The Reader's Eye: Between Annotation and Illustration

In 'Used Books' (my study of marginalia in early printed books), I tried to argue that readers in the 13th to 17th centuries picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and practical power of the hand, and concluded that pre-modern reading was, to a surprising extent, a manual art, but in doing so I lost sight of sight itself and have now begun to recover the ways in which readers responded with images as well as words.

Between medieval illumination and modern illustration there are many traces of reading as a visual mode, traces that we have been slow to see and study and for which we are poorly served by both methodology and terminology. Active readers drew sketches, diagrams, iconic tags and body parts as well as fully-fledged decorative or illustrative schemes, and there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that reading was closely bound up with seeing, and even drawing, across the Medieval-Renaissance divide.