Picture it: you’re overwhelmed by all of the new information that new technologies have thrown at you. It seems like you can’t keep up, and every day there is something new to learn. You need a place to store all the information that you want to remember, because unlike in the past, when books and newspapers were so expensive that you just didn’t have the option to be flooded with facts and news, nowadays you can’t walk a block without having conflicting opinions flooding your brain.
What do you do? Get an Evernote subscription, right?
Nope, in this scenario you’re a Tudor, overwhelmed by all of the new information that the printing press has allowed you to consume. In his 1545 book Bibliotheca universalis, the Swiss scholar Conrad Gesner called on princes and kings to deal with the “confusing and harmful abundance of books,” that were flooding the world.
So you start a Commonplace Book.
What’s a Commonplace Book? Simply, a place where you keep notes on things you read, quotes, illustrations, and general tidbits you want to remember. According to the Harvard University Libraries, a commonplace book “contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler”
We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
Adrian Ballet, 1685
In the middle ages and early modern period the florilegium (flowers of reading) collected passages from religious and theological works (Harvard Libraries). The zibaldone appeared in fourteenth century Italy and was used by merchants to keep records of daily life and activities.
In 1512 Erasmus gave instruction on how to create a commonplace book in his book De copia. He advises on how to store collections of information that are easily retrievable. One should make oneself a notebook divided by place-headings, then subdivided into sections. The headings should relate to ‘things of particular note in human affairs’ or to the main types and subdivisions of vices and virtues.”
Through the years people used commonplace books to keep recipes, healing mixtures, and other notes. They continued until the Victorian age, and then slowly fell away. So what would you use one for? Leave a comment and tell me!
Want some more resources on Commonplace books?
Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book – Ann Blair, Journal of the History of Ideas: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709935?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Harvard University Libraries on the history of reading: https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast, the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop. She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.