Call for Papers: Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700
National Library of Australia, August 7-8 2025

Early modern women marked their books in myriad ways, and their marginalia provide evidence of their book ownership, their reading, writing and drawing practices, their acquisition of literacy, and the interrelation of body, book, and material world. This symposium invites papers and panels interpreting this exciting new textual corpus and discussing the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing marginalia by early modern women, elite and non-elite, known and unknown. What can marginalia tell us about women’s textual agency, education and literacy, their use of books, their lived experience of household economics, organization and technologies, and their interpersonal, affective and social relationships? What evidence does marginalia provide for women’s engagement with orality, performance, print, and scribal cultures? How can marginalia help us position women as humanist, political and religious agents and understand their worlds of work and leisure? And how can such new analyses of early modern women’s marginalia reshape early modern marginalia studies more broadly?

20 minute papers and panels are invited on any aspect of early modern women’s marginalia, but might consider the following topics:

• Marginalia, book ownership, book collecting, and provenance
• Marginalia as evidence of early modern women’s reading
• Marginalia as evidence of early modern women’s writing
• Visual and material cultures in early modern women’s marginalia
• Authorship, attribution and agency
• Form and genre
• Marginalia and sociability
• Marginalia, politics and power
• Marginalia and race
• Non-elite women’s marginalia
• Marginalia, education and literacy
• Marginalia, emotion and affect
• Marginalia and haptics
• Marginalia and heuristics

Invited speakers include Professor Micheline White (Carleton University), Professor Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo), Professor Paul Salzman (La Trobe University), Professor Sarah Ross (Victoria University of Wellington), and Dr Hannah August (Massey University)

The symposium will also launch the database Early Modern Women’s Marginalia: The Library of Libraries, with over 3000 examples of early modern women’s marginalia from 100 archives worldwide, hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University. Please send a 200 word abstract (or panel proposal) plus a short biography to admin.cems@anu.edu.au by 31 March 2025.