The Classical Art of Keeping a Commonplace Book

Have you ever had the nagging suspicion that you once knew something, but the memory of it now escapes you? Even when you can remember the general concept, have you ever struggled to put that idea into words? And, when you do put it into words, have you ever thought to yourself that you once heard or read someone else put it into even better words? If these questions remind you of yourself, then you would benefit from keeping a commonplace book: a notebook in which you record ideas and quotations and index them for future retrieval. Long before smartphones became our surrogate brains, people used commonplace books to aid their memory, to sort their thoughts, and to prepare themselves to wax eloquent at a moment’s notice.

“The method of commonplace,” according to historian Ann Blair, involves a reader’s selection of “passages of interest for the rhetorical turns of phrase, the dialectical arguments, or the factual information they contain; one then copies them into a notebook, the commonplace book, kept handy for the purpose, grouping them under appropriate headings to facilitate later retrieval and use, notably in composing prose of one’s own.”¹

Commonplacing became widespread among leading scholars during the Renaissance period, but its roots can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity. Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric about topoi, or “topics,” meaning a stock of ideas from which an orator could produce a speech.² Cicero wrote similarly of loci, or “commonplaces.” Cicero’s first canon of rhetoric, inventio, involved the gathering of material so that one could produce a speech on any subject for any audience on any occasion.³ Whether called topoi (in Greek) or loci (in Latin) or commonplaces (in English), the keeping of organized notes compensates for deficiencies of memory while also beginning the process of organizing inspirational material for crafting oral or written works of one’s own.

The value of notetaking has not always gone unchallenged. Socrates, relating a debate between two Egyptian gods, stated the following criticism against the art of writing:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.⁴

The irony, of course, is that we know of Socrates’s words today only because Plato wrote them down, and not Plato only, but also Xenophon, whose Memorabilia of Socrates was itself a commonplace book of sorts! If “to the victor go the spoils” and “the pen is mightier than the sword,” then it follows that those who write outlast those who do not. By the fifteenth century, it seemed clear that if Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and others whose fame outlived them by far, each kept notes on what they read, then Renaissance scholars should do the same. As Seneca reportedly explained:

We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.⁵

However, Seneca’s advice concerning how to find good advice also expressed suspicion about the commonplacing habits of others:

We can get assistance not only from the living, but from those of the past. Let us choose, however, from among the living, not men who pour forth their words with the greatest glibness [verba magna celeritate praecipitant] turning out commonplaces [communes locus volvunt], and holding, as it were, their own little private exhibitions,—not these, I say, but men who teach us by their lives, men who tell us what we ought to do and then prove it by practice, who show us what we should avoid, and then are never caught doing that which they have ordered us to avoid.⁶

While medieval classrooms deployed commonplacing for pedagogical purposes, Erasmus and his Renaissance contemporaries prepared tutorials for expanding such notekeeping beyond classroom exercises.⁷ By the early modern period, the practice flourished among literary geniuses, such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Montaigne.⁸ As time went on, John Locke, like Erasmus before him, published a tutorial concerning commonplacing. He suggested an alphabetical index (but omitting K, Y, and W, since he thought C, I, and U would do just as well), plus a stock of words and phrases organized by subject.⁹ Jonathan Swift endorsed commonplacing in his “Advice to a Young Poet”:

A common-place book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories”; and whereas, on the other hand, poets being liars by profession, ought to have good memories. To reconcile these, a book of this sort is in the nature of a supplemental memory; or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own by entering them there. For take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.¹⁰

Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Oscar Wilde picked up the habit as well.¹¹ With printing presses churning out books, the modern period saturated readers with information overload; a commonplace book became a necessary coping device (as much as a copying device) even for the less famous, more ordinary reader.¹² Nor were such notes kept only as a private repository from which to compose creative works. Commonplace books were published posthumously as testimonies to erudition and as guides to understanding the minds that created the best of modern literature.¹³ Wouldn’t you like to read the commonplace notes of one of Shakespeare’s early fans? Fortunately, you can!¹⁴

By the nineteenth-century, commonplacing had become so common as to diverge into a myriad of styles, involving both notetaking as well as the clipping of excerpts from publications. Archivists struggle today to classify such documents: are they diaries, commonplace books, or scrapbooks? Or perhaps, simply, “whatchamacallits”? Arguably, the most significant fact about commonplacing relates not to the detailed method, but the ubiquity of the varied practices, encouraged further by the printing of notebooks, keyed for a year’s worth of entries, entitled, for example, Pocket Diary, Daily Remembrancer … for the Record of Interesting Events … Etc.¹⁵

Twenty-first century social media posts, in their own way, echo the commonplacing of the past, but now as a more disorganized practice that fosters an ephemeral semblance of community without anyone slowing down enough to savor truths that endure. The functional benefit of posting to social media now has less to do with preparing for future speechwriting and more to do with mouthing off on the digital soapbox of one’s choice. However, the former practice of pursuing excellence by collecting and rearranging the wisdom of one’s ancestors has not been entirely lost. For example, the honors program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has adopted the following plan, effectively reviving the medieval pedagogical method:

• a 250-word preface introducing semester goals.
• a minimum of 3 entries per week. Each entry must include the date, each page must be numbered, and each source must be fully cited. Each entry must include a primary text (quotation, image, etc.) and an analysis of that primary text.
• 21 entries to turn in by Week 8 and 18 more entries by Week 15.
• an epilogue of 200–250 words in which students explain what these accumulated entries reveal about themselves and their first semester. What narrative has emerged? Have they accomplished the goals they originally set for themselves? Have they learned something entirely different?¹⁶

A similar assignment in an Intellectual Heritage class at Temple University led to the establishment of The Commonplace Book Project, an online repository of commonplace specimens together with a blog plus links to library archives, lesson plans, and books concerning commonplacing—both antiquarian and instructional.¹⁷ Teachers may recommend to students specific questions to address in their commonplace books while reading, or else leave the selection of topics to the students’ discretion and curiosity; either way, students  will benefit from habitually recording the wisdom gleaned from others plus pre-writing exercises of their own in one readily accessible notebook, a “common” place.¹⁸

When teaching Philosophy 450: Philosophical Readings, at Bethany Lutheran College in the Spring 2023 semester, I asked student to record commonplace entries on the following topics, and to add their own topics as they thought of ways to branch out from these initial themes:

• constitution
• God
• human nature
• justice
• law
• liberty
• morality
• natural law
• revolution
• rights
• rule of law
• tyranny

I provided my students with some sample entries as follows:

Sample Entries

Each entry consists of a quotation or paraphrase, some key words for indexing by topic, and a citation.

“So Gréndel rúled // in defíance of ríght.”
[NATURAL JUSTICE; TYRANNY; Anglo-Saxon tetrameter/alliteration]
Beowulf, line 144

“Prevent them [civil rulers] from exercising tyranny over Your people, so, after wearing glittering clothing and elegant gems, they do not descend, naked and wretched, to be tormented in hell.”
[TYRANNY]
Johann Gerhard, Meditations on Divine Mercy, tr. Harrison, 4.3 (p. 139)

“The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility. The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.”
[SCIENTISM / TYRANNY]
Aaron Kheriarty, “Technocracy and Totalitarianism,” Epoch Times, 11/30-12/6/22, A15.

“It is more choiceworthy, therefore, to have law rule than any one of the citizens. … The law is reason unaffected by desire.”
[RULE OF LAW]
Aristotle, Politics, 3.16, 1287a17,32

A “mere mortal” cannot “override the laws of the gods, unwritten and unshakable. They are not for now and yesterday, but live forever.” 
[NATURAL LAW]
Sophocles, Antigone, 445–447

Soon their own examples outperformed mine, as they gleaned from the assigned readings, as well as from some of their own pleasure reading, brilliant insights grouped topically for future reference.

Now serving as Academic Dean at Luther Classical College, I have included commonplace notebooking across the curriculum, with programmatic discussions launching the project during the first semester of study in Theology 181: Christian Culture, intending that this activity continues to the senior thesis and beyond. Several members of LCC’s board of regents and faculty also have been practicing the art of commonplace notebooking. Together we look forward to mentoring our students, both classically and especially “Lutheranly.”

During the Lutheran Reformation, the term Loci (“commonplaces”) took a different meaning than what the commonplace notebook tradition represents. Melanchthon’s Loci Communes et Theologici (1521) was neither a personal collection of semi-organized passages from Scripture nor a formalized work of systematic theology, but rather something midway between: a thoughtful, rehearsed presentation of the chief doctrines of Holy Scripture, arranged to assist in the proper interpretation of the Bible and, above all, to comfort troubled consciences with the pure Gospel of the Atonement in Christ alone, to be received by faith alone, through the means of grace alone. Gerhard’s Loci Theologici (1610–1625), coming a century later, was an erudite refutation of heretical doctrines, reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, but with the same passion of a Seelsorger (a caretaker of souls) that one finds in Melanchthon’s and especially Luther’s works. Since the Loci of Melanchthon and Gerhard were polished as coherent and complete presentations of their chosen subject matters, they go beyond the basic meaning of topoi or loci as found in Aristotle, Quintilian, and the Renaissance-to-present commonplace afficionados.

Nevertheless, Melanchthon’s and Gerhard’s chosen titles are defensible in another sense: even by keeping the most basic and provisional commonplace book, a reader is always striving toward the fullness of understanding that those Lutheran theologians achieved in their published works. If there ever is to be another Melanchthon or Gerhard—one who can bring together so many different subjects in harmony with the teachings of Holy Scripture and present them, well-ordered, for the edification of others—then that person would be wise to begin now to collect examples in a commonplace notebook.

Endnotes

1. Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods of Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992): 541–55, at 541.
2. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.12, 1358a11–26, and passim.
3. Cicero, De Inventione; Sara Rubinelli, Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero (n.p.: Springer, 2009).
4. Plato, Phaedrus, 275a-275b, translated by Harold N. Fowler, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Asection%3D275b.
5. From an unconfirmed quotation attributed to Seneca: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book.
6. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters, 52.8. 
7. Desiderius Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (Cologne, 1540).
8. Victoria E. Burke, “Recent Studies in Commonplace Books,” English Literary Renaissance 43, no. 1 (2013): 153–77.
9. John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (London: J. Greenwood,1706).
10. Jonathan Swift, “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet,” excerpted from English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay, The Harvard Classics (1909–14), https://www.bartleby.com/27/10.html, accessed December 2, 2022.
11. Lynee Lewis Gaillet, “Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style,” Journal of Teaching and Writing 15, no. 2 (n.d.): 285–294, at 287; “A Brief Guide to Keeping a Commonplace Book,” https://notebookofghosts.com/the-notebook, accessed December 2, 2022; “Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History,” https://library.harvard.edu/collections/reading-harvard-views-readers-readership-and-reading-history, accessed December 2, 2022.
12. Alan Jacobs, “A Commonplace Book,” First Things, May 2008, 14–15, at 14.
13. For example, Alfred J. Horwood, ed., A Common-Place Book of John Milton and a Latin Essay and Latin Verses Presumed to Be by Milton (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1876)
14. “A Common Place Book,” ca. 1622–1625, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/shakespearean-extracts-included-oxford-commonplace-book, accessed December 2, 2022.
15. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zbora, “Is It a Diary, Commonplace Book, Scrapbook, or Whatchamacallit? Six Years of Exploration in New England’s Manuscript Archives,” Libraries and the Cultural Record 44, no. 1 (2009): 101–23, at 104.
16. Kate Krueger, “The Commonplace Book Project,” Honors in Practice 16 (2020): 205–207, at 206.
17. The Common Place Book Project, www.thecommonplacebookproject.com, accessed November 28, 2022.
18. Gayle B. Price, “A Case for a Modern Commonplace Book,” College Composition and Communication 31, no. 2 (May 1980): 175–82.