Aristotle’s m ethod o f recording and organising information was one o f the most influential innovations in a period that extended from the twelfth century until well into the seventeenth century. Though both his Topics and his Rhetoric (which also dealt with commonplaces) were known in the middle ages, the majority o f his ideas were transmitted through the works o f Cicero (or TuUy as he was known). These included the
Topica of Cicero and De Inventione as well as a num ber o f glosses and commentaries by
authors such as Boethius and Albertus Magnus. It was Cicero who translated Aristotle’s
koinos topos into the Latin loci communes or commonplaces."^
Both commonplaces and memory in general played an im portant part in medieval life. Manuscripts illustrating the seasons, the winds, and the Zodiac were laid out spatially both as an indication o f their subject matter and as an aid to memory; poems were constructed using mnemonic schemes; medieval recipe books (along with a num ber of later examples)^ were laid out from ‘head to toe’, a capite ad calcem^ mapping disease onto middle ages see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. A Study of Memoy in Medieval Culture,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 2 Moss, p.3
5 This of course is a central theme in Frances Yates, The A rt of Memoy, (London: Pimlico, 1996; orig. 1966)
^ On transmission see Moss, pp. 4-23. Also important were Macrobius (fl. 400 A..D.) whose
Saturnalia discusses Seneca’s work, and Quintillian.
______________________________________________ C h ap ter 2
the body and helping readers locate the required cure; recipes were concocted or borrow ed from Arab or Jewish authors in order to produce the physiological conditions that were required for a good memory.^ Commonplaces had perhaps their greatest influence in the universities and cathedral schools that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. H ere they were central to the medieval trivium o f grammar, logic, and rhetoric, providing scholars with a means o f recording their reading and formulating arguments both on paper and in their scholastic debates. The purpose o f commonplaces was b oth pedagogic and moral. According to the twelfth-century teacher H ugh o f St. Victor, keeping commonplaces was, along with a moderate diet and adequate sleep, the key to a well-ordered memory and an example o f moral goodness; whilst in the thirteenth century the theologian Thomas Aquinas suggested that students compile commonplaces from the Bible and the patristics, as well as pagan authors, under headings o f Virtue’ and Vice’, in order to assist in their studies and in the writing o f sermons.
These m oral and theological aspects o f keeping commonplaces survived and were strengthened by the Reformation. In his The Rule of Reason (1551), Thom as Wilson extolled the value o f commonplaces in persuading doubters and apostates that Protestant beliefs were both logical and correct. Commonplaces were a God-given means by which man could recover some (though not all) o f the knowledge that had been lost at the Fall. As he noted,
Manne, by nature hath a sparke o f knowelge [sic], and by the secrete woorking o f G od, iudgeth after a sorte, and discerneth good from euil. Before the fal o f Adam, this knowelege was perfeicte, but through offence, darkenesse folowed, and the bright Hght was taken awaie. Wisemen therefore, consideryng the weakness o f mannes witte, and the blindnesse also, wherein we are all drouned: inuented this Arte, to helpe us the rather, by a natural order, to find out the trueth.^
^ Carruthers, p.233. Though Aristotle had partly located the memory in the heart (on account of its role in the production o fpneuma or vital spirit), Galen, in his De LociAffectis shifted the focus wholly to the brain (the fifth ventricle). A cool and moist brain was thought to be best for the memory. If the brain was too cold, then recipes involving warming materia medica (such as the anacardum nut) were used. If it was too hot then washing of the head with cooling camomile solution might be recommended. Many of these recipes survived into the early modern period. See for example, Guiliemus Gratarolus, De Memoria Rjiparanda^ (Tiguri, 1553) translated by Willyam Fulwod as The Castel ofMemorie^ (1562)
________________________________________________________________ C h ap ter 2
Keeping a commonplace book was intimately related to reading and writing, activities which, as David Cressy has suggested, were a fundamental aspect o f the Godly culture that emerged with the English Reformation. As clergymen stressed the importance o f personal immersion in scripture, so too, the practice o f keeping commonplace books widened to include an increasing num ber o f laymen.® Both manuscript and printed versions were available and were used by those who wished to order and contemplate their readings, picking out phrases or passages that were appropriate to their own spiritual well-being. The Protestant martyrologist Joh n Foxe pubhshed Locorum
Communium (1557), a thousand page commonplace book which was largely blank but
which provided a skeleton structure o f Latin headings and subheadings under which the devout would place the Jlorilegia or flowers o f their study. A century later, John Evelyn’s favoured Anghcan preacher Jo hn Cosin wrote to his friend Christopher Lord H atton giving detailed recommendations for ‘paper books’ which would contain pre-formatted headings for theology and secular and ecclesiastical history as well as ‘choyce and difficult places o f ye scripture.’^ Evelyn himself dedicated one o f his three foho commonplace books to theology, using commonplaces to record his extensive reading o f scripture and devotional hterature as well as material on other religions and sects under headings such as ‘sacramentum’ and ‘meditatio’.^® Finally, Locke, in his ^ New Method of Making
Common-place Books (1706) dem onstrated how a religious text could be divided up
according to a series o f two letter codes.
Theological commonplace books were often supplemented with material from other subject areas. Thanks in part to the work o f Protestant reformers such as Melanchthon, and the emphasis they placed on the supremacy o f things (res) before words (verba),
commonplace books were, “a mode o f apprehending the world” and an aid to the study
® David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order. Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). A notable example are the commonplace books of Nehemiah WaUington. On Wallington see Paul S. Seaver, Wallington's World APuntan
Aristan in Seventeenth-Centuiy London, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985)
^ Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’ in W. Speed HiU (ed.). New Ways of Ljooking at Old Texts. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 107, (Bingham, New York: Renaissance and English Text Society, 1993), pp. 139-40
*0 Evelyn’s commonplace books are detailed in Michael Hunter, ‘The British Library and the Library of John Evelyn’, in Frances Harris et al. (eds), ]ohn Evelyn in the British IJbray (London: British Library Publications, 1995), pp.82-102, and Michael Hunter, John Evelyn in the 1650s: A Virtuoso in Quest of a Role’, Science and the Shape of Intellectual Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in
______________________________________________ C h ap ter 2
o f natural history/^ Medicine and theology were also allied, physically on the pages o f commonplace books where the actual task o f writing was regarded as morally good, and by the prevailing m onist view o f a healthy soul and a healthy body. Ju st as memorisation enabled the ordering o f thoughts that had been imprinted on the soul (described as a wax tablet by classical authors), so, too, commonplace books allowed for the ordering o f thoughts on the page.^^
Such connections were not limited to Protestants. They also existed in pre-Reformation society. R obert Reynes o f Acle, a church-reeve living in the last quarter o f the fifteenth century stored a wealth o f prayers and charms, many o f which were medical, in his commonplace book; whilst the devout Yorkshire gentleman Robert T hornton recorded how a cup o f water blessed by reciting a prayer from St Paul would bring safe delivery to pregnant w o m e n . T w o hundred years later, and stripped o f much o f the intercessionary power that was believed to lie in spells and charms, Evelyn’s commonplace books also included headings such as ‘preces’ and ‘salus’ as well as a number o f re c ip e s .F in a lly , the practice o f medicine by clergymen, which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, raised the ire o f zealous Calvinists, is evident in the early seventeenth-century commonplace books o f Jo hn M oulton and Henry Fowler. As vicar o f the Church o f Bartholemew the Less in N orth Waltham, Hampshire, M oulton used his com monplace headings to write sermons on ingratitude, wretchedness and humility (most o f his quotations came not from scripture but from X enophon and Suetonius), while at the same time providing recipes for ‘ye stone, or strangulation or any gripping o f the body.’^^
G rowth in the use o f commonplace books was linked to developments in Renaissance humanism both at the level o f the university and the school. These developments were
*• Melanchthon quoted in Moss, Printed Commonplace-books, pp. 120-8. On Melanchton and natural history see Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophj. The Case of Philip
Melanchthon, (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For example Cicero, AdHerennium, “For the places are very much like wax tablets or papyrus, the images like letters, the arrangement and disposition of the images like the script, and the delivery like the reading’, quoted in Yates, p.22. Carruthers, p.B6 notes the connection between the soul as a wax tablet and the Benedictine practice of writing on wax tablets.
Robert Reynes, The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle, (ed.) Cameron Louis, (London: Garland Press, 1980); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England
1400-1580, (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p.272
________________________________________________________________ C h ap ter 2
aided in the fifteenth century by Manuel Chrysoloras’ revival o f QuintiUian’s recom m endation that students keep notebooks, and by the dissemination o f that advice in influential texts such as Rudolph Agricola’s De Inventione Dialectica (c.l487) and Erasm us’ De Ratione Studii (1512) and De Copia (1512). Pupils at St Paul’s School (where Erasm us’ recommendations were adopted by its founder Joh n Colet), were encouraged to com pose themes and to take exemplars from their reading o f historical episodes, fables, quotations, apophthegms, and proverbs (such as those found in Erasmus’
Adagid). Erasmus advised pupils and teachers alike to use commonplace books in order
that each,
...should provide himself with places and clearly defined sections and systematic procedures worked out for this purpose, so that whenever he lights on anything w orth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.^^
According to the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, commonplace books should be laid out in the following way, ‘Make a book o f blank leaves o f a proper size. Divide it into certain topics, so to say, nests. In one jot down the names o f subjects o f daily converse...in another sententiae.’^^
The uptake o f recommendations such as these can also be seen in the sixteenth-century statutes and charter o f Rivington School. Here pupils were encouraged to,
refer every thing they read to some com m on place, as to virtue, vice, learning, patience, adversity, prosperity, war, peace, &c. for which purpose they must have paper books ready to write them in.^®
From an early age pupils were made familiar with the use o f commonplace books in the study o f Latin grammar. During the seventeenth century, fifth and sixth form pupils at E ton were taught both to follow classical models for keeping commonplaces and to use
sententiae in their disputations, a practice which William Badger, master o f Winchester
School during the 1560s, likened to the mustering o f forces and the ordering o f the
’5 Wellcome MS 571. f.l29r, f.lr, f.266r, n.p (large sections of this manuscript are unfoliated). On both Moulton and Fowler see below.
Erasmus De Ratione Studii^ quoted in Moss, p.l03
Quoted in R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1954), p.272; Carruthers, p.35. The likening of a topic to a nest in which commonplaces might rest can be traced to Plato’s description of the soul as a caged bird. Hugh of St Victor likened the placement of commonplaces, either in the memory or in writing, to a dovecote. Other metaphors compared the memory to a honeycomb or, in the case of the humanist Conrad Gesner, an apothecary’s shop with its many drawers for different drugs.
________________________________________________________________ C h ap ter 2
ranks.^^ Both within the universities, where in the main Aristotle’s m ethod held its position against the innovations o f Peter Ramus (d.1572)^®, and outside, in the courts and in the expanding area o f sixteenth-century diplomacy and bureaucracy, manuscript commonplace books as well as printed versions such as Ralph Lever’s The A rte of Keason,
^ ^ t l y Termed Witcraft (1550) assisted humanists in their appropriation o f what Pierre
Bourdieu termed ‘cultural capital’ — that is the authoritative language o f classical antiquity.2^