In this important study of early modern habits of reading as manifested in handwritten inscriptions in the margins of select early modern books, Stephen Orgel focuses on what he terms “an archaeology of the use of margins and other blank spaces, a sociology of reading and writing in relationship to ownership” (2). He addresses uncommon examples of the marking of “books in which the text and marginalia are in intense communication with each other, glossing, correcting, reminding, emphasizing, arguing—cases in which reading constitutes an active and sometimes adversarial engagement with the book” (24). He thus considers the underlying historical problem of how the marking of books and inclusion of marginalia that originally enhanced the value and utility of books came to be viewed by modern collectors as an act of defacement. In recent decades, scholars and librarians have come to appreciate readers’ marks and annotations as valuable evidence concerning how early readers responded to and understood books.

The glory of this opulently illustrated book inheres in Professor Orgel’s rich case studies of marginalia in books drawn largely from his personal library. Transcriptions of annotations and eighty facsimiles illuminate his investigation. Following introductory remarks about his subject at large in chapter 1, he enters into an investigation of “humanist education in action” (30), focused largely on reader response to the homoerotic component in an unexpurgated 1507 Cologne edition of the Latin text of Virgil’s Bucolica. Notes inscribed by three German schoolboys in the margins of this core text within the grammar school curriculum cut against the grain of the printed notes based on Servius’s allegorical interpretation, which elides the homoerotic content of Virgil’s eclogues. In all likelihood, these students followed the remarks of their teacher, who seems to have adopted a more open-minded stance than Erasmus, who wished to “sanitize” the poems by ignoring their unorthodox content (34).

Orgel continues his investigation in chapter 3 with an invigorating discussion of how an early modern understanding of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries often seems quite alien to modern reception of these works. Notations by two seventeenth-century readers on different copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio evince concern with domestic and courtly decorum. The marking up for performance of two plays in another First Folio is notable for excisions that shorten long speeches and cut what strikes most modern respondents as essential, namely, “the complex poetry; the rhetorical grandeur; and, in large measure, the bits that became famous” (74). The fourth chapter affords an illuminating consideration of adversarial reading in two editions of verse by Edmund Spenser. In the first instance, a Puritan reader who engages “in angry dialogue” with the text of book 1 of The Faerie Queene (84) misunderstands the text’s anti-Catholic premises by misreading poetic conventions as heresy or idolatry. (A later reader of the same copy rejects these views.) In the second case, yet another early reader engages in the kind of thoughtful and systematic reading that Erasmus recommended. Attending in particular to moralization, sententious rhetoric, and some of the poetic elements in the poem, this reader attempts to clarify confusing plot lines and reduce them to “straightforward narrative” (103). By contrast, at least one eighteenth-century example finds that elements prized by earlier readers are simply boring.

This book closes with two chapters concerned with reading by or about notable women. The first offers interesting examples of the insertion of scurrilous verses into a copy of Truth Brought to Light and Discovered by Time, published by Michael Sparke in 1651. They magnify the infamy of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, for their involvement in the scandal that swirled around the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, for which they were convicted. The final chapter offers a fascinating account of three readings of the Mirror for Magistrates that Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke and Montgomery, began in 1670, at the age of eighty. Annotations in the aged and spidery italic hand of Lady Clifford and the very different hand of her secretary detail the dates and locations of her sequential readings at different manors among her baronial holdings. Evincing conservative taste in literature, she clearly enjoyed the philosophical, moralistic, and epigrammatic elements in this Elizabethan classic, in addition to its grandly elevated prosody. Above all, she appreciated the heroic account of her own family history in England’s Eliza, added in honor of Elizabeth I by the editor of the 1610 edition of the Mirror read by Lady Clifford and her companion(s).

This instructive study affords a compelling example of Stephen Orgel’s archaeology of reading, whereby investigation of early inscriptions in the margins and other blank spaces of books contributes greatly to our understanding of the sociology and history of reading.