Earle Havens, Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, Johns Hopkins University

Book History Seminar, Harvard University

This talk will address the Elizabethan scholar-courtier, Gabriel Harvey, and his vast enterprise of close reading and intensive manuscript annotation of the margins of printed books from his personal library. Particular comparison will be made between the annotations in thirteen of these books in the collection of the Houghton Library, and many others that have been recently digitized, transcribed, encoded, and made fully searchable through the Mellon-Foundation funded digital humanities initiative, “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe.” For more on the Archaeology of Reading—a scholarly collaboration between Johns Hopkins, Princeton University, and University College London—see the project website: https://archaeologyofreading.org/.