Philosophical origins Beginning in
Topica,
Aristotle distinguished between forms of argumentation and referred to them as commonplaces. He extended the idea in
Rhetoric where he suggested that they also be used to explore the validity of propositions through
rhetoric.
Cicero in his own
Topica and
De Oratore further clarified the idea of commonplaces and applied them to public speaking. He also created a list of commonplaces which included
sententiae or wise sayings or quotations by philosophers, statesmen, and poets.
Quintilian further expanded these ideas in
Institutio Oratoria, a treatise on rhetoric education, and asked his readers to commit their commonplaces to memory. He also framed these commonplaces in moral and ethical overtones. While there are ancient compilations by writers including
Pliny and
Diogenes Laertius, many authors in the Renaissance credited
Aulus Gellius as the founder of the genre with his commonplace
Attic Nights. In the first century AD,
Seneca the Younger suggested that readers collect commonplace ideas and sententiae as a bee collects pollen, and by imitation turn them into their own honey-like words. By
late antiquity, the idea of employing commonplaces in rhetorical settings was well established.
Stobaeus, a writer usually placed in the fifth century, compiled an extensive two volume manuscript commonly known as
The Anthologies, containing excerpts from 1,430 works of poetry and prose; all but 315 of these works are lost except for Stobaeus's quotations. In the sixth century
Boethius had translated both Aristotle and Cicero's work and created his own account of commonplaces in
De topicis differentiis.
Florilegium By the eighth century, the idea of commonplaces was used, primarily in religious contexts, by preachers and theologians, to collect excerpted passages from the Bible or from approved
Church Fathers. Early in this time period passages were collected and arranged in the order of their appearance in the works from which they were taken, but by the
thirteenth century they were more commonly arranged under
thematic headings. French encyclopediast
Jean Bodin used the commonplace book as "''an arsenal of 'factoids'.''"
Zibaldone During the course of the fifteenth century, the Italian peninsula was the site of the development of two new forms of book production: the deluxe registry book and the
zibaldone (or hodgepodge book). What differentiated these two forms was their language of composition: a vernacular.
Giovanni Rucellai, the compiler of one of the most sophisticated examples of the genre, defined it as a "salad of many herbs". Zibaldone were always paper
codices of small or medium format never the large desk copies of registry books or other display texts. They also lacked the lining and extensive ornamentation of other deluxe copies. Rather than miniatures, a zibaldone often incorporates the author's sketches. Zibaldone were in cursive scripts (first
chancery minuscule and later mercantile minuscule) and contained what
palaeographer Armando Petrucci describes as "an astonishing variety of poetic and prose texts". Devotional, technical, documentary, and literary texts appear side by side in no discernible order. The juxtaposition of taxes paid, currency exchange rates, medicinal remedies, recipes, and favourite quotations from
Augustine and
Virgil portrays a developing secular, literate culture. By far the most popular literary selections were the works of
Dante Alighieri,
Francesco Petrarca, and
Giovanni Boccaccio: the "Three Crowns" of the Florentine vernacular traditions. These collections have been used by modern scholars as a source for interpreting how merchants and artisans interacted with the literature and visual arts of the Florentine Renaissance. The best-known zibaldone is
Giacomo Leopardi's nineteenth-century
Zibaldone di pensieri. It significantly departs, however, from the early modern genre of commonplace books comparable rather to the intellectual diary which was practiced by, for example, by
Lichtenberg,
Joubert,
Coleridge, and
Valéry, amongst others.
English By the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students in such institutions as
Oxford. The commonplace tradition in which
Francis Bacon and
John Milton were educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classical
rhetoric, and "commonplacing" persisted as a popular study technique until the early twentieth century. Commonplace books were used by many key thinkers of
the Enlightenment, with authors like the philosopher and theologian
William Paley using them to write books. Both
Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books at
Harvard University (their commonplace books survive in published form). However, it was also a domestic and private practice that was particularly attractive to authors. Some, such as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Mark Twain, and
Virginia Woolf kept messy reading notes that were intermixed with other quite various material; others, such as
Thomas Hardy, followed a more formal reading-notes method that mirrored the original
Renaissance practice more closely. The older, "clearinghouse" function of the commonplace book, to condense and centralize useful and even "model" ideas and expressions, became less popular over time. == Examples ==