Commonplace book

A commonplace book from the mid-seventeenth century

Commonplace books(orcommonplaces) are a way to compileknowledge,usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during theRenaissanceand in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar toscrapbooksfilled with items of many kinds: notes,proverbs,adages,aphorisms,maxims,quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.

Entries are most often organized under systematicsubject headingsand differ functionally from journals ordiaries,which are chronological and introspective.

Overview

"Commonplace" is atranslationof theLatintermlocus communis(from Greektópos koinós,seeliterary topos) which means "a general or common place", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such asJohn Milton's example. "Commonplace book" is at times used with an expansive sense, referring to collections by an individual in one volume which have a common theme (e.g. ethics) or explores several themes. The term overlaps with aspects of the terms "anthology"or" mixed-manuscript "in these productions but most properly refers to a collection of sayings or excerpts by an individual, often collected under thematic headings.

Commonplaces are a separate genre of writing fromdiariesortravelogues.Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts; sometimes they were required of young women as evidence of their mastery of social roles and as demonstrations of the correctness of their upbringing.They became significant inEarly Modern Europe.As a genre, commonplace books were generally private collections of information, but as the amount of information grew following the invention ofmovable typeand printing became less expensive, some were published for the general public.

In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopherJohn Lockewrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 asA New Method of Making Common-Place-Books,"in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Following the publication of his work, publishers often printed empty commonplace books with space for headings and indices to be filled in by their users. An example is" Bell's Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke "which was published byJohn Bellalmost a century after Locke's treatise. A copy of this blank commonplace was used byErasmus Darwinfrom 1776 to 1787, and it was later used byCharles Darwinwho called it "the great book" when composing his grandfather's biography.

By the early eighteenth century, they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations, and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713and a typical example was published byMrs Anna Jamesonin 1855,including headings such asEthical Fragments;Theological;LiteratureandArt.

Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used:Carl Linnaeus,for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of hisSystema Naturae(which is the basis for the system used by scientists today).

The commonplace system of categorized note-keeping was not restricted to books. In the twentieth century,Henri de Lubactraveled with his notes in a sack.Erasmusof Rotterdam traveled with a chest of notes, including examples of well-written Latin that formed the basis of hisAdagia.InDe CopiahisMethod of Collecting Examples(Ratio collegendi exampla) advocated a hierarchical butad hocbreakdown of topics: for example, the top-level might bePietyandImpiety,under Piety might comeGratitude,and under these headings one puts example texts.The commonplaceproperwould be some simple aphorism or moral, possibly several, that can be drawn from the example, such asThe crowd loves and hates thoughtlessly.

As a result of the development ofinformation technology,there existvarious software applicationsthat perform the functions that paper-based commonplace books served for previous generations of thinkers.

History

Philosophical origins

Beginning inTopica,Aristotledistinguished between forms of argumentation and referred to them as commonplaces. He extended the idea inRhetoricwhere he suggested that they also be used to explore the validity of propositions throughrhetoric.Ciceroin his ownTopicaandDe Oratorefurther clarified the idea of commonplaces and applied them to public speaking. He also created a list of commonplaces which includedsententiaeor wise sayings or quotations by philosophers, statesmen, and poets.Quintilianfurther expanded these ideas inInstitutio Oratoria,a treatise on rhetoric education, and asked his readers to commit their commonplaces to memory. He also framed these commonplaces in moral and ethical overtones.

While there are ancient compilations by writers includingPlinyandDiogenes Laertiusmany authors in the Renaissance creditedAulus Gelliusas the founder of the genre with his commonplaceAttic Nights.

In the first century AD,Seneca the Youngersuggested that readers collect commonplace ideas and sententiae as if like a bee and by imitation turn them into their own honey-like words. Bylate antiquity,the idea of employing commonplaces in rhetorical settings was well established.

Presumed to have been written in the fifth centuryStobaeuscompiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known asThe Anthologiesof excerpts containing 1,430 poetry and prose quotations of works of which only 315 are still extant in the twenty-first century.

In the sixth centuryBoethiushad translated both Aristotle and Cicero's work and created his own account of commonplaces inDe topicis differentiis.

Florilegium

Main article:Florilegium

By the eighth century, the idea of commonplaces was used, primarily in religious contexts, by preachers and theologians, to collect excerpted passages from the Bible or from approvedChurch Fathers.Early in this time period passages were collected and arranged in the order of their appearance in the works from which they were taken, but by thethirteenth centurythey were more commonly arranged underthematic headings.These religious anthologies were referred to asflorilegiawhich translates asgatherings of flowers.Often these collections were used by their creators to compose sermons.

Early examples

Precursors to the commonplace book were the records kept by Roman and Greek philosophers of their thoughts and daily meditations, often including quotations from other thinkers. The practice of keeping a journal such as this was particularly recommended by Stoics such asSenecaandMarcus Aurelius,whose own workMeditations(second century AD) was originally a private record of thoughts and quotations.The Pillow BookofSei Shonagon,a courtier of the tenth or eleventh-century Japan is likewise a private book of anecdote and poetry, daily thoughts and lists. However, none of these include the wider range of sources usually associated with commonplace books.

A number ofrenaissance scholarskept something resembling a commonplace book – for exampleLeonardo da Vinci,who described his notebook exactly as a commonplace book is structured: "A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat."French encyclopediastJean Bodinused the commonplace book as "an arsenal of 'factoids'."

Zibaldone

Zibaldone di pensieri,written by the Italian poetGiacomo Leopardi

Main article:Zibaldone

During the course of the fifteenth century, the Italian peninsula was the site of the development of two new forms of book production: the deluxe registry book and the zibaldone (or hodgepodge book). What differentiated these two forms was their language of composition: a vernacular.Giovanni Rucellai,the compiler of one of the most sophisticated examples of the genre, defined it as a "salad of many herbs".

Zibaldone were always papercodicesof small or medium format – never the large desk copies of registry books or other display texts. They also lacked the lining and extensive ornamentation of other deluxe copies. Rather than miniatures, a zibaldone often incorporates the author's sketches. Zibaldone were in cursive scripts (firstchancery minusculeand later mercantile minuscule) and contained whatpalaeographerArmando Petrucci describes as "an astonishing variety of poetic and prose texts".Devotional, technical, documentary, and literary texts appear side by side in no discernible order. The juxtaposition of taxes paid, currency exchange rates, medicinal remedies, recipes, and favourite quotations fromAugustineandVirgilportrays a developing secular, literate culture.

By far the most popular literary selections were the works ofDante Alighieri,Francesco Petrarca,andGiovanni Boccaccio:the "Three Crowns" of the Florentine vernacular traditions.These collections have been used by modern scholars as a source for interpreting how merchants and artisans interacted with the literature and visual arts of the Florentine Renaissance.

The best-known zibaldone isGiacomo Leopardi's nineteenth-centuryZibaldone di pensieri,however, it significantly departs from the early modern genre of commonplace books and is rather comparable to the intellectual diary which was practiced, for example, by Lichtenberg, Joubert, Coleridge, Valery, among others.

English

By the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions asOxford.John Lockeappended his inde xing scheme for commonplace books to a printing of hisAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding.The commonplace tradition in whichFrancis BaconandJohn Miltonwere educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classicalrhetoric,and "commonplacing" persisted as a popular study technique until the early twentieth century. Commonplace books were used by many key thinkers ofthe Enlightenment,with authors like the philosopher and theologianWilliam Paleyusing them to write books.BothRalph Waldo EmersonandHenry David Thoreauwere taught to keep commonplace books atHarvard University(their commonplace books survive in published form).

However, it was also a domestic and private practice that was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such asSamuel Taylor Coleridge,Mark Twain,andVirginia Woolfkept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such asThomas Hardy,followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the originalRenaissancepractice more closely. The older, "clearinghouse" function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions, became less popular over time.

Examples

Manuscripts

• Adelaide Horatio Seymour Spencer, nineteenth-century gentlewoman. Held in the Franklin Library, University of Pennsylvania.
• Glastonbury Miscellany. (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 0.9.38). Originally designed as an account book.
• Isaac Newton(1643–1727), mathematician and physicist. Held at the University of Cambridge, with a digitised version freely available to view online.He developed thecalculusin a commonplace which he called hiswaste book.
• Jean Miélot,fifteenth-century Burgundian translator and author. His book is in theBibliothèque nationale de France,and the main sources for his verses, many written for court occasions.
• Loci communes (Pseudo-Maximus),a late ninth- or early tenth-centuryflorilegium
• Richard Hill, a London grocer (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354).
• Robert Reynes of Acle, Norfolk (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 407).
• Virginia Woolf,twentieth-century novelist. Some of her notebooks are held in Smith College, Massachusetts.
• Zibaldone da Canalmerchant's commonplace book (New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MS 327)

Published examples

• Mrs. Anna Anderson,A Common Place Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fancies(Longman, Brown, Green and Longman, 1855)
• W. Ross Ashby(1903–1972) started a commonplace book in a journal in May 1928 as a medical student. He kept it for 44 years until his death at which point it occupied 25 volumes comprising 7,189 pages and was indexed with 1,600 index cards. TheBritish Librarycreated a digital archive of his commonplace which has been published online with extensive cross-linking based on his original index.http:// rossashby.info/index.htmlArchived2009-02-08 at theWayback Machine
• W.H. Auden,A Certain World(New York: The Viking Press, 1970).
• Francis Bacon,The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies,Longman, Greens and Company, London, 1883.Bacon's Promuswas a rough list of elegant and useful phrases gleaned from reading and conversation that Bacon used as a sourcebook in writing and probably also as a promptbook for oral practice in public speaking.
• Robert Burns,Robert Burns's Commonplace Book. 1783–1785.James Cameron Ewing and Davidson Cook. Glasgow: Gowans and Gray Ltd., 1938.
• E.M. Forster,Commonplace Book,ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
• The Houghton Club,which holds the fishing rights to more than a dozen miles of the river Test, kept a club commonplace book from 1827 - 1902, filled with manuscript text and drawings, with numerous letters and drawings by members tipped in. A limited edition facsimile was printed for members (London: Atelier Press, 2019).
• Thomas Jefferson,Literary Commonplace Book(D.L. Wilson, ed., Princeton University Press, 1989)
• Thomas Jefferson,Legal Commonplace Book(David Thomas Konig and Michael P. Zuckert, eds., Princeton University Press, 2019)
• Ben Jonson,Timber; or, Discoveries, made upon men and matter, as they have flow’d out of his daily Readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar Notion of the Times(London, 1641).
• Lovecraft, H.P.(4 July 2011)."Commonplace Book".H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book.Wired.Retrieved5 July2011.Transcribed byBruce Sterling.
• The Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Lyttelton(Cambridge University Press, 1919)
• John Man,Commonplaces of Christian Religion(London, 1578)
• John Marbeck,A book of notes and commonplaces…collected and gathered out of the works of diverse singular writers and brought Alpha betically into order(London, 1581).
• Philip Melanchthon,Loci communes,1512 (Internet Archive)
• John Milton,Milton's Commonplace Book,inJohn Milton: Complete Prose Works,gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). Milton kept scholarly notes from his reading, complete with page citations to use in writing his tracts and poems.
• Ronald Reagan(1911–2004) kept a commonplace book with traditional commonplace headings and using index cards which "were kept in the plastic sleeves of a black photo album".They are held at theRonald Reagan Presidential Library.Edited by his biographerDouglas Brinkley,his notes were published as the bookThe Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom(Harper Collins, 2011).

Literary references to commonplacing

• Amos Bronson Alcott,1877: "The habit of journalizing becomes a life-long lesson in the art of composition, an informal schooling for authorship. And were the process of preparing their works for publication faithfully detailed by distinguished writers, it would appear how large were their indebtedness to their diary and commonplaces. How carefully should we peruse Shakespeare's notes used in compiling his plays—what was his, what another's—showing how these were fashioned into the shapely whole we read, how Milton composed, Montaigne, Goethe: by what happy strokes of thought, flashes of wit, apt figures, fit quotations snatched from vast fields of learning, their rich pages were wrought forth! This were to give the keys of great authorship!" Amos Bronson Alcott,Table-Talk of A. Bronson Alcott(Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877), p. 12.
• InArthur Conan Doyle'sSherlock Holmesstories, Holmes keeps numerous commonplace books, which he sometimes uses when doing research. For example, in "The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger",he researches the newspaper reports of an old murder in a commonplace book.
• InAlan Moore's graphic novel Providence, the protagonist Robert Black keeps a commonplace book; his entries into this book make up the second halves of the novel's chapters, contrasting with the graphic sections.
• InLemony Snicket'sA Series of Unfortunate Eventsa number of characters including Klaus Baudelaire and the Quagmire triplets keep commonplace books.
• InMichael Ondaatje'sThe English Patient,Count Almásy uses his copy ofHerodotus'sHistoriesas a commonplace book.
• Virginia Woolf,mid-twentieth century: "[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink." Virginia Woolf, "Hours in a Library",Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958), p. 25.

See also

• Attic Nights
• Biji (Chinese literature),a similar Chinese genre
• Book of Shadows
• Bullet journal
• Card file
• Commentarii
• Family cookbooks
• Hypomnema
• Knowledge organization
• Memex
• Memorandabooks
• Miscellany
• Notebook (style)
• Notetaking
  • Comparison of notetaking software
• Personal information management
  • List of personal information managers
• Personal knowledge base
• Personal knowledge management
• Personal wiki
  • List of wiki software § Personal wiki software
• Reference management software
• Sammelband
• Silva rerum(aka sylvae ( "forests" ))
• Sudelbücher
• Swipe file
• Table-book
• Tag (metadata) § Knowledge tags
• Thesaurus( "treasure chests" )
• Vade mecum( "go with me" ) or handbook

Further reading

• Burke, Victoria E.Recent Studies in Commonplace Books.English Literary Renaissance. The University of Chicago Press. 43 (1 (Winter 2013)): 153–177.doi:10.2307/43607607.Retrieved 3 August 2021.
  • A thorough bibliography of research and writing on commonplace books with associated notes.
• Havens, Earle (2001).Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century.Yale University.
• Allen, Roland (2023).The Notebook: a history of thinking on paper.Profile Books.

Handbooks

Influential treatises, handbooks, and books in the history of the commonplace tradition.

• Desiderius Erasmus,De duplici copia verborum ac rerumat theInternet Archive.Cologne, 1540.
• Desiderius Erasmus,De ratione studii et instituendi pueros comentarii totidem.[Paris, 1512].
• Henry Peacham,The garden of eloquence: conteyning the figures of grammar and rhetorick.London, 1577.
  • One of the first handbooks in English
• Joachim Camerarius,Elementa rhetoricae.Basel, [1545].
• John Brinsley,Ludus literarius: or, The grammar schoole; shewing how to proceede from the first entrance into learning, to the highest perfectionat theInternet Archive.London, 1612.
• John Locke,A new method of making common-place-booksat theInternet Archive.London, 1706.
  • Introduced a popular method for creating an index for commonplaces.
• Obadiah Walker,Of education: especially of young gentlemenat theInternet Archive.Oxford, 1673.
• Petrus Mosellanus,Tabulae de schematibus et tropis.... In Rhetroica Philippi Melanchthonis. In Erasmi Roterdami libellum De duplici copia.Paris, 1542.
• Philip Melanchthon,De locis communibus ratio.Augsburg [1593].
• Philip Melanchthon,Institutiones rhetoricae.Wittenberg [1536].
• Philip Melanchthon,Rhetorices elementa.Lyon, 1537.
• Rodolphus Agricola,De formando studio.Antwerp, 1532; composed 1484.

External links

• A Common-place Book of John Milton, and a Latin Essay and Latin Verses Presumed to be by Miltonat theInternet Archive
• Cameron Louis, ed. (1980).The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle
• Commonplace Booksby Prof. Lucia Knoles,Assumption College.
• Commonplace Books, Harvard Open Collections– digitized commonplace books
• Commonplaces as figures of speech
• Extraordinary Commonplaces,New York Review of Books