Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700

Early modern women marked their books in myriad ways, and their marginalia provide evidence of their book ownership, their reading, writing and drawing practices, their acquisition of literacy, and the interrelation of body, book, and material world. This symposium interprets this exciting new textual corpus and discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing marginalia by early modern women, elite and non-elite, known and unknown. What can marginalia tell us about women’s textual agency, education and literacy, their use of books, their lived experience of household economics, organization and technologies, and their interpersonal, affective and social relationships? What evidence does marginalia provide for women’s engagement with orality, performance, print, and scribal cultures? How can marginalia help us position women as humanist, political and religious agents and understand their worlds of work and leisure? And how can such new analyses of early modern women’s marginalia reshape early modern marginalia studies more broadly?

Program

9.00-9.15: Arrival, refreshments and welcome

9.15-10.00: Keynote 1: Paul Salzman, '"Sheep of my own": Women’s marginalia in early modern almanacs' (Chair: Sarah C. E. Ross)

10.00-11.30: Panel 1 (Chair: Paul Salzman)

Anna Welch, '"Martha Molesworth oneth this booke": A Lost Library'

Shane Carmody, '"Then tush and turde a farte": A fragment of Catholic resistance recorded by Martha Moulsworth'

Diana Barnes, 'Lady Eleanor Douglas at Work in the Matriarchive: Marginalia as maternal communication to a daughter-reader, Lady Lucy Hastings'

11.30-11.45: Morning Tea

11.45-12.30: ECR Keynote 2: Emma Rayner, "Self-Fashioning in the Margins: Insights from Mary Astell’s Book Collection" (Chair: Una McIlvenna)

12.30-1.30 Lunch

1.30-2.15: Keynote 3: Sarah C. E. Ross, 'Hester Pulter’s marginal readers' (Chair: Micheline White)

2.15-2.45: Afternoon Tea

2.45-4.00: Panel 2 (Chair: Amelia Dale)

Aydogan Kars, 'Arabic Marginalia as a Source on Muslim Women (1000-1600)'

Hannah Upton, 'Anne Guise and The Life of Alexander the Great'

Jennifer Nicholson, 'Worldly Hands: Multilingualism in the Margins'

4.00-5.00: Keynote 4: Micheline White, 'Women’s Marginalia in Liturgical and Para-Liturgical Texts: The Case of Mary Tudor' (Chair: Rosalind Smith)

6.30: Symposium dinner at Ottoman Cuisine, Barton

Abstracts

“Lady Eleanor Douglas at Work in the Matriarchive: Marginalia as maternal communication to a daughter-reader, Lady Lucy Hastings”

Diana G. Barnes

In this paper I will consider a special category of early modern women’s marginalia: an author’s retrospective annotation and adaptation of her own printed works in order to design a reading experience for a specific and named reader. Around 1650-1 the prolific pamphleteer and religious prophet, Lady Eleanor Douglas (Davies/Tuchet; 1590-1652) bound 44 of her pamphlets together making a sammelband dedicated to her daughter Lady Lucy Hastings (1613-79). This textual assemblage is materially held together by stitching and binding, but conceptually the glue is extra-textual markings, annotations, and excisions designed to vigorously adapt the original(s) for a particular reader, her daughter. In places Douglas’s marginalia function to take authorial control of her published oeuvre: she corrects typos and infelicities that may have resulted from the transmission of her text to print. In other places she intervenes in the printed text to renovate her reputation: for example, she corrects errors of historical fact, particularly as related to her own trial and imprisonment. Douglas reworks the printed pamphlets by crossing out words and paragraphs, physically cutting pages out, and resequencing; together the reassembled printed works and the author’s commentary on, and adaptation of, them form a palimpsest that allows the reader to see the original under revision. This is a highly complex and lengthy work about which it is difficult to present a single interpretive line. So, in this paper, I propose to describe the different kinds of marginal work Douglas undertakes in constructing a text for Hastings to read.

“Then tush and turde a farte”: A fragment of Catholic resistance recorded by Martha Moulsworth

Shane Carmody

At the end of the manuscript folios in Martha Moulsworth’s 1542 edition of the Collected Works of Chaucer, is a transcript of a printed fragment which was used as binder’s waste. The fragment was most likely found by Moulsworth in the 1561 Chaucer edition which she used to copy John Stow’s additions to the Chaucer canon. The text is 67 lines from a doggerel polemic attacking reformer’s views of the Mass, and especially the doctrine of transubstantiation. As such it presents a Catholic defence of doctrine in very earthy, simple and unsophisticated language. In this paper Shane Carmody will explore what we can learn from this faint (and possibly unique) echo of popular Catholic resistance to the English Reformation, as well as what it suggests about Molesworth’s own historical imagination.

Arabic Marginalia as a Source on Muslim Women (1000-1600)

Aydogan Kars

This presentation introduces various forms of marginalia and appendices found in Arabic manuscripts as a source on Muslim women. Narrative sources (written by men) tell little about the details of women’s participation in scholarly circles, while the records of study sessions, notes of ownership, endowment deeds, authorisations, and colophons appended to the beginning, end, or margins of scholarly works provide a rich yet underutilised source. Relying on my emerging database of knowledge transmission, I shall analyse a large body of Arabic manuscripts to shed light on medieval Muslim women’s roles as scribes, readers, book owners, teachers, pupils, and authors. My presentation will re-evaluate the existing academic literature on Muslim women’s scholarship and education in light of the newly discovered archival material. I shall also discuss the works authored by medieval Muslim women and their reception and circulation beyond scholarly circles.

Worldly Hands: Multilingualism in the Margins

Jennifer Nicholson

When Hamlet expresses his regrets about his treatment of Laertes, he clarifies their similar motivations: “by the image of my cause, I see / The portraiture of his” (V.ii.77-78) . By expressing how an image reveals a portrait, Hamlet paints a verbal miniature which functions as a microcosm for the play’s ever-present questions of recognition: who’s there? Posing such questions about identity to those who annotate texts complicates our assumptions about translation and/as authorship, as printed and marginal contributions in many Renaissance texts are frequently multilingual, even and perhaps in spite of their authors’ affiliations to specific linguistic, cultural or national identities. From personal commonplace books to printed volumes, handwritten additions to texts often exemplify such multilingual ways of thinking, seen in instances like Esther Inglis’ bilingual poetry and the anonymous annotations in a copy of John Baret’s 1580 quadruple dictionary. This paper will consider how such sources provide greater insight into women’s translation as key to their interactions with and engagement with education, literacy and other forms of textual meaning.

Self-Fashioning in the Margins: Insights from Mary Astell’s Book Collection

Emma Rayner

This keynote explores the marginalia of England’s “first feminist” Mary Astell (1666-1731), author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Part I, 1694; Part II, 1697) and Some Reflections on Marriage (1700). The recent discovery of Astell’s personal book collection at the University of Cambridge’s Magdalene College Library has been heralded as a landmark event in feminist intellectual history, not least because Astell was a prolific annotator of her books. The exceptional body of evidence she left in the margins—all of it captured within the Early Modern Women’s Marginalia Library database—shifts our understanding of Astell as a reader, writer, and thinker, revealing as much about the advancement of her protofeminist thought as it does about her proficiency in French and profound understanding of natural philosophy. 

Rather than reading Astell’s annotations as evidence of literacy or ownership, this talk positions her marginalia as a deliberate practice of philosophical and literary self-fashioning. In particular, I argue that Astell’s inscriptions in books issuing from the French tradition—especially the works of Malebranche,  Descartes, and Jacques Du Bosc—demonstrate the deliberate distance she put between the French femme savante inherited from the institution of the salon, and the English learned woman she sought to form in her all-female academy. In doing so, I consider how Astell’s markings demand new approaches to understanding early modern women's marginalia that attend to multilingualism, affect, and epistemic resistance, using the Library of Libraries as a springboard to begin formulating these frameworks.

Hester Pulter’s marginal readers

Sarah C. E. Ross

Hester Pulter is often celebrated as one of the most notable recuperations in early modern women’s writing in the last decades: a ‘new’ poet of skill and substance brought into the light after centuries of obscurity in the archive. But the beguiling narrative of occlusion ignores the evidence of marginal annotations and loose sheets that accompany the manuscript volume of her verse. In this talk I will step off existing work on Pulter as a complaint poet and explore the ways in which she was understood as one by her earliest readers. I examine marginalia in her manuscript and sheets added to it by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers, arguing that she was read in the context of the vernacular and Ovidian complaint traditions on which her own poetry draws. Via the manuscript’s marginalia and ‘marginal’ additions, I will trace an early reception history of Pulter’s poetry and explore the ways in which this complements our sense of both Pulter’s and  complaint poetry’s readers, audiences, and circulation.

“Sheep of my own”: Women’s marginalia in early modern almanacs

Paul Salzman

Almanacs were the most popular printed work sold in the early modern period, running to something in the order of 400,000 printed in every year. Around 25% of extant almanacs have some form of annotation or evidence of use, but of that number only a very small proportion are clearly by women. In this talk I will explore four examples that give us important access to non-elite women’s engagement with almanacs from 1647 through to 1692, looking at annotations by Isabella Twysden, Frances Wolfreston, Sara Sale, and Hannah Sykes.

'Anne Guise and The Life of Alexander the Great'

Hannah Upton

On the blank front flyleaf of a 1690 English translation of The Life of Alexander the Great found in the National Library of Australia is written an ownership mark in seventeenth-century italic, ‘Anne Guise Her Book’, accompanied on subsequent pages by thirty-six instances of what I believe to be significant corrections to the translated text throughout. This paper will examine the evidence that indicates these marks to be corrections, the sources Guise may have used to influence her own translation, and women’s access to classical texts and Latin education in the seventeenth century. I use this case study to demonstrate how we can use marginalia to understand how women’s education was practiced in the early modern period, and consider the margins not just as a private space for personal study, but as a space where women like Guise can pose a challenge to the education and textual authority of the ‘several gentlemen at the University of Cambridge’ identified as the translators of this text.

“Martha Molesworth oneth this booke”: A Lost Library

Anna Welch

Martha Moulsworth (1577–1646) is known to early modernists for her autobiographical poem The Memorandum of Martha Moulsworth Widdowe (1632), one of the earliest of its genre in English, and believed to be the earliest written by a woman. Most of what is known about Martha’s life comes from the poem itself and the few legal documents associated with her life: her three marriages, the wills of her husbands, and her own will. Books are not mentioned in these wills, though Martha was clearly a highly literate person. A sermon preached after her death in 1646 mentions her love of reading and her practice note-taking, but until now there has been no material evidence of this aside from the existence of her poem. 

In 2024, historian Shane Carmody identified a copy of the 1542 edition of Chaucer’s collected works in the State Library Victoria as belonging to Martha Moulsworth. In this paper, I will introduce our work together on the provenance of this volume, which is heavily annotated in several hands, including (we posit) Martha’s own. The history of this volume offers insights into the previously hidden life of Martha Moulsworth as a book owner who read and responded to texts in her library, and other women who owned the book.

Women’s Marginalia in Liturgical and Para-Liturgical Texts: The Case of Mary Tudor

Micheline White

To date, studies of Tudor women’s marginalia in religious books have focused on Bibles, Books of Hours, sermons, and treatises. In this paper I begin by considering women’s annotations in a range of liturgical and para-liturgical books. Liturgical books are different from other books in that they were imposed on readers/hearers by the state. Moreover, the state changed the liturgy frequently between 1540 and 1559, requiring readers to conform themselves to new texts whether they liked it or not. To purchase and write in a liturgical or para-liturgical book was perforce to engage with the state to some degree, and when seen in this light, even the most basic annotations can take on complex meanings. In the second part of the paper, I focus on the period between 1534 and 1555 and examine marginalia pertaining to an exceptional, royal figure: Mary Tudor. This marginalia includes handwritten additions, friendship inscriptions, and deletions, and they are found in a Book of Hours, Katherine Parr’s copy of the English Litany, and Latin Processionals and Missals. I argue that the markings on the pages of these books are the product of creative, nuanced, and complex religio-political and personal interactions, and that they are instructive because they reveal the ways in which Mary Tudor found herself engaging with books over the course of four decades: as an embattled, resistant subject; an evasive conformist subject; and an empowered monarch demanding conformity from others.

Presenters

Diana G. Barnes is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of New England. She has ongoing research interests in gender and early modern women’s writing in a range of literary and non-literary genres. She is currently undertaking an investigation of early modern women’s engagement with stoicism supported by the Australian Research Council.

Shane Carmody is a historian with an interest in the history of books and libraries. He was Partner Investigator in the ARC Linkage Grant Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in Australia: researching and relating Australia’s manuscript holdings to new technologies and new readers (2009–2013), and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Discovery Grant A Baroque Archbishop in colonial Australia: James Goold (1812-1886), (2017–2019). In this project he was co-editor and contributor to two volumes of essays The Invention of Melbourne, A Baroque Archbishop and a Gothic Architect (MUP 2019) and The Architecture of Devotion, James Goold and his Legacies in Colonial Australia (MUP 2021).

Aydogan Kars is a Senior Researcher at Monash University, and his field of specialisation is the Islamic intellectual history. He is running an ARC-DECRA project on knowledge transmission in Islamic history and participating an ARC-DP project on the transregional histories of pre-industrial public health, among other research projects.

Jennifer E. Nicholson is an early career scholar working in early modern studies, largely drama, considering how locating Shakespeare and Marlowe at the porous edges of French and English generates new readings of nationhood, identity, and uncertainty. To develop her book project on this topic, she is working on the presence of “French English” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and other Renaissance texts, deepening work begun during her PhD in English at the University of Sydney. Jennifer is also working on critical whiteness studies and The Winter’s Tale. Since conferral, she has taught as a sessional academic and as a secondary English teacher. She can be found online @justjenerally.

Sarah C. E. Ross is Professor of English Literature at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. She works on early modern anglophone literary culture, with a focus on poetry and poetics, women’s writing, politics, religion, and print and manuscript culture. Her recent publications include the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English, 1540-1700 (2022, with Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann), awarded the Roland Bainton Prize for Reference and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender’s Collaborative Project award;  Early Modern Women’s Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics (2020, with Rosalind Smith); and Women Poets of the English Civil War (2017, with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann). She is currently completing a book on Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint  (with Rosalind Smith and Michelle O’Callaghan), forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Emma Rayner was awarded her PhD in early modern English literature from the Australian National University in July 2024. Her research and teaching interests include women’s writing and gender, the history of emotions, and transnational approaches to literature and history. She has published articles on women’s writing and early modernity in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Sillages Critiques, and English Literary Renaissance (forthcoming), and is currently working on turning her PhD thesis—titled Early Modern Women and Discourses of Civility—into a monograph.

Paul Salzman is an Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University. He has worked extensively on early modern women, including a number of critical studies and  editions. His most recent book is Facsimiles and the History of Shakespeare Editing in the Cambridge Elements in Shakespeare and Text series. He is currently working on the use of almanacs from 1550 to 1850.

Hannah Upton is a PhD student in the School of Languages, Literature and Linguistics at Australian National University. Her thesis title is Early Modern Women’s Education and Marginalia, 1530-1700, and she is a research assistant and HDR candidate for the ARC-funded Future Fellowship Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1530-1660. She is currently a member of the Early Career Committee for the ANZAMEMS journal, Parergon, and has recently published a book chapter on early modern women and the Bible.

Dr Anna Welch is Honorary Lecturer (Level B) at the Centre for Early Modern Studies at ANU and Principal Collection Curator, History of the Book at State Library Victoria. She was Partner Investigator in the ARC Linkage Grant Transforming the Early Modern Archive: The John Emmerson Collection at State Library Victoria (2019–2023) and co-edited, with Prof. Rosalind Smith and Prof. Sarah Ross, the associated special issue of Parergon (41:2, 2024). This issue contains Anna’s most recent publication: ‘The Book as Mirror: Embroidered Bindings at the Court of Charles I’. She is co-curator of the State Library Victoria’s annually refreshed exhibition World of the Book.

Micheline White is Professor in the College of the Humanities and the Departments of English and History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on women writers, religious history, book history, and social networks in early modern England. She and Jaime Goodrich have co-edited a volume on women and communal worship which is forthcoming from the Delaware University press in 2025. In 2018, she co-edited (with Leah Knight and Elizabeth Sauer) Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (University of Michigan Press). She is the editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Ashgate, 2011) and Secondary Work on Early Modern Women Writers (Ashgate, 2009). She has published widely on early modern women writers in venues including the Times Literary Supplement, Renaissance Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. In 2024, she was awarded the Sixteenth Century Society’s “Raymond B. Waddington Prize” for the best English-language article on the literature of the Early Modern period. Her work on Katherine Parr and Henry VIII has been featured in interviews with the London Times, CNN, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Canadian Globe and Mail, and other radio and TV outlets.