The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books

Abstract

When Horatio tells Hamlet, “I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done” (V.ii. 156-57), we find ourselves amused and bemused trying to imagine what conceiveable edification could be gleaned from a marginal gloss on the courtly gabble of Osric's invitation to the duel. Yet while Horatio was having his little joke about edifying margents, Renaissance commentators, scholarly annotators, translators, editors, printers, and authors of all kinds were busily constructing elaborate scaffolds of printed marginalia around texts both ancient and modern, ranging from Holy Writ to handbooks for New World entrepreneurs and manuals on the courtly art of self-defense. The ostensible and frequently advertised purpose of this marginal material was to make texts more accessible to the “general reader,” to provide the non-specialist working on a difficult text a place to stand that was grounded on more familiar books, ideas, and experience.

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