reading the seventeenth century AN OLD LIBRARY COMMONP L A C E - B O O K
Miscellaneous notes on the damaged flyleaf of Old Library MS F.4.21
The commonplace-books habitually kept by learned and semi-learned men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide a rich body of evidence for the intellectual culture of the period, fine-grained in its particular detail but attesting to the larger structures of knowledge and methods of learning and inquiry on which that culture depended. Recommended by humanist teachers since the fifteenth century, the keeping of such notebooks enabled one to record and organise useful details encountered in the process of reading. Despite the essential similarity of the instructions which numerous pedagogues gave for the compilation of such books, the many hundreds of examples that survive from early modern England are quite varied in their structure and content. Some are stubbornly miscellaneous accumulations of material added as the compiler came across it in his reading; others contain quotations dutifully entered under predetermined headings, arranged either alphabetically or conceptually. A middle way between these extremes was to enter material as one encountered it, while maintaining a cumulative alphabetical index at the back of the book. Each commonplace-book is both a record of an individual’s private study and a window into the world of learning which he was trying to grasp.
80
