Commonplace book

Based on Wikipedia: Commonplace book

Erasmus of Rotterdam traveled across Europe with a chest full of notes. Henri de Lubac, the twentieth-century theologian, carried his in a sack. Isaac Newton developed calculus in what he called his "waste book." And Virginia Woolf kept messy notebooks filled with reading observations mixed with quite various other material that scholars now pore over at Smith College in Massachusetts.

These were all commonplace books—perhaps the most influential personal information management system ever invented, predating our databases, note-taking apps, and search engines by roughly two thousand years.

What Exactly Is a Commonplace Book?

A commonplace book is a personal notebook where you collect anything you find interesting or useful. Quotes. Recipes. Prayers. Legal formulas. Poems. Proverbs. Tables of weights and measures. Medical remedies. Observations about life. The key distinction from a diary is organizational: while diaries proceed chronologically and tend toward introspection, commonplace books are organized by subject. You might have a section on love, another on politics, a third on religion.

The name comes from the Latin locus communis, itself from the Greek tópos koinós, meaning "a general or common place"—a statement of proverbial wisdom that applies broadly across situations. The original commonplace books were literally collections of such sayings.

Think of it as the original second brain, centuries before that term became a productivity buzzword.

The Ancient Roots

The philosophical foundations trace back to Aristotle. In his work Topica, he distinguished between different forms of argumentation and called them commonplaces. He expanded on this in Rhetoric, suggesting these commonplaces could be used to test whether propositions were valid. Cicero picked up the thread in his own Topica and De Oratore, applying these ideas to public speaking and creating a list of commonplaces that included sententiae—wise sayings from philosophers, statesmen, and poets.

Quintilian took it further still in his Institutio Oratoria, a comprehensive treatise on rhetoric education. He wanted his readers to commit their commonplaces to memory and framed the whole enterprise in moral and ethical terms. This wasn't just about being a better speaker. It was about becoming a better person.

But the practice of keeping such collections goes even deeper. In the first century, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered a beautiful metaphor: readers should collect commonplace ideas and sententiae as a bee collects pollen, then through imitation transform them into their own honey-like words. You don't just copy—you digest, synthesize, and create something new.

Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, written in the second century, began as exactly this kind of private record—thoughts, quotations, daily reflections. It was never meant for publication. That it survived and became one of the foundational texts of Stoic philosophy was essentially an accident of history.

The Medieval Flowering

A writer we know only as Stobaeus, working in the fifth century, compiled an extraordinary two-volume manuscript called The Anthologies. It contained excerpts from 1,430 works of poetry and prose. Here's the remarkable part: of those 1,430 sources, all but 315 are now completely lost. We know they existed only because Stobaeus quoted them. His commonplace book became an ark, preserving fragments of ancient thought that would otherwise have vanished entirely.

By the eighth century, the commonplace tradition had been absorbed into religious practice. Preachers and theologians collected excerpted passages from the Bible and approved Church Fathers. These religious anthologies were called florilegia—gatherings of flowers. The metaphor is lovely: you wander through the garden of sacred literature, plucking the most beautiful blossoms to arrange in your own bouquet.

Early medieval collectors organized passages in the order they appeared in the original sources. But by the thirteenth century, thematic arrangement had become standard. The subject headings made these collections far more useful—you could quickly find everything you'd gathered on, say, humility or divine providence, rather than hunting through pages of sequentially copied text.

Renaissance Innovation: The Zibaldone

During the fifteenth century, something new emerged on the Italian peninsula: the zibaldone, which translates roughly as "hodgepodge book." Unlike the formal commonplace books of scholars, these were vernacular productions—written in Italian rather than Latin, kept by merchants and artisans rather than academics.

Giovanni Rucellai, who compiled one of the most sophisticated examples, defined his zibaldone as "a salad of many herbs." That's exactly what these books contained. Taxes paid sat alongside currency exchange rates. Medicinal remedies appeared next to favorite quotations from Augustine and Virgil. Recipes mingled with devotional texts and literary excerpts.

The physical form mattered too. Zibaldones were always paper codices of small or medium format—never the large display copies meant to impress. They lacked elaborate decoration. Instead of professional miniatures, you might find the author's own rough sketches. They were written in cursive scripts, first chancery minuscule and later mercantile minuscule. These were working documents, not showpieces.

The literary favorites were predictable: Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio—the "Three Crowns" of Florentine vernacular literature. Modern scholars have mined these zibaldones to understand how ordinary people of the Renaissance engaged with the high culture around them. The juxtaposition tells us something important: culture wasn't siloed. A merchant might care as much about Virgil as about grain prices.

Leonardo's Method

Leonardo da Vinci kept notebooks that functioned exactly as commonplace books, and he described them in precisely those terms: "A collection without order, drawn from many papers, which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they treat."

That last phrase is key—"according to the subjects of which they treat." The intention was always eventual organization, even if the initial collection was chaotic. Leonardo's notebooks famously mixed engineering diagrams with anatomical drawings with observations about water and light and flight. But the underlying logic was the same: gather everything interesting, plan to sort it later.

The French encyclopedist Jean Bodin had a more utilitarian view. He used his commonplace book as "an arsenal of 'factoids'"—ammunition for arguments and writings.

Locke's Revolution

In 1685, the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on how to keep a commonplace book. It was translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. This might sound like a minor contribution compared to Locke's major philosophical works, but its influence was enormous.

Locke provided specific, practical advice on arranging material by subject and category. He developed an indexing scheme that made retrieval efficient. The method was so popular that publishers began printing blank commonplace books with space for headings and indices, ready to be filled in by their purchasers.

Nearly a century later, a publisher named John Bell released "Bell's Common-Place Book, Formed generally upon the Principles Recommended and Practised by Mr Locke." One copy of this blank book was used by Erasmus Darwin from 1776 to 1787. Later, his grandson Charles Darwin used the same volume—he called it "the great book"—when composing his grandfather's biography. The commonplace tradition passed literally from hand to hand across generations.

The Domestic Practice

By the early eighteenth century, commonplace books had evolved into general-purpose information management devices. A note-taker might store quotations, observations, definitions, ethical texts, and practical information like recipes or medical treatments all in the same volume.

For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book served a special function. It could be a private repository of intellectual life, a place to engage with ideas even when denied access to universities and learned societies. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713. Mrs. Anna Jameson published a typical example in 1855 with headings like "Ethical Fragments," "Theological," and "Literature and Art."

Young women were sometimes required to keep commonplace books as evidence of proper upbringing. The contents demonstrated their mastery of social roles and the correctness of their education. This was a double-edged function: the commonplace book could be a tool of intellectual freedom or a performance of expected femininity, depending on who was looking and who was writing.

Scientific Applications

Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern biological taxonomy, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae. The binomial naming system that scientists still use today—Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, Escherichia coli—emerged from Linnaeus's methodical habit of collecting and categorizing observations.

Isaac Newton's "waste book" deserves special attention. The term sounds dismissive, but the contents were anything but wasteful. This was the notebook where Newton worked out the calculus. His commonplace method—recording ideas, working through problems, organizing thoughts by subject—provided the scaffolding for one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history.

The University Tradition

By the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become standard pedagogy at institutions like Oxford. Students were formally taught the practice. John Locke attached his indexing scheme to printings of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, making it available to the educated public.

The tradition shaped some of the most important thinkers in English letters. Francis Bacon and John Milton were both educated in the commonplace method rooted in classical rhetoric. The practice persisted as a standard study technique well into the early twentieth century.

Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at Harvard University. Their notebooks survive in published form, offering windows into how these transcendentalist thinkers processed their reading and developed their ideas. When you read Emerson's essays with their dense weave of quotation and allusion, you're seeing the product of a lifetime of commonplacing.

Authors and Their Methods

The authorial use of commonplace books varied considerably. Some writers kept messy, sprawling notebooks where reading notes mixed with quite various other material. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was like this. So was Mark Twain. So was Virginia Woolf. Their commonplace books resisted easy categorization—which perhaps suited their creative temperaments.

Others, like Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal method that mirrored the original Renaissance practice closely. Systematic subject headings. Careful organization. The discipline of the form matched the discipline of the prose.

William Paley, the philosopher and theologian best known for the watchmaker analogy in arguments for God's existence, used his commonplace book directly in composing his published works. The book was a working tool, a way station between reading and writing.

The Decline of the Clearinghouse

Over time, one traditional function of the commonplace book became less popular: what scholars call the "clearinghouse" role. The original purpose had been to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions—to create a personal anthology of the best thinking you'd encountered, ready to be deployed in your own speech and writing.

This function assumed that certain expressions were objectively superior, that there was a canon of excellent formulations worth collecting and imitating. As Romantic notions of originality took hold—the idea that authentic expression must come from within rather than being assembled from without—the clearinghouse model lost prestige.

But the practice itself never disappeared. It just evolved.

Modern Descendants

The commonplace book anticipated databases, wikis, note-taking applications, and personal knowledge management systems. When you clip articles to Evernote, highlight passages in Kindle, or build a Notion database of ideas organized by tag, you're participating in a tradition that stretches back through Emerson and Locke and Erasmus to Seneca and Aristotle.

The tools have changed. The underlying human need has not: to capture interesting ideas before they slip away, to organize them for retrieval, to build a personal collection that becomes more valuable over time, to transform borrowed pollen into your own honey.

Some modern practitioners have taken the tradition to remarkable extremes. W. Ross Ashby, a pioneer of cybernetics, started his commonplace book in May 1928 as a medical student. He kept it for 44 years until his death, at which point it occupied 25 volumes comprising 7,189 pages and was indexed with 1,600 cards. The British Library has digitized the entire archive, with extensive cross-linking based on Ashby's original index. You can explore it online—a twentieth-century commonplace book rendered navigable by twenty-first-century technology.

The Persistence of Paper

Despite all our digital tools, physical commonplace books endure. There's something about the tactile act of copying a passage by hand that aids memory and comprehension in ways that digital highlighting does not. The constraint of limited space forces selectivity—you can't copy everything, so you must choose what matters most.

And there's the question of serendipity. A paper commonplace book, flipped through idly, surfaces unexpected juxtapositions. Your note on Stoic philosophy appears on the same spread as a recipe for bread or a fragment of poetry. The hodgepodge quality that Giovanni Rucellai celebrated—the salad of many herbs—creates connections that over-organized digital systems might miss.

A Japanese Parallel

The commonplace tradition was not exclusively Western. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, written by a courtier in tenth or eleventh-century Japan, is likewise a private book of anecdote and poetry, daily thoughts and lists. Scholars debate whether it should be classified alongside European commonplace books—it lacks the systematic subject headings and wide range of sources typical of the genre—but the impulse is recognizably similar: to capture and preserve what strikes you as interesting or beautiful or true.

The practice emerges wherever literate people read widely and want to remember what they've learned. It's a natural human response to the problem of information overload—a problem that is not, despite what we sometimes assume, unique to the digital age.

How to Begin

If you wanted to start your own commonplace book, the Renaissance masters would offer simple advice. Read widely. When something strikes you—a phrase, an idea, a fact—copy it down. Don't trust your memory. Organize by subject, or at least plan to. Review periodically. And remember Seneca's bees: the goal is not merely to accumulate, but to transform what you gather into something distinctly your own.

Erasmus, in his De Copia, suggested a hierarchical but flexible breakdown of topics. You might have a top-level category like Piety and Impiety. Under Piety might come Gratitude. Under each heading, you place example texts—passages that illuminate the concept. The commonplace proper would be some simple aphorism or moral that emerges from the examples, such as "The crowd loves and hates thoughtlessly."

The system is both structured and organic. It grows with you. The categories that matter to you at twenty may differ from those that matter at fifty. Your commonplace book, if you keep it long enough, becomes a map of your intellectual life—a record of what you found worth preserving.

The Chest and the Sack

We began with Erasmus traveling across Europe with a chest of notes. Those notes, including examples of well-written Latin, became the foundation of his Adagia—a hugely influential collection of proverbs and sayings that shaped Renaissance humanism.

Henri de Lubac carried his notes in a sack. Less elegant, perhaps, but equally effective. The container doesn't matter. What matters is the habit of collection, the discipline of organization, and the creative act of synthesis that transforms scattered fragments into coherent thought.

The commonplace book is a technology—one of the most successful ever invented for managing information and cultivating wisdom. That it requires no electricity, no software updates, and no monthly subscription is perhaps its most appealing feature. A notebook and a pen. That's all you need to join a tradition stretching back two millennia.

And unlike your digital notes, your commonplace book might survive to be studied by scholars centuries from now, the way we study Stobaeus and Newton and Virginia Woolf. The words you copy today could outlast civilizations—if you choose them well.