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A commonplace book from the mid-seventeenth century
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled 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 systematic subject headings[1] and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective.[2]
Overview
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary 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 as John 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 from diaries or travelogues. 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.[3] They became significant in Early Modern Europe. As a genre, commonplace books were generally private collections of information, but as the amount of information grew following the invention of movable type and printing became less expensive, some were published for the general public.
In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 as A 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 by John Bell almost a century after Locke's treatise. A copy of this blank commonplace was used by Erasmus Darwin from 1776 to 1787, and it was later used by Charles Darwin who called it "the great book" when composing his grandfather's biography.[4]
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 1713[5] and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855,[6] including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art.
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 his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today).[7]
The commonplace system of categorized note-keeping was not restricted to books. In the twentieth century, Henri de Lubac traveled with his notes in a sack.[8]Erasmus of Rotterdam traveled with a chest of notes, including examples of well-written Latin that formed the basis of his Adagia.[9] In De Copia his Method of Collecting Examples (Ratio collegendi exampla) advocated a hierarchical but ad hoc breakdown of topics: for example, the top-level might be Piety and Impiety, under Piety might come Gratitude, and under these headings one puts example texts.[10] The commonplace proper would be some simple aphorism or moral, possibly several, that can be drawn from the example, such as The crowd loves and hates thoughtlessly.[11]
As a result of the development of information technology, there exist various software applications that perform the functions that paper-based commonplace books served for previous generations of thinkers.
History
Philosophical origins
Beginning in Topica, Aristotle distinguished between forms of argumentation and referred to them as commonplaces. He extended the idea in Rhetoric where he suggested that they also be used to explore the validity of propositions through rhetoric. Cicero in his own Topica and De Oratore further clarified the idea of commonplaces and applied them to public speaking. He also created a list of commonplaces which included sententiae or wise sayings or quotations by philosophers, statesmen, and poets. Quintilian further expanded these ideas in Institutio 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 including Pliny and Diogenes Laertius, many authors in the Renaissance credited Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre with his commonplace Attic Nights.[12]
In the first century AD, Seneca the Younger suggested that readers collect commonplace ideas and sententiae as a bee collects pollen, and by imitation turn them into their own honey-like words. By late antiquity, the idea of employing commonplaces in rhetorical settings was well established.[13]
Stobaeus, a writer usually placed in the fifth century, compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as The Anthologies, containing excerpts from 1,430 works of poetry and prose; all but 315 of these works are lost except for Stobaeus's quotations.[14]
In the sixth century Boethius had translated both Aristotle and Cicero's work and created his own account of commonplaces in De topicis differentiis.
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 approved Church 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 the thirteenth century they were more commonly arranged under thematic headings.[13] These religious anthologies were referred to as florilegia which translates as gatherings 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 as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, whose own work Meditations (second century AD) was originally a private record of thoughts and quotations. The Pillow Book of Sei 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 of renaissance scholars kept something resembling a commonplace book – for example Leonardo 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."[15] French encyclopediast Jean Bodin used the commonplace book as "an arsenal of 'factoids'."[16]
Zibaldone
Zibaldone di pensieri, written by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi
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.[17]Giovanni Rucellai, the compiler of one of the most sophisticated examples of the genre, defined it as a "salad of many herbs".[18]
Zibaldone were always paper codices of 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 (first chancery minuscule and later mercantile minuscule) and contained what palaeographer Armando Petrucci describes as "an astonishing variety of poetic and prose texts".[19] 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 from Augustine and Virgil portrays a developing secular, literate culture.[20]
By far the most popular literary selections were the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio: the "Three Crowns" of the Florentine vernacular traditions.[21] 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 is Giacomo Leopardi's nineteenth-century Zibaldone 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 as Oxford.[1]John Locke appended his indexing scheme for commonplace books to a printing of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[22] The commonplace tradition in which Francis Bacon and John Milton were educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classical rhetoric, and "commonplacing" persisted as a popular study technique until the early twentieth century. Commonplace books were used by many key thinkers of the Enlightenment, with authors like the philosopher and theologian William Paley using them to write books.[23] Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard 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 as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice 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.[24]
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.[25] He developed the calculus in a commonplace which he called his waste book.
Jean Miélot, fifteenth-century Burgundian translator and author. His book is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the main sources for his verses, many written for court occasions.
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. The British Library created a digital archive of his commonplace which has been published online with extensive cross-linking based on his original index. https://ashby.info/ Old site: Archived 2009-02-08 at the Wayback Machine
Francis Bacon, The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies, Longman, Greens and Company, London, 1883. Bacon's Promus was 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.
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, 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).[27]
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 alphabetically into order (London, 1581).
John Milton, Milton's Commonplace Book, in John 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".[28] They are held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Edited by his biographer Douglas Brinkley, his notes were published as the book The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom (Harper Collins, 2011).[29]
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.
In Alan 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.
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.
↑ Miller, Susan (1998). Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN978-0822939917.
↑ An example is the Zibaldone da Canal merchant's manual held at the Beinecke Library, which dates from 1312 and contains hand-drawn diagrams of Venetian ships and descriptions of Venice's merchant culture.
↑ Reagan, Ronald (2011-05-10). Brinkley, Douglas (ed.). The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom. HarperCollins. ISBN978-0062065131.
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.
Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis.... In Rhetroica Philippi Melanchthonis. In Erasmi Roterdami libellum De duplici copia. Paris, 1542.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic priest and theologian, educationalist, satirist, and philosopher. Through his vast number of translations, books, essays, prayers and letters, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.
Philip Melanchthon was a German Lutheran reformer, collaborator with Martin Luther, the first systematic theologian of the Protestant Reformation, an intellectual leader of the Lutheran Reformation, and influential designer of educational systems.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a Roman educator and rhetorician born in Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.
Renaissance humanism is a worldview centered on the nature and importance of humanity that emerged from the study of Classical antiquity.
The Latin school was the grammar school of 14th- to 19th-century Europe, though the latter term was much more common in England. Other terms used include Lateinschule in Germany, or later Gymnasium. Latin schools were also established in Colonial America.
The incipit of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of notes, having the same purpose. The word incipit comes from Latin and means "it begins". Its counterpart taken from the ending of the text is the explicit.
Christian humanism regards classical humanist principles such as universal human dignity, individual freedom, and the importance of happiness as essential and principal or even exclusive components of the teachings of Jesus.
De Officiis is a 44 BC treatise by Marcus Tullius Cicero divided into three books, in which Cicero expounds his conception of the best way to live, behave, and observe moral obligations. The posthumously-published work discusses what is honorable, what is to one's advantage, and what to do when the honorable and private gain apparently conflict. For the first two books Cicero was dependent on the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, but wrote more independently for the third book.
Ramism was a collection of theories on rhetoric, logic, and pedagogy based on the teachings of Petrus Ramus, a French academic, philosopher, and Huguenot convert, who was murdered during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in August 1572.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. Part 1 of The New Negro: An Interpretation, titled "The Negro Renaissance", includes Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
Personification is the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person. It is, in other words, considered an embodiment or an incarnation. In the arts, many things are commonly personified. These include numerous types of places, especially cities, countries, and continents, elements of the natural world such as the trees or four seasons, four elements, four cardinal winds, five senses, and abstractions such as virtues, especially the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins, the nine Muses, or death.
Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style is a rhetoric textbook written by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, and first published in 1512. It was a best-seller widely used for teaching how to rewrite pre-existing texts, and how to incorporate them in a new composition. Erasmus systematically instructed on how to embellish, amplify, and give variety to speech and writing.
Irenicism in Christian theology refers to attempts to unify Christian apologetical systems by using reason as an essential attribute. The word is derived from the Greek word ειρήνη (eirene) meaning peace. It is a concept related to a communal theology and opposed to committed differences, which can cause unavoidable tension or friction, and is rooted in the ideals of pacifism. Those who affiliate themselves with irenicism identify the importance of unity in the Christian Church and declare the common bond of all Christians under Christ.
Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged "Dean"—of the Harlem Renaissance. He is frequently included in listings of influential African Americans. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."
Leonard Cox was an English humanist, author of the first book in English on rhetoric. He was a scholar of international reputation who found patronage in Poland, and was friend of Erasmus and Melanchthon. He was known to contemporaries as a grammarian, rhetorician, poet, and preacher, and was skilled in the modern as well as the classical languages.
A zibaldone is an Italian vernacular commonplace book or notebook containing a wide variety of vernacular texts, copied into a small or medium-format paper codex by citizens in late-medieval and Renaissance Italian city-states.
Milcah Martha Moore (1740–1829) was an 18th-century American Quaker poet, the creator of a manuscript commonplace book featuring the work of women writers of her circle and compiler of a printed book of prose and poetry.
Erasmus of Rotterdam is commonly regarded as the key public intellectual of the early decades of the 16th century. He has been given the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists", and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists". He has also been called "the most illustrious rhetorician and educationalist of the Renaissance".
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