Glossing and Reading in Western Europe and East Asia: A Comparative Case Study

Glossing, the practice of writing between the lines or in the margins of manuscripts, is a phenomenon that can be observed in a wide variety of historical cultures. Since the 1980s, researchers of European manuscripts have established and refined typologies to describe different varieties of glosses. There has been very little work, however, on the comparability of glossing practices between Europe and other cultural spheres. This paper focuses on "reading glosses," which function to help the reader recover the literal sense of a text. Our argument is that the basic schemes of classification and analysis that have been developed for the study of medieval European glossing systems can be extended to the study of manuscript glossing in other cultural regions. Furthermore, insights from the comparative study of these systems enhance our understanding of not only medieval European glossing but medieval reading more generally.