Event—Public Programming

Romance And Its Readers: A Survey Of Readers’ Marks In Seventeenth- Century Printed And Manuscript Romances

In this colloquium, Edwina Christie will present some findings from a survey of readers’ marks in seventeenth-century prose romances in collections across the globe. She will pick out frequently met types of annotation found in the Newberry and elsewhere, and suggest that these point to common romance reading strategies. When readers marked their books, they were inscribing a counter-attitude towards romance, not as trivial, but as deeply serious.