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The Collation

This month’s crocodile mystery was, as Andrew Keener quickly identified, an image from Gabriel Harvey’s copy of Lodovico Domenichi’s Facetie and (Folger H.a.2):

Gabriel Harvey's heavily annotated copy of Facetie (fol. 1v-2r)

Gabriel Harvey’s heavily annotated copy of Facetie (fol. 1v-2r)

There is a lot that could be said about Gabriel Harvey and his habits of reading. 1 He was a scholar, a writer, and a prolific reader who heavily annotated his books, about 200 of which survive (the Folger holds seven of his annotated books). 2 Harvey was, as Heather Wolfe puts it in her account of this book in “The Pen’s Excellencie”, an “ambitious and goal-oriented reader” both on his own account and in his work as a professional reader as the secretary for the Earl of Leicester. But in this book, Harvey also seems to engage in some personal reflections, as Heather describes: “Relying on the printed text as a trigger for his own ideas, Harvey used the margins to outline his strategies for self-improvement, to encourage himself in his studies, to make cross-references to other readings, and to comment on a variety of themes. At the end of the volume he appended a list of the books most necessary for civilized elocution.” 3

The layers of annotation we see here—in which Harvey has not only squeezed his thoughts into all available white space, but has used his notes to point outward to other writers and inward to his own thoughts on self-improvement—is akin, I think, to the layered way in which web 2.0 has developed. This isn’t a new thought, but there is a new resource that builds on this invitation to bring annotated books into the digital world, recognizing the layers of interaction and links to networks of communities. 

  1. Two places to start are Virginia Stern, Gabriel Harvey: his life, marginalia, and library (Oxford UP, 1979) and Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30-78.
  2. In addition to Domenichi’s Facetie, which is bound with Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti et Fatti Piacevoli, the Folger has his annotated copies of Lodovico Dolce’s Medea Tragedia (PQ4621.D3 M4 1566a Cage), George North’s Description of Swedland (STC 18662), Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le notti, Pindar’s Olympia, John Harvey’s A discoursive Probleme concerning Prophesies (STC 12908 Copy 2), and Erasmus’s Parabolae.
  3. Heather Wolfe, ed. “The Pen’s Excellencie”: Treasures from the Manuscript Collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library (Folger Shakespeare Library, 2002) pp 136-37. Consult her account for a fuller description of this book.

Comments

Thanks for these details about ABO! Very interesting & useful project there (looks like there’s room for a lot more work on Harvey’s books, too!)

Andrew Keener — June 26, 2013

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