Lisa Jardine: A Life in the Margins

Abstract

This chapter records part of the history of Lisa Jardine’s pathbreaking work on Renaissance marginalia and the readers who made them. It is also meant to enable readers who did not have the chance to collaborate with Lisa to witness Lisa at work, and to grasp why joining her in a project had a transformative effect on senior as well as junior scholars. In the 1970s, Jardine and Grafton agreed that the explication of texts formed the core of classroom activity in the sixteenth century: this shared sense led to their joint work on From Humanism to the Humanities. They became experienced at writing together, and over time in the 1970s and 1980s, as they continued to discuss the state of intellectual history, they came into contact with the new history of books being created by Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier and others. Conversations with Darnton prompted them to examine books from Gideon Harvey’s personal library held in Princeton, and by doing so they discovered the intellectual and tactile experience of reading in a prior age. Together they learned not only to see how Harvey interpreted individual books, but also to situate him as an example of a category that modern scholarship had forgotten, the professional reader. His marginalia revealed much about the material conditions in which he worked. They also showed that he had served as an intellectual facilitator, who guided his contemporaries’ interaction between ancient texts and their political present. He stressed that they had deliberately avoided the erudite tradition of philological analysis in favor of a thoughtful hermeneutics meant to draw practical lessons for the present from the past. Jardine’s and Grafton’s arguments, soon published, inspired both objections and applications (more of the latter than of the former), and their joint article on Harvey became a standard reference for historians of books and reading. Over the years, they modified many of their initial conclusions. They also became aware that Harvey’s books had not been open to all: they were able to work on these extraordinary documents not just because that they had been preserved and donated to Princeton but because they (Jardine and Grafton) had the rarefied credentials to view them. So keenly aware of this contingency was Jardine that she worked to end it with efforts to digitalize Harvey’s work, among others. These eventuated in the Archeology of Reading project that she undertook in collaboration with Earle Havens at Johns Hopkins and her colleagues at CELL, and which has now made a substantial number of books annotated by Harvey and John Dee available on line, with searchable transcriptions and translations. This is just one instance, among many, where an idea that took root in Lisa’s scholarship grew to bear fruit for what her subjects would have called the Republic of Letters.