William W. E. Slights. Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. xiv + 298 pp. + 22 b/w pls. index, illus, bibl. $59.50. ISBN: 0-472-11229-5.

In Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (1993), Evelyn B. Tribble remarked on the value of "attention to the particular, the local, and the material" (5) as a useful strategy for approaching bibliographical problems as well as for exploring layers of cultural construction. This new book by Slights covers much the same ground, and many of the same texts, as Tribble's groundbreaking book. Both analyze the margins of English printed Bibles, the appropriation of literary authority in works like Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, the extratextual apparatus of Sir John Harington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the anticlerical pamphlets of the Marprelate controversy, and the glossed works of Ben Jonson, but Slights' larger book refers to more secondary sources and contains a fuller bibliography, along with 22 plates.

Not all of the works under discussion here seem to fall comfortably within the rubric of "English Renaissance Books," however, as announced in the subtitle. Erasmus' Encomium moriae, published in 1515 by Froben in Basel, with its glosses penned in part by Listrius, is said to deserve "a special place in any account of English Renaissance printed marginalia" (52) because it was composed, in part, in England and dedicated to Sir Thomas More, though of course the work was written by a Dutch scholar in Latin and published in Germany. Discussion of marginal commentary in James Joyce's Ulysses, along with its appearance in the works of Coleridge and Poe, also seems somewhat far afield when applied to a rather lengthy theoretical analysis about Renaissance margins and marginality.

Broad statements about the printed books in question are very difficult to make, and Slights does best when he draws on his own observation, devising a useful taxonomy of types of marginal notation, for example. Though the book is broadly synthetic, mentioning almost every conceivable general work pertinent to the history of print from Eisenstein to Derrida, the synthesis of scholarship on the use of margins in medieval manuscripts, one clear exemplar for the marginalia that appears later in print, seems fairly cursory. That said, this book is full of specific details, the stuff of literary history, and contains some lively anecdotes (not to mention footnotes).

Here one can learn about the origin, use, and survival of the maniculum, the index finger which begins to be printed in the margins of books in the sixteenth century. Multiple voices in the interaction between text and marginal notes are considered in John Donne's Biathanatos, comments in the margins indicating an attempt at authorial control of a controversial text that also may work against its meaning. The heavily annotated margins of John Dee's General and Rare Memorials are discussed, along with layers of meaning further created by pasted-on cancellation slips and pen-and-ink marginalia. Slights makes a good case for his assertion that "translation is a radical form of annotational supplement" (15) in his analysis of Henry Savile's English translations of Tacitus. And, in his informative consideration of printed chronicles and histories, one can read John Stow's account of "Gerrarde the Gyant," as well as about the censorship of Holinshed's Chronicles, Richard Grafton's treatment of Hardyng's Chronicle, and John Selden's perhaps self-consciously disjunctive notes to Drayton's Poly-Olbion. Slights also presents a convincing case for the influence of marginalia in Renaissance chronicles and histories, particularly the notes produced by John Speed, on the construction of Shakespeare's Richard II.

Among the multiple purposes of annotation is creating a community of readers, one consistent theme that emerges here, along with the idea that print is not as entirely fixed as some have argued, the text instead multivalenced and mediated by its producers: "The apparent fixity of a printed text is ... severely compromised by the chorus of self-correcting, deauthorizing, hedging, but vigorously insistent voices from the edge" (156). Slights' volume deserves a place beside Tribble's book on the shelves of book historians, bibliographers, and students of print, religious controversy, and cultural studies, and may find a more popular following as well among those who like to read books about books.

MARTHA W. DRIVER

Pace University, New York