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^It was a long wait at the airport. I brought with me a book that I had been reading for my last projects, but I probably need to study it more thoroughly. It is Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht's Production of Presence. What meaning cannot convey (Stanford University Press, 2004). It is a book to which I feel very close, insofar as it is an inquiry in the materialities of communication (the expresion is also Gumbrecht's). This is more or less what I have been doing lately, focusing mainly on the particular materiality of manuscript communication. The book I just finished, Poetica del Orden Caballeresco (whose title contains at least two important twists, if not three, but to appreciate them you will need to read the book) relates very closely to the problem of the production of a physical presence, and the book as a place that has to be practiced to become a space, and how all this becomes a central point in the organization of the knightly bourgeois and nobiliary institutions in the Late Middle Ages.

The book on which I intend to work during the rest of the year (my first sabbatical year at Berkeley) is somewhat different, but it also wants to explore the particular problem of the physical impacts created and put forth by (some of) the glossed manuscripts contained in private libraries during the 15th Century. I have worked on this project for many years, and it has taken many different shapes. Now I think I can, at least, prepare a preliminary research, which will be contained in a short text (let's say a final book of no more than 120 pages in English) to be published (I hope) by an English institution. The reason I have finally decided to prepare this book can be traced back to a conversation I had with Francisco Bautista (Universidad de Salamanca) this past Summer, while we were in El Escorial.

I have already published three articles related to this subject. One is in the first volume of eHumanista, a second one is in press in Romance Philology and a third one forthcoming in Syntagma. Now it is time to rethink some of the theoretical problems, and maybe produce, as well, a less general study, more centered on a corpus' set of problems.

While I was at the airport, and after reading, thinking, and studying Gumbrecht's book (I said that it was a very long wait), I began to develop a preliminary description of this project. An initial plan that, and I am most sure of this, will change in the coming months. What follows are some of the conclusions that have occurred to me.

1. Problems that I would like to discuss. A glossed manuscript is a physical representation of a dialectic of meanings. I would hardly see it as the product of a reader. Rather, I would consider it the set of processes through which an intellectual tries to put forth his or her voice as a valid presence in the library. In the archive. In the material realm of authoritative products. The whole problem of the poetics of the gloss, or, maybe, the poetics of glossing is related to the ways in which this voice of the margins creates its unavoidable presence. I need to clarify these concepts, and work very carefully not on the thesis (or theses), but rather on the arguments I would like to articulate. It's more or less easy to come up with a thesis, but extremely difficult to create the valid arguments and documentation to support it. This is a problem in any project in its beginning stages. Let's also note that this is a work I would undertake from a non-hermeneutical perspective. My interest does not lie in the kind of interpretation the glosses represent, but rather in the kind of physical impact the existence of the gloss creates.

2. Let's imagine a double corpus. The first would be the corpus I am going to study more or less in-depth, and it cannot be too big (otherwise, there would not be any in-depth study), and another one I can use to contrast some of my analysis. This is sort of a genealogical study, inasmuch as it is probably very difficult to find a systematic way of approaching our authors' desire of glossing. However, the contrast is essential in order to create the particular ways in which our central corpus works and why it is important to pay attention to a particular analysis.

a. Study corpus

• The Works of Diego de Valera, glossed by himself and distributed in tens of manuscripts throughout 15th Century in private libraries. One of his works was also translated into French for the Burgundian court.

b. Contrast corpus

• Juridical glossators, particularly those related to the romanist tradition of the mos italicus.
• Glossators contemporary to Valera, including Enrique de Villena's glosses to the Eneida, Alfonso de San Cristóbal's glosses to Vegetius, Pedro de Portugal and his Satira de Felice e Infelice Vida, Juan de Mena and his Coronación, Hernán Núñez and his glosses to Mena's Trescientas, etc.
• Non-glossators who, nevertheless, produce treatises related to glossing habits, as for instance Juan Rodríguez del Padrón's Triunfo de las Donas & Cadira del Honor or Ferrán Mexía's Nobiliario Vero.
• Private-library glossators in vernacular language throughout Europe.
• Erasmus (Adagia) and Montaigne (Essais, particularly, III, 13). 

3. Tentative plan structure.

• I Part: I, Glossator. The gloss as the product of a first person, and, therefore, a "grammar" of glossing.
• II Part: Presence of the book, presence of the glossator. The gloss considered as an image (or, rather, as an imago, with all the problems concerning memory, meditation, contemplation, related to the concept og imago; we'll have in mind Jean-Claude Schmitt and, from a critical point of view, Carruthers' two books, on memory and on meditation).
• III Part: Orbits. The glosses seem to gravitate around the center text, and that means that there is a force of attraction and a force of repulsion. The first one makes the gloss stay close to the text, the other one avoids the crashing of the gloss against the text. There is always a white space between central text and gloss. What is this space like? How can your eyes, your body, but also your mind, negotiate it? How can its presence create a disturbance?

4. Bibliography. It would be useless to copy the bibliography here (we know that, for that matter, the best solution is to use a program such as EndNote or similar). But these are more or less the sections around which I should make a bibliographical search. I will certainly come up with other sections throughout my research. Each section already has a number of titles. I am always willing to share my bibliographies, and I even might post them here. You never know how useful a bibliography can be.

• Glosses, codicology, commentary traditions
• Vernacular, lay Humanism
• History of book and reading
• Iconic page, images, cognitive approaches to reading / looking at images, etc.

This is more or less all for today.