When: 8 August, 2025
Where: National Library of Australia

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 one-day symposium interprets this exciting new textual corpus and discusses the challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing this material. 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?

The symposium will include keynotes by Professor Micheline White (Carleton University), Emeritus Professor Paul Salzman (La Trobe University), Professor Sarah C.E. Ross (Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr Emma Rayner (Australian National University).

For details and registration, click here.