Approaches to the edge.

Handwritten entries by readers in books have long been the subject of cultural studies research. Because such annotations between the lines or on the edge of the page are among the few witnesses who provide information about the actual use of literary works. They help to answer the question of who, when and how texts were read, and offer an almost unique starting point for understanding knowledge acquisition and knowledge stripping.

In her lecture, Claudine Moulin investigates this special phenomenon of writing culture and outlines a cultural history of annotation. In doing so, she primarily draws on examples from the holdings of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar and shows the wide range of these "paratexts" that were added later, from the entry of individual words or entire text passages through corrections and underlining to the insertion of notes and Bookmark is enough.

Prof Dr Claudine Moulin has held the Chair of German Studies / Language History with a focus on German in the Middle Ages at the University of Trier since 2003. At the same time she heads the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. In 2010 she received the Academy Prize for Research and Teaching of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate.

Claudine Moulin gives her lecture at the invitation of the “Author Libraries” project in the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association (MWW), to which the German Literature Archive Marbach, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel (MWW) merged. The aim of MWW is to bring the collections of these three institutions even more into the focus of science and the public through joint research projects, events and exhibitions and thus to give new impetus to research in the humanities.