03-01-2017, 07:04 AM
Without wanting to suggest any sociological shift, I'd say that the flooding of the market with cheap printed books, together with rising literacy rates, helped to destroy much of the mystique of these old manuscripts.
Hence, people in the 16-18 centuries had a tendency to use blank space as notepaper. You come across some quite bizarre notes just jotted down.
Genealogical records are quite common in books of hours, for example - people knew the books would be kept for generations so they wrote down birth dates for posterity.
But that's not what we're seeing in the VM, whose notes seem to suggest some sort of link with the original content.
Which is why I suggested the colophon link - it could be another one of those 'finally finished this pox leber of a book' annotations
Hence, people in the 16-18 centuries had a tendency to use blank space as notepaper. You come across some quite bizarre notes just jotted down.
Genealogical records are quite common in books of hours, for example - people knew the books would be kept for generations so they wrote down birth dates for posterity.
But that's not what we're seeing in the VM, whose notes seem to suggest some sort of link with the original content.
Which is why I suggested the colophon link - it could be another one of those 'finally finished this pox leber of a book' annotations