Abstract:

The study of marginal notes has become of particular interest to many scholars from a variety of fields in the recent years. There is a number of different aspects which have been discussed, analyzed and could be studied further. However, a major aspect seems to have been neglected – reading or even in certain cases deciphering marginal notes.

In the Slavonic tradition there are marginal notes which could be found in manuscripts and early printed books. There are some published editions of marginal notes from Bulgarian manuscripts on one hand and from old printed Cyrillic books on the other hand. Some descriptions of specific books include marginal notes as well. These editions have been prepared by professional philologists. Recently marginal notes have attracted the attention of specialists from other fields of study. This induces a need for creating a teaching guide which should be used when teaching students how to work with marginal notes.

It should be pointed that each language and font has its own peculiarities. Therefore, this paper suggests that there should be a teaching guide at least for the major scripts, for example Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. They should be written by highly qualified linguists who have previously specialized in paleography or historical handwriting. Such guides could be created for any script or language and later used worldwide and they could especially be implemented in academia. The paper deals with some of the special characters in Cyrillic marginal notes in particular and it aims to become a basis for creating teaching guides for other scripts in the future.

When teaching the skill of recognizing and reading marginal notes, one should have in mind that such could be studied in a digital environment since many libraries have digitized or are in the process of digitizing their rare book collections. Once students have become acquainted with the special characters, how to read and how to present them using special fonts, students could also later be included in automating the process of deciphering marginal notes through a specially developed software for turning handwritten text into machine written text. This new educational approach and the implementation of such educational tools in the teaching and learning process in academia aims to result in increased interest in students toward their written heritage and maybe even inspire future researchers in the area.

Keywords:

Marginal notes, a teaching guide, students, education, academia.