Note taking as an art of transmission

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 85-107

  Blair, Ann ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33846669285     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427303     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. Quoted in Vernon F. Snow, "Francis Bacon's Advice to Fulke Greville on Research Techniques," Huntington Library Quarterly 23, no.4 (1960): 370; hereafter abbreviated "FB."
2. On this term, see Jean-François Chatelain, "Les Recueils d'adversaria aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Des pratiques de la lecture savante au style de l'érudition," in Le Livre et l'historien: Etudes offertes en l'honneur du Professeur Henri-Jean Martin, ed. Frédé ric Barbier (Geneva, 1997), pp. 169-86.
3. In a looser sense the term is also used to designate notes of any kind, as in the Adv. shelfmark in the Cambridge University Library reserved for books containing marginal annotations; see William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995), pp. 65-66.
4. For an important recent study of this tradition, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996).
5. For an introduction to the Chinese leishu, see J.-P. Diény, "Les Encyclopédies chinoises," in L'Encyclopédisme: Actes du colloque de Caen, 12-16 janvier 1987, ed. Annie Becq (Paris, 1991), pp. 195-201;
6. on Islamic methods, see Franz Rosenthal, The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship (Rome, 1947).
7. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," quoted in Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago, 1996), p. 294 n. 22.
8. For an introduction to recent work of this type, see Pierre-Marc de Biasi et al., Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories (Paris, 1998).
9. See, for example, Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J., 1991);
10. Christina Haas, Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy (Mahwah, N.J., 1996);
11. and Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh, 1992).
12. For a discussion of the impact of linotype, see Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford, 1987).
13. Most guides to research devote a few pages to methods of note taking, but they lag behind the new technologies; see, for example, Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher (1957; Boston, 1992).
14. Paul Chavigny, Organisation du travail intellectuel: Recettes pratiques à l'usage des étudiants de toutes les facultés et de tous les travailleurs (Paris, 1920), p. 16.
15. Francis Bacon compared one of his notebooks to a merchant's wastebook; see Brian Vickers, introduction to Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, ed. Vickers (Oxford, 1996), p. xliii.
16. Francesco Sacchini recommends two notebooks in De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus (Würzburg, 1614), chap. 13, p. 91: "Not unlike attentive merchants... [who] keep two books, one small, the other large: the first you would call adversaria or a daybook (ephemerides), the second an account book (calendarium) and ledger (codex)." I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for a copy of this Latin edition.
17. The comparison also occurs in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, as discussed in Anke te Heesen, "Die doppelte Verzeichnung: Schriftliche und räumliche Aneignungsweisen von Natur im 18. Jahrhundert," in Gehäuse der Mnemosyne: Architektur als Schriftform der Erinnerung, ed. Harald Tausch (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 263-86.
18. Cicero already contrasted the short-lived memoranda of the merchant with the more carefully kept account book designed as a permanent record; see Cicero, "Pro Quinto Roscio comoedo oratio," The Speeches, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), 2.7, pp. 278-81.
19. See Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).
20. For an introduction to early modern juridical citations see Michel Reulos, Comment transcrire et interpréter les références juridiques (droit romain, droit canonique, et droit coutumier) contenues dans les ouvrages du XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1985). Medical note taking would also be worth studying; for one example, see Richard J. Durling, "Girolamo Mercuriale's De modo studendi," in Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, ed. Michael McVaugh and Nancy G. Siraisi (Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 181-95;
21. on the genre of the consilia, see Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Consilia médicaux, trans. Caroline Viola (Turnhout, 1994).
22. Jeremias Drexel, Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium: Excerpendi sollertia, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata (Antwerp, 1638), pp. 68-69; hereafter abbreviated A.
23. See Paul Saenger, "Reading in the Later Middle Ages," in A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst, Mass., 1999), p. 133.
24. Beryl Smalley attributes to the Victorines the innovation of taking down lecture notes, called reportationes; see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages ( Oxford, 1952), p. 202.
25. For an example of a Sammelband of annotated school texts, see Ann Blair, "Ovidius Methodizatus: The Metamorphoses of Ovid in a Sixteenth-Century Paris Collège," History of Universities 9 (1990): 73-118;
26. for the geography course, see Blair, "The Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Case of Jean-Cécile Frey," History of Universities 12 (1993): 96.
27. See Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, introduction to Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, ed. Brandt and Stark, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1997), 1:lxxi-ii.
28. No original set of notes taken by a group of students has as yet been identified. On the general pedagogical context of these lectures, see Stark, "Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions about Kant's Lectures on Anthropology," trans. Patrick Kain, in Essays on Kant's Anthropology, ed. Brian Jacobs and Kain (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 15-37, esp. 15-20.
29. See Nicole Bériou, "La Réportation des sermons parisiens à la fin du XIIIe siècle," Medioevo e rinascimento 3 (1989): 87-123.
30. Forgetting is also an important aspect of remembering; see Harald Weinrich, Gibt es eine Kunst des Vergessens? (Basel, 1996).
31. For the most recent study of ancient working methods, see Tiziano Dorandi, Le Stylet et la tablette: Dans le secret des auteurs antiques (Paris, 2000).
32. For Pliny the Younger's famous description of his uncle's working methods, see Pliny, letters and "Panegyricus," trans. Betty Radice, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 3.5, 1:172-79.
33. See also Quintilian, The Orator's Education, trans, and ed. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 10.3.32, 4:351.
34. As studied by Peter Stallybrass in joint work with Frank Mowery, Roger Chartier, and Heather Wolfe, entitled "Hamlet's Tablets and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England," forthcoming in The Tables of Memory: Technologies of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England and America.
35. See Marcello Gigante, Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum, trans. Dirk Obbink (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995), p. 16.
36. See Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy: Studies in the History of Written Culture, trans. Charles M. Radding (New Haven, Conn., 1995), chap. 8.
37. See The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo (Victoria, 2001).
38. This tabula is edited by Philipp W. Rosemann in Opera Roberti Grosseteste Lincolniensis, ed. J. J. McEvoy, 1 vol. to date (Turnhout, 1995-), 1:235-320, esp. p. 236. I am grateful to John Flood for this reference.
39. See John van Engen, "The Work of Gerlach Peters (d. 1411), Spiritual Diarist and Letter-Writer, a Mystic among the Devout," Ons geestlike erf 73 (1999): 150-77.
40. On the diary and its origins in different kinds of writing, see Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford, 1974).
41. See Anthony Grafton, "How Guillaume Budé Read his Homer," Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997), p. 169
42. and the list of manuscripts in Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983-93), 2:753-55.
43. See Sacchini, Moyens de lire avec fruit, trans. Durey de Morsan (The Hague, 1786)
44. See also A, as discussed in Helmut Zedelmaier, "Johann Jakob Moser et l'organisation érudite du savoir à l'époque moderne," in Lire, copier, écrire: Les Bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Elisabeth Décultot (Paris, 2003), p. 54.
45. Spin-offs from Drexel include Kergerus, Methodus drexeliana succinctior (1658)
46. and P. Philomusus [Johannis Jacobus Labhart], Industria excerpendi brevis, facilis, amoena (Konstanz, 1684).
47. Other works in the genre include Johann Petrus Titius, Manuductio ad excerpendum (Danzig, 1676);
48. Just. Christoph. Udenius [Michael Kirsten], Excerpendi ratio nova (Nordhausen, 1684);
49. Vincent Placcius, De arte excerpendi vom gelehrten Buchhalten liber singularis: Quo genera et praecepta excerpendi (Stockholm, 1689);
50. Fridericus Sidelius, De studio excerpendi (Jena, 1713);
51. and Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor, literarius, philosophicus, et practicus: Cum accessionibus virorum clarissimorum loannis Frickii et Iohannis Molleri (Lübeck, 1732), bk.1, tome 3, chap. 1.
52. From the words of de Thou, quoted in Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Basel, 1738), s.v. "Bodin," n. E.
53. See Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London, 1997), p. 130
54. and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), p. 13.
55. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966).
56. On Erasmus's preference for "study, order and care" over places and images, see Erasmus, De ratione studii (1512), quoted in Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 127.
57. Conversely, authors in the arts of memory tradition make no mention of note taking: see Christoph Meinel, "Enzyklopädie der Welt und Verzettelung des Wissens: Aporien der Empirie bei Joachim Jungius," in Enzyklopädien der frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zu ihrer Erforschung, ed. Franz Eybl et al. (Tübingen, 1995), p. 186.
58. See, for example, Benjamin Franklin's record keeping about his behavior in Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York, 1986), p. 70.
59. On the importance of making reading seem morally useful, particularly in the eighteenth century, when reading was spreading to new social groups, see Reinhard Wittmann, "Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?" in A History of Reading in the West, pp. 292-93.
60. Tears, pp. 88-95; resurrection, pp. 95-96; love of enemies, pp. 96-98; dance and jumping, pp. 98-99; and bacchanalia and their origin, pp. 99-101.
61. For one example, see how Jean Bodin lifts a set of references from Pico della Mirandola, as discussed in Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 76.
62. More generally on footnoting, see Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
63. For critiques of commonplacing, see Meinel, "Enzyklopädie der Welt und Verzettelung des Wissens," p. 57;
64. Grafton, "Les Lieux communs par les humanistes," in Lire, copier, écrire, p. 39;
65. For example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann copied passages out faithfully while Montesquieu did not distinguish between quotation and paraphrase, though he did designate with an asterisk his own commentary interspersed in his excerpting; see Décultot, "L'Art winckelmannien de la lecture," pp. 97-98
66. and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, "L'Ombre d'une bibliothèque: Les Cahiers d'extraits de Montesquieu," in Lire, copier, écrire, p. 83.
67. Jean Paul owned few books and excerpting was a way of getting the most out of those he could access; see Christian Helmreich, "Du discours érudit à l'écriture romanesque: Recherches sur les cahiers d'extraits de Jean Paul," in Lire, copier, écrire, p. 185.
68. See Volpilhac-Auger, "L'Ombre d'une bibliothèque," pp. 88-89.
69. Many entries in Locke's commonplace books relate directly to topics treated in his published works, as discussed by Richard Yeo, "John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information," Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004): 33-69.
70. See Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1963), 1:47-48 n. 97.
71. For example, in the Universae naturae theatrum, as discussed in Blair, The Theater of Nature, pp. 72-75.
72. See Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (1572; New York, 1945), chap. 2;
73. See Francis Goyet, "A propos de 'ces pastissages de lieux communs' (le rôle des notes de lecture dans la genèse des Essais)," Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 5-6 (1986): 11-26 and 7-8 (1987): 9-30.
74. See Fausta Garavini, "Montaigne et le Theatrum humanae vitae," in Montaigne et l'Europe: Actes du colloque international de Bordeaux (Mont-de-Marsan, 1992), pp. 31-45.
75. See John Locke, "Nouvelle Méthode pour dresser des recueils," Bibliothèque universelle et historique 2 (1687): 315-39
76. and George Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, ed. George H. Thomas and A. A. Luce (New York, 1989);
77. these notebooks are often called Berkeley's commonplace books. On Berkeley's use of signs, see Luce, "Berkeley's Commonplace Book: Its Date, Purpose, Structure, and Marginal Signs," Hermathena 22 (1932): 99-131.
78. John Evelyn used a combination of keywords and symbols to arrange his notebooks and provided an index volume to accompany his three folio volumes of commonplace books, as described in Theodore Hofmann et al., "John Evelyn's Archive at the British Library," in Anthony Kenny et al., John Evelyn in the British Library (London, 1995), pp. 32-43.
79. For a case of a scholar who devoted so much effort to indexing his notes that he never produced a book from them, see Klaus Weimar, "Les Comptes savants de Johann Caspar Hagenbuch," in Lire, copier, écrire, pp. 65-78.
80. See Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Books, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 13-14.
81. On Auden, among other modern keepers of commonplace books, see Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 2001), p. 61.
82. These rules (which often overlap) are: to excerpt with maturity, judgment, assiduity, to select items worthy of note, to read one's notes during idle time, to learn not just copy, and to attend to the purpose of one's studies; see A, p. 82. Drexel comments that taking notes with discernment presents the advantage of not accumulating too much bulk so that the notes may be carried easily from one place to another; see A, pp. 70-71. Drexel cites as an example of "learned vanity and otiose diligence" one Thomas Haselbach who reportedly spent twenty-two years commenting on the first chapter of Isaiah (A, p. 105).
83. Notwithstanding the late publication (down to 1832) of Sacchini's manual, which advocates memorizing one's notes. On the transition from the commonplace book as a method of study to aid the memory to a research tool that serves to relieve the memory, see Yeo, "John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing" and "John Locke's 'Of Study' (1677): Interpeting an Unpublished Essay," Locke Studies 3 (2003): 147-65.
84. See Lisa Jardine and Grafton, "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," Past and Present, no. 129 (1990): 30-78.
85. See Peter Beal, "Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book," in New Ways of looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985-1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, N.Y., 1993), p. 134.
86. On disputes over the legacy of the sixteenth-century Italian naturalist Luca Ghini, see Paula Findlen, "The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Late Renaissance Italy," paper delivered at the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, 2003;
87. 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.
88. Families with multiple generations of scholars include the Vossii, Scaligers, Casaubons, Estiennes, and Zwingers. For a report that someone attempted to purchase at no small cost the notes of famous legal scholar Hermann Conring, see Placcius, De arte excerpendi vom gelehrten Buchhalten liber singularis, p. 185.
89. Already in antiquity Pliny the Younger reports an attempt to buy his uncle's notes for 400,000 sesterces; see Pliny, Letters and "Panegyricus, "3.5, 1:179.
90. For some discussion, see Jens Erik Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro's "De re rustica" (Copenhagen, 1968), p. 102.
91. Morhof, Polyhistor, literarius, philosophicus, et practicus, p. 239.
92. See Grafton, "Where Was Solomon's House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon's New Atlantis," in Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism, ed. Herbert Jaumann (Wiesbaden, 2001), pp. 21-38.
93. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Leibniz on His Calculating Machine," trans. Mark Kormes, in A Source Book in Mathematics, ed. David Eugene Smith (New York, 1959), p. 181.
94. This passage from a Leibniz manuscript in Hannover was first published by W. Jordan, "Die Leibniz'sche Rechenmaschine," Zeitschrift für Vermessungswesen 26 (1897): 307.
95. On the phenomenon of information overload in early modern Europe, see the papers by Daniel Rosenberg, Blair, Brian Ogilvie, Jonathan Sheehan, and Yeo in Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (Jan. 2003): 1-72.
96. Chavigny, Organisation du travail intellectuel, p. 35.
97. See David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (New York, 2001), pp. 26-38.