The Little Hand
On the strange history of pointing at what matters
The hand in the margin has five fingers and no thumb. Its index finger is long — longer than any finger on a living hand — with the nail carefully marked at the tip. Two parallel lines cinch the wrist into a cuff, and from there five digits fan outward, all trained in the same direction, toward a line of Virgil’s verse on the parchment page. It is a hand that belongs to no human anatomy. Five fingers where there should be four and a thumb, a pointing gesture that no wrist could produce, drawn by a man who owned this manuscript for most of his adult life and apparently never once looked down at his own hand to check.
The manuscript is the Ambrosian Virgil — parchment, 270 folios, 41 by 26.5 centimetres, roughly the size of a broadsheet newspaper page. It sits today in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where it has been since 1607. The two-column layout gives Virgil’s verse the wider interior column and Servius’s commentary the narrower outer one, with blue and red initials, gold at the opening of each major work, and a built-in gutter between text and margin that a reader could fill with notes. This reader filled it. Nearly 2,500 annotations crowd the pages — glosses, corrections, cross-references, thoughts — and scattered through the Eclogues and the Georgics and the Aeneid, those strange pointing hands. The reader was Francesco Petrarch. The hands were his way of saying here.
The Virgil came to Petrarch early. His father, Ser Petracco, likely commissioned it during the poet’s youth in Avignon — a parchment copy of Virgil’s complete works with Servius’s commentary, produced by an Italian scribe sometime in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Around 1325 or 1326, the manuscript was stolen. Petrarch does not record how, or by whom. For twelve years he was without it. He recovered it in 1338, and from that year until his death in 1374 he never stopped writing in its margins.
The annotations accumulated like sediment. Thirty-six years of reading and rereading the same poems, the same commentary, the same parchment surfaces, and each pass leaving another layer of ink. The manuscript was not a reference copy to be consulted and shelved. It was a surface Petrarch thought on — a workspace so intimate that when, around 1340, he wanted it decorated, he asked one of the finest painters alive to do it.
Simone Martini, the Sienese master then resident at the papal court in Avignon, produced an allegorical frontispiece nearly as large as the page itself — 29.5 by 20 centimetres. Virgil sits laurel-wreathed and writing. Servius lifts a curtain to reveal him, as though the commentator were an usher at the threshold of the poem. Three figures stand for the genres: a soldier for the Aeneid, a farmer pruning a vine for the Georgics, a shepherd with his flock for the Eclogues. Petrarch composed Latin hexameter couplets to accompany the image — the poet annotating the painter annotating the poet.1 The book was becoming a collaboration between the living and the ancient dead, a place where centuries overlapped on a single page.
Around 1351, the reading copy became a reliquary.
On the manuscript’s flyleaf, Petrarch inscribed a note about Laura — not in a diary or a letter but in his Virgil, “the very place,” he wrote, “that so often passes before my eyes”:
Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate.
The symmetry is liturgical. The sixth day of April, the first hour, twice — once for the meeting, once for the death. Same city, same date, same hour, twenty-one years apart. Laura had died in the plague of 1348, and Petrarch, in Verona, had not known. He learned later. He waited three years to inscribe it. When he did, he placed the inscription where he knew he would encounter it again and again, every time he opened the book to read — so that grief became a kind of marginalia, something you met in the gutter between the text and the edge of the page.
He added more. His son Giovanni, dead of plague in Milan on July 10, 1361, aged twenty-four. His friend Socrates — Ludwig van Kempen — also 1361. Philippe de Cabassoles. The flyleaf of the Virgil became a necrology. Petrarch was not keeping a record. He was building a memorial on the surface he touched most often.2
According to legend, he died on July 19, 1374, at Arquà — less than forty-five miles from Virgil’s own birthplace at Mantua — one day short of his seventieth birthday. He was found with his head resting on the manuscript. The detail has the neatness of hagiography: the reader dying on his text, the humanist returning to his Roman master. Whether or not it happened, it captures the relationship precisely. This was a man so intimate with a single book that his pointing hands in its margins were as habitual and as unreflective as breathing. He drew them for thirty-six years, and he never thought to count his fingers.
But then, almost no one did.
William H. Sherman, the scholar who spent years cataloguing marks like these across thousands of volumes in libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, described Petrarch’s version with the precision of someone who had seen enough to know what was distinctive: “his hands are distinctive: they have long index fingers, generally with the nail marked, a cuff is indicated by two parallel lines, and although no thumb is shown there are often five fingers, which makes the hand look very odd.” It does look very odd. But Petrarch was one instance of something vast. Between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, readers across Europe drew pointing hands in the margins of their books — in monasteries and law schools, in private studies and university libraries — and Sherman believed these marks were “the most common symbol produced by readers” across that entire span. He called them manicules, from the Latin manicula: little hand. The word is his. Before 2005, the symbol had no settled name.
But it had a settled gesture. A hand in a margin meant: this mattered to me. Look.
The simplest manicules in the medieval record are barely hands at all — “two squiggly strokes,” as one survey described them, the barest sketch of a pointing gesture, a mark made in the time it takes to register emphasis and move on. From there the spectrum opens wide. A thirteenth-century manuscript at Leiden shows a hand with digits in precisely the right shape and angle, the fingernail rendered with care — a reader who was, for once, paying attention to anatomy. A late fifteenth-century volume at St Andrews has a hand with a detailed sleeve, fabric folds visible, as though the reader had rolled up their own cuff and drawn what they saw. A fifteenth-century manuscript at the Bodleian attaches a pointing hand to an entire human body. And in a late fifteenth-century Danish manuscript in Copenhagen, someone drew manicules with six fingers — two of them, on separate folios, produced by different readers in different inks, one working in red to mark structural divisions, the other in black iron gall ink with cross-hatched sleeve cuffs and fingernails rendered for no one’s benefit but their own.3
The sleeves changed with the fashions. Petrarch’s flowing cuffs gave way, over the following centuries, to delicate lace-trimmed wrists in later manuscripts, and eventually — when the manicule migrated into print — to the sober cuff of a suit-wearing professional. The hand tracked its era’s clothing the way a portrait tracks its era’s hair. But the anatomy remained stubbornly, universally wrong. Too many fingers or too few. Thumbs facing the wrong way, or absent. Wrists that could not bend as the drawing demanded. Each reader drew the hand they carried in their head — the idea of a hand, not the observation of one — and the result was as individual as handwriting, which is to say: legible to the reader who made it and strange to everyone else.
A scholar examining a fifteenth-century copy of Pliny the Younger’s letters at Stanford was able to identify the reader as Bernardo Bembo — the Venetian patrician, father of the poet Cardinal Pietro Bembo — precisely because Bembo’s pointing hands and annotated eyes were as distinctive as a signature. The manicule was a fingerprint that predated fingerprints. Its wrongness was its identity. A correctly drawn hand would have been anonymous.
And yet this most common of reader’s marks — the one Sherman believed might have been drawn more often than any other symbol across six centuries of European reading — had no name. Not one name. In English alone, before Sherman imposed manicule in 2005, the symbol answered to at least fourteen alternatives: fist, mutton fist, bishop’s fist, pointer, digit, index, indicator, hand director, and more — three of them conflations with other symbols entirely, as though the manicule were so present that it absorbed its neighbours’ identities along with its own.4 It was the kind of thing you recognised instantly and named differently every time. Giving it a single word required standing far enough back to see it as a category — a thing that could be studied rather than simply used.
On August 28, 1479, a printer in Milan named Leonhard Pachel produced the Breviarium totius juris canonici, a compendium of canon law compiled by Father Paolo Attavanti of Florence. The book is a small monument to firsts. It contains the first printed portrait of an author. It contains a passage in which the author explains his own notation system to the reader — a self-documenting text, the medieval equivalent of a user manual. And on the opening leaf, before the index, it contains the first manicule ever cast in metal type: an eight-millimetre block with a notably elongated index finger, paired with a pilcrow. The pilcrow marks points of law; the manicule marks authoritative pronouncements. Attavanti explained the difference, and in doing so he codified something that had never needed explaining when it lived in a reader’s hand.
The manicule had stepped out of the margin and into the press.
What changed was not only the look of the symbol, though that changed too — uniform, repeatable, stripped of sleeves and fingernails and anatomical error. What changed was who was pointing. A manicule drawn by a reader in a margin was an act of private judgment: this passage matters to me. A manicule set by a compositor in a page was an act of editorial instruction: this passage should matter to you. The first was a reader selecting what to keep. The second was a publisher selecting it for them. The gesture was identical. The authority behind it had reversed.
For a while, both versions coexisted. Readers went on drawing their own hands in the margins of printed books through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and printers went on casting uniform ones into the text. But the printed version had an advantage the handwritten one could never match: it could be reproduced without limit. By the late eighteenth century, the manicule had migrated from the margins of books onto the surfaces of the commercial world — advertisements, broadsides, shop signs, handbills, any flat surface that needed a viewer’s eye directed to a price or a promise. The pointing hand that had once said this matters to me now said look here, and what it pointed at was usually for sale.
The 1865 wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth is the form at its most stripped. Three blank frames at the top of the broadside — photography could not yet be integrated into the printing process, so portraits were pasted in by hand afterward. Below the frames, a manicule points to “$100,000 REWARD.” The hand is functional, urgent, anonymous. It does not belong to a reader. It does not belong to a publisher. It belongs to the War Department.
By the 1890s, the manicule was retreating from commercial use — drowned, as Sherman argued, by its own ubiquity. When every poster pointed, the pointing stopped working. Simpler arrows began to replace the ornate fists. The hand that had once carried a reader’s personality — their wrong fingers, their particular sleeve — had become a commodity, and then a cliché, and then a relic.
Alan Kay’s Smalltalk, running on Xerox workstations in the early 1980s, put a small white hand on screen — a few dozen pixels arranged into the shape of an extended index finger. Apple’s 1987 HyperCard software made the hand the standard signal for a clickable hyperlink: move the cursor over a link, and the arrow becomes a pointing finger. Susan Kare, who designed much of the original Macintosh interface, created a clicker icon whose influence runs through every hand cursor since. The CSS property that governs this transformation is named, with an engineer’s plain unconsciousness, cursor: pointer.5
Unicode 1.0, published in 1991, included six pointing-index characters — typographic descendants, five centuries removed, of the metal manicule that Pachel had cast in Milan. Unicode 6.0, in 2010, added four backhand-pointing variants. Unicode 7.0, in 2014, added Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers, so that the pointing hand could be assigned a skin colour for the first time in its history. The hand changes shade but not shape. It has no sleeve. It has no fingernail. It has the correct number of fingers.
The manicule was always different — different fingers, different cuffs, different errors — because it was always someone’s. The cursor is the same for everyone because it is no one’s.
The Ambrosian Virgil is still in Milan. Petrarch’s manicules are still in its margins — the long index finger, the nail at the tip, the two parallel lines for a cuff, the five fingers fanning from a wrist that has no thumb. They are still pointing at lines of Virgil that mattered to one reader six and a half centuries ago. The hand is anatomically impossible. It could not grip anything, could not hold a pen, could not belong to the man who drew it or to anyone else who has ever lived. It is wrong in a way that only Petrarch’s hand is wrong — his fingers, his cuff, his error, still there in the margin beside the verse, the nail still visible at the tip of the index finger where he always marked it, pointing at a word he thought was worth the trouble.
Sources
Sherman, William H. “Toward a History of the Manicule.” Lives and Letters (2005). PDF at livesandletters.ac.uk (content accessed via secondary citations).
Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. (Referenced via publisher descriptions and secondary sources.)
Wikipedia. “Manicule.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
Ziereis Facsimiles. “Ambrosian Virgil of Francesco Petrarca.” facsimiles.com. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Facsimile Finder. “Petrarch’s Virgil.” facsimilefinder.com. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Electrum Magazine. “Petrarch’s Virgil: Simone Martini’s Frontispiece Examined.” January 2013.
Messynessy Chic. “The Secret History of the Manicule, the Little Hand that’s Everywhere.” March 7, 2025.
University of York. “Finger on the Manicule.” york.ac.uk. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Kwakkel, Erik. “Octopus Fingers.” Tumblr post (Leiden University), 2013.
Medievalbooks.nl. “Helping Hands on the Medieval Page.” March 13, 2015.
Medievalbooks.nl. “Manicula” (tag page). Accessed July 5, 2026.
Manuscript.ku.dk. “Pointing Out Manicules in AM 76 8vo.” University of Copenhagen. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Wood Type Customs. “The Story of Scala Manicule.” woodtypecustoms.com. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Public Domain Review. “Petrarch’s Plague: Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
CNN. “A Rare ‘Wanted’ Poster for John Wilkes Booth.” April 29, 2023.
Poetry & Popular Culture blog. “Putting the Man in Manicule.” Guest post by Eric Conrad, June 2010.
ResearchGate. “The Poet as Printer’s Fist: Walt Whitman’s Indicative Hand.” 2019.
HandWiki. “Manicule.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
Baylor University. “Pointing Out the (Not Always) Obvious: Manicules Through History.” Exhibition, April 2023.
History of Information. “Petrarch Discovers Cicero’s Letters to Atticus.” historyofinformation.com. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Wikipedia. “Fingerpost.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
RuralHistoria. “Fingerposts, What is Their History?” October 2023.
Jackson, H.J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. (Referenced via publisher description.)
Baglio, Marco, Antonietta Nebuloni Testa, and Marco Petoletti. Le postille del Virgilio Ambrosiano. 2 vols. Rome, 2006. (Referenced via secondary citations.)
Billanovich, Giuseppe. “Il Virgilio del Petrarca da Avignone a Milano.” Studi Petrarcheschi (1985). (Referenced via secondary citations.)
Scolarcardiff.wordpress.com. “Pointing the Finger, or, A Handy Guide to Manicules.” May 2013.
Wikipedia. “Nota bene.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
Brown University. “Petrarch on the Plague.” Decameron Web. Accessed July 5, 2026.
Britannica. “Petrarch — Later Years 1353–74.” Accessed July 5, 2026.
The Ambrosian Virgil is still in Milan. Petrarch’s manicules are still in its margins — the long index finger, the nail at the tip, the two parallel lines for a cuff, the five fingers fanning from a wrist that has no thumb. They are still pointing at lines of Virgil that mattered to one reader six and a half centuries ago. The hand is anatomically impossible. It could not grip anything, could not hold a pen, could not belong to the man who drew it or to anyone else who has ever lived. It is wrong in a way that only Petrarch’s hand is wrong — his fingers, his cuff, his error, still there in the margin beside the verse, the nail still visible at the tip of the index finger where he always marked it, pointing at a word he thought was worth the trouble.
The Virgil's journey after Petrarch's death was nearly as eventful as its life with him. It passed to Giovanni Dondi dall'Orologio, the polymath clockmaker, then to the Visconti family, then to the Sforza at Pavia. When French forces took Milan in 1499, the manuscript was among some 900 volumes earmarked for plunder. A Pavian named Antonio di Pirro — whose name survives in almost no other context — stole it back. It wandered to Rome, where Cardinal Agostino Cusani eventually sold it in 1600 to Archbishop Federico Borromeo for the Biblioteca Ambrosiana he was founding. In 1930, the Milanese publisher Hoepli produced a facsimile edition: 350 copies, now priced between one and three thousand euros. Even a reproduction of Petrarch's margins is an expensive thing to touch.
Petrarch’s habit of treating ancient authors as living presences went beyond the margins. In 1345, in the Biblioteca Capitolare at Verona, he discovered a manuscript of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus — a find credited with helping to ignite Renaissance humanism — and composed a letter addressed to Cicero himself, dated June 16, 1345, likely written in the library where the discovery had just occurred. A man who drew pointing hands beside Virgil’s verse and inscribed his griefs on Virgil’s flyleaf also sat down and wrote a letter to someone who had been dead for fourteen centuries.
Some readers gave up on hands entirely. A fourteenth-century Cicero manuscript in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library contains a manicule whose arm has been replaced by an octopus — its tentacles spread wide to grip the passage the way fingers grip a margin, the tentacles doing the work of digits and the digits, in a neighbouring annotation, curling and twisting like tentacles to cover the full page length. A copy of the Topica in the British Library (Royal MS 12 E.xxv, around 1300) has a manicule whose arm is a dragon’s body, the beast tapering to a wrist and ending, as though nothing were unusual, in a human hand with a pointing finger.
The fourteen names are worth listing, because the list itself is the evidence. In English alone, before Sherman: hand, pointing hand, hand director, pointer, digit, fist, mutton fist, bishop’s fist, index, indicator — and then three terms borrowed by conflation from other symbols: pilcrow, maniple, and indicule, each of which properly refers to something else but was pressed into service because the manicule had no word of its own.
There is one intermediate form worth noting. Fingerposts — physical roadside signs with pointing arms directing travellers — became compulsory on English turnpike roads under the Highways Act of 1766. The oldest surviving example stands near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, dated 1669.