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The printed ☞-sometimes called a “mutton fist” in Old English slang-overtook its handwritten counterpart, and was overtaken in turn by the numbered footnote. Date Range: 1440-1465 (Hunt and Watsons notes on Digby Cat). We know that in the Middle Ages, cats were kept mostly for their. Browse Authors: Authors > Manuscripts authored by Hoccleve and Anon Close this box.
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But, as was the case with many other marks, the arrival of printing in the fifteenth century triggered a crisis for the manicule: with printed versions of the symbol-and of other reference marks such as * and †-now available to writers, “authorized” notes began to spring up in the margins, encroaching upon the space once available to the reader. Perhaps the feline troublemaker who prowled across this page was pursuing a mouse at the time. For the next several hundred years, scholars marked up the margins of their classical texts, law manuals, and notebooks with manicules drawn in a wide variety of styles.
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Sherman-the sole historian of this idiosyncratic mark-wrote that, between at least the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, the manicule was possibly “the most common symbol produced both for and by readers in the margins of manuscripts and printed books.” First recorded in the “Domesday Book” of 1086, the manicule-taken from the Latin maniculum, or “little hand”-was a mark that readers drew to call out points of interest. In his 2005 essay “Towards a History of the Manicule,” Professor William H.