Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought [Hardcover]

Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this study, Ann Moss investigates the evolution of the commonplace-book from its medieval antecedents, through its humanist realization, its later printed manifestations, and, finally, to its gradual decline in the seventeenth century.

With graceful, multilingual scholarship, Moss surveys hundreds of documents with unflagging patience and sympathetic attention. --Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

extraordinarily erudite new book... --SHARPNews

This is clearly an important book. By examining that all so common sixteenth-century form, the commonplace book, Ann Moss has given us an uncommonly clear view of the intellectual intricacies of the organization of knowledge in early modern Europe. --Sixteenth Century Journal

...a compendious, learned, and thoughtful book....Moss is entirely persuasive in her assessment. Her judgements are trenchant, her familiarity with the secondary literature in several languages is exhaustive, and her intelligent sampling of this enormous mass of neo-Latin academic treatises inspires confidence. --Modern Europe

...Moss has important contributons to deliver. --Journal of Modern History