Commonplaces from "Extraordinary Commonplaces" by Robert Darnton

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus [De Copia] instructed them how to do it; . . . The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. . . . Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. . . . The best example of a twentieth-century commonplace book is Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, published in 1981. . . . it is a great read, especially for anyone interested in reading itself as a way of making sense of the world.

When he recorded his observations, he adhered to the Erasmian principle of distilling things down to their essence and entering them in notebooks, . . . As Erasmus advised, Madan devised his own set of rubrics for classifying his material.

Important if true. Inscription which Kinglake wanted on all churches.

Odd that we call the end of a rope or a chain, the end; while in Greek it is the beginning.

No gentleman can be without three copies of a book; one for show (and this he will probably keep at his country house), another for use, and a third at the service of his friends. —Richard Heber

But his humor had an edge to it, because after the slaughter of World War I, everything looked absurd, including patriotism and religion:

The citations and bons mots flow by endlessly; but instead of giving the impression of disordered jottings, they convey a coherent view of the world, one both intensely personal and shot through with the flavor of its time.

Why pause over this arcane, forgotten book? Because it shows how an archaic genre could be used to impose order on experience in modern times. Commonplace books served far more effectively in this manner several centuries earlier, when they were standard tools of readers. By studying them, historians and literary scholars have come closer to understanding reading, both as a specific cultural practice and as a general way of construing the world.

Thomas Jefferson is a case in point. When his commonplace book was first published in 1928, its editor, Gilbert Chinard, celebrated it as a key that would unlock Jefferson’s impenetrable personality as well as his view of the world. That world view came to epitomize the American Enlightenment,

It is a "literary" commonplace book, as opposed to the "legal" commonplace book that he used for his work as a lawyer. Of its 407 entries, 339 are citations of poetry, including 14 from Ossian, the pseudo-Celtic bard invented by James Macpherson and considered by Jefferson to be "the greatest Poet that has ever existed." Jefferson had a low opinion of novels and cited only one, Tristram Shandy. He preferred the standard classics that he studied as a schoolboy under the Reverend James Maury and as a student at the College of William and Mary: Homer, Euripides, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid—but not Plato, whom he scorned. His Cicero was the somber moralist of the Tusculan Disputations rather than the orator. His British poets included contemporary favorites like Edward Young and James Thomson along with Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope. But his selections from the poetry were less predictable than his choice of poets. For example, he treated Samuel Butler’s mock heroic Hudibras as a source of solemn moralizing, unlike other Virginians, who used it to poke fun at Yankee puritanism. In fact, he did not betray the slightest sense of humor anywhere in his commonplace book. Nothing could be further from the world of Geoffrey Madan, though Madan was a more accomplished classicist.

"The lost world of Thomas Jefferson," as Daniel Boorstin called it, was a serious place, saturated with Enlightenment philosophy; but few philosophers appeared in the commonplace book, perhaps because Jefferson used it primarily as a record of his favorite readings in the classics and belles-lettres. The exception is Henry Saint-John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who accounts for 40 percent of all the material that Jefferson selected for the final version, which he had bound in the 1780s. He admired Bolingbroke as a bold commentator on the Bible and copied passages such as the following, which is quoted as Jefferson copied it:

The hostile references to women coincided with his prolonged bachelorhood, and they came to an end with his happy marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. Jefferson’s commonplacing ended at about the same time. Having committed himself to a career as a lawyer and a politician, he stopped reading poetry and closed the book on his earlier emotions, although he opened it, consulted it, and quoted it at various times for the rest of his life.

...Jefferson did not accompany the citations in his commonplace book with comments of his own. But by selecting the most egregiously hostile remarks on women from the endless variety of literature available to him, he injected so much fear and loathing in his picture of the war between the sexes…

Lockridge’s evidence seems largely circumstantial; and we have been there before, in a long line of psycho-biographies that pretend to penetrate the souls of the dead by reading domestic details as if they were tea leaves. . . . But Lockridge’s [Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century] reading of Jefferson’s commonplace book challenges conventional wisdom in an interesting way. He treats it like a Rorschach test, and invokes Foucault rather than Freud. The bits and pieces of literature that Jefferson assembled are therefore deemed to function like an epistemological field: the relations among them and spaces between them suggest an unconscious process of ordering.

Marginal note: e.g., Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History and No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, both by Fawn Brodie

Lockridge does detect a pattern, even if he cannot accommodate exceptions to it, such as this passage from Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved:

he [Lockridge] demonstrated the possibility of studying commonplace books as cosmologies.

For a still more thorough study and a richer run of commonplacing, one can turn to Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, Kevin Sharpe’s new book on William Drake, a voracious reader and bit player in the conflicts that convulsed England from 1640 to 1660.

Although Drake did not participate in the great events of the mid-century, he followed them closely through the press and spliced the information that he culled from pamphlets and broadsides with excerpts from wide-ranging reading in history and philosophy. All of it went into commonplace books: . . . Taken together, these sources provide the richest cache of material about a reader and his reading anywhere in existence.

They . . . show how he understood reading and made use of it. Some examples:

Drake understood reading as digestion, a process of extracting the essence from books and incorporating them into himself. He favored bite-sized bits of text, which could be useful in their application to everyday life. For reading should not be aimed at erudition; it should help a man get ahead in the world, and its most helpful chunks came in the form of proverbs, fables, and even the mottoes written into emblem books.

Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton . . . published a dazzlingly original analysis of the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey ["’Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," in Past & Present, Vol. 129 (November 1990), pp. 31-78.], a lawyer and secretary to the Earl of Leicester in Elizabethan England. Harvey read and reread a 1555 edition of Livy’s History of Rome over a period of twenty-two years, leaving behind a trail of annotations, which often can be linked to contemporary events. In fact, he filled the margins with so many allusions and cross-references that they turned into a kind of palimpsest or a commonplace book within a book.

Jardine and Grafton showed that Harvey never read his Livy straight through or by itself. Instead, he selected passages appropriate to the exigencies of the moment and assembled them, with excerpts from other classics, to be used as ammunition in rhetorical battles or advice to potential patrons. . . . Classical culture belonged to the rough and tumble of Tudor-Stuart politics, and Harvey read his way through it, not in order to refine his knowledge but to get ahead in life.

When Kevin Sharpe set out to find the underlying logic in Drake’s commonplace books, he detected the same classical-political culture that Grafton and Jardine had found between the lines and around the margins of Harvey’s Livy. Drake and Harvey drew on the same sources and slanted them in the same direction: toward action rather than contemplation, for secular success instead of otherworldly wisdom. This ethos showed through glosses and cross-references. Like Harvey, Drake constantly cited Livy. He also cited Machiavelli and Machiavelli’s citations of Livy. Then he rearranged the citations, added other authors, and worked in allusions to recent as well as ancient history. From Latin to Italian to English, from ancient Rome to Renaissance Florence to Stuart England, everything was refracted in everything else; yet it held together as a view of the world, thanks to an ordering principle: an improvised, amateur Machiavellianism.

Drake cited Machiavelli more often than any other author, but he did not respond to the patriotic, republican aspects of Machiavelli’s writings. He merely culled through them for adages that might be useful in his efforts to improve his own lot in life while the Stuart monarchy disintegrated around him. The most striking quality of this selection process was its secularism. While his countrymen were killing themselves over disputes about the Book of Common Prayer, the legitimacy of bishops, and the meaning of the sacraments, Drake saw only power struggles. Never did he indicate the slightest sympathy for the conventional notion that England was and ought to be a Christian commonwealth. He worried about abuses of the royal prerogative in the 1630s and the need to reinforce it after 1642, but he did not mention the spiritual ingredient in the king’s authority. He even interpreted the Bible as a collection of cautionary tales about whose ox might be gored, and he cross-referenced passages from the Gospels with excerpts from Machiavelli and Guicciardini, one more secular than the other.

He saw little else than cunning and deceit in the world around him: every man pursued self-interest, no matter how loudly he proclaimed his allegiance to causes. Life was a war of all against all; politics, the rule of the strong; history, a cyclical movement in and out of chaos:

The cynicism runs so deep that Drake seems to have compounded Machiavelli with Hobbes.

Marginal note: Hobbes' Leviathan comes to mind: "...during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man." and "...the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

That is Kevin Sharpe’s interpretation. He pursues it with unflagging energy, through hundreds of pages of sibylline citations, across widely scattered manuscript sources, from histories to fables to proverbs to emblem books, and back again in a dizzying hermeneutic circle. It is a tour de force, but is it true?

Having immersed himself in Drake’s reading, Sharpe can come up with plenty of evidence to connect that string of "isms" to a pattern of culture implicit in the commonplace books. But he disputes the notion of evidence itself. To him, it smells of positivism, a mode of historical argument that, he claims, has carried the study of British history into a dead end.

In order to make that charge stick, Sharpe begins his book with a discourse on method and a survey of historiography. He goes over the great debates that have divided historians of seventeenth-century Britain for the last fifty years, stressing the opposition between an "old guard" of social historians . . . and "revisionists" like . . . himself. . . . However, having routed their elders and occupied the main terrain in the historiographical battles, the revisionists faced the problem of what to do next. An endlessly detailed account of political events would lead nowhere. But by following the lead of Sharpe, they can find the only way out of "post-revisionism"—namely, postmodernism, or a great leap into theory.

By theory, Sharpe means an amalgam of the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Hayden White, Clifford Geertz, Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, and the other familiar suspects. They make up "a gallery of unknowns" to early modern historians, he claims—rather oddly, considering the saturation of references to them in scholarly journals over the last thirty years. Odder still is his notion that "theory" is a coherent whole, something that can be used to rescue historians shipwrecked on the shoals of positivism:

My project is to suggest that for Renaissance scholars, for early modern historians, the issues and questions raised and some of the methods advocated by theory may help us to reimagine a Renaissance culture that did not share the positivism or "the organicist ideology of modernism…."

It seems doubtful that by invoking "evidence" and "facts" the older generation subscribed to a mindless variety of positivism. And it seems unlikely that their successors can be saved from future shipwrecks by means of self-reflective prolegomena about method and theory. Sharpe’s triumphalist version of historical debates and his claims to originality will put off many readers. But that would be a pity, because he has worked through a vast amount of unfamiliar material and arrived at some challenging conclusions.

He is right, I think, to treat commonplace books as sites to be mined for information about how people thought in a culture based on different assumptions from our own. By selecting and arranging snippets from a limitless stock of literature, early modern Englishmen gave free play to a semi-conscious process of ordering experience. The elective affinities that bound their selections into patterns reveal an epistemology—a process of knowing—at work below the surface. That kind of phenomenon does not show up in conventional research and cannot be understood without some recourse to theory. Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His "archaeology of knowledge" suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.

That dimension can be at least surmised, thanks to other studies of commonplace books and marginalia. Sharpe surveys them all and extracts enough material to indicate some underlying similarities in the reading practices of early modern Englishmen. They had all sorts of opinions and read all sorts of books. But they read in the same way—segmentally, by concentrating on small chunks of text and jumping from book to book, rather than sequentially, as readers did a century later, when the rise of the novel encouraged the habit of perusing books from cover to cover. Segmental reading compelled its practitioners to read actively, to exercise critical judgment, and to impose their own pattern on their reading matter. It was also adapted to "reading for action," an appropriate mode for men like Drake, Harvey, John Dee, John Rous, Sir Robert Cotton, Edward Hyde, and other contemporaries, who consulted books in order to get their bearings in perilous times, not to pursue knowledge for its own sake or to amuse themselves.

By mastering so much material and synthesizing it so aptly, Sharpe has made an important contribution to the history of reading. But he wants to do more—to demonstrate that the history of reading is the key to history in general, or at least to the seventeenth century. To Drake and his contemporaries, he insists, the mental sorting that went into commonplace books proved to be crucial in finding a way through the cutthroat politics of Renaissance courts. The result was a Machiavellian mentality—not that everyone in the educated elite adopted the same philosophy, but everyone tended to read the world in the same disabused manner.

"We are what we read."

That may be better than the old slogan, proclaimed by the German Greens: "We are what we eat" ("Man ist was man isst"). But, again, is it true? . . . Unlike the notes of Harvey, they consist of endless excerpts, which cannot be connected with anything that was happening in the world of politics.

In attempting to answer that objection, Sharpe musters some evidence of the kind that he had rejected at the outset in his discourse on method. But ultimately he falls back on references to literary theory, as if they can do the job when the paper trail gives out in the archives. Sharpe’s use of theory would carry more conviction if he did not proclaim it like a preacher. He harangues the reader, declaiming Derrida and brandishing Foucault. To those who have been through it all, it will sound suspiciously like Bible-thumping.

That point warrants pondering, because the history of reading has become one of the most vital fields of research in the humanities; . . . Now that the research has shifted to commonplace books, we may add segmental vs. sequential reading to the list.

More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities—that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. . . . The assembled texts reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.

Read more: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/dec/21/extraordinary-commonplaces/?pagination=false