Natural Interactions in the Book as Art and Making Knowledge

Annotating

The Cambridge Dictionary defines annotations as short explanations or notes added to a text or image. Annotations were integral components of early modern books. They allowed for a direct knowledge contribution to scholarly fields, including natural history. Books were the primary sites of scholarly debates and dialogues: scholars would write each other commentaries, not unlike modern reviews, which they would then often publish. The structure of books encouraged adding notes and facilitated efficient organizing of them. Publishers often incorporated designated margins on the page, or they added full pages with printed lines for annotations either throughout the book or at the end. Sometimes they simply added extra blank pages that readers could use as they wished. Readers could easily access their thoughts on these pages, arrange them in order, and transfer them to another book if needed.

Annotations were often messy and were not always in the service of writing public commentaries. Scholars and interested readers alike would leave scattered notes squeezed in between tight margin spaces, sentences, and illustrations. These private notes vary in terms of their style and function, but they most often provide quick summaries of the printed text, personal observations and questions, references to other sources, and sometimes corrections. Annotations allowed readers to not only stop and assess, but also to connect knowledge, contribute to it, store information, and situate it in the larger epistemological context of natural history. As the abundance of annotations in natural history books demonstrates, annotations were convenient and helpful instruments for practicing natural history on the margins of the page.

Annotated clove/cytisus plant in Turner’s herbal

Illustrations play an important role in the production of knowledge about nature. Annotated illustrations help us understand the history of this process better. A 1568 copy of William Turner’s  plant treatise, A New Herball includes a handful of annotations that pertain not to the text, but the engraved images of the plants. The vernacular treatise was a British bestseller for centuries as it made the physical, medicinal, and magical properties of plants accessible for the first time not only to naturalists but also to interested laymen. While Turner based the accounts of the specimens entirely on his observations, he had repurposed the images from none other than Leonhart Fuchs. Turner labeled one of Fuchs’ images as a clove specimen (p.158), an identification that the unknown annotator calls into question.

The note says that “on page 196 [of an unidentified book]...this figure was under the name of Cytisus.” The note is seemingly objective: it is a factual piece of information. But it also reflects the annotator’s broader knowledge of natural history. The note subtly suggests the possibility that the plant might belong to another species. It casts a slight doubt on Turner’s labeling, corrects his identification, and offers a new one. The note produces a personalized copy of the annotator’s Turner, which in turn could serve as a storehouse of information that was in tune with the annotator’s learning. In addition, the note also creates a cross-reference to another body of knowledge by which the annotator contextualizes Turner within the larger scholarship of natural history. Turner’s observations, such as the one that explains how the clove’s “leaves broken and dronken help [those] that are bitten of venomous beastes,” had floated around for centuries. But whether the annotator agreed with this piece of knowledge or not remains a mystery.

Annotated rose root plant in Mattioli’s herbal

Pietro Mattioli was no stranger to natural history. The Italian naturalist, who was also the personal physician to the Habsburg court, was an avid learner of plants. His book, Compendium de plantis omnibus (“Compendium of All Plants”) provides a nearly exhaustive account of the known plants at the time. But it seems that even 1,000 pages worth of information about specimens were not enough for a particular reader, for a copy of the Compendium is filled with annotations that aimed to complete and add to Mattioli’s thoughts. Mattioli describes the natural habitat of the rose root plant accompanied by an illustration of the specimen (p. 769). He says that the plant is “born in the cliffs of the highest mountains, on rocky and precipitous places.” The unknown annotator corrected the period sign into a comma and continued the sentence with crabbed letters in ink. He or she says that “it [the plant] rejoices in the shaded soil,” which could mean either that the plant thrives best in dark soil, or that it prefers to stay in the shade. It’s a piece of information that adds extra information to Mattioli’s account of the specimen and demonstrates the annotator’s outside knowledge at the same time.

In other places, we see that the annotator underlined certain phrases, such as the “smell of the rose,” and added a note to them in the margins. While the patchy ink makes it virtually impossible to decipher the note, it seems that the annotator referred to page 271 of a herbal for further information on the rose. He or she also engaged with ideas about the medical properties of the plant and inserted two now unrecognizable words into Mattioli’s sentence regarding the plant’s ability to treat headaches. A later hand also provided the Linnean Latin and German names of the plant in the upper right corner of the page.

The annotations had produced a natural history book that was both complete and up-to-date with the latest knowledge in the eyes of its annotator. Annotating within the space of the paper provided a means through which the annotator could become a naturalist in his or her own right in Mattioli’s book.

Click on the arrows below to see other annotated pages in Mattioli's work.

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