Reading Practices

Much attention is devoted in MEI to the description of manuscript annotations.

Like any other material evidence, they are geographically located, at least by area, and dated, at least by century.

Their analysis and description is thoroughly articulated in typology, frequency, and location in the book.

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The key-idea of MEI is to analyze and cathegorize each provenance clue by century (possibly decade) and by geographical area (city and/or country), so that the more the book was used and read in the past – underlined, annotated, rebound, decorated etc. – the more we have provenance blocks of information for describing it and thus retrievable data for research.

MEI indeed provides to classify, within space and time, the identities of the buyers and users -even if Anonymous- distinguishing between personal and insitutional ones, religious and lay, male and female etc., by profession – physician, lawyer, politician, clergy, scholar, civil servant, student, librarian etc. -, and by role (annotator, donor, censor, former owner etc.).

Bio-bibliographical investigations by MEI-editors on the identified owners refine their detection.

Among the material evidence of the users’ traces on books and pages, much space is devoted in MEI to the description of manuscript notes.

Their analysis and description is thoroughly articulated in 17 typologies: corrections, completions, supplements, extraction of key words, collation, translation, structuring the text (pagination etc.), comments, censorship, reading marks (underlining and pointing hands), drawings, corrections/notes by the printer, lecture notes, later rubrication, autograph, pen trials, personal notes.

Below you can see some examples of these typologies.