Marginalia

Marginalia (from the Latin margo — 'edge, margin') are inscriptions, notes, comments, drawings, or glosses in the margins of a manuscript or printed book, made by a copyist, editor, owner, or reader. Marginalia are divided into authorial, editorial, and readerly (ownership) notes. They are an invaluable source for the history of the book, of reading, and of reception: they reveal how a book was perceived, who owned it, and which passages drew attention. Readers' provenance notes help reconstruct the fate of a copy and its circle of readers. Marginal glosses in old manuscripts recorded interpretations of obscure words, out of which the first dictionaries arose. The Ukrainian bookman Ivan Vyshensky left polemical marginalia; numerous ownership and readerly notes on old prints have been studied by bibliologists. In a broader cultural sense, the 'marginal' means the peripheral, 'in the margins' of the dominant discourse — a concept important for postcolonial theory.