Kenneth Spencer Research Library

One of the most fascinating things about medieval manuscripts is that every copy is unique and individual. Because scribes wrote manuscripts by hand, no two copies are identical. On March 8th, Kenneth Spencer Research Library opened Marvelous Medieval Marginalia, an exhibit that celebrates the unique and the individual, the best parts of medieval manuscripts, and the scribes, readers, and owners who had a hand in transforming texts over time. It’s dedicated to the voices of not necessarily the great and influential authors and artists of old but to a quieter subset who aren’t always given the attention they deserve – the readers, the imaginers, and doodlers across centuries.

The exhibit focuses on marginalia. From the Latin for literally just “things in the margins,” marginalia can encompass many things, from formally executed illustrations meant to enhance the manuscript into a work of art to notes and annotations. We tend to think of books as static or frozen in time, but through marginalia and readers, they were often amorphous and ever-changing, shaped and reshaped by their owners over decades and centuries. Medieval readers were not merely passive consumers of manuscripts; they thought about and engaged with their texts, argued and agreed, and added their thoughts. And their relics are preserved in the notes they left behind, capturing their fleeting thoughts in amber for us to enjoy centuries later.

With annotations, we can see what people actually thought about the texts they read. They let us see where readers denied or disagreed with the original manuscript – as with this manuscript copy of Lactantius’ Divine Institutes, a defense of Christianity and a refutation of Greek and Roman polytheism.

An early reader has added the note “falsum” or “false” while striking lines through parts of the text – potentially either disagreeing with the text itself or perhaps claiming it was spurious and misattributed. Where readers’ notes give us insight into the sometimes-critical thoughts of medieval readers, their doodles provide glimpses into the universal experience of boredom and the creativity it can allow to blossom. With doodles, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” We doodle just as much today as people did 800 years ago, but what we doodle changes, reflecting the nuances of human culture and identity. It’s a time-honored tradition across the centuries; you’ve likely stuck at least a few notes in the margins of your class assignments or books over the years. Idle doodles encapsulate the wandering thoughts of people from the past as they were when they took quill pen to page.

Sometimes, it was the scribes themselves, the people writing and copying the manuscripts for later audiences, who added flares of fun into the margins. Copying manuscripts by hand was often a long and tedious process, taking anywhere from days to months. A certain playfulness to these marginalia emerged when the scribe’s mind and hand wandered. You wind up with texts like MS B15, a collection of Divine Offices, hymns, prayers, and devotional poetry, where the scribe has very diligently copied the text for over 700 pages, all written in the same hand so that you know this is one person scribbling page after page after page. But they’ve broken the tedium by dappling the tops and bottoms of letters with -Picasso-esque caricatures, skewed profile faces wearing silly hats, and the occasional peacock.

Marginalia can help reveal the silent reader’s voice and how they understood or analyzed texts – but even in the case of drawings and doodles, these weren’t all the product of an idle mind. Often, the doodles in the margins directly responded to and sometimes commented upon the text itself, creating visual commentary that shows how a scribe or reader responded to the work. These are called deliberate or communicative doodles.

Marginalia didn’t end with the advent of print, but they were unquestionably changed by it. In many ways, printing is more rigid than writing a manuscript. You work with a metal frame that limits where letters can fit, the shape of the page and its structure, and all the letters are predetermined shapes carved into small metal pieces that you then reorganize into different words. That rigidity, of course, meant that it was much easier to make literal copies of the text, nearly identical to one another.

While print stole some of the freedom and flexibility of the page and written word, readers continued to imbue their books with their agency and interpretations, even with the radical technological shift. One reader of Agostino Nifo’s A Small Commentary on the Most Accurate Signs of Weather has bestowed nearly every page with minute illustrations connected to the text, highlighting the vibrancy of weather with sketches of animals associated with certain types of weather alongside copious notes, including a doodle of a bat next to Nifo’s claim that when bats fly in a great flock in the evening, it promises a calm, serene night.

Manuscripts reflect the medieval mind. Through marginalia, we can see how they organized their thoughts and how they reacted and responded to text and information.  In the same way, when you visit an exhibit, you bring your thoughts, experiences, and analyses to the books. As you go through it, you may pick and choose different parts of the exhibit that catch your eye and interest; you may find the exhibit text insightful (or boring!). My exhibit text will tell you what I think is important about materials, but those won’t be the same things that you find interesting or important. With this exhibit, open through July, I invite you to bring your own doodles to our margins – including the exhibit wall text! You’ll see the manuscripts mentioned above, with many more, that all embody the agency and choices of their readers over the centuries. We welcome you to read, think, and doodle about the exhibit (albeit preferably not in our manuscripts). Thank you for being a reader of our exhibits here at Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Eve Wolynes
Special Collections Curator

Nola Mary Ayers was born in Horton, Kansas, in 1886. She arrived in Lawrence in the fall of 1905 to enter the University of Kansas and graduated from KU with a bachelor’s degree in 1909. Nola documented her college years by creating a scrapbook, as did many other university students at the time. 

Typically, students purchased a large scrapbook from one of the bookstores near the university. Nola broke with tradition by using a blank “Specimens” science notebook to paste in mementos of her life at KU. 

Nola’s scrapbook was also unique because she was an artist and decorated her album with original pen and ink drawings. One of the first drawings in the scrapbook is a self-portrait where she describes herself as a “poor home sick freshman” whose “college home for the year 1905-06 was 1305 Vermont St. Lawrence, Kansas with Mother Dow to call us eight girls down.” This house on Vermont is still standing in the Oread neighborhood. In the years before dormitories, many students lived in boarding houses near campus; many of these large multi-story houses still exist. 

Nola documented her studies in her scrapbook. As seen in the image below, she took “Hygiene” and “Gymnasium” during her freshman year – courses that all KU students in the early twentieth century were required to enroll in. Nola also studied rhetoric, German, geology, solid geometry, and botany. Her scrapbook reflects her love of drawing, and her coursework included drawing, ornament design, and Greek art. 

Besides coursework, friendships with other students are well represented in the pages of Nola’s scrapbook. She documented slumber parties with other girls, popcorn making, a Halloween party where she dressed as the “Western Girl,” and events at her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. Nola celebrated Valentine’s Day with a party and red hearts pasted into her scrapbook. 

As evidenced by her scrapbook, Nola partook many of the outdoor activities KU students enjoyed in the early twentieth century: walking, boating on the Kaw River, picnicking in the countryside, and attending sporting events. According to the 1908 Jayhawker yearbook, Nola was an “authority on baseball” and an “enthusiastic fan.” Indeed, she pasted photos of the KU baseball team into her scrapbook. Nola also included items related to the KU debate team. Debate was almost as popular as athletic sports during the early twentieth century, and students would travel to other cities like Topeka to support the KU team. 

According to a newspaper article, Nola was crowned Queen of the May at the second annual May Fete in 1909. She was a member of Allemania (German Club) and attended their events. She appeared to have attended many dances, plays, and concerts while a student, as documented by the many programs decorating her scrapbook. Plays and concerts were held on campus and in downtown Lawrence at the Bowersock Opera House. 

Nola Ayers married KU alumus Benjamin P. Young in 1910. According to a newspaper article announcing their wedding, the couple settled in Halstead, Kansas, where Ben was a high school principal. Ben and Nola relocated to Ithaca, New York, by 1923 and appear to have lived there for the rest of their lives. They had two children. Ben died in 1958; Nola passed away in 1973 at age 86.

Becky Schulte
Retired University Archivist and Curator of the Wilcox Collection

I began working as the Ringle Conservation Intern during the fall of 2024, drawn to the position as an art history graduate student with a budding interest in art conservation and passion for collecting antique photographs. Throughout the course of the semester, and the beginning of the spring 2025 semester, I was able to rehouse 2,400 glass plate negatives and contribute to the online database that will be used towards the creation of a future finding aid. Under the guidance of the incredibly kind and knowledgeable conservation staff, such as Whitney Baker, Charissa Pincock, and Kaitlin McGrath, I was able to take my first steps into the world of conservation and archival work, and will look back at this time fondly.

Throughout my time at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library Conservation Lab, I was privileged with the ability of looking into the past through the eyes of Hannah Scott, the Independence, Kansas based photographer and studio owner who operated from the 1910’s into the 1940’s. Each glass plate negative that I carefully removed from their aged and yellowed envelopes showed me a moment frozen in time; a bride on her wedding day with her bouquet cascading to the floor, a baby with a wide, toothless, grin clutching a doll, or an elderly couple still donning the out-of-fashion garb of decades past. I became an undetected observer from a distant time, one who was able to watch children and families grow over the years as they returned time and time again to Hannah’s studio.

As I made my way through the collection I was repeatedly met with glass plates that possessed faint scratches outlining the contours of a face where wrinkles tend to form, or scribbled dots speckling the skin. I continuously wondered what these etchings might be when I came across a plate that had two negatives of the same woman, but on one she was heavily freckled, and in the other, there was not a spot on her skin to be found. On the emulsion side of the plate, her freckles had been meticulously removed one-by-one with a pointed instrument of sorts to render her skin seemingly airbrushed. I instantly recognized that these “scratches” were an example of the pre-digital age method of “photoshopping” photographs, a technique that Hannah would employ to provide her customers with the option of having a perfect portrait to display.

I had read about the act of manually retouching glass plate negatives in the Victorian era, where the outer edges of a woman’s mid-section were erased to achieve the desired “wasp-waist” look. However, I thought this was an outlying and rare occurrence, but the fact that almost every plate of Hannah’s bears some evidence of retouching shows how common and pervasive this practice was. Furthermore, there was not a specific demographic of Hannah’s client that received this treatment; men and women of all ages, from infants to seniors, were able to take home a photograph of themselves looking their absolute best. Excess stray hairs, deep set wrinkles from decades of emoting, blemishes, freckles, moles, or an accidental hand or prop in the image were all able to be removed by the dedicated photographer’s technique of building up hair-thin lines to erase the undesired.

After doing some research of my own, I discovered that the practice of manually retouching glass plate negatives had been in place since the 1840s, and involved the use of either a graphite pencil or knife to scratch out or cover up whatever it may be that was preventing the desired image. Such retouching appeared almost invisible, both in the glass plate negative and in the final positive. I was able to see evidence of the retouching only when I viewed the emulsion side of the negative from a certain angle where the light could reflect off the scratches. Such a trick-of-the trade exemplifies how not so different we are today from those who lived almost a hundred years ago, and how certain behaviors, such as the editing of photographed portraits, show a formidable continuity over time. I can almost imagine the scene appearing in front of me; Hannah in her studio hunched over a negative, surrounded by various tools and instruments, a soft, rhythmic, scratching noise permeates the air as she works on perfecting her customer’s portrait, the hours ticking by, a radio playing a vintage tune hums in the background, unknowingly creating the plate that would end up in my very hands all these years later.

For further reading on manual retouching of glass plate negatives see https://pastonglass.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/the-art-of-retouching-pre-photoshop/ and https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/83262/how-photo-retouching-worked-photoshop

Alessia Serra
2024-2025 Ringle Conservation Intern
Conservation Services

Currently, I am treating a group of parchment leaves that make up a legal document. The text discusses partitions of land in Wickenby and Great Humby, hamlets in Lincolnshire, England. The document is dated September 21, 1716.

The large pieces of animal skin are affixed to one another with sewing and fourteen red wax seals. Each seal was stamped with a heart, pierced by two arrows.

How appropriate to discover fourteen red hearts on a document on Valentine’s Day, February 14!

Whitney Baker
Head, Conservation Services

Ah, the highs and lows of 2024. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster over the past year for the manuscripts processing team here at Spencer with changes in leadership, new digital workflows, and university-wide events like the Watson Library centennial celebrations. Last year we “got out of the basement” and worked more closely with faculty members and staff across campus on larger, multi-year processing projects and adding to existing collections. One of the most fulfilling parts of archival processing work is directly working with history to shape how we see the past long into the future. Entering 2025, the manuscripts processing team has many exciting collections in the works that we cannot wait to share with you all. In the meantime, here are the new finding aids published in 2024!

Kansas Collection

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius letter, January 12, 1921 (RH MS P1006)

World War II era V-Mail form envelopes, circa 1942-1945 (RH MS P1007)

Nate Foster papers, 1977-1981 (RH MS 1601)

Barbara Burghart-Perreault collection, 1886-2020, bulk 1950-2010 (RH MS 1604 + other call numbers)

Quivira Lakes collection, 1981-2003 (RH MS 1605)

Vote for liquor-by-the-drink mug collection, 1986 (RH MS 1607)

Alvamar Estates collection, June 1, 1966-December 21, 1968 (RH MS 1608)

Floyd Schultz history, 1922-2011 (RH MS 1609)

Victoria Shinn collection, 1952-2000 (RH MS 1610 + other call numbers)

O’Sullivan family history, 1955-2018 (RH MS 1611)

Lawrence Free State High School calendars, 1997-1999 (RH MS S89)

Special Collections

Central American textile maps, approximately 1745-1897 (MS S16)

Real Sociedad Económica de Amanetes de la Patria de Guatemala collection, 1830-1883 (MS 110)

Hong Kong return to China newspaper collection, July 1997 (MS Qa51)

Political ephemera from national elections in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama, 2001-2010 (MS 384 + other call numbers)

Orsetti family papers, 1180-1874, bulk 1450-1820 (MS 131 + other call numbers)

River City Reunion audiovisual recordings, 1987, 1993, and February 1995 (SC AV 56 + other call numbers)

University Archives

Albert Bloch slides, 1906-1959 (PP 657)

Personal papers of Charles E. Skidmore Jr., 1949-1944 (PP 658)

Personal papers of Angela V. Woodhull, 1984 (PP 659)

Walter J. and Virginia H. Meserve family photographs, 1951-1953 (PP 660)

Personal papers of Arthur Davidson, 1927-1971 (PP 661)

Personal papers of Edward R. Canda, 1968-2023 (PP 662 + other call numbers)

Charissa Pincock
Archives and Manuscripts Coordinator