The art of trascegliere e notare in early modern Italian culture

ABSTRACT

Twenty years ago, historians complained that the art of excerpting was still a marginal topic. Ten years later, Ann Blair said that the history of note-taking had only just begun to be written. Indeed, historians spent nearly 25 years investigating how note-taking and excerpting systems developed in early modern Europe, and how great an influence they had on knowledge management and production in a society that gradually adapted to the mentality of printing. In the absence of an interdisciplinary book combining historical evidence with theoretical reasoning, this article aims at sketching out how early modern Italian culture took part in the debate on what we call the art of excerpting and note-taking (trascegliere e notare). The main hypothesis is that, within a century of the invention of the printing press, the notebook lost its function of memory aid and became a secondary memory. This functional change implied a loosening of the rhetorical structure of learning and experimentation with a new form of knowledge production, based on recombination. As a result, scholars discarded the culture of repetition and began to look for novelty. This produced a type of hypertrophy of variety: note-taking and excerpting techniques were understood as a way not only to avoid an excess of variety but also to produce substantially more variety than before. Knowledge was thus stored as a kind of “fine Capital” (Muratori) in view of an open future. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, scholars regarded such capitalisation as a question of “good taste”.

KEYWORDS:

• Commonplace books
• excerpting systems
• card index
• note-taking
• social memory

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their insightful commentaries on my paper and their advice on stylistic improvement.

Notes

1 Zedelmaier, “De ratione excerpendi”, 75; Blair, “The Rise of Note-Taking”, 316.

2 Cf. Zedelmaier, “Buch, Exzerpt, Zettelschrank”; Décultot, Lire, copier, écrire; Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids”; Yeo, Notebooks; Yeo and Blair, Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe; Blair, Too Much to Know. The term “typographic mentality” is taken from McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy.

3 Cevolini, “Verzetteln lernen”; Cevolini, De arte excerpendi; Cevolini, Forgetting Machines.

4 Staub, “Notizenmachen”.

5 Leopardi, Scritti filologici, 15.

6 See Harrison, The Ark of Studies.

7 Blair, Too Much to Know.

8 Cancellieri, Dissertazione, 106ff.

9 Ibid., 106.

10 “Post cibum […] iacebat in sole, liber legebatur, adnotabat excerpebatque. Nihil enim legit, quod non excerperet”. Pliny the Younger, Epistularum (III.5), 64.

11 Cancellieri, Dissertazione, 107, 109–11, 112–13.

12 Sacchini, De ratione libros, esp. 65ff. Cf. Cevolini, De arte excerpendi, 111f., 145ff.; Nelles, “Libros de papel”. Sacchini inspired the German Jesuit Jeremias Drexel’s successful book Aurifodina. A century later, it was praised and repeated almost verbatim by the Italian Jesuit Ranieri Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi.

13 Sacchini, De ratione libros, 65–6.

14 Ibid.

15 Secondary literature on commonplacing is very large. See Lechner, Renaissance Concepts; Beal, “Notions in Garrison”; Yeo, Notebooks.

16 According to Carruthers, florilegia were “memorative both in origins and purposes” and the commonplace book was actually “the essential book of memory”. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 176.

17 The technical term “redundancy” is drawn from the mathematical theory of communication and refers to what recurs. The opposite term is “variety”. Information is a combination of selecting variety and redundancy. See Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication.

18 Cf. Lechner, Renaissance Concepts; Ong, The Presence of the Word, 82; Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, esp. 44ff.; Blair, “Le florilège latin”, 185ff.

19 Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, 168.

20 See Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books.

21 According to Walter Ong, it was alphabetic typography which gave “the fatal blow” to oral, formular culture. See Ong, The Presence of the Word, 87.

22 Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, esp. 77; Beal, “Notions in Garrison”, 131ff.; Heß, “Enzyklopädien und Florilegien”, 52–4.

23 The letter can be read in Verdenelli, “Cronistoria”, 601.

24 Cancellieri, Dissertazione, 107.

25 Cardano, De subtilitate libri XXI, 865–6. This filing system is the same method described only two years earlier by Gessner, Pandectarum, Tit. XIII, § 2, for indexing books. On Gessner, see Wellisch, “How to Make an Index”; Cochetti, “Teoria e costruzione degli indici”.

26 See Arato, “Un erudito barocco”, 532–3. The manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome (Fondi Minori, S. Onofrio 3–24). No systematic study has yet been conducted on the Acus Nautica. The following information could be used to conduct a survey.

27 In the entry “Onyx” (S. Onofrio 17, 91v), a slip of paper has been glued to the page vertically.

28 The entry “Amor” (S. Onofrio 3, 260v–266r), for instance, is organised into 175 paragraphs.

29 Lancellotti, Acus Nautica, S. Onofrio 4, 1r-v.

30 On the Renaissance success of this literary genre, see Cherchi, “La selva rinascimentale”. There were two main features of these works: their ability to satisfy the curiosity of readers by means of scholarly materials and the very fact that in principle they could be extended without limits.

31 Bartoli, Dell’huomo di lettere, 376ff. (“Chi non ha in capo una viva libreria raccolta con istudio di molto tempo […], conviene che da molti libri morti accatti e raccolga ciò che a suo bisogno farà”).

32 Petrarca, De remediis utriusque fortunae, 90, 104.

33 Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, 170.

34 Sacchini, De ratione, 57; Drexel, Aurifodina, 67, 84.

35 Yeo, “Loose Notes and Capacious Memory”, 336.

36 Cf. Meinel, “Enzyklopädie der Welt”, 168. To form an opinion about this method, see Jungius, Historia Vermium. This is a posthumous work put together, as Morhof, Polyhistor, 439, noted, by means of author’s file cards, yet without any particular order or selection (“è Schedis sine selectu & ordine congruo”).

37 Tugnoli Pattaro, Metodo e sistema, 19ff.; Krämer, “Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon”, 411ff.; Krämer and Zedelmaier, “Instruments of Invention”.

38 Dohrn, Der Ursprung der Wirbelthiere, esp. 60. See also Gould and Vrba, “Exaptation”, and Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 505ff., for a sociological use of this concept.

39 Cf. Cevolini, De arte excerpendi. See also Yeo, “John Locke’s New Method”, 9; Yeo, “Notebooks as Memory Aids”, 129–30; Yeo, Notebooks, 56ff. Yeo speaks of a “shift in function” with respect to commonplace books, yet without any explicit reference to the theory of evolution.

40 The letter may be read in Pozzetti, Elogio d’Ireneo Affò, 102–3. A shortened version is provided by Cancellieri, Dissertazione, 108–9 (yet without the crucial passage dealt with here).

41 Bacon, The Two Books, 58.

42 Sacchini, De ratione, 54. The same results have been verified by experimental psychology. See Staub, “Notizenmachen”.

43 On this relationship, see especially Yates, The Art of Memory; Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria.

44 Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, 127.

45 Aristotle, De memoria, 2, 452a 15, 693.

46 Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, 127–8.

47 Lancellotti, L’Hoggidì, 73–4; Drexel, Aurifodina, 57: “Ut saepius è charta sapere, ita etiam saepissime è charta meminisse ac recordari cogimur”.

48 As Yeo, Notebooks, 37ff., 50ff., has pointed out, this may also be verified in the English milieu, demonstrating that the evolutionary change was spreading across early modern Europe.

49 See Malcolm, “Thomas Harrison and his Ark of Studies”, esp. 206–7. Morhof, Polyhistor, 713; Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 69; Harrison, The Ark of Studies.

50 Esposito, Soziales Vergessen, 149ff., 161ff.

51 Quintilian, Institutionis oratoriae (V.10.20), 206: “Locos appello […] sedes argumentorum, in quibus latent, ex quibus sunt petenda”.

52 Ong, Ramus, 116–21; Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, 151; Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 34ff.

53 Esposito, Soziales Vergessen, 239ff. See also Cevolini, “Indexing as Preadaptive Advance”, about indexing as evolutionary advancement.

54 Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 661: “Less reliance on memory work and rote repetition in lecture halls also brought new mental talents into play”.

55 Tritheim, De laude scriptorum, ch. 7. On the (troublesome) transition from the manuscript to the printed book, see McKitterick, Print, Manuscript.

56 Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Rule IV, 379 (you can “exonerata memoria […] liberiorem animum ad caetera transferre”).

57 Partenio, Della imitatione poetica, 39–40.

58 In this very sense, as Barthes states in “L’ancienne rhetorique”, § B.1.20, topic was a way of “operationalising latency”.

59 Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 10ff.; Carruthers, “Ars oblivionalis, ars inveniendi”.

60 Aristotle, Rhet., III, 1404b 2. See also Seneca, Epist. ad Luc., 84; Partenio, Della imitatione poetica, 26.

61 The outcomes of scientific research become socially visible only when they take on the form of publications.

62 Bartoli, Dell’huomo di lettere, 167–70, 174.

63 Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, 131.

64 Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, 355.

65 On this point, see Luhmann, “Die Behandlung von Irritationen”; Mathiesen, “The Unanticipated Event and Astonishment”, 4–5.

66 Bartoli, Dell’huomo di lettere, 145, 345, 148.

67 Placcius, De arte excerpendi, 70; Meiners, Anweisungen für Jünglinge, 91.

68 This issue is explained clearly by Luhmann, “Interdisziplinäre Theoriebildung”, 66.

69 Cf. Luhmann, “Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen”.

70 Cf. Eco and Migiel, “An Ars oblivionalis?”. In the art of memory, oblivion was possible either by substituting vivid images which had been previously placed in the storehouse or by hooking a multitude of meanings onto the same image. The former solution required a huge effort. This effort was the same the orator had to make in order to fix all active images to be used as mnemonic hooks in his mind. See Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria, 145ff. One contemporary source is Giovanni Fontana, whose Secretum de thesauro (c. 1430) recommended hiding images with a canvas or imagining that the storehouse is collapsing or burning down. According to Fontana, this system is much more effective than multiplying meanings. See the manuscript edited by Battisti and Saccaro Battisti, Le macchine cifrate di Giovanni Fontana, 155. Carruthers, “Ars oblivionalis, ars inveniendi”, 16, fn. 4, has rightly pointed out that images were cleared away, yet the basic structure of the places remained the same.

71 Drexel, Aurifodina, 57 (“Excerpta & Notae medicamentum oblivionis nobilissimum”), 258 (“Excerpere, non meminisse hic doceo”).

72 The verbs “to saturate” (imprägnieren) and “to set free” (freigeben) are drawn from the phenomenology of forgetting developed by Foerster, Das Gedächtnis.

73 Muratori, Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto, 247. Without reference to Muratori, Bisello, Medicina della memoria, 19, spoke of “capitalising reading” when dealing with “centoni” (another name for Renaissance florilegia).

74 See Lechner, Renaissance Concepts, 178, with respect to early modern florilegia, where loci are no longer a “place for storing arguments, but rather a place for storing dilations and expansions of a theme”.

75 See Malcolm, “Thomas Harrison and his Ark of Studies”, 196. Bertram, Discours von der Klugheit zu excerpiren, § 11, also states that excerpts are a kind of “Register über eine ganze Bibliotheque” (“index upon a whole library”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alberto Cevolini

Alberto Cevolini is Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He was fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Constance and visiting professor at the University of Bielefeld. He has recently edited Thomas Harrison’s Ark of Studies (Turnhout, 2017).