An early modernist's perspective

ISIS

Volumn 95, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 420-430

  Blair, Ann ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33645801730     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/428961     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Mark Pattison, Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, ed. Henry Nettleship, 2 vols. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1889), Vol. 1, p. 343.
2. On Wolf; I thank Jonathan Sheehan for this lead.
3. Robert Boyle, Some Consideration Touching the Style of the H. Scriptures (London: For Henry Herringman, 1661), sig. A4r.
4. René Descartes to Marin Mersenne, 14 Aug. 1634, in Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), Vol. 1, pp. 303-304.
5. Girolamo Cardano, De propria vita liber (Lyon: Guillaume Rouille, 1557), p. 187.
6. Jean Stoner, The Book of My Life (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 151.
7. Nancy Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 52-65.
8. Adrian Johns has been a pioneer in advancing the history of early modern scientific reading; for his most recent contribution, including a helpful overview of the field.
9. Adrian Johns, "Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society," in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 244-271.
10. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1998), Ch. 4.
11. The references from the index. For an entry into the history of reading more generally.
12. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: Univ. Massachusetts Press, 1999).
13. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
14. For the important reminder that 'perhaps the majority of the books ever printed have rarely been read'.
15. Hugh Amory, "The Trout and the Milk: An Ethnobibliographical Talk," Harvard University Library Bulletin, 1996, 7:50-65, on p. 51.
16. Michel Espagne, De l'archive au texte: Recherches d'histoire gé-nétique (Paris: Presses Univ. France, 1998).
17. Pierre-Marc de Biasi et al., Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories (Paris: CNRS, 1998).
18. Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, ed. Charles M. Radding (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1995), Ch. 8.
19. The notes and drawings that Conrad Gessner had collected for a historia plantarum took a particularly long and circuitous route to publication in the eighteenth century.
20. Hans H. Wellisch, Conrad Gessner: A Bio-Bibliography (Zug, Switzerland: IDC, 1984), p. 22.
21. Michael Hunter, ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1998).
22. William Sherman, "'Rather Soiled by Use': Attitudes towards Readers' Marks," Book Collector, 2003, 52:471-490.
23. John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), p. 15.
24. Scott Mandelbrote, Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work, Exhibition at Cambridge University Library, 9 October 2001-23 March 2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Library, 2001).
25. Newton's method of 'highlighting' can be identified in over a quarter of his surviving books at Trinity College; see Harrison, Library of Isaac Newton, pp. 25-27. The shift in his reading pattern over time is noted in Mandelbrote, Footprints of the Lion, p. 10.
26. Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 196-197.
27. Anthony Grafton, "How Guillaume Budé Read His Homer," in Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 135-183, esp. pp. 152ff.
28. For a rare example of a key to such symbols see the page from a Folger Library volume reproduced and described.
29. William Sherman, "'Rather Soiled by Use': Renaissance Readers and Modern Collectors," in The Reader Revealed, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp. 84-91, on p. 84.
30. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: Univ. Massachusetts Press, 1995).
31. Roger Stoddard, Marks in Books, Illustrated and Explained (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, 1985).
32. Helen Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2001).
33. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 229-252, esp. pp. 245-250.
34. 'Since the multitude of books, the shortness of time, and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in summary order some flowers selected according to my talents from all the authors I was able to read'.
35. Vincent of Beauvais, Bibliotheca mundi (Douai: Baltazar Beller, 1624), Vol. 1: Speculum naturale, Prologue, p. 1(my translation).
36. Ann Blair, "Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book," Journal of the History of Ideas, 1992, 53:541-551.
37. Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italy after 1500 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987).
38. Ann Blair, "Note-Taking as an Art of Transmission," Critical Inquiry, 2004, 31:85-107.
39. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1966).
40. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).
41. Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
42. Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (Nürnberg, 1543 and Basel, 1566) (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 19-21.
43. Steven Shapin, "The Invisible Technician," American Scientist, 1989, 77:554-563.
44. Michael Hunter has distinguished up to eleven amanuenses from the different hands found in the Boyle papers.
45. Hunter, ed., Archives of the Scientific Revolution (cit. n. 5), p. 12.
46. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, "Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," Past and Present, 1990, 129:30-78.
47. Ann Blair, "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550-1700," J. Hist. Ideas, 2003, 64:11-28.
48. On disputes over the legacy of the sixteenth-century Italian naturalist Luca Ghini.
49. Paula Findlen, "The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Late Renaissance Italy," paper delivered at the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, 2003.
50. Related research on the bequests of Renaissance naturalists is forthcoming in Findlen, A Fragmentary Past: The Making of Museums and the Making of the Renaissance. Families with multiple generations of scholars include the Vossii, Scaligers, Casaubons, Estiennes, and Zwingers. For a report that someone attempted to purchase the notes of the famous legal scholar Hermann Conring.
51. Vincent Placcius, De arte excerpendi, vom Gelährten Buchhalten liber singularis quo genera et praecepta excerpendi (Stockholm/Hamburg: Gottfried Liebezeit, 1689), p. 185.
52. Already in antiquity Pliny the Younger reported an attempt to buy his uncle's notes for 400,000 sesterces (Epistles 3.5).
53. Jens Erik Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro's De re rustica (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1968), p. 102.
54. Placcius boasts about his useful chest in De arte excerpendi, pp. 146, 161-162.
55. Anthony Grafton, "Where Was Salomon's House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon's New Atlantis," in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), pp. 21-38.
56. Johns, "Reading and Experiment in the Early Royal Society" (cit. n. 2).
57. Johns, Nature of the Book (cit. n. 2).
58. For a study of Johannes Kepler's different approaches to reading history, imaginative literature, and astronomy.
59. Anthony Grafton, "Johannes Kepler: The New Astronomer Reads Ancient Texts," in Commerce with the Classics (cit. n. 7), pp. 185-224, esp. pp. 203-224.
60. Michel Reulos, Comment transcrire et interpréter les références juridiques... contenues dans les ouvrages du XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1985).
61. Richard J. Durling, "Girolamo Mercuriale's De modo studendi," in Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, ed. Michael McVaugh and Nancy G. Siraisi (Osiris, N.S., 6) (Philadelphia: History of Science Society, 1991), pp. 181-195.
62. Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Consilia médicaux, trans. Caroline Viola (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994).
63. Francis Bacon, "Of Studies," in Essays (1612), rpt. in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 439-440, on p. 439.
64. Vickers notes that 'curiously' should be understood here from its root, cura: 'with minute attention'; see p. 773. The passage is also used without acknowledgment.
65. James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Nobleman (London, 1607), p. 147.
66. It is cited approvingly as Bacon's in D. G. Morhof, Polyhistor, ed. Johannes Moller (Lübeck: Petrus Boeckmann, 1732), Vol. 1, Bk. 1, chap. 2, par. 9 (p. 14), Bk. 2, chap. 8, par. 20 (p. 409).
67. Adrien Baillet, Vie de M. Descartes, 2 vols. (Paris: Daniel Horthemels, 1691; rpt., New York: Arland, 1987), Vol. 2, Bk. 8, chap. 3, p. 469.
68. Dinah Ribard, "Le savoir philosophique et les livres: Sorel et Bayle," in Le XVIIe encyclopédique, ed. Claudine Nédélec (Cahiers Diderot, 12) (Rennes: Presses Univ. Rennes, 2001) p. 147.
69. Jesuit Franciscus Sacchini, De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus (Würzburg, 1614), pp. 32, 41-42.
70. Which was reprinted down to the mid-eighteenth century. For more discussion of Descartes's indebtedness to his Jesuit education.
71. Anthony Grafton, Traditions of Conversion: Descartes and His Devil (Berkeley, Calif.: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2000).
72. Baillet, Vie de M. Descartes, Vol. 2, p. 468.
73. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 110, 244 n 38.
74. Conrad Gessner, Historiae animalium lib. I de Quadrupedibus viviparis (Zurich: Froschauer, 1551), sig. beta 1v. Gessner seems conscious here of the need to explain what he means by 'consulting' a book (as opposed to a person or an oracle), which suggests that the expression was unusual at the time. For Descartes's recommendations see 'Descartes à ***' [Oct. 1637], in Oeuvres, ed. Adam and Tannery (cit. n. 1), Vol. 1, pp. 457-458 (on the Geometry), Vol. 9, Pt. 2, pp. 11-12 (on the Principia).
75. On Johnson's references to reading periodicals as 'mere reading,' as opposed to other kinds of reading.
76. Robert De Maria, Jr., Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), Ch. 1.
77. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), Ch. 2.
78. A. I. Sabra, "The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam," History of Science, 1987, 25:224-243.
79. Elisabeth Labrousse, "Reading Pierre Bayle in Paris," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Kors (Philadelphia: Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 7-16.
80. R. J. Tarrant, "The Reader as Author: Collaborative Interpolation in Latin Poetry," in Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. John N. Grant (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 121-163.
81. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Victoria, Canada: English Literature Studies, 2001).
82. Robert Westman, "The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory," Isis, 1975, 66:165-193.
83. Owen Gingerich, "Astronomical Paper Instruments with Moving Parts," in Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientific Instruments Presented to Gerard L'Estrange Turner, ed. R. G. W. Anderson et al. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Variorum, 1993), pp. 63-74.
84. Sten Lindberg, "Mobiles in Books: Volvelles, Inserts, Pyramids, Divinations, and Children's Games," trans. William S. Mitchell, Private Library, 1979, 2:49-82.
85. Suzanne Karr, "Constructions Both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels, and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts," Yale University Library Gazette, 2004, 79:101-127.
86. For a likely example of a 'homemade' rubrication, which has since bled, see the copy of Hortus sanitatis (Mainz, 1491) at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. On practices of cutting and pasting, which I hope to study further, see Blair, 'Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload' (cit. n. 13).
87. The decisions contemporary owners made in binding Bodin's Theatrum to other works were also crucial in leading me to works that contemporaries considered comparable to Bodin's; indeed, these works often contained printed references to Bodin's Theatrum.
88. Blair, Theater of Nature (cit. n. 7), Ch. 6.
89. Concerning Samuel Johnson, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), Vol. 2, p. 365.
90. De Maria, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (cit. n. 20), p. 38.
91. Richard Yeo, "John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information," Eighteenth-Century Thought, 2004, 2:33-69.
92. Conrad Gessner, Pandectae (Zurich: Froschauer, 1548), fol. 20r.
93. Hans Wellisch, "How to Index a Book-Sixteenth-Century Style: Conrad Gessner on Indexes and Catalogs," International Classification, 1981, 8:10-15, on p. 12.
94. Ann Blair, "Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy," in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 69-89.
95. The attempted purchase of the notes of Hermann Conring failed because he reportedly relied more on his memory than on note-taking (see note 14, above).
96. Pierre Gassendi, Viri... senatoris Peiresc vita (Paris: Sebastian Cramoisy, 1641), p. 361.
97. I am grateful to Peter Miller for this lead.