Page titled "Commonplace Books", A (http://www.assumption.edu/users/lknoles/commonplacebook.html) (This reference was retrieved from the web site of Dr. Lucia Z. Knoles, an Associate Professor of English at Assumption College.)
Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplacebook is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read.
Commonplacebooks can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors.
The era of the commonplacebook reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians.
The first part of the exhibit surveys the origins of the tradition of "commonplaces" in the Classical era and traces its history in the medieval period, when such compilations of knowledge were mainly theological, philosophical or rhetorical in nature, and in the Renaissance, when the commonplacebook as a formal genre originated, according to Havens.
Among the authors and compilers of commonplacebooks represented in the exhibition are ancient Roman polymath Seneca the Younger, Protestant Reformer and humanist Philip Melanchthon, philosopher John Locke, 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon and modern poet W.H. Auden.
A commonplacebook of John W. Sterling, Class of 1864, is arranged more like a diary and includes a list in which he names some of his teachers for the Roman gods they most resemble.
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