The cog­nitive intu­ition of the impor­tance of the margin in the process of studying texts, empir­i­cally demon­strated by psy­chol­o­gists and ped­a­gogues cited in the attached article, explains the reasons why the margin of books is a coveted space. It is not enough to occupy that space. It is nec­essary, also, to produce it, to give it a new life as an epis­te­mo­logical artifact. It is nec­essary to turn the margin into an institution.

It would not be enough, however, for the mar­ginal insti­tution to have an indus­trial presence. It did have one, as the ordinary gloss to the Bible or the ordinary gloss to the Civil or the Canon Law bear witness to. This insti­tution is an object of desire on the part of indi­viduals who, even if they practice one of the dis­ci­plines that partake in the indus­trial pro­duc­tions of the gloss, nev­er­theless see the oppor­tunity to build this mar­ginal inter­vention outside that discipline.

It is con­ve­nient to study some of these cog­nitive and political endeavors from the per­spective of the pro­duction of the space for the artic­u­lation of textual glosses in medieval man­u­scripts. By pro­duction of space I mean, then, indi­vidual move­ments in which the process of writing and study con­sists of a mul­ti­di­men­sional search to organize the location and use of cul­tural products on the surface of the page. It is a pro­duction of space because those indi­viduals who seek to create their presence in the uni­verse of the intel­lectual sphere, do so pre­cisely through the rede­f­i­n­ition of a given space that allows them to transform the the terms in which inter­action with the system of author­ities and with the doc­trinal system takes place Those systems where the ones, also, that allowed the cre­ation of the book in the first place.

I propose, then, to analyze how the man­u­facture of man­u­scripts with glosses and their ele­ments of design allow us to under­stand the cog­nitive cir­cum­stances in which intel­lectual vocab­u­laries related to the political and cul­tural needs of the 15th century ver­nacular culture were shaped and put into use.