Working Papers are pre-publication versions of academic articles, book chapters, or reviews. Papers posted on this site are in progress, under submission, or in press and forthcoming elsewhere. Although, as far as we know, this is the first Working Papers series in the field of Classics, such series are very common in other academic disciplines.
This project on the textual hand-with-pointing-finger symbol--what I will call the "manicule" for reasons to be explored below--grows out of a book-in-progress called Used Books: Reading Renaissance Marginalia, which is the product of my long-standing interest in the marks that readers make in books, particularly during the first century or two after the invention of printing.