Reading the margins: investigating reading practices in early sixteenth-century Scotland

Abstract

This dissertation examines the marginalia and other forms of readerly intervention found in early printed books owned and used in Scotland before and during the Reformation. It reconstructs how learned Scottish readers interacted with texts, demonstrating that their annotation practices formed part of a shared European scholarly culture. By analysing a corpus of annotated books preserved in Scottish and continental collections, the study identifies a consistent set of annotating tools—such as nota marks, manicules, keywords, and textual summaries—and writing practices which Scottish readers employed in ways comparable to their continental contemporaries. Methodologically, the thesis combines bibliographical and palaeographical analysis with approaches from the history of reading and intellectual history. Detailed case studies focus on William Scheves, readers associated with King’s College, Aberdeen—among them Hector Boece, John Vaus, and Theophilus Stewart and George Buchanan. The dissertation also includes anonymous or unknown readers whose annotations provide valuable evidence for understanding the Scottish cultural context. My thesis shows that learned Scottish readers of pre-Reformation books used a set of common annotating tools and writing practices which they shared with the mainstream of contemporary European scholarship. Through a close examination of marginalia across a range of theological, classical, and humanist texts, the study identifies recurrent features such as systematic nota marks, manicules, keywords, and schematic summaries that reflect the structured reading methods promoted in continental universities and humanist circles. These tools were not random scribal habits but deliberate aids to study, memory, and argumentation, revealing how Scottish readers approached books as active participants in a transnational intellectual culture. Their use of both secretary and italic hands, further demonstrate the permeability of Scottish scholarly practice to European models of learning. The consistency of these annotating techniques across diverse contexts—academic, ecclesiastical, and private—indicates that Scottish scholars were well-informed contributors to the methods and disciplines of scholastic and humanist scholarship. In tracing these practices, the thesis situates Scotland within a wider geography of reading that connected local academic communities to the evolving norms of Renaissance intellectual life.