First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a ground-breaking study of the way educated people were trained to think in Renaissance Europe. As Ann Moss demonstrates, the commonplace-book of quotations which every schoolboy of the period was taught to use opens a window on to the manner in which attitudes were structured, a moral consensus was established, and styles of writing evolved. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought is much more than an account of humanist classroom practice: it is a (...) major work of cultural history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625 [Access article in PDF] Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain Lucia Dacome University College London Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes."1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information (...) they reputed worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a [End Page 603] manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge."3 It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has [End Page 604] accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Politica of Justus Lipsius and the Commonplace-BookAnn MossThroughout Western Europe in the sixteenth century, schoolboys and grown men educated in the Latin schools of the humanists would recognize the commonplace-book as an indispensable tool for making sense of the books they read, for assimilating the written culture transmitted to them, and for possessing the means of production in their turn. This handy organizer of information (...) and rather effective retrieval mechanism has been treated with a fair amount of contempt after being sidelined towards the end of the seventeenth century and then falling into public disrepute, its rich stock of precious commonplaces devalued into the small change of mere banalities. Nor indeed does it suit the agenda of post-Romantic scholars and critics looking in a simplistic way for signs of originality and innovation. However, the last few years have seen commonplaces in their more sophisticated guise back on the critical agenda, with several particular studies and, latterly, two major overviews published in a single year. 1 The thesis underlying this paper is that the commonplace-book is central to an understanding of how knowledge was organized in the early modern period. More than that, the commonplace-book keys us into procedures of investigation and debate and into the dialectical and rhetorical modes of articulating thought which were agreed to have persuasive force; and it exhibits the commonality of expectations, the common places, which ensured a common route into a shared area of communication when the cultural consensus of Western Europe was strained to breaking point.One test of this thesis will be whether it can be usefully applied to texts which fit badly into interpretative frames familiar to the modern reader. The particular purpose of this paper is to apply the principles of commonplace-book [End Page 421] reading to just such an awkward case, in order at least to suggest the possibility of recovering an historically probable reading strategy which may more fully recuperate the text for the modern reader. The Politica of the eminent Stoic philosopher and scholar of antiquity, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), is a network of quotations from ancient authorities linked together by Lipsius’s own words. He himself regarded it as one of his most important achievements. His contemporaries and their seventeenth-century descendants knew perfectly well how to read it, and there is plenty of evidence that they regarded it highly. 2 Modern readers find it an embarrassment, not knowing quite what to do with a book from which the author eclipses himself, yet keeps a dead hand on it: “All of it is mine and nothing is.” 3 Modern critics tend to assume it is all Lipsius, riding roughshod over the quotation indicators 4 ; or they prefer to think that nothing is and treat the text solely as a compilation of extracts 5 ; or they get tied in knots trying to rescue Lipsius’s voice drowned out in his quotations. 6 But Lipsius’s original readers in 1589 knew how to read it, because he told them: “For what is it but a well-arranged register of accounts or COMMONPLACES?” 7If we are going to get anywhere near the original point of reception, we must remind ourselves about commonplaces and commonplace-books. It was Erasmus in De copia who gave the first systematic guidelines for making commonplace-books, but by the time of Lipsius schoolboys in every Latin school in Northern Europe were busy excerpting from their [End Page 422] texts as they read, either under the schoolmaster’s instructions or at their own discretion. The commonplace-book was a probe and an instrument for redistributing text so as to ensure maximal retrievability and optimum application. Here is one of the many enthusiastic promoters of the practice, writing in 1564:So that the more important passages in the authors set for reading and the more brilliant sententiae, exempla, similitudes, words, phrases, and outstanding figurative expressions may be the more readily imprinted on the memory and available and ready for use as occasion requires, it is extremely useful to have the common-places of the main intellectual disciplines arranged in a definite order, under which students may note... (shrink)

In recent years, historians of science have increasingly turned their attention to the “print culture” of early modern science. These studies have revealed that printing, as both a technology and a social and economic system, structured the forms and meanings of natural knowledge. Yet in early modern Europe, naturalists, including John Aubrey, John Evelyn, and John Ray, whose work is discussed in this paper, often shared and read scientific texts in manuscript either before or in lieu of printing. Scribal exchange, (...) exemplified in the circulation of writings like commonplace books, marginalia, manuscript treatises, and correspondence, was the primary means by which communities of naturalists constructed scientific knowledge. Print and manuscript were necessary partners. Manuscript fostered close collaboration, and could be circulated relatively cheaply; but, unlike print, it could not reliably secure priority or survival for posterity. Naturalists approached scribal and print communication strategically, choosing the medium that best suited their goals at any given moment. As a result, print and scribal modes of disseminating information, constructing natural knowledge, and organizing communities developed in tandem. Practices typically associated with print culture manifested themselves in scribal texts and exchanges, and vice versa. “Print culture” cannot be hived off from “scribal culture.” Rather, in their daily jottings and exchanges, naturalists inhabited, and produced, one common culture of communication. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Commonplace is a study of the everyday as a region of overlooked value in the work of William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Romantic poet, the realist novelist, and the modern philosopher are each separately associated with a commitment to the common, the ordinary, and the everyday as a vital resource for reflection on language, on feeling, on ethical insight, and social attunement. The Aesthetic Commonplace is the first study to draw substantive lines of (...) connection between Wittgenstein and the cultural and literary history of nineteenth century England. Tracing conceptual and formal affinities between the poet, the novelist, and the philosopher, the book brings to light significant links between the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, making the case for a continuous cultural commitment to the aesthetic as a distinctive mode of investigating thought, feeling, and the everyday language upon which we depend for their articulation. Addressed to both literary studies and to philosophy, The Aesthetic Commonplace makes a compelling case for the interdependence of form, concept, and emotion in the history and interpretive practices of both disciplines. (shrink)

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the "new philosophy" in the mid-seventeenth century.

The drama of life rarely unfolds in majestic settings. Instead, nondescript spaces are more often the stage upon which one's life is lived. What Christine Welch sees as these sometimes modest, sometimes sterile, sometimes pretentious rooms are often dismissed or overlooked by their occupants, even when transformative encounters and events occur within their walls. Commonplace, a powerful new work of photography, provokes greater appreciation for these common spaces of everyday American life, as it captures their quiet power and subtle (...) beauty in evocative images. Whether she photographs the food-stained living room of a fraternity house, the dimly lit booth in a local café, or the cool sleekness of a corporate boardroom, Welch captures the poignancy of common spaces and the meaning they hold in our contemporary society. The unpopulated images in her book are blank canvases on to which readers can project the particulars of their own experiences. Commonplace helps us redefine and rediscover those spaces too common for preservationists to save, yet too vital to the emotional fabric of American life to pass over. (shrink)

Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art, as well as the connections that hold between art and social institutions and art history. The book (...) distinguishes what belongs to artistic theory from what has traditionally been confused with it, namely aesthetic theory and offers as well a systematic account of metaphor, expression, and style, together with an original account 0f artistic representation. A wealth of examples, drawn especially from recent and contemporary art, illuminate the argument. (shrink)

This volume explores the many dimensions of the work of Joseph P. Fell. Drawing from continental sources such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre as well as North American thinkers such as John William Miller, Fell has secured a place as an enduring and important thinker within the tradition of phenomenological thought. Fell’s critical development of these strands of philosophy has resulted in a provocative and original challenge to complacent dualism and persistent problems of skepticism, alienation, and nihilism.

Aimed at a wide audience, this book in the general area of practical ethics consists of seven independent and humorous philosophical analyses of common moral situations, occurrences, and confrontations. The introduction discusses the idea of moralising; Cohen explains what it is, why moral philosophers tend to avoid it, and why it seems a particularly worthwhile enterprise for the book. Throughout its discussions, the book is accessible to readers at any stage of philosophic interest. The author distinguishes between moral encounters and (...) more mundane concerns, an aspect that separates this book from other practical ethics works. Contents: Introduction; Too Busy: A Note on Wasting Time; The Derogatory Erstwhile Fact, or Calling a Spade a Spade; Justification/Explanation and Treatment, or Putting the Shoe on the Other Foot; Vicarious Pride; 'Women's' Gymnastics; Vocations and Vocations; The Last Word. (shrink)

While much has been written on the cultural and intellectual antecedents that gave rise to Carolus Linnaeus?s herbarium and his Systema Naturae, the tools that he used to transform his raw observations into nomenclatural terms and categories have been neglected. Focusing on the Philosophia Botanica, the popular classification handbook that he published in 1751, it can be shown that Linnaeus cleverly ordered and reordered the work by employing commonplacing techniques that had been part of print culture since the Renaissance. Indeed, (...) the functional adaptability of commonplace heads allowed him to split and combine the book?s chapters and tables and played a notable conceptual role in the way in which he spatialized words and, to a certain extent, specimens. (shrink)

Despite the bad press that revenge has received from moral philosophers and legal theorists, it can be a legitimate way to forge a link between wrongful behavior and penalties that karmic moral theories can only postulate. It can be especially effectual in commonplace cases that are under the radar of formal systems of justice. In such cases it can play a positive role in strengthening the moral foundations of a community. In those cases acts of revenge can provide a (...) morally valuable antidote to the negative participant reactive attitudes of community members. They can be an expression of morality in and for itself while exorcizing such pent up emotions as resentment, hatred, indignation, anger, antipathy, annoyance, umbrage, and ire. I maintain that responding in morally appropriate ways to insults, derisions, disparagements, and other forms of perceived wrongful disrespect and ill will is elemental in sustaining equitable human relations. To reiterate and paraphrase a point Robert Nozick made, the only power that morality has to affect human affairs resides in the critical responses moral people feel obliged to make upon recognizing the wrongful quality of another person’s acts or will. In this paper I apply the four criteria I defended in the book The Virtues of Vengeance to rather mundane cases of perceived maltreatment, exploitation, oppression, and/or neglect, and I deal with the issue of regulating multiple avengers who are bent on dealing out revenge to offenders in such commonplace cases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728) and the Tradition of CommonplacesRichard YeoIn the fifth volume (1755) of the Encyclopédie in his entry on “En-cyclopædia,” Denis Diderot forecast a time in which the sheer number of books would require a division of intellectual labor. Some people, he said, will not do much rea ding but rather “devote themselves to investigation which will be new, or which they will believe to be (...) new.” The majority, unable to produce anything of their own, “will be busy night and day leafing through these books, taking out of them the fragments they consider worthy of being collected and preserved.” 1 Although Diderot set this prospect in the future, he believed the signs were already visible and offered his encyclo-pædia as a response. Part of this image, however—the selection of passages from a range of authors—was already a familiar one. Re commended by the Ancients, it was widely practised during the Renaissance by the educated elite who kept commonplace books for recording quotations on various themes from Classical authors. Even the epigram from Horace on the title page of the Encyclop édie suggests this lineage: “What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection.” 2In the classical period, the Latin term, locus communis, referred to a general argument capable of being used in different situations. In his Institutiones Oratoriae Quintilian discussed the notion of copia verborum in connection with the ability of a good orator to produce copious illustrations [End Page 157] and embellishments from particular ideas. Renaissance writers thought this facility was enhanced by a record of similar ideas in the same place in a notebook. This practice had been followed in the medieval period, but it became more systematically taugh t as part of rhetoric from the sixteenth century. Commenting on this, R. R. Bolgar wrote:The whole purpose of the Humanists in transmogrifying Greek and Latin literature into a series of notes was to produce a body of material which could be easily retained and repeated. They made titanic efforts to remember the contents of the note-books the y compiled. 3Quintilian’s work, and more immediately, that of the German humanist, Rudolph Agricola, influenced Erasmus in his De Copia, first published in 1512 as De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum Commentarii Duo. This offered advice on how to collect words and passages under various topoi or loci (places) as a means of storing extracts from books that could later be brought together and embellished in either writing or conversation. The set of ideas or themes grouped under one “Head” wer e known as “common-places,” and the notebooks kept for this purpose were commonplace books. 4 These were also called “copie” books in the sense of collections enabling copia, or free flow of material for oratory. Versions of this practice continued into the nineteenth century: figures such as John Milton, George Berkeley, Robert Southey, R obert Burns, and David Thoreau kept commonplace books, some of which were subsequently published. Some of these included less than elevated content: Kenneth Lockridge has uncovered a string of misogynist remarks and anecdotes in the commonplace book of Th omas Jefferson. 5In the only major study of the commonplace tradition, Sister Joan Marie Lechner analyzed its status in Renaissance rhetorical training from the sixteenth to the early seventeenth century, identifying some confusion and [End Page 158] tensions, partly as result of dissatisfaction with the “doctrine of places” taught by classical writers, and also because “commonplace” had come to refer both to a “locus or seat of arguments” and a “speech-within-a-speech.” 6 Her work shows that commonplace books were kept as aids to recall reading and as storehouses (thesauri) of topics and phrases suitable for speeches and conversation, as recommended by Erasmus and other writers. However, Lechner noted a new need pa rtly satisfied by the commonplace collections, which was that they accommodated Renaissance passions for “accumulating universal knowledge.” Thus, in her words:The commonplace book with its encyclopaedic array of topics or places was thought of as a compend of knowledge displayed in a systematic pattern... (shrink)

Arthur C. Danto's 1981 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace begins and ends with quotations of William Shakespeare's 1604–1605 Hamlet. This chapter aims to follow the slender threads of few Shakespearean phrases to see what they can teach us about Danto's book. Danto himself points out that “mirrors and then, by generalization, artworks, rather than giving us back what we already can know without benefit of them, serve instead as instruments of self‐revelation.” In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto (...) hardly mentions money or social power and their role in our evaluation of meaning. Danto is wrong when he says that “in his final statement” Shakespeare put art on “on the lowest ontological rung.” Danto quotes, as support, the much‐quoted Shakespearean phrase from The Tempest, that art is “an insubstantial pageant fading”. (shrink)

Covering the theories of, among others, Derrida, Lefort and Laclau, this volume opens up space to the political (polemicisation). Chapters cover themes such as social structure, ethical arguments, and political organisation.

Selected by the American Library Association's journal, Choice, as "one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year" "Leonard's book is a fine example of interdisciplinary studies.

In this sweeping revision of avant-garde history, John Cage takes his rightful place as Wordsworth's great and final heir. George Leonard traces a direct line back from Cage, Pop, and Conceptual Art through the Futurists to Whitman, Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, showing how the art of everyday objects, often thought an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, actually began as far back as 1800. In recovering the links between such seemingly disparate figures, Leonard transforms our understanding of modern culture. Selected by the (...) American Library Association's journal, _Choice_, as "one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year" "Leonard's book is a fine example of interdisciplinary studies. He shifts focus persuasively from art theory to literature to religious thought and biography, making his method seem the natural mode of inquiry into culture."—Kenneth Baker, _San Francisco Chronicle Book Review_ "Provocative and illuminating."—_Library Journal_ "Highly stimulating, impassioned."—_Publisher's Weekly_ "A rich and rewarding study written in a clear and accessible style with excellent references and a very useful index. Highly recommended."—_Choice_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s ‘Comedy’Edward Donald KennedyMismapping the Underworld: Daring and Error in Dante’s ‘Comedy,’ by John Kleiner; 182 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $32.50.Critics once emphasized the unity and apparent perfection of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Mismapping the Underworld, John Kleiner emphasizes instead the imperfections, the inconsistencies, and inaccuracies in Dante’s work both to give a more accurate assessment of Dante’s artistry (...) and, as he remarks, to help readers “learn to enjoy” the imperfections (p. 2).The five chapters of the book are devoted to various cruces in the Vita nuova and the Comedy. The first chapter considers numerology in the Vita nuova: pointing out that scholars’ arguments for that work’s numerological symmetry have been flawed, Kleiner asks if Dante had as much “passion for order” as scholars have assumed. The second chapter, from which the title of the book is taken, considers earlier scholars’ attempts to draw accurate maps of Dante’s vision of Hell and inaccuracies and inconsistencies in that vision. Probably not many readers, for example, have realized that Satan, partially buried in the ice of Cocytus at the bottom of Hell, must be about 2,500 feet tall, if one calculates his height from the evidence Dante has given us, and even the part of his body extending above the ice must approximate “the height of the World Trade Center.” One must then ask how Dante, the narrator in the poem, is able to give such detailed descriptions of the tormented bodies of Cassius, Brutus, and Judas dangling from Satan’s mouth: “at their height they should be as insignificant a sight as a trio of deluded tourists waving from the top of the Empire State Building” (p. 44). One of the reasons why scholars have attempted to map the underworld so precisely is, as Kleiner points out, that Dante makes it seem so much more concrete than the “dreamlike” surface of earth. (Here C. S. Lewis may have taken a clue from Dante, in his notion that the concrete belongs to Heaven, that things on earth are only “shadowlands.”)The third chapter concerns Dante’s reputation as a student of classical literature. Here, focusing on two cantos of the Inferno and the Purgatorio, Kleiner considers Dante’s inaccurate citations from Virgil, Statius, and other [End Page 415] classical writers and his intentional use of “masterful distortions” to create the effect he wanted. In the fourth chapter, Kleiner discusses Dante’s use of scientific material, such as his precise description of the duration of a lunar eclipse that no one on earth would have been able to gauge and his design of an impossible experiment concerning reflected light. The final chapter associates Dante’s interest in Geryon, the monster who appears in Canto 16 of the Inferno, with the medieval fascination with the grotesque. Moreover, the Ovidian allusions in this canto, Kleiner believes, make the encounter with Geryon a meditation on poetry and show “fiction’s proximity to fraud, its perilous attractiveness, and its susceptibility to perversion” (p. 132). Thus the Geryon episode represents Dante’s concern with the dangers inherent in reading, dangers depicted earlier in the Inferno in, for example, the Francesca and Paolo episode of Canto V, in which the lovers had been seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. In such episodes, Dante reminds us of the power a writer has over his readers and of his duty not to use that power irresponsibly.Because of the post-Renaissance emphasis on the importance of unity in a work of art and the later emphasis on realism, earlier critics naturally emphasized the unity and consistency of Dante’s work. A great work, they assumed, had to have these qualities. As Kleiner’s book reminds us, however, earlier writers did not always prize them as highly as modern critics do, and some inconsistencies and errors (some deliberate, some not) seem to have been acceptable. Inaccurate citations of classical works are due in part to the fact that medieval writers often knew earlier works only from commonplace books and in part to... (shrink)