“Commonplacing.”

We warmly invite you to participate in K-SAA’s 2023-2024 public outreach initiative! It's our way of getting connected with teachers and students of all levels, as well as the general public. Over the coming year, we will explore the ancient scholarly practice of commonplace book-keeping along with its vibrant modern descendent, scrapbooking. Our target audiences are teachers and students, but we’d be delighted for anyone interested in the topic to explore these pages and attend our events as they are announced!

Jump to: Introduction | Why this theme? | History | Downloadable Teaching Materials | Digital Platforms | Glossary | Bibliography | Contribute to K-SAA’s Digital Commonplace Book!

Click here to contribute to our digital commonplace book!

Introduction: What is a commonplace book?

Since antiquity, readers have relied upon practices of copying in order to support their comprehension of challenging texts, to compile knowledge from different sources in one convenient place, and to store information for future use.

For most of human history, “copying” meant re-writing key passages of a book or document by hand. In times before computers and key-word searches, a particularly diligent reader would be mindful to keep all these hand-written excerpts in a singular, well-ordered volume; they might even take the time to devise and append an index.

The resulting anthology of quotations or excerpts could be consulted at the book-keeper’s leisure: to confirm facts, refresh their memory of events, re-experience a favourite passage of prose or poetry, or share their discoveries with others. This was a commonplace book!

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Boyle Family Archive (MS 1340), 1670s-1710, via the Wellcome Collection.

“[Scholars and students] accumulate evidence in the form of quotations, historical documents, and photographic images. When I refer to respected scholars, I am partaking in a tradition inherited from early modern humanism and the ancient rhetorical appeal to authority. Within the humanities, the commonplace tradition has been–and continues to be–an integral method of collecting and presenting authentic evidence.”

— Jillian Hess, How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information

Why this theme?: Commonplacing as a 21st-century practice

From our 21st-century vantage point, a re-examination of the historical commonplace book allows us to re-envision the study of Romanticism as a force for connecting globally, yet intimately, and for sharing creatively through our love of Romantic-era texts. We have chosen “commonplacing” as our public outreach theme not merely to spotlight a fascinating historical practice—but because this practice embodies forms of collaboration and intellectual community-building which we seek to incorporate into our own thinking, learning, and teaching. We embrace commonplacing as an intimate and tactile, social and collaborative, art form. With our Commonplacing project, we hope to bring together students, teachers, and community members; merging many voices through the juxtaposition of their diverse visual and textual contributions.

The way we see it, today’s students are already master commonplace book-keepers, by virtue of their fluency in the social-media arts of posting, re-posting, sharing, replying, embedding, and compiling! By approaching these familiar modes of digital collection and juxtaposition through the lens of “commonplacing,” we reveal to students how the social media landscape of the 21st century fits into a rich intellectual history going back thousands of years!

The educational resources we have gathered take advantage of students’ sociable intuition as an in-road to historical and literary concepts which may at first seem alienating or simply “too difficult.” Paying respect to the ways in which young people are already accomplished intellectual- and creative-world-builders, our lesson plans encourage students to challenge and expand their assumptions about what “counts” as academic or scholarly work. We encourage them to place themselves, as 21st-century readers and learners, on an equal and friendly footing with our early 19th-century counterparts. Our commonplacing activities empower students to develop their own canons and archives, prioritising themes, values, and aesthetics which are meaningful to them personally.

Put another way, our commonplacing activities go beyond asking students to retain or memorize what early 19th-century writers thought. Instead, we invite students (and teachers!) to experience how Keats, the Shelleys, and their contemporaries organized their thoughts, and to learn alongside them from across the centuries.

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“[W]hen Reynolds assembles a page dedicated to love by clipping a stanza from one poet who writes on love and combining it with another stanza clipped from another poet who writes on love, and adorns these with a scissored-out picture of a cupid, this reader as gleaner is making something new and personal to herself.”

— Deidre Lynch, “Paper Slips: Album, Archiving, Accident”

I: What can Enlightenment scholars teach us about modern readers?

Commonplacing was most popular in the Enlightenment period, especially among classically-educated men who set down their indexes in Latin. This practice may be seen as a revival of the vade mecum ("come with me") pocket notebook which was popular in the classical period (circa. 100CE), in which aspiring poets, orators, and philosophers would note down useful sayings and rhetorical figures they aspired to incorporate into their own writings. Perhaps the most famous of later commonplace book keepers was the philosopher John Locke, who even published a guide to commonplace book-keeping for other scholars.

Even for a wealthy man like Locke, paper and ink were expensive resources which had to be used conscientiously! As you can see in the illustrations to the right—photographs of pages from the printed edition of his New Method of Making Common-Place-Books—Locke developed a highly efficient system for fitting as much information as possible into the limited space of his indexes. Rather than creating a separate index entry for every topic (e.g. “love,” “lordliness,” “loss,” “loquacity”), [he organized the relevant page numbers according to the first letter and vowel of his topics (e.g. ‘Epistola’). >>review, still a bit confusing to me?]

Okay, by now your students (and maybe you yourself) are probably thinking, this is all a bit dry. Why spend so long thinking about how John Locke put together his indexes? Isn’t that the most boring part of any book?

Nope! Studying these smelly old indexes teaches us how important technology, media, and form are to the way we end up organizing information! Thanks to computers, we no longer need to worry about saving ink and paper when we compile information. Some questions to pose to students: Has this development been 100% positive? How might our access to computers (or other technologies) make our experience of reading and learning different from that of someone who lived in John Locke’s time?

We can also reflect more broadly about how modern technologies shape our methods for seeking out, gathering, compiling, and sharing information. What is the difference between using a phone-based app and visiting a website on your laptop? How is the experience of using an e-reader different than physically checking a book out from your school library (or even spending a few hours at the library to read it)?

II: Commonplace books and women’s contributions to early science

The early-modern commonplace book represented an intersection between the domestic and scientific spheres. The careful collection of common remedies was a staple activity for literate upper-class women, according to historian Leigh Whaley [citation]. For the benefit of the household as well as the local community, women would compile—sometimes in collaboration with other family members—the tried and tested remedies of their neighbors, local physicians, and other authorities.

Making use of readily-available ingredients, pantry staples, and local herbs, these medicinal recipes contributed to the foundation of the botanical and chemical sciences as we know them today. The inclusion of an ingredient in a household commonplace book suggested it had been successfully applied in a number of cases over the years—i.e. its beneficial properties had been isolated through repeated experimentation. Many of the most popular ingredients [examples?] have in fact been proven by modern research to cary genuine medical benefits!

III: The Romantic and Victorian eras: commonplacing for all!

In the nineteenth century, commonplacing underwent three important changes, gradually becoming a practice for, as historian Jillian Hess puts it in her book How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information, “everyone.” That included people of all economic classes, especially women and young girls. Commonplace book-keepers also began to incorporate all different kinds of media into their volumes, inventing a new at form that anticipated what we now call “scrapbooking.”

-Thoughts/questions about gender?

Commonplacing could also be a social endeavor, as many households kept dedicated notebooks for collecting extracts added by visitors or friends. While visiting a friend, it was common practice to take a moment to record a few lines of your favourite poem or novel in their commonplace book.

-Cite Mai-Lin Cheng’s book. Discuss the idea of a house/palace of literature… a “reader’s house.” This can also be a way for students to conceptualize the process of reading and incorporating the works of different authors into their interior world.

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History

I: What can Enlightenment scholars teach us about modern readers?

II: Commonplace books and women’s contributions to early science

III: The Romantic and Victorian eras: commonplacing for all!

A 1670s-1710 family commonplace book with botanical remedies from the Boyle Family archive (MS 1340), via the Wellcome Collection.

“What she extracts is what is most important to her, the fragment of the poem that she wants to share. It is an expression of an interpretation and a moment in conversation…rather than a ‘writer’s house,’ in the period of the Wildmans, Newstead Abbey is best understood as a ‘reader’s house,’ the commonplace book as its signal artifact, and extraction as the paradoxical act that holds it all together.”

— Mai-Lin Cheng, Domestic Extracts

Downloadable, printable classroom resources!

Getting students invested in 19th-century literature can be tough, but we want to make it easier for both you and them!

Follow the links below for ready-to-go teaching materials, tailored to the unique needs of middle-school, high-school, and post-secondary classrooms. Our contributors include teachers of grades 6-12, community college instructors, university faculty, librarians—and, of course, students!

Examples of what you’ll find:

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Keep scrolling for some reflections from students on the value of commonplacing in the classroom!

Student reflections on commonplacing…

This will be a section for sharing comments from students who have experience maintaining commonplace books as a component of their studies. We will populate this area after confirming their wishes regarding what elements of their work might be shared and how they are to be cited. We’re very grateful for their participation, and can’t wait to publish their thoughts in this space!

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Digital Platforms

The digital platforms featured below can help students share their work—with each other, and other learners around the world!

Have students contribute to our online, collaborative K-SAA Commmonplace Book by exploring this platform and adding your own entries:

Recited Verse allows students to read aloud, practice, and recite lines from their favorite Romantic-era poems or other passages. Students may also wish to translate key passage to different languages and record them, making those lines their own.  Other students can respond to these audio files. We are excited to hear lines of poetry and key passages spoken from different geographical locations, in different languages, accents, interpretations, and voices – breathing in new life to familiar or otherwise overlooked lines. These new entries will change what Romantic poetry sounds like to us and our students.

An open-access platform with tools for "flipped classroom" student projects and class anthologies, as well as peer-reviewed materials. COVE allows multiple students in a class or community to collectively annotate key texts.

We recommend archive.org as a place for students to explore historical examples of commonplacing or choose passages from Romantic-era texts that they find worthy of copying over, annotating, or responding to.

Resources

Activities

  • Recited Verse: http://recitedverse.com

    • “Invite your students to study, practice, recite, and record their own version of a favorite Romantic poem.”


Primary Sources [provide links or publication info for best available editions]


Open-Source Anthologies


Scholarly Articles


Books



Essays & Blog Posts

News Articles


Syllabi

(Maybe she’ll share her full syllabus with us?)