The margins of the text have become a much sought after topic along the ambits of the many turns that the humanities have experienced, most notably the material one and Genette’s theory of the paratext. Particularly in English studies, a thrilling field has opened that focuses on readers’ marks and marginalia in printed Renaissance books so as to draw attention to how texts and books were used and how readers interacted with these objects. This research can be placed in the larger tradition of collecting and analyzing glosses, annotations, and other marginalia in the context of text reception, transmission, and knowledge creation or the so-called biography of the book, to name but a few domains of applications of this kind of approach.

Jane Griffiths’s monograph offers a completely new perspective on the phenomenon of the margin. This is one reason why her study offers a fascinating and enriching yet also demanding contribution to glossing as paratextual practice. The author turns her attention to the (heretofore scarcely examined) case of self-glossing in manuscript and print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She develops this in a series of chronologically ordered case studies from which a sequential argument unfolds as each chapter builds upon the findings of the preceding ones. These case studies highlight the glossatory practices of a number of authors, translators, and printers of the chosen period, including John Lydgate, Gavin Douglas, William Copland, Sir Thomas Chaloner, William Baldwin, William Bullein, Sir John Harrington, and Thomas Nashe. An analysis of the practice of self-glossing naturally raises problems about whether the glosses can be reliably established as having been made by their alleged hands; yet Griffiths’s argumentation is always transparent and cautious about conclusions drawn.

The author gives a complex and illuminating investigation of the glossing practices in selected texts by these authors, as well as of the glossing practices in the Bodleian MS Fairfax 16. She reveals new, distinct functionalities of the gloss as literary genre. She also explores the transmission of a selection of glossed texts, both as manuscript and print, in order to investigate the extent to which the new print medium influenced glossing practices. Furthermore (and as a logical extension to this question), a choice of glossed texts are studied that were composed with the intention of being printed. In this setting, a further red thread (that also resolves the enigmatic title) is woven through the book: the peculiar case of glosses that were written and printed not for knowledge transmission, indexing, or to guide the reader, but with the aim of (playful) diversion and even subversion. Griffiths shows that this category of “diverting glosses” is highly experimental and closely linked to contemporary concepts of authorship, authority, and genre building. Diverting glosses, she argues, consciously create “a destabilizing effect” and “draw attention to the artificiality of the glossing conventions” (4).

The book is convincing in all chapters. It makes clear that the era of print has brought new functionalities and “lives” of the gloss as a paratextual element of the printed page. Griffiths opens the door on these manifold declensions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and her book is not only a gift for the study of literature and the history of the book in England, but also has interdisciplinary outcomes that will be hopefully taken on by other scholars working on marginalia.

Within this abundance of impressive research findings a caveat must be raised, namely the scarcity of illustrations in this monograph. Illustrations are not only nice to have; in a book such as this they are a vital mode of communicating research findings. This book contains too few of them and what is provided is treated poorly: margins are cropped; small, grayscale formats are used; and subtitles that should tell the reader what is pictured have been omitted. There is thus a drop of bitterness to Griffiths’s great text in terms of how it has been treated as a book. This is surely a contradictio in adiecto, if not a hurt to the intrinsic subject of the book, its own moderate mise-en-page leaving the reader literally without good margins. This monograph certainly deserved better materialization.