Marginalia: the genre that lived in the margins

Everything happens in the margins of medieval manuscripts: one scribe complains about the cold, another curses his ink, a fifteenth-century reader corrects the author with the confidence of a man who will never be contradicted. Marginalia is the most honest literary genre there is: nobody writes in a margin for posterity.

And yet posterity reads it. Today those notes are worth as much as the text: they tell us who read, when, and in what mood. An annotated copy is two documents in one — and sometimes the second is better. This journal takes its name from exactly that.