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Why I’m Obsessed With Marginalia (And You Will Be Too If You Love History)

When I was a little girl, I loved going to libraries.

Not just because I loved to read, but because it felt like I was going on a treasure hunt.

Every once in a while, I’d come across a book that had tons of notes scribbled on the edges.

While this can be annoying if you buy a book online thinking it’s new, I still find this to be a treat.

Because someone’s scribbles tell you a lot about that person, and what that person got out of the text that you’re now reading.

I’m a big fan of journaling in margins.

For years, I’ve only bought bibles with room to write in the margins – because I find that this is the best way for me to learn, take notes, and reflect back on what I’ve learned in recent years when I return to those same passages again.

The more I learn about history (and women’s history, in particular), the more I find marginalia is a decentralized, nontraditional way of finding out what life was really like for women in various times and places.

So if you’re interested in exploring the idea of alternative primary sources, then marginalia is definitely something you need to know about.

What Exactly Is Marginalia?

If you’re anything like me, when you check out a book from the library or read a used book…

Your eyes don’t stay on the printed text.

They instantly jump to the pen marks.

Those faint, ink-stained scribbles are called marginalia.

When I think of marginalia, my mind immediately goes to the handwritten medieval manuscripts.

To most people, they might look like minor visual noise or damage to a pristine page.

But to me (and to a growing movement of historians), they are absolute gold.

Marginalia refers to any marks made in the margins of a book, manuscript, or document. It includes:

Exclamations & Responses: Readers agreeing, disagreeing, or wrestling with a text
Practical Annotations: Vocabulary definitions, translations, or study notes
Personal Ephemera: Dates, family births, deaths, recipes, or emotional outbursts
Doodles & Marks: Manicules (tiny drawn hands pointing at key lines), stars, and decorative sketches (this eBook shows some really interesting illustrations and examples)

While official histories tell us what institutions wanted people to read, marginalia reveals how people actually read.

It turns a static, one-way broadcast (the printed book) into a two-way, living conversation between the author and the reader.

Isn’t that amazing??

Why Marginalia Matters: The Secret Interior Mind

When someone writes for the public sphere… whether it’s a published essay, a speech, or a legal record… they wear a mask.

They edit themselves.

They write for an audience, for power, or for posterity.

(and this is even assuming that a person has the pleasure and privilege of being able to write for the public sphere! but that’s a discussion for another time)

Marginalia is different.

This is writing that is usually unedited, raw, and intimate.

I know I definitely share things in the margins and notes of my bible that I wouldn’t share as readily with a bible study group.

When you read a person’s marginal notes, you are stepping directly into their unshielded interior mind.

You see their knee-jerk reactions, their doubts, their sense of humor, and their private emotional life.

You get to take a peek at their most unfiltered, authentic being.

From an academic view, marginalia acts as an alternative archive… a counter-narrative to the official record.

State records and classic history books tell us how society was supposed to run according to the rulers, the wealthy, and the public leaders of the time.

But marginalia reveals how regular individuals (often people with limited records, living under those systems) actually lived and processed their world day-by-day.

The Ultimate Counter-Archive: Uncovering Women’s History

This is where my true passion lies, and why I believe marginalia is essential to academic history: it gives voice to the people history tried to silence.

For centuries, women were largely excluded from public discourse.

They rarely published books, governed institutions, or made laws.

If you only look at mainstream historical archives, women often appear invisible, or at best, passive background figures defined solely by their male relatives.

Marginalia flips this dynamic on its head.

Even when women weren’t allowed to write the books, they were reading them.

And in the margins, they were writing what they read, thought, and what they thought about what they read.

1. The Family Bible as a Living Registry

For generations of women, the family Bible was the only domestic object guaranteed to survive over decades.

Women used the margins and blank flyleaves of Bibles to record births, miscarriages, local events, herbal remedies, and personal prayers.

Passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, these books became intergenerational heirlooms… a quiet, female-led genealogy that lived completely outside official state records.

2. Private Rebellions and Moral Dialogue

In a society where a woman couldn’t publicly argue with a sermon, a political treatise, or a male scholar’s opinion, she could talk back in the margins of her own library books.

Annotations reveal women questioning religious doctrine, offering sharp literary critiques, and resisting social expectations in real-time… leaving a record of intellectual independence that history otherwise erased.

Through marginalia, we realize that women were never silent; we just weren’t looking in the right places to hear them.

3. Domestic Science, Healthcare, and Secret Networks

Before modern pharmacy or published cookbooks, women were the primary healthcare providers, cooks, and scientists of their households.

They used book margins, flyleaves, and shared notebooks to record medicinal remedies for just about everything – from childbirth and seemingly seasonal fevers, to culinary recipes and household management tricks.

Even better, women constantly annotated these recipes with notes like “tested by my sister,” “proved by Mrs. Hore,” or “this failed.”

These marginal notes reveal a thriving, invisible network of female knowledge-sharing.

While men were publishing formal medical treatises at universities, women were conducting real-world empirical science in the margins of their homes… testing, tweaking, and passing down life-saving information from neighbor to neighbor.

Ready to Fall Down the Rabbit Hole? (Resources to Get Started)

If you want to look at primary sources, explore digitized manuscripts, or see what real historic marginalia looks like, here are a few incredible places to start your journey:

Book Traces: A massive collaborative project sponsored by the University of Virginia that identifies and digitizes unique marginalia, inscriptions, and inserts left in 19th and early 20th-century library books. It’s a goldmine for ordinary people’s reading habits.
The Archaeology of Reading: An incredible digital humanities project mapping early modern reading strategies. It offers searchable, high-resolution scans of heavily annotated 16th- and 17th-century books.
British Library Digitised Manuscripts: Search through medieval illuminated manuscripts and early print books. Keep an eye out for medieval marginal doodles, notes, and scribbles (including famous marginalia left by historical figures like Elizabeth I).
Annotated Books Online: A digital archive specifically dedicated to early modern annotated books, complete with transcriptions and translations of marginal notes.