A Short Commonplace Book on Commonplace Books
In true commonplace form, I provide quotes (and citations!):
A Basic Definition:
"A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement."
— Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., "commonplace-book."
History:
"In this method of reading (which I will call the method of commonplaces) one selects passages of interest for the rhetorical turns of phrase, the dialectical argumetns, or the factual information they contain; one then copies them out in a notebook, the commonplace book, kept handy for the purpose, grouping them under appropriate headings to facilitate later retrieval and use, notably in composing prose of one's own." (541)
"The commonplace book [...] encompassed all the aspects of inventio, or the gathering of material for an argument, and became the crucial tool for storing and retrieving the increasingly unwieldly quantity of textual and personal knowledge that guaranteed copiousness in speech and writing. The commonplace book thus spread as widely in Renaissance Europe as the Erasmian ideal of eloquence thorugh copia rerum or abundance of material. Historicans of literature have indeed amply shown how minor and major literay figures, most notably Shakespeare and Montaigne, relied for their writing on commonplace books, both on personal notebooks and on the printed cribs designed to supplement (or in the case of the lazy writer, to replace) them." (542)
— Blair, Ann. "Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book." Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541-51.
"The literary flowers of poets and philosophers [were] organized and preserved for future reference and application in 'commonplace books,' by dons and dilettantes alike, well into the twentieth century. These compilations of quotations, maxims, anecdotes, verses, recipes, spells, numerical tables, and all manner of extracts and observations, have remained a central fixture of intellectual, literary, and artistic activity for centuries. Historically, they have served as storehouses of knowledge in the form of personal, and often quite revealing manuscripts and as general works of reference in print. In the latter form, commonplace books counted among the early modern progenitors of the encyclopedia, concordance, and book of quotations. Indeed, commonplace books have always been closely allied, and have often overlapped, with other recognized medieval and Renaissance literary forms--the florilegium, sylva, theatrum, thesaurus--and with various other genres of collected texts such as journals, diaries, verse miscellanies, anthologies, scrapbooks, albums, and so forth. These now present historians with a rich archive of the practices of reading and memorializing knowledge, from the Renaissance to the present day." (137, 140)
— Havens, Earle. "'Of Common Places, or Memorial Books': An Anonymous Manuscript on Commonplace Books and the Art of Memory in Seventeenth-Century England." Yale University Library Gazette 76.3-4 (2002): 136-53.
