Into the Modern Age
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
The printing press transformed written information dramatically in the decades after its invention. With manuscripts, every page could be edited, corrected, but also erred or mistaken, by the hand that copied it, so that no two manuscript pages were the same. With the printing press, a printer might produce dozens or hundreds of virtually identical pages. And with this transition, so too changed the role and presence of marginalia, where it was formalized as an official part of the text; at the same time, print didn’t stop readers from taking pen to paper to make their own additions to the page.
Printers grappled with the new technology and explored different ways to organize the page visually to convey its text and information. They often aped the familiar styles and techniques from manuscripts: from creating fonts that mimicked different styles of handwriting, to using the page layout developed by the ordinatio of the later Middle Ages. In doing so, however, they calcified what was once flexible and changeable. Marginalia that could be tweaked, edited and adapted by each individual scribe, one manuscript at a time, were instead reproduced in scores of copies in printed books.
But the individuality of marginalia did not entirely disappear with the advent of print, as readers continued to add their own notes and details in the borders and boundaries of books, preserving the practice of customizing and doodling, conversing with texts long after their leaves left the press’ cradle.
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A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather/Seasons, by Agostino Nifo. Italy, 1540.
Published in Venice in 1540, De verissimis temporum signis commentariolus, by Agostino Nifo, was one of the first printed treatises to focus entirely on eteorology and weather forecasting. Nifo divided the book’s chapters into three sections: he dedicated the first to predicting the weather and its general mechanisms; the second exclusively to good weather; and the third to rain, droughts and floods.
Predictions of weather impacted not only the harvesting of grains that formed the bulk of the everyday person’s diet but also travel and trade across the Mediterranean. Scientists, farmers, and sailors alike were eager to understand the whims of the weather. Nifo was no exception. He drew on everything from the phases of the moon and astrology to the behavior of birds to instruct on how to predict the weather.
The owner of this volume added their own artistic play to these themes. More than the occasional note or comment on the text itself, they integrated art and doodles in direct communication with the texts’ subjects: rainbows near Nifo’s explanations on the relationship between rain and rainbows, illustrations of the different astrological star signs near his discussions of the connection between the stars and weather, with birds, dogs, cicada and more. They’ve graced nearly every page with a quick scribble or endearing doodle. The reader may have been a scholar or sailor rather than an artist, but their drawings transformed a practical, scientific work into a work of beauty.
De verissimis temporum signis commentariolus [A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather/Seasons], by Agostino Nifo. Italy, 1540. Call Number: MS B75.
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Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, with commentary by Filippo Beroaldo. Bologna, 1500.
Apuleius’ Metamorphoses arranges episodic tales surrounding the life and adventures of its hero, Lucius, and those he meets on his journeys, a narrative style imitated and followed by later authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Rabelais, Daniel Defoe, and others. First composed in the second century, it managed to make its way from manuscript to print in the early decades of the printing press’ arrival in Europe due to its popularity among humanist scholars.
One of those humanists, Beroaldo, taught at the University of Bologna in the late 15th century, where much of his work revolved around producing commentaries on classical Roman literature, including his commentary on Apuleius’ work. This first edition of his commentary embodies the medieval influence on early printed book design: a minuscule snippet of Apuleius’ text stands smothered by Beroaldo’s commentary on every side, while a third layer of printed annotations on the fringes that would help the reader navigate the endless walls of unbroken text: each word on the fringe corresponds to a key term within the text so that a reader searching for a particular quotation or line about a particular subject or topic might be able to easily return to that section to reread it. Text within text within text.
Yet one owner of this volume appears to have been dissatisfied with the insufficient number of guiding notes in the margins and has gone through the entire text, over 550 pages, and added their own navigational markers, as well as a handful of manicules, small hands that point to particularly important passages. Here, they’ve marked out the line discussing St. Augustine’s analysis of the Roman gods Liber and Libera, twin gods of fertility often connected with Dionysus, god of wine and sexuality. The thin finger, little more than a line with a few squiggled loops for a hand, has the helpful “Augustinus” written above it.
Apuleius’ Asinus Aureus [The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses], with commentary by Filippo Beroaldo. Bologna, 1500. Call Number: Summerfield E36.
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Marsilio Ficino’s Familiar/Intimate Letters, Germany, 1497.
Marsilio Ficino led the Florentine Academy, a group of some of the greatest Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, funded Cosimo de’ Medici, wealthy banker, politician, and patron of the arts. The academy centered around the revival of scholarship around Greek philosopher Plato, whose influence had waned in the Middle Ages while his student, Aristotle, became a defining figure of scholarship. With his translation of Plato’s works in 1453, Ficino aimed to bring Plato back into contemporary scholarship — and it worked. Over forty years, Ficino debated and discussed Plato and philosophy with his peers across the academy through letters that he then gathered together for publication in 1495 under the title Epistolae Familiares (Familiar/Intimate Letters).
This 1497 edition, one of the first published outside of Italy, had an adamant and enthusiastic early reader. They consistently embellished the text with underlines, manicules (tiny hands meant to point to important parts of the text), and copious notes. Often, the notes provide little more than additional citations of classical scholars and intellectuals; other times, they contribute something of greater substance, with knowledge of contemporary Italian politics and history.
On the displayed page, the reader has added several small notes to Ficino’s discussion of the Greek philosopher Xenocrates, with a squiggled line bordering an anecdote of Xenocrates chastising a man gambling with dice. The reader has corrected the text in the line “Cum vidisset quendam aleia ludentem arguit” (“When he saw someone playing dice, he rebuked them”)— changing the word for dice from “aleia” to “alea” by striking out the “I,” and then has added a quick six-sided die to the border, as if teasing the printer’s mistake.
Marsilio Ficino’s Epistolae Familiares (Familiar/Intimate Letters), Nuremberg, Germany, 1497. Summerfield C332.
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Virgil’s Works with Commentaries. 1491.
Virgil’s Opera (“Works”) was among the first non-religious texts printed in Europe after the advent of the printing press in 1454, and over 180 different editions were printed between 1469 and 1500, making him one of the most widely printed authors of the fifteenth century. Today, we call printed books from this period “incunabula” (or “incunables”), meaning “cradles,” because the printing press was said to be in its infancy.
This copy numbers among those early editions, printed in Venice in 1491 by the publisher Lazzaro Soardi. It includes all (or so it thought) of Virgil’s known works: his Georgics, Eclogues, and the Aeneid, together with what it believed to be his poetry, and includes a blend of commentaries from influential authors, both classical and Renaissance, including Servius the Grammarian, Aelius Donatus, Cristoforo Landino, and Domizio Calderini.
To those grand names, however, multiple owners added their own authorship, with substantial thoughts across centuries with over 100 of its pages are scrawled with notes by multiple hands. Those notes reveal the complex and adventurous life the early example of printing led: one previous own has dragged a line through the ad Priapum poems, a collection of 80 short snippets of anonymous poetry incorrectly attributed to Virgil, about the phallic Greek god Priapus. Several Venetian laws censored these poems for their obscenity beginning in 1517, 1526, 1542-1543, and again in 1547. A sixteenth-century owner likely drew the line through the poems to comply (however lazily) with those laws.
Elsewhere, however, the readers’ interventions are more help than hindrance, adding translations and annotations — at least one hand devised an efficient footnote system, adding numbers throughout the text corresponding to notes at the side of the page. These footnotes hint at the book’s voyage across continents: the footnotes are in English, suggesting that the book left its Italian homeland for the shores of England within a few centuries of its printing.
Virgilius Maro (Publius). [Opera,] with Commentaries by Servius, Landinus, Donatus, and Calderinus. 1491. No Call Number.