Commonplace books are personal notebooks used to collect information that the owner finds interesting or helpful. These books can include notes, sayings, recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of measurements, prayers, legal forms, and other useful information. People have used them for a long time, especially during the Renaissance and in the 1800s.

The entries in these books are usually organized by topic, unlike journals or diaries, which are written in order of when events happened and focus on personal thoughts and feelings.

Overview

The word "commonplace" comes from the Latin phrase locus communis, which means "a general or common place." This term refers to widely known sayings or ideas, like proverbs. In the past, people created "commonplace books" to collect such sayings. For example, the writer John Milton kept a commonplace book. Sometimes, the term "commonplace book" refers to a single book that gathers ideas or writings about a specific topic, such as ethics, or explores several topics. These books are similar to anthologies or mixed-manuscripts, but they are most often personal collections of sayings or notes, organized by theme.

Commonplace books are different from diaries or travel logs. They were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars to help remember important ideas or facts. In some cases, young women were required to keep commonplace books to show they understood proper social roles and had received a good education. These books became important during the Early Modern period in Europe. At first, they were private collections, but as printing became cheaper and more information became available, some were published for the public.

In 1685, the philosopher John Locke wrote a book in French about how to create commonplace books. It was later translated into English as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. In this work, Locke explained how to organize ideas by subject, such as love, politics, or religion. After his book was published, some publishers made blank commonplace books with spaces for users to write notes and create indexes. One example was Bell's Common-Place Book, which was used by Erasmus Darwin from 1776 to 1787. His grandson, Charles Darwin, later called this book "the great book" when writing about his grandfather.

By the early 1700s, commonplace books became tools for organizing information. People used them to store quotes, observations, and definitions. In private homes, they were sometimes used to collect ethical or informative texts, along with recipes or medical notes. For women who could not attend formal schools, these books were a way to keep track of intellectual ideas. One example is the commonplace book kept by Elizabeth Lyttelton from the 1670s to 1713. Another example was published in 1855 by Anna Jameson, with sections like "Ethical Fragments" and "Theological."

Scientists and thinkers used commonplace books like a database to store and organize information. For example, Carl Linnaeus used this method to create and arrange the names in his Systema Naturae, a system still used by scientists today.

The idea of organizing notes by topic was not limited to books. In the 20th century, Henri de Lubac carried his notes in a sack, and Erasmus of Rotterdam carried a chest of notes. Erasmus used these notes to write Adagia, a collection of Latin sayings. In De Copia, he described a way to group ideas hierarchically, such as starting with the topic "Piety and Impiety," then adding subtopics like "Gratitude," and placing example texts under these headings. A "commonplace" might be a short saying or moral, like "The crowd loves and hates thoughtlessly."

Today, because of advances in technology, software programs help people do what commonplace books once did. These programs allow users to store, organize, and retrieve information in ways similar to how people used to use paper-based commonplace books.

History

Beginning in his work called Topica, Aristotle talked about different types of arguments and called them "commonplaces." He later explained in his book Rhetoric that these commonplaces could help people check if ideas were true using speeches. Cicero, in his own writings Topica and De Oratore, made the idea clearer and used it for public speaking. He also listed commonplaces, including wise sayings from philosophers, leaders, and poets. Quintilian, in his book Institutio Oratoria, which was about teaching rhetoric, told readers to memorize commonplaces. He also connected them to ideas about morals and ethics.

Ancient writers like Pliny and Diogenes Laertius collected commonplaces, but many Renaissance writers believed Aulus Gellius started the practice with his book Attic Nights.

In the first century AD, Seneca the Younger suggested readers gather ideas and sayings like bees collecting pollen and then turn them into their own words. By the late ancient times, using commonplaces in speeches was common.

Stobaeus, a writer from around the fifth century, made a large two-volume book called The Anthologies, which included parts from 1,430 works of poetry and prose. Most of these works are now lost, except for what Stobaeus wrote.

In the sixth century, Boethius translated Aristotle and Cicero’s works and made his own list of commonplaces in De topicis differentiis.

By the eighth century, commonplaces were used mainly in religious settings. Preachers and theologians collected Bible passages or quotes from approved Church leaders. Early collections were arranged by the order they appeared in their sources, but by the thirteenth century, they were grouped by themes. These collections were called florilegia, which means "gatherings of flowers." They were often used to write sermons.

Before commonplace books, Roman and Greek philosophers kept records of their thoughts and daily reflections, including quotes from others. Stoics like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius encouraged this practice. Seneca’s Meditations was originally a private notebook. In Japan, the Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon was a personal collection of poetry, anecdotes, and daily thoughts. However, these early records did not include as many sources as later commonplace books.

During the Renaissance, some scholars kept notebooks similar to commonplace books. For example, Leonardo da Vinci described his notebook as a collection of ideas from many sources, hoping to organize them later. French writer Jean Bodin called his commonplace book an "arsenal of facts."

In the fifteenth century, Italy developed two new types of books: the deluxe registry book and the zibaldone (or "hodgepodge book"). Both used everyday language instead of Latin. Giovanni Rucellai, who made one of the most detailed zibaldone, called it a "salad of many herbs."

Zibaldone were small, handwritten books. Unlike the large, decorated registry books, they often had the author’s sketches. They used simple, cursive handwriting and included a wide mix of texts, such as religious writings, recipes, and quotes from famous authors. These books showed how people were becoming more interested in secular and everyday life.

The most popular writings in zibaldone were by Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio, known as the "Three Crowns" of Florentine literature. Modern scholars use these collections to study how people in the Renaissance interacted with art and literature.

The most famous zibaldone is Giacomo Leopardi’s nineteenth-century Zibaldone di pensieri. However, Leopardi’s work is more like an intellectual diary than a traditional commonplace book.

By the seventeenth century, using commonplaces was taught in schools like Oxford. John Locke included his system for organizing commonplace books in his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The practice of commonplacing, which was part of teaching classical rhetoric, remained popular until the early twentieth century. Thinkers like Francis Bacon and John Milton were taught this method. Many Enlightenment writers, such as William Paley, used commonplace books to write their books. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were taught to keep them at Harvard, and their books still exist today.

Commonplace books were also used by writers at home. Some, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, kept messy notes mixed with other materials. Others, like Thomas Hardy, followed more organized methods similar to Renaissance practices. Over time, the role of commonplace books as a place to collect useful ideas became less popular.