Congratulations to PhD student Lydia Craig on being awarded the MMLA 2016 Graduate Student Paper Prize!

Craig’s paper “The Juvenile and the Erudite: A Study of the Marginalia in Newberry Case Y 12.T219” examined the marginalia done by two hands within the Newberry Library’s Roxburghe copy of All the Workes of John Taylor (London, 1630), demonstrating the various ways in which two Early Modern readers, an adult and a child, could utilize a printed book as both text and object to reinforce social standing, to promote literacy and penmanship, and, finally to promote good moral values and educational learning.  While the adult’s marginalia indicates political and moral perspectives by expressing approbation through marks, thus subjecting the manuscript to a selective and personal reading process, the child’s marginalia rewrites, imitates, mocks, and even changes Taylor’s text. These instances provide physical evidence of how two readers separately constructed their own paratexts in order to respond to, or to resist what D.F. McKenzie terms an author’s “directed meanings” in his contemporary historical moment.