Assessing the Impact on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

Although much has been written about the history of commonplacing, there is a lack of evidence-based research to show the extent to which this historical practice may still be valuable today as a pedagogy that educates citizens in critical reading for democracy. This article describes an institutional-review-board-approved, experimental study to answer this question. Three sections of the same first-year reading and writing course were compared: one section did not use commonplace books, a second section used commonplace books that included quotations only, and a third section used commonplace books with reflective writing. We expected to find that students who used commonplace books would perform better in end-of-study assessments than those who did not. Instead, we were surprised to find that many of the students who were not required to use commonplace books created their own note-taking methods that performed a similar function. In essence, they developed their own commonplace book culture and methodology using Google Docs and other social reading practices. Their performance was as strong as the students who used commonplace books.

The Manuscript Miscellany

This chapter surveys manuscript miscellanies or commonplace books, unique compilations of seemingly random items chosen by individual compilers for their own purposes. The author discusses the physical evidence for the compilation procedure, the textual and cultural context in which the compilation was made, and the content of the manuscript in question.

Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene

“I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?” The plaint of an anonymous reader in 1712 sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene's reception history, from its first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, who urged him to write anything else instead, to Virginia Woolf, who insisted that if one wants to like the poem, “the first essential is, of course, not to read” it. For more than four centuries critics have sought to counter this strain of readerly resistance, but rather than trying to remedy the frustrations and failures of Spenser's readers, this book cherishes them as a sensitive barometer of shifts in the culture of reading itself. Indeed, tracking the poem's mixed fortunes in the hands of its bored, baffled, outraged, intoxicated, obsessive, and exhausted readers turns out to be an excellent way of rethinking the past and future prospects of literary study. By examining the responses of readers from Queen Elizabeth and the keepers of Renaissance commonplace books to nineteenth-century undergraduates, Victorian children, and modern scholars, this book offers a compelling new interpretation of the poem and an important new perspective on what it means to read, or not to read, a work of literature.

Reproducing Music

Amateur musicians played an important role in the material reproduction of musical texts in the eighteenth century. Their work represents the coalescence of technological, bibliographical, and cultural forces in the early national period. Print and manuscript were mutually informing technologies for music reproduction, and both entailed manual and creative labor and expertise. Yet, unlike print, chirography (handwriting) focused attention on the creation of unique, personalized items; moreover, the practice of copying music by hand challenged the primacy of the author by emphasizing an effort to re-cord (to take material to heart). Thus, manuscript music books can be linked to earlier modes of book production, such as commonplace books. Yet they also align with other genres, such as anthologies. Finally, gendered expectations informed books’ creation: like other forms of handwork, musical penmanship expressed femininity. The work of copying music was subject to the same gendered evaluations that minimized the significance of (and yet relied on) women’s domestic work.

Remaking Verse in the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany

The immensely popular eighteenth-century poetic miscellany was more than simply a collection of poems: the selection and presentation of texts constituted a deliberate, market-focused, editorial, and publishing policy that emphasized novelty and utility. Poems were edited, abridged, and repackaged in a variety of ways as they were appropriated to their editors’ ends. This chapter examines the scale and variety of poetic miscellany publication, the strategies of their creators, and the audience expectations they both generated and met, to show that they demonstrate the literary or market preoccupations of the editors and booksellers, often in a manner akin to the practice of commonplace books. Particular attention is paid to issues of sexuality and gender in relation to the re-presentation of the poems of Aphra Behn. The chapter draws evidence from a wide range of publications, including John Dryden and Jacob Tonson, Robert Dodsley, and Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry.

Arranging Daily Gifts of Devotion

This chapter begins by examining some of the ways that Victorian readers inscribed, marked, and altered devotional books. Some kept albums, scrapbooks, and commonplace books in order to pluck and transplant, as it were, verse from original sources to their own blank books, while others annotated the pages of existing books or wrote lengthy dedications. Even as readers were engaged in their own tactile interactions with devotional texts, the religious publishing marketplace was emulating these material reading practices as though they were a form of domestic handicraft, as in Frances Ridley Havergal’s Four-Fold Counsel tetralogy, a series of botanically inspired devotional gift books. Another of Havergal’s popular gift book sets, known as the Royal Series, is instructive, moreover, of how the material organization of devotional books could make a gift-time of daily reading.

Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry

Chapters 12 and 13 examine the experience of poetry in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, and assess the claim that the public performance of poetry was common in England at this time. The publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in 1579 shows a concern for the reader of the printed page, while Sidney’s influential Astrophil and Stella, written around the same time, exploits the tones of the speaking voice. Manuscript circulation continued, and several poets avoided print; others, however, including Shakespeare, made use of the new opportunities provided by the printed book. Popular verse was also widely disseminated through printed sheets. The publication of Jonson’s 1616 Workes definitively marks the establishment of the modern print poet. Several anthologies were published, though individuals also kept manuscript miscellanies; in favour, too, were commonplace books, both printed and handwritten. Paratexts and marginalia furnish further evidence for readers’ experience of poetry.

Sir Hugh Plat’s Network of Notebooks

This chapter discusses the notebooks of the inventor, writer on agriculture, brewer, and businessman, Sir Hugh Plat. Building on the discussion of knowledge transfer in Chapter 4, this chapter shows how Plat’s surviving manuscripts constitute a ‘network of notebooks’. Focusing on the copying and circulation of information across these volumes, the chapter reveals how Plat developed a system of annotation, which progressed from hodgepodge miscellanies, organized only by date of entry, to topically rigorous manuscripts arranged by subject. This system was essential to Plat’s lifelong project to improve recipes, information, and ultimately knowledge itself. Drawing on his printed commonplace books as well, the chapter reveals that Plat’s ‘network’ was grounded in humanist methods of reading, but that he also transformed those precepts and practices by extending them from textual examples to incorporate observed particulars and much more miscellaneous material as well.

Commonplace Failure

This chapter addresses the genre most associated with (but also more often confused with) the miscellany: the commonplace book. Starting from the frequently made observation that commonplace books are strikingly underused, this chapter argues that we should not see this failure as a rejection of the culture of annotation and transcription, but as a reflection of the increasing move towards miscellaneity. Exploring the metaphors used by humanist pedagogues to describe the practice, and examining the mise-en-page of a number of manuscripts, it shows that the spatial disposition of knowledge persisted in miscellaneous manuscripts long after the commonplace book itself faded from use. Both metaphor and mise-en-page, moreover, show that the spatial organization of knowledge was intimately connected with the memorial function of miscellanies, and so also with the vexed questions of search and retrieval and future use. Central to the chapter are John Foxe’s successive attempts to produce printed commonplace books and their use by various owners and readers.