Marginalia and mortality in early modern Venice

This article evaluates the significance of marginal images in Venice’s civic death registers. Throughout the early modern period, clerks drew attention to a small proportion of deaths in the city by supplementing the textual entry about the deceased individual with a drawing in the margin adjacent to the entry. This study assesses the incidence, iconography and uniqueness of these images, and compares them with visual marginalia in other early modern documents from Venice and beyond, to locate them within the broader context of manuscript culture. The surge of research into manuscript paratexts, marginalia and doodles by scholars of medieval Europe and early modern literary studies has been neglected by early modern historians, who often remain preoccupied with printed sources. Meanwhile, scholarship on manuscript marginalia has tended to use them as evidence of reading, not textual production. The inclusion of marginal images in Venice’s death registers was motivated by demographic, public health and governance considerations. Marginal images were used to classify deaths, and as finding aids and tracking devices. Overall, the article aims to highlight the importance of non-textual components of government documents, and to shed new light on early modern cultures of record-keeping.