After a very enjoyable tour of John Ryland’s Library a few weeks ago (which I blogged about here), I was looking forward to returning to learn more about the collection. Last week, Natasha and I attended two events, ‘On the Edges’ and ‘Locating Boccaccio in 2013’. Ryland’s run a fantastic programme of events which you can look at here.

The first event, ‘On the Edges’, was a talk from John Hodgson who is a manuscript specialist. The talk focused on the interesting things that can be found in the margins of books and manuscripts – the ‘marginalia’. Often what is written in the margins can be very revealing! The talk was really interesting, and I came away feeling that I had learnt a lot about the terminology associated with manuscripts and special collections.

We were shown a large variety of examples of marginalia, the oldest text we looked…