Marginalia: Meaning, History, and Famous Examples

What Is Marginalia? Meaning, Pronunciation, and Origin

Marginalia are the notes, marks, and drawings that readers leave in the margins of a book or manuscript. That includes written comments, underlines, symbols like a pointing hand or "NB," corrections, and doodles. The word is a plural noun from the Medieval Latin marginalis ("of the margin"), and it entered English through the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1819.

It's pronounced mar-juh-NAY-lee-uh. A few related terms come up again and again in the history below:

• Gloss: a short explanation of a word or line, written between the lines or beside them. Medieval glosses could swell into full commentaries.
• Annotation: the umbrella term for any note attached to a text, on paper or on a screen. All marginalia are annotations, but not every annotation sits in a margin.
• Manicule: a drawn pointing hand (☞) that tells the next reader to look here.
• Drollery: a comic or bizarre picture in the margin of a medieval manuscript, often with no obvious link to the text.

The dictionary definition undersells them, though. Every underline, every scribbled "YES!" or "wrong," every tiny hand drawn beside a passage is evidence that someone was here, reading this, and had something to say about it. A 9th-century monk glossing his Bible and a student highlighting a web article with Glasp are doing the same basic thing, and research on the science of highlighting shows it pays off most when you do something with what you marked.

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Types of Marginalia, With Examples

Historians of reading sort marginalia into a handful of recurring kinds. Most readers, then and now, mix several of them on the same page.

Two things get lost in most definitions. First, underlining and highlighting count. Historians include them because a plain line under a sentence still records what one reader judged important. Second, marginalia don't have to be clever to matter. A name and a date on a flyleaf can tell a historian who owned a book, when, and sometimes why.

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Medieval Marginalia: Glosses, Manicules, and Knights Fighting Snails (9th-15th Century)

The Collaborative Manuscript

Before printing, every book was copied by hand. Making one took months, sometimes years, so books were rare, expensive, and shared. A single copy of a theological text might pass through dozens of hands over a century, and each reader could add a layer of commentary.

So medieval reading was collaborative by default. One monk copies a passage of Augustine. A later reader adds a Latin gloss on a difficult word. A 12th-century scholar writes a longer note in the margin, debating the interpretation. After two centuries in circulation, the margins of a manuscript could hold as much writing as the main text.

These layered glosses were valued enough to become part of the textual tradition itself. The Glossa Ordinaria, the standard commentary on the Bible assembled in the 12th century, grew out of marginal and interlinear notes. Its pages put a small block of scripture at the center, surrounded on every side by commentary. The margins had eaten the text.

Irish Scribes Who Talked Back

Some of the liveliest early marginalia came from Irish monks. Around 851, a team of Irish scribes copied Priscian's Latin grammar, a manuscript now known as the St Gall Priscian after the Swiss abbey library that holds it. They filled it with thousands of explanatory notes, roughly a third of them in Old Irish rather than Latin.

In the bottom margins of two pages, a scribe broke off to write a short Old Irish poem: a hedge of trees around him, a blackbird singing to him, birdsong above his lined page, a cuckoo calling from the bushes. Elsewhere in the same manuscript, its scribes left complaints any office worker would recognize, from "I am very cold" to a weary "Alas, my hand."

Those asides are a reminder that copying was physical labor. The margin was where a scribe could admit it.

The Manicule: A Pointing Hand Across Centuries

The best-known medieval reading mark is the manicule (from the Latin manicula, "little hand"): a drawn hand with an extended index finger, pointing at a passage the reader thought mattered.

William Sherman, who traced the symbol's history in a 2005 essay, "Toward a History of the Manicule," and expanded it in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (2008), argues that "between at least the 12th and 18th centuries, [the manicule] may have been the most common symbol produced both for and by readers in the margins of manuscripts and printed books." Manicules show up in 12th-century Spanish manuscripts and became common in 14th- and 15th-century Italian ones. The Domesday Book of 1086 contains one, though nobody knows when it was added.

They varied wildly in style: crude stick-figure hands, elegant versions with ruffled cuffs, fingers stretched across half the margin. The job never changed. A manicule meant "look here, this is the important part."

Monsters in the Margins

Not all medieval marginalia were scholarly. Manuscripts from the late 13th and 14th centuries are full of bizarre, funny, and sometimes obscene pictures. Knights fighting giant snails. Rabbits with swords and bows. Apes dressed as people. Hybrid creatures with human heads and animal bodies.

Art historians call these drolleries or grotesques, and the snail fights are among the best known. Lilian Randall gathered more than seventy examples from twenty-nine manuscripts for "The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare," a 1962 article in Speculum. The motif appeared in northern French manuscripts toward the end of the 13th century, spread to Flemish and English ones, and turned up again and again through the first quarter of the 14th. Randall argued the snail stood for the Lombards, the foreign moneylenders and pawnbrokers many northern Europeans resented. Other scholars read the image differently, and nobody has settled it.

Whatever their purpose, these doodles show readers and illuminators treating the page as their own. Whoever drew a rabbit jousting in the margin of a prayer book was doing something recognizably human: joking, needling, or just passing the time.

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The Print Revolution Changes Everything (15th-17th Century)

From Shared Manuscripts to Personal Books

Johannes Gutenberg's press, developed around 1440 and used for his famous Bible in the 1450s, changed how people related to books. Within half a century, Europe's presses had turned out millions of copies.

For marginalia, print cut both ways. More people owned books, so more people could write in them freely. But the shift from shared manuscripts to personal copies slowly moved annotation from a communal activity to a private one. In manuscript culture, your notes joined the text's living tradition. In print culture, your notes mostly sat on your own shelf, seen by few people unless you lent, gave away, or sold the book.

Erasmus and the Humanist Annotators

Renaissance humanists treated annotation as a discipline, and Desiderius Erasmus pushed the habit into print. When he published his Greek New Testament in 1516, he added a long section of Annotationes, his notes on the text, so thousands of readers could follow his reasoning.

Gabriel Harvey Reads for Action

The Elizabethan scholar Gabriel Harvey left some of the most studied marginalia in English history. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton reconstructed how he worked through his copy of Livy's history of Rome in "Studied for Action," a landmark 1990 article in Past and Present. He read it several times, sometimes alongside friends such as Sir Philip Sidney, and used its margins to turn ancient history into practical lessons for Elizabethan politics.

Virginia Woolf noticed him too. In "The Strange Elizabethans" (1932), she wrote that Harvey "had the habit of making notes in the margins of books as he read," and that he loved books not as trophies but as things that, in Harvey's own words, "must be meditated, practised and incorporated into my body and soul."

His reading faced outward. Harvey read with other people and for other people, and his margins record the conversation.

Fermat's Margin, Milton's Folio, and Galileo's Almagest

The single most famous marginal note comes from mathematics. Around 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote in his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica that a cube can't be split into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, and so on for every higher power. He added that he had found a truly marvelous proof, but "hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet": this margin was too narrow to contain it.

The original copy is lost. Fermat's son Samuel printed the notes in a 1670 edition, and the claim became known as Fermat's Last Theorem. It took until 1994 for Andrew Wiles to prove it, using mathematics Fermat couldn't have known.

Margins can also turn up new evidence centuries later. In 2019, the Cambridge scholar Jason Scott-Warren argued that the anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia was John Milton. He built on Claire Bourne's study of the notes, which include corrections, cross-references, and a restored prologue to Romeo and Juliet.

The newest find is from 2026. On February 17, the National Central Library of Florence presented a copy of Ptolemy's Almagest, printed in Basel in 1551, whose margins carry numerous notes attributed to Galileo Galilei. Ivan Malara, a historian at the University of Milan, found it after more than three years studying how Galileo worked with the Almagest. The handwriting matches Galileo's early hand, and the notes echo passages in works he wrote before and after Sidereus Nuncius (1610). Four centuries on, a margin is still changing what we know about the Scientific Revolution.

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The Golden Age of Marginalia (18th-19th Century)

Coleridge Gives It a Name

Samuel Taylor Coleridge borrowed books constantly and filled other people's copies with notes. His friend Charles Lamb, in the 1820 essay "The Two Races of Men," advised lending books only to a reader like Coleridge, because "he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value."

Coleridge also gave the practice its English name. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for "marginalia" is an 1819 piece in Blackwood's Magazine. H. J. Jackson, co-editor of his collected marginalia, wrote on the Oxford University Press blog that the piece was Coleridge's own, published under a pseudonym.

His notes ranged from a single word to essays that filled every white space on the page. The scholarly edition of his marginalia, edited by George Whalley and Jackson and published in six volumes between 1980 and 2001, gathers more than 8,000 of them. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (2001) traces English-language marginalia from about 1700 on.

John Adams Argues with His Books

Across the Atlantic, John Adams was conducting his own war in the margins. His library, more than 3,000 books held by the Boston Public Library since 1894, is full of his notes.

His copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) is the famous case. Adams first read it in 1796 and was still arguing with it in 1812. Its margins hold roughly 10,000 words, calling the author by turns "a Lady of a masculine masterly Understanding" and "this foolish Woman." In his copy of Rousseau's discourse on inequality, he simply asked: "Is it possible this man could believe this?"

Blake, Poe, and the Margin as a Stage

By the 19th century, marginalia could be a performance. William Blake, annotating his copy of Joshua Reynolds's Discourses between 1798 and about 1809, opened with a verdict: "This Man was Hired to Depress Art." Charles Darwin marked up books on geology and natural history, and Mark Twain argued in the margins of the history books he read.

Edgar Allan Poe went further and turned the margin into a genre. Starting in November 1844, he published short reflections under the title "Marginalia," explaining: "In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general."

In this era, marginalia worked almost like a slow-motion social network. Friends read each other's annotated books, margin notes sparked letters, and published notes let a wider audience join the conversation.

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The Long Decline: Don't Write in That Book (19th-20th Century)

Books Get Cheap, Margins Get Empty

Industrial printing made books dramatically cheaper in the 19th century. Paperbacks, serialized novels, and mass-market publishing put reading within reach of nearly everyone in the industrialized world.

When books were expensive and cherished, annotating them felt like a natural extension of reading. When books became cheap and replaceable, the culture around them shifted. Public libraries, which spread from the mid-1800s, reinforced a norm: books are shared property, and writing in shared property is vandalism.

Libraries enforced rules against marking books. Schools followed, and parents told children to keep their textbooks clean for the next student. Within a few generations, annotation went from "this is how serious readers engage with texts" to "this is how careless people damage books."

What Book Traces Found

The taboo was never total, and one project proves it. In 2014, Andrew Stauffer, an English professor at the University of Virginia, launched Book Traces, a crowdsourced hunt for marked-up 19th- and early-20th-century books still sitting in library stacks. It grew out of a 2009 class assignment: his students, sent into the university's Alderman Library to find copies of Felicia Hemans's poetry, kept finding readers' traces, among them a mother's elegy for her seven-year-old daughter.

Volumes printed between 1820 and 1923 are especially at risk of being discarded as libraries go digital, and they're full of traces: poems, drawings, inscriptions, pressed flowers, even locks of hair. Ordinary readers kept writing in books. They just stopped being celebrated for it.

The 20th Century: Private Highlights, Public Silence

Some voices pushed back. In "How to Mark a Book," published in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941, the philosopher Mortimer Adler argued that marking up a book is an act of love, not mutilation. He laid out a system: underline the major points, star the ten or twenty most important statements, and build a personal index on the back endpapers. His bigger case for active reading is in How to Read a Book, which we break down in How to Apply How to Read a Book.

Still, for most readers annotation became private. You might underline a book you owned and feel slightly guilty about it. Then came the fluorescent highlighter, invented by Francis Honn at Carter's Ink Company in 1963 and sold as the Hi-Liter. It made marks quicker to make and brighter on the page, but the elaborate color-coding systems students built were seen by almost nobody else.

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The Digital Renaissance of Annotation (1989-Present)

The Web Was Supposed to Have Margins

Annotation was part of the plan from the start. Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal for what became the World Wide Web listed it among the requirements: "One must be able to add one's own private links to and from public information. One must also be able to annotate links, as well as nodes, privately."

Early browsers tried. NCSA Mosaic added "group annotations" in 1993, letting members of a group see each other's notes on any page. NCSA dropped the feature from Mosaic 2.0 later that year, with Marc Andreessen explaining that the protocol was "strictly experimental" and the server software "sadly deficient." In 2012 he recalled that a server for the whole web "would obviously have had to scale to enormous size."

Third Voice, Annotea, and the First Backlash

The first public experiments followed. Third Voice, a browser plug-in launched in 1999, let users attach notes to any website and read notes left by strangers. Site owners hated it. Critics called it "Web graffiti," a "Say No to Third Voice" campaign sprang up, and spam and security problems piled on. In April 2001, unable to raise more money, the company discontinued the product.

That same year, W3C researchers presented Annotea, an open framework for storing shared annotations on separate servers, built into the Amaya browser. It was clunky, but it kept the idea alive.

Kindle Makes the Crowd Visible

Amazon's Kindle, launched in 2007, opened another front. In 2010, Amazon added Popular Highlights, which marks passages highlighted by at least three readers and shows how many highlighted them, though not who. Suddenly you could see what thousands of strangers found important in the same book.

Open Standards and Social Highlighters

The 2010s brought a wave of web annotation tools. Hypothesis built an open-source annotation layer for the web, and on February 23, 2017, the W3C published the Web Annotation Data Model as an official Recommendation, giving notes on web pages a shared format.

Glasp takes the most social version of that idea. Highlights are public by default, so when you mark a passage, other readers can see it and discover new articles through your reading, much as a medieval reader inherited every earlier reader's glosses. Glasp's own research found that, within an article, what other readers marked predicts which sentences a person will highlight better than a model built from that person's own past highlights, as we explain in Reading Was Always Social.

Your other reading can live there too: Kindle highlights import next to your web highlights, and YouTube Summary brings transcripts and AI summaries to video. The result is one record of what you've read, watched, and marked.

The Manicule and the Cursor

There's one more echo across the centuries. Move your mouse over a link and the arrow turns into a pointing hand. The pointing-hand cursor goes back at least to Smalltalk, the system Alan Kay's group built at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. An early version, Smalltalk-72, even used ☞ to mark a literal symbol, a convention its 1976 manual says the children learning the language preferred.

So the manicule was already on screens at PARC. Nobody has documented whether the cursor was modeled on it, but the gesture is the same. The manicule said, "This passage matters." The cursor hand says, "This link goes somewhere."

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Famous Marginalia Examples at a Glance

In the margin, readers argued, corrected, joked, and now and then changed what later generations knew.

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What Marginalia Teaches Us About Reading

Reading Was Never Passive

Learning science explains why the habit works. In a 1978 study, Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf showed that people remember words they generate themselves better than words they simply read, a finding now called the generation effect. A 2013 review led by John Dunlosky rated highlighting and underlining on their own as "low utility." The margins point to the fix: mark the passage, then write something back. Readers who annotate thoughtfully get both halves.

Sharing Makes Annotation Better

Marginalia thrived whenever other people could read the notes. Monks wrote glosses knowing the next reader would rely on them. Harvey read with companions. Coleridge's friends lent him books knowing he would write in them.

When you know someone else may see your marks, you think harder about what deserves one. That's one of the core ideas behind learning in public: sharing your thinking, even informally, sharpens it.

How to Write Your Own Marginalia Today

You don't need a quill. A few habits borrowed from a thousand years of readers go a long way:

• Use a small set of symbols. A star for key claims, a question mark for doubts, a bracket for lines worth quoting. Medieval readers had the manicule; three marks you use every time will do.
• Write back, don't just underline. Add one line in your own words next to each important passage. That's the generation effect at work.
• Argue like Adams. Note where you disagree and why. Pinning down a disagreement is one of the fastest ways to understand what an author actually claims.
• Index the back pages. Adler used the back endpapers for a personal index of the author's main points, which turns a marked-up book into something you can search.
• Take it digital when you can. Highlight web articles with Glasp and attach a note to each highlight, so your marginalia stay searchable and shareable instead of trapped in one copy.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does marginalia mean?

Marginalia are notes, marks, and drawings written in the margins of a book, manuscript, or document. The term covers comments, underlines, symbols such as manicules or "NB," corrections, and doodles. It comes from the Medieval Latin marginalis, meaning "of the margin," and historians use it for everything from medieval glosses to the notes a student pencils into a paperback.

What are some examples of marginalia?

Everyday examples include glosses that explain a word, underlines and stars, the drawn pointing hands called manicules, corrections, doodles, and arguments with the author. Famous ones include the knights fighting snails in manuscripts from the late 13th and 14th centuries, Fermat's "margin is too narrow" note, John Adams's roughly 10,000 words in Mary Wollstonecraft's history of the French Revolution, and Coleridge's more than 8,000 notes.

Is marginalia singular or plural?

Technically plural. "Marginalia" is a Latin neuter plural, so careful writers say "marginalia are." In everyday English you'll also see it used as a collective noun ("the marginalia in this book is fascinating"), much like "data." For a single note, "a marginal note" or "a margin note" is the natural choice.

Who coined the word "marginalia"?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is credited with bringing the word into English. The earliest recorded use is an 1819 piece in Blackwood's Magazine, which H. J. Jackson, co-editor of his collected marginalia, says Coleridge wrote under a pseudonym. He was also one of history's most prolific annotators: the scholarly edition of his marginalia runs to six volumes and more than 8,000 notes.

What is the most famous example of marginalia?

Pierre de Fermat's note in his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica, written around 1637, usually ranks first. Fermat claimed a truly marvelous proof that the margin was too narrow to hold. His son published the note in 1670, and mathematicians chased the problem, Fermat's Last Theorem, until Andrew Wiles proved it in 1994.

Why are there knights fighting snails in medieval manuscripts?

Nobody knows for certain. The motif appeared in northern French manuscripts in the late 13th century and spread to Flemish and English ones. In her 1962 study of more than seventy examples in the journal Speculum, Lilian Randall argued the snail stood for the Lombards, foreign moneylenders resented in northern Europe. Other readings include a jab at cowardly knights or simple absurdist humor.

What is a manicule?

A manicule (from the Latin manicula, "little hand") is a drawing of a hand with a pointing index finger, used in the margins of manuscripts and printed books to flag important passages. Manicules appear in 12th-century manuscripts, and the historian William Sherman suggests they may have been the most common readers' mark from the 12th to the 18th century. The pointing-hand cursor on your screen uses the same gesture.

Why did people stop writing in books?

Mass-market publishing in the 19th century made books cheap, and the spread of public libraries made many of them shared property. Libraries banned marking their books, schools asked students to keep textbooks clean, and the habit came to look like vandalism. People never fully stopped, though: projects like Book Traces keep finding notes, poems, and drawings in 19th-century library copies.

Is highlighting a form of marginalia?

Yes. Historians of reading count underlines and highlights as marginalia, because a mark beside a passage records what one reader judged important. Digital highlighting also solves the two problems paper marginalia ran into in the 20th century: isolation (your notes were trapped in your own copy) and the taboo against marking shared texts (highlighting a web page damages nothing). Tools like Glasp make highlights visible to other readers, much like the communal manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and add search and AI summaries that paper never could.

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Conclusion: The Margins Are Alive

Some nine hundred years ago, a monk drew a small pointing hand beside a line he wanted the next reader to notice. Readers have kept leaving marks like it ever since, through the printing press, cheap paperbacks, and the library's "do not write in this book."

Over those centuries, the bigger change was in who could see the marks. A shared manuscript passed every earlier note on to its later readers; a private paperback kept them on one shelf. Tools like Glasp bring back the shared version: you can see what other readers marked in the same article, and they can see what you marked.

The margin has moved from parchment to paper to the screen, and it is still where readers talk back to the text.