Ad margines lemmatum. Nutzungsspuren in frühneuzeitlichen Wörterbüchern

This study investigates the material dimension of early modern dictionaries (17th century), analysing readers’ annotations to reconstruct historical usage practices. Moving beyond traditional ‘dematerialized’ approaches that often overlook individual copies, the research examines a corpus of 60 annotated dictionaries, encompassing both general and specialized types. The traces of use reveal diverse forms of active readers’ engagement, challenging the notion of passive reception. Dictionaries served as dynamic knowledge repositories, with users systematically indexing and organizing information. They also functioned as didactic tools for language learning, evidenced by grammatical additions and translations. Crucially, many became ‘cooperative texts’, where readers acted as co-lexicographers, correcting errors, adding missing entries, and differentiating homonyms. Some copies were even utilized as lexicographical working tools by scholars or editors for systematic revision and compilation, integrating metalinguistic comments. Ultimately, these annotations transform dictionaries into cultural ecosystems, where individual copies became unique historical artifacts, reflecting evolving knowledge creation and a rich interaction between the printed text and its users.