Commonplace book
Method of knowledge compiling From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Method of knowledge compiling From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
"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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.
