INTRODUCTION
Detail of plate 21, Jodocus Hondius’s America (Amsterdam: Jodocus Hondius, [1619]), with the itinerary of Le Maire’s voyage drawn in ink.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (Cabinet B619 1).
The term marginalia (marginalium in singular) was coined in
Company, appointed his son to lead a private expedition to discover
the early nineteenth century to refer to scribbles and comments
a new passage to the Dutch East Indies in 1615.
written in the margins of books and manuscripts, a practice that
A more recent use of the term marginalia has been given to the
readers have undertaken since antiquity. The incunable of Hartmann
images drawn in the borders of manuscripts, mostly those from the
Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1493)
Middle Ages. Scholars such as Lilian M. C. Randall and Michael
at the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows in its edges notes
Camille use these marginal images as a key to fully decipher the
written by an anonymous German reader who probably owned the
meaning of illuminated medieval codices, deepening our knowledge
book in the very late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (plate 7).
of their authors and of the social and historical context in which
These written additions also appear on maps, updating
these manuscripts ݕɔ