'Edified by the margent': Dramaturgical Evidence injonson's Masques,” Parergon 3 (1985): 163-72. I quote from 171.

8 To take just two of Erasmus's works as examples, the Moriae encomium (Basel, 1515), contains not only the hefty marginal commentary by Listrius but also further side notes to help the reader find his place in the commentary. The English translation of the Paraphrases of Erasmus upon the Newe Testament, 2 vols. (London, 1551-1552), prepared by Nicholas Udall, is itself a kind of extended gloss on the four Evangelists and the Acts of the Apostles but is further equipped (“coted” is Udall's word for it) with paraphrases of the paraphrase in the outside margins and with divisions of the original biblical text in the inside ones.

9 Hermetic appropriations of biblical texts, especially of the Apocalypse, often relied on typographical oddities such as charts, tables, illustrations, and wildly mixed type faces, which were employed, along with unusual printed marginalia, to imitate the strange revelations that these authors claimed could be drawn out of Scripture. A notably unsuccessful example of this is the rare vertical marginalia sandwiched between two columns oftext in Hugh Broughton's A Concent of Scripture (London, 1591[?]), sig. F2. These notes are nearly impossible to decipher, since one sentence ends halfway down the page where it meets another that is coming up from the bottom and hence is printed upside-down from the first.

10 The marginal annotator of Dent's, Arthur Hand-Maid of Repentance. Or, a short treatise of restitution written … as a necessary appendix to his Sermon of Repentance (London, 1614)Google Scholar comments against the phrase “If an Usurer be in conscience mooved to restore the mony taken by Usury… ” that this premise is simply “Too good to be true” (sig. B^v).

11 Purchas, Samuel in Purchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1613)Google Scholar evaluates his travel-book sources, sometimes voicing skepticism in the margins about a particularly far-fetched report of the long ago and far away, other times accepting as fact an equally fantastic report.

12 Hobbs, Stephen, author of Margarita chyrurgica (London, 1610), 38 Google Scholar, places a stern warning against his section on opiates: “Let young beginners take heede they be not too busie with these dormitives.”

13 See phrases such as, “The first part subdivided and interpreted,” in Barnes, Thomas, The Court of Conscience (London, 1623), 2 Google Scholar.

14 In Beware the Cat (London, 1584), William Baldwin uses his margin to mock his own fictional persona, the narrator Streamer, who converses with telltale cats. When Streamer refers in the text to “myself and few more the best learned alive,” Baldwin retorts from the margin, “the best learned are not the gretest boasters” (sig. Bv ) . According to William Ringler, whose edition of this work is in press at the Huntington Library, Baldwin composed this “first English novel” in the early months of 1553.

15 According to Herford and the Simpsons, “it is clear, from the small percentage of error in the notes, that a watchful eye supervised the printing” (Jonson 4:330).

16 See ibid., 2:4-5, 4:329; Jonson's Conversations, 11. 326-27 (1:141); and also Patterson, Annabel, “ ‘Roman-cast Similitude': Ben Jonson and the English Use of Roman History, ” in Rome in the Renaissance, ed. Paul A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY, 1982), 381-94Google Scholar, esp. 384-85. Her book, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984), places the Sejanus material in a slightly different framework. Patterson argues for an important change in English historiography around the turn of the century, a change she believes was brought into prominence partly by the so-called Taciteans, some of them followers of the earl of Essex, whose political subversiveness was encoded in their preference for certain Roman historians over others.

17 ForJonson's response to the conspiratorial habit of mind, see Envie's induction to Poetaster (1601) and the satiric attacks on those who trade in state secrets and conspiracies in Volponc, The Alchemist, and Catiline, his Conspiracy, as well as Sejanus. Some of this material is evaluated in my essay, “The Play of Conspiracies in Volpone,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27 (1985): 369-89.

18 See the folio dedication to Esme, Lord Aubigny. The Sejanus marginalia were doubtless designed partly as a learned credential for a play decidedly out of public favor, as were the eight commendatory poems, the first such poems ever to be affixed to an English stage play. See Williams, Franklin B., “Commendatory Verses: The Rise of the Art of Puffing,” Studies in Bibliography 19 (1966)Google Scholar: 5.

19 Henry Raymond's poem, The Maiden Queene (London, 1607), likewise prints Latin marginalia next to English verse, but the parallel stops there. Raymond's work did not go to a second edition. As Daniel Broughner has demonstrated, Jonson relied on the marginal glosses in Justus Lipsius's edition of Tacitus, Opera quae cxstant (Antwerp, 1600), not only for his own notes but also for the selection of details to dramatize and even for specific phrases that he incorporated into the dramatic dialogue. See “Jonson's Use of Lipsius in Sejanus,” Modern Language Notes 73 (1958): 247-55. l n preparing the present essay, I have at times felt a deep sympathy with Broughner's candid confession that such a study could never be complete because “the sheer pedantry of the process [of tracking down individual glosses] is stupifying” (250, n. 5).

20 See McLane, Paul E., Spenser's Shepheardes Calender: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, IN, 1961), 280-95Google Scholar.

21 See Marcus, Leah Sinanoglou, “Masquing Occasions and Masque Structure,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981)Google Scholar: 8-11. Lindle, Davidy points out in “Embarrassing Ben: The Masque of Frances Howard,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986)Google Scholar: 343-59, that the occasion of Love's Triumph Through Callipolis, the wedding of Frances Howard to the earl of Essex, is pushed completely off the margins of the 1616 folio, after the marriage had ended disastrously and scandalously.

22 Culler, Jonathan, On Reconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 140 Google Scholar. See also La marginalité dans la litterature et la pensée anglaise (Aixen- Provence, 1983).

23 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley, 1953-1962), 6:224.

24 Ibid., 9:237. The sermon is tentatively dated 1630.

25 The Dumbe Divine Speaker, or: Dumbe Speaker of Divinity, trans. A. M. (London, 1605), 3. The Italian edition, published in Venice, rather surprisingly bears the date 1606. Celeste Turner calls The Dumbe Divine Speaker “a fittingly respectable conclusion to nearly thirty years among foreign books,” though she questions whether there might not have been a French intermediary source, as Munday “felt little at home in the Italian language.” See Turner, , Anthony Munday: An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, 1928), 149 Google Scholar and n. 11.

26 See Ong, particularly, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Not all editors were so scrupulous in handling their originals. In An Explanation or Enlarging of the ten Articles … (Oxford, 1625), Thomas James puts forth elaborate marginal arguments in defense of his vast proposed project to restore to the work of the Latin Church Fathers passages expunged or altered in order to bring them into line with Roman doctrine. He deplores the “shuffling and cutting there is betweene the Master of the sacred Palace, and the Printer; both hired to reforme say they, (no doubt) to deforme and corrupt the fathers workes” (2). Censorship of all kinds left its mark on works of the period. More precisely, it often left no mark. This fact alone makes thejob of assessing the disruptive impact of such silent cuts on texts more difficult than is the case with printed marginalia. For some ramifications of the censor's work in the Renaissance, see Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation.

28 The volume was probably printed by John Foigny of Rheims. SeeA. F. Allison and Rogers, D. M., A Catalogue of Catholic Books in England Printed Abroad or Secretly in England 1558-1640, 2 pts. (Bogner Regis, 1956), 1 Google Scholar:3. This list appeared as vol. 3, pt. 3 of the journal Recusant History. A note on the last page of Cardinal Allen's book begs the reader to “consider our difficulties in printing, and beare with the faults escaped us.” For Lord Burghley's response to Allen's work, see also Woodfield, Denis B., Surreptitious Printing in England, 1550-1640 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

29 G. B., A Fig for the Spaniard, or Spanish Spirits (London, 1591), sig. D3.

30 The volume was printed in London by G. E. for Samuell Macham and Mathew Cooke in 1606. Standard Chaucer bibliographies have little to say about this bit of apocrypha, but Walter W. Skeat records that it appeared first in Thynne's edition of The Canterbury Tales (1542). Skeat dates the work, which occurs in none of the Chaucer manuscripts, about 1395. See Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford, 1897), xxxi-xxxv.

31 Gibson, Abraham, The Lands Mourning, for vaine Swearing: or The downe-fall of Oathes (London, 1613)Google Scholar, “To The Christian Reader.”

32 I quote from the First Part (London, 1601), sig. C2.

33 See the anonymously translated Corderius Dialogues (London, 1614), “Epistle to the Courteous Reader,” and 331.

34 Synesius, Cyrenaeus, A Paradoxe, proving by reason and example, that Baldnesse is much better than bushie haire, trans. Abraham Fleming (London, 1579)Google Scholar, sig. biii^v.

35 Peacham, , Mourning (London, 1613)Google Scholar, sig. C4.

36 Erasmi Roterodami, Encomium Moriae, i.e. Stultitae Laus, Praise of Folly (1515; facsimile, Basel, 1931). This handsome facsimile, edited by H. A. Schmid, contains 82 penand- ink drawings done by Hans Holbein the Younger in the margins of the copy originally owned by Oswald Molitor or Myconius, a friend of Erasmus who also added his handwritten marginalia while preparing a set of lectures on the Moria. This was the first edition to print the extensive marginalia which Erasmus commissioned Listrius to write and to which he himself contributed. See below at nn. 48-59.

37 Part of Mary Ann Caws's thesis in Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (Princeton, NJ, 1985) is that framing up points permits an infusion of other genres into the primary narrative. She assumes that generic mixing is a mark of “modernist” texts, but see Colie, Rosalie L., The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K.Lewalski (Berkeley, 1973)Google Scholar, which argues strenuously for the prevalence of genera mixta in the period under discussion. I return to the matter of Renaissance-Modernist continuities at the end of this essay.

38 Hypnerotomachia (London, 1592), fol. 29. The event in question, the murder of Lord John L. Burke by an Irish soldier named Cosby, Arnold, is noted in John Stow's The Annates of England (London, 1601), 1270 Google Scholar, and is sensationalized in two contemporary ballads and three pamphlets. See also G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals (1928; rpt. Ann Arbor, 1955), 1:6-7, 353.

39 Stow, Annales, 1201.

40 See Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols. in2 (London, 1587)Google Scholar. We learn from the marginal note that in 1586 Lovelace tried to swindle his kinsmen “by example of T. S. who before had sought to spoile his eldest brother of his life, after he had defrauded him of his goods and catties, and was never punished therefore” (3:1557). TheT. S. in question is Thomas Stow. These unfortunate events in John Stow's life are referred to in The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (New York, 1919), 19:4. I am grateful to Elizabeth Story Donno for pointing out the Holinshed reference and letting me read the proofs of her essay, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 229-48.

41 General and Rare Memorials (London, 1577); I quote from 18. At this time there was an intense “struggle between [John Hawkins and Sir William Winter] for dominion over the Navy Board,” according to D. B. Quinn and Ryan, A. N., England's Sea Empire, 1550-1642 (London, 1983), 56 Google Scholar. See also the analysis of Dee's title page as an emblem of English naval security in French, Peter, John Dee: The World of An Elizabethan Magus (London, 1972), 182-86.Google Scholar

42 The remainder of the handwritten marginalia in the right-hand margin are as follows: “ his exact / his profound search & / Or his singualar & heavenly / tallent in now needefull / matter & conclusions; yea / many whose excellent / Arts inventing: / By part of all this & other / his Treasury & learned / furniture, he very aptly” [sic]. The Huntington Library copy of the General and Rare Memorials was formerly owned by the Earl of Bridgewater, the British Museum, James Bindley, and M. Lort. Sometime after 1788, when Lort acquired the book, he wrote in it that the “many MS additions & alterations” it contains are “in Dr. Dees own hand writing.” Lort also seems to have been responsible for pasting into the front of the book a bit of paper with Dee's signature, dated 1588. The signature and manuscript marginalia are not by the same hand, and neither matches at all well the authenticated samples of Dee's hand that I have seen. The Curator of Manuscripts at the Huntington and Professor Paul Christianson of Queen's University tentatively concur in this view.

43 The Shepheards Calender (London, 1579), rpt. ed. S. K. Heninger,Jr. (Delmar, NY, 1979)- See Helgerson, Richard, Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley, 1983)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

44 See Genette, Gérard, Palimsestes: la littérature au second degre (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar.

45 Higginson, James Jackson in Spenser's Shepherd's Calender in Relation to Contemporary Affairs (New York, 1912), 165-78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, tries very hard to put to rest the “Uhlemann-Somer theory” that E. K. was in fact a Spenser-persona, largely on the slippery grounds that the novice poet would not have made such extravagant claims for himself as E. K. does. But who knew better than the poet himself his plans to establish a noble and distinctive poetic voice for his nation? Higginson, like R. W. Church, plunks for Spenser's fellow Cambridgean, Edward Kirke. Preferring someone closer to the politically vocal group at Leicester House where Spenser was employed in 1579, Paul McLane, rejects the Kirke identification and argues persuasively for Fulke Greville (Elizabethan Allegory, 280-95). For further discussion of the identity of E. K., see The Works of Edmund Spenser, A Variorum, The Minor Poems, 9 vols. (Baltimore, 1932-1949), 1:235-428. I continue to find attractive the possibility that Spenser himself created the sometimes contentious, sometimes contradictory, always counterpointing voice of E. K.

46 After tracing the convoluted publication history of Vergil's Bucolics, glossed by Servius, Badius, and Mancinelli, and variously commented on by Landino, Erasmus, and Melanchthon, Bruce R. Smith concludes that E. K.'s gloss on the “Januarye” eclogue provides one of three related ways of reading Spenser's poem: “with Colin's passionate abandon, with E. K.'s analytical detachment, with the narrator's balanced irony” (“On Reading The Shepheardes Calender,” Spenser Studies 1 [1980]: 69-93; I quote from 89). While I agree with the thrust of Smith's argument, I believe there is a wider range of voices in E. K.'s provocative glosses than he allows for.

47 Annabel Patterson has recently revived Paul McLane's account of the poem's political allegory in an excellent article that traces the Vergilian tradition of the state pastoral, particularly in its sixteenth-century French flowering. See “Re-opening the Green Cabinet: Clement Marot and Edmund Spenser,” English Literary Renaissance 1 (1986):44-70. She concludes that “the function of the commentator… [is] to incite the reader to interpretive speculation” (67). Arguing more generally about subordinates who must stand to one side when they speak, Jonathan Dollimore claims that “marginal or dissident elements could appropriate dominant discourses and likewise transform them in the process.” See his essay, “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. idem and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 12.

48 See the letter to George Halewin dated 29 August 1517 in P. S. Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1906-1958), Ep. 641:3-7.

41 Gerardus Listrius, born probably not long before 1490, was living in Basel at the time when the annotated Moria was published in 1515 but had taken charge of a school in Zwolle by the next year. He held a doctorate in medicine, had helped Erasmus edit his Adagia in 1514, and subsequently wrote several works on rhetoric and language. See Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (Toronto, 1986), 2:335-36.

50 Allen, Opus epistolarum, Ep. 2615:171-80.

51 “Ces scholier … sont si concise et si measurees semblent etre sortis d'une plume moins alerteet surtout moins vagabonde que celledu grand Rotterdammois” (F. van der Haeghen, Bibliotheca Belgica [1891-1923], ed. Marie-Therese Langer [Brussels, 1964], 2:890).

52 Joseph A. Gavin and Clarence H. Miller, “Erasmus’ Additions to Listrius’ Commentary on ‘The Praise of Folly,’ ” Erasmus in English II (1981-82): 20. Indeed, these two experts on the question conclude that “we are justified in considering the whole commentary ‘Erasmian’ ” (25). See also J. Austin Gavin and Thomas M. Walsh, “The Praise of Folly in Context: The Commentary of Girardus Listrius,” Renaissance Quarterly 24(1971): 193-209. 53 The Latin word culumniator appears twice in the marginal notes that Erasmus added in the 1532 edition. See Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. IV-3, ed. Clarence H. Miller (Amsterdam, 1979), 121, 1. 954, and 161, 1. 556. Hereafter I refer to this standard Latin edition as ASD. For translations of the Listrius commentary, I shall quote Gavin and Miller's essay, “Erasmus’ Additions.”

54 ASD 143, 1. 340; Gavin and Miller, 23.

55 ASD 69, 11. 19-20; Gavin and Miller, 20.

56 Speaking of himself in the third person, Dee says in the margin of General and Rare Memorials, “ …he hath advisedly spent above Thirty Hundred pounds, for learning of worthy Knowledges & Sciences: to the Honor of God advancing, (far and nere,) and the better ennabling of himself to pleasure his Native Cuntry above all other: how litle soever they have yet deserved it, at his hande” (sig. ɛ*i).

57 ASD, 77, 1. 107; Gavin and Miller, 20-21.

58 The original Moria, replete with puns on the Latin name of Folly, was dedicated to More, who corresponded with Erasmus about the work and its reception for years to come. See also Colie, Rosalie, “Some Notes on Burton's Erasmus,” Renaissance Quarterly 20 (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 335-41. Sir Thomas Chaloner, translating the Moria in 1549, relied on the Listrius marginalia for interpretations to guide him in his choice of English equivalents, and as Chaloner's work was used by White Kennet in his 1683 translation, English readers were exposed for a considerable period to the indirect influence of the commentaries. See the introduction to Clarence H. Miller's translation of the Moriae encomium in ASD, IV-3, 37-38.

59 The only complete translation that I know of is the one by J. Austin Gavin in his unpublished St. Louis University dissertation of 1974 entitled “The Commentary of Gerardus Listrius on Erasmus’ Praise of Folly: Critical Edition and Commentary.”

60 Lawrence Lipking, “The Marginal Gloss: Notes and Asides on Poe, Valery, ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ The Ordeal of the Margin, Storiella as She Is Syung, Versions of Leonardo, and the Plight of Modern Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 609-55, quotation from 612. This major essay, which makes imaginative use of its own margins to illustrate its points, is on firmer ground when discussing Romantic and Modernist texts than Renaissance ones.

61 Commerce 14 (1927): 11-41.

62 Lipking, “Marginal Gloss,” 612.

63 Ibid., 633.