Writing in the Mind, Thinking on the Paper

No matter the time period, it is difficult to remember what one has read without a system of writing, and early modernity is no exception. Humanist commonplacing was developed to help students and scholars overcome this hardship. Although those trained in this technique could rely on keywords to locate the desired quotations or data, in most cases, they were expected to memorise the structure of their notebooks to be efficient in their research. This book summarises the history of this method as well as the extant research on it, and drawing on examples from Protestant Central Europe, focuses on a characteristic way of arranging information, termed the natural order of things. Following a fourfold categorisation of the world into concepts related to God, the Creation, man, and human artefacts, this method of notetaking was used to teach languages, rhetoric, and even natural history.