Miscellanies and commonplace books

Lo que había sido un quehacer propio de humanistas (escribir epigramas en latín, imitando los de la Antología Griega en la versión Planudea, colocándoles un título) se convirtió en un género editorial al publicarse en Augsburgo el Emblematum liber de Alciato, en 1531, por el impresor Heinrich Steyner. A partir de ese momento, muchos autores imitaron el formato editorial, dando paso a un género literario, y se produjeron más de 6.500 publicaciones de este tipo entre 1531 y 1700, principalmente en Francia, Italia, Bélgica, Países Bajos, Alemania y España. Los jesuitas tuvieron importancia especial en la difusión de la moda emblemática, tanto por la formación que dieron en sus colegios como por la producción de libros de emblemas de sus miembros. A finales del siglo XVI, los emblemas se incorporaron también a las polianteas, florilegios y enciclopedias de lugares comunes, obras a las que acudían los poetas, oradores, sacerdotes, etc. en busca de material erudito para ornar su discurso o producciones.

“The Network Behind ‘Tottel’s’ Miscellany,” English Literary Renaissance 46:2 (2016), 193-224 - provided here in copyright-allowed Word version.
Abstract: Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward (1557), was a landmark volume in English printing history and literary culture. However, its origins are poorly understood. While half a dozen possible editors have been suggested, critics have increasingly settled that role on the printer, Richard Tottel. “The Network behind ‘Tottel’s’ Miscellany” uses new manuscript evidence to show the involvement of one William Digges of Newington-next-Sittingbourne, Kent. Writing between the end of 1555 and the summer of 1557, an anonymous correspondent asked Digges to collect copies of Wyatt’s works from “bothe out of your owne store and from my ladye wiat.” William was a cousin of Leonard Digges (who carried the letter), a relative of Thomas Wyatt the younger and a business partner of William Brooke, future Lord Cobham. His associations in these years point not to Tottel as the originating force behind the Miscellany, but to a network of a network of kin, admirers, and “frendes of olde Sir Thomas wiat.” If Songes and Sonettes initiated a trend in which printers rather than authors gathered and published poetry, it did so only by suggesting a production model in which it did not fully participate.

This article explores the composition of Glasgow MS Ferguson 6, a sixteenth-century alchemical miscellany that combines almost every known image cycle in the related period corpus. Some of the manuscript's illuminations draw directly from print sources, but edit their content to create more affect for the reader. Others rework existing manuscript sources, culminating in a wordless copy of the Aurora Consurgens, a simultaneously erotic and scientific text. This article argues that love—carnal and visceral, as well as the traditional sense of philosophy as love of wisdom—is the motivation behind the creation of learned manuscripts of this kind.

final version via T&F: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02666286.2017.1322448

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the most important tools of a reader or writer was a commonplace book (CPB). Peter Beal, leading expert on English manuscript studies, defines a commonplace book as “a manuscript book in which quotations or passages from reading matter, precepts, proverbs and aphorisms, useful rhetorical figures or exemplary phrasing, words and ideas, or other notes and memoranda are entered for ready reference under general subject headings.”

Your sources can include, first and foremost, the assigned readings and supplementary materials, as well as any other useful texts you come across. I encourage you to supplement CPB entries with extra-curricular material: quotations from readings for other classes, lyrics from songs, lines from movies, tweets with relevant hashtags, an occasional quotation from a classmate during discussion, etc. These extra-curricular commonplace passages, however, are in addition to and not in place of the required passages as described below.

This chapter explores the idea that many plays were published as ‘literature’, whilst also suggesting that ‘watching’ was a highly textual activity. The argument is in four parts. First, it addresses the roles of printed books in the public theatre, considering how they were regularly read in the playhouse and, indeed, were also sold there. Secondly, it looks at literate members of the audience, asking how tablebooks were used in the playhouse and to what extent performed text was immediately turned back into written text. Third, it discusses the way the stage pandered to and used that reading audience: how the stage, hung about with words written on large boards, inscribed itself, encouraging readers to view it as, always, a semi-textual space. Finally it turns to audience ‘plots’: the printed abstracts of the spectacular entertainments provided by playwrights for what might be expected to be highly visual theatrical events. Performances on stage were continually surrounded by a marginalia of written words, it argues; the theatre was obsessed with text and performances were ‘published’ in many textual ways beyond or beside what happened in the printing houses.

The Ottoman miscellany examined in this thesis was borrowed from Prof. Ismail Erunsal's personal collection. The first goal of this study was to make the Miscellany accessible to researchers by transcribing the text after comparing it with the former (un)published texts pertaining to classical Turkish literature. An additional goal was to determine why these texts were compiled in this Miscellany. I reached the conclusion that it was compiled by different compilers in a long process, updating current suggestions about reasons for producing miscellanies and about ways of consumption. It has also shown that the miscellanies can be regarded and analyzed as collective works. Accordingly, the texts in verse in the Miscellany were studied in terms of the literary styles adopted by the poets in the Miscellany. The fact that the poems belonging to the philosophical style in classical Turkish literature were relatively more numerous than the others, along with the fact that the texts in prose had short notes by the compilers, demonstrates that the compilers of the Miscellany were followers of the philosophical style. The texts written in prose have been separately studied and analyzed in terms of the reasons for the miscellanies' production reasons and their ways of consumption. This thesis is important in that it shows why a variety of texts were collected in a manuscript, going beyond the transcription of miscellanies, which is the general tendency of researchers in similar subjects.
ÖZET
Bu tezin konusu, Prof. Dr. İsmail Erünsal'ın kişisel koleksiyonunda bulunan ve onsekizinci yüzyılda derlendiğini düşündüğümüz 90 varaklık karışık bir Mecmua'dır. Çalışmanın ilk amacı, Mecmua'da bulunan manzum ve mensur metinleri yayımlanmış metinlerle karşılaştırdıktan sonra transkripsiyon alfabesi ile araştırmacılara erişilebilir hâle getirmektir. İkinci amacı ise Mecmua'da bulunan manzum ve mensur metinlerin bir araya getirilişinin arkasındaki sebepleri bulmaya çalışmaktır. Farklı mürettipler tarafından uzun bir zaman diliminde son hâlini aldığı kanaatine vardığımız bu Mecmua, hem mecmuaların tüketim biçimlerine dair birtakım önerileri güncellemiş hem de mecmuaların kolektif bir eser olarak incelenebileceğini göstermiştir. Bu bakımdan Mecmua'da yer alan manzum metinler, şairlerin takip ettikleri veya benimsedikleri edebî üsluplar çerçevesinde ele alınmıştır. Mecmua'da Nābī ekolü olarak da bilinen hikemî üslubu takip eden şairlere ait şiirlerin daha fazla tercih edilmesi ve Mecmua içinde yer alan mensur kısımlar ve kısa notlar Mecmua mürettiplerinin hikemî üslubu benimsediklerini göstermiştir. Mecmua'daki mensur metinlerin üzerinde ayrıca durulmuş ve mecmuaların üretim sebepleri ve tüketim biçimleri üzerine fikir yürütülmüştür. Bu çalışmanın önemi ise mecmuaların yalnızca transkripsiyon ile aktarılmasından bir adım öteye giderek Mecmua'da bulunan bu metinlerin hangi sebeplerle bir araya getirildiğini göstermeyi hedeflemesidir. Mecmuaların bize sunduğu metinlerin bu tür yöntemlerle incelenmesinin Osmanlı sahası klasik Türk edebiyatındaki edebî üsluplara ve Osmanlı yazılı kültürüne dair ufuk açıcı bilgiler vereceği kanaatindeyiz.

This article investigates not whether one person, using one form
of shorthand, on one occasion, copied Q1 Hamlet, but whether some people, using any form of handwriting they liked, on any number of occasions, could have penned Hamlet Q1. It considers evidence that plays, like sermons, were noted during
performance; it looks at what might constitute ‘note traces’ in the text of Hamlet and asks why watchers might want to capture in notes – and then publish – the uttered performances that they heard.

Estudio de dos Cadernos de diversas curiosidades donde se acumulan elementos dispares que sólo se articulan en su relación con la reina Catarina de Bragança (1638-1705): sus bodas con Carlos II de Inglaterra explican el componente epitalámico (que amalgama a su vez poemas celebratorios de la dimensión política del casamiento con abundante poesía erótica y escatológica); documentos sobre la destitución de su hermano Afonso VI de Portugal; poesía y documentos sobre el apoyo de la reina a los judeoconversos portugueses; recetas de interés para las artes decorativas, reglas para pasatiempos y juegos de palabras. La yuxtaposición de estos elementos se hace de modo que entran en diálogo, produciendo lecturas distintas de las que tienen por separado.

A study of two Curiosity chapbooks that bring together most disparate elements articulated only in relation to Queen Catherine of Bragança (1638-1705): her wedding to Charles II of England justify the presence of the epitalamic components (celebratory poems on the political dimensions of the event, erotic and eschatologic poetry); documents relative to the destitution of her brother, Afonso VI of Portugal; poetry and documents on the queen's support for Portuguese Jews and converts; formulae and instructions of interest to decorative arts, pastimes and plays with words. By been yuxtaposed, all these elements engage in a dialogue that allow readings different from the meanings each entry has separately.

Anthologies of speeches excerpted from history books constitute a relatively little-known rhetorical and bibliographic genre. From ancient times to the present day, the practice of culling characters’ orations from one or more works and publishing them independently of their original source has produced new and different ways of reading and using history. Anthologies of Historiographical Speeches offers an introduction to the very diverse questions that arise from the study of the genre through a variety of approaches and methodological tools. Lying at the point where rhetoric and historiography intersect, the essays included in this volume focus on the rhetorical aspects of the collections, as well as on their production, transmission, and reception from antiquity to the early modern period.

Although the anthology has its roots in the ancient world, it arose in German letters in the eighteenth century. While the nineteenth century can be called – quantitatively and terminologically – the heyday of the anthology, the eighteenth century was the dawn of its diversity. The present special number examines this variety, as represented in particular examples. The first and most obvious problem for our period is terminological. Once we overcome the heterogeneous terms for anthologies, however, we propose a focus on their functions. Central to these is an acknowledgement of an anthology's agenda, which can be applied or aesthetic, cultural-political or poetological. Consequently, we contend that examining eighteenth-century anthologies and collections into the mid-nineteenth century contributes more broadly to an emergent body of scholarship on editorship and its relationship to the topic of authorship at a time when a commercial book market was becoming established, and for which the ‘modern author’ was increasingly plural in its manifestations.

Die Anthologie hat zwar ihre Wurzeln in der Antike, in der deutschsprachigen Literatur gewinnt die Sammelform jedoch erst im 18. Jahrhundert an Aktualität. Während das 19. Jahrhundert zahlenmäßig wie terminologisch als das eigentliche Jahrhundert der Anthologie angesehen werden kann, gilt es hier, das 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts als Formierungsphase der deutschsprachigen Anthologie in den Blick zu nehmen. Das vorliegende Themenheft widmet sich dieser Vielfalt mit einer Reihe von exemplarischen Studien. Die folgende Einleitung stellt die deutschsprachige Anthologie von ca. 1700 bis 1850 als Forschungsgegenstand vor und unternimmt sowohl terminologische wie funktionale Abgrenzungsversuche, um sie im Spannungsverhältnis zu anderen Sammelformen zu thematisieren. Dabei wird dem ästhetischen, kulturellen und poetologischen Potenzial der anthologischen Sammlung Rechnung getragen. Die unternommene Neuperspektivierung der Anthologie des 18. Jahrhunderts bis in das 19. Jahrhundert hinein versteht sich im weiteren Sinne als Beitrag zu einem wachsenden Forschungsinteresse am Thema der Herausgeberschaft, das nicht zu trennen ist von Überlegungen zu Autorschaftskonzepten in einer Zeit, als sich ein literarischer Markt etablierte.

La literatura aljamiada es una producción principalmente miscelánea, aunque también existen manuscritos unitarios y facticios. El objetivo de este artículo es hacer una clara presentación sobre los conceptos de manuscrito «unitario», «misceláneo» y «facticio» —palabras aún muy confusas de delimitar en esta tradición, por la complejidad que entrañan—, con el fin de identificar claramente cuáles son las diferencias semánticas entre los tres términos, y cómo esa apreciación, a priori anodina, va a ser fundamental a la hora de interpretar correctamente la producción, transmisión y recepción de los códices moriscos. Los fondos manuscritos sobre los que fundamentaré mi argumentación son los conservados en la biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás del CCHS del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, así como en la Bibliothèque Nationale de France (París) y Bibliothèque Méjanes de Aix-en-Provence.

Pourquoi, alors que rien ne semblait particulièrement l’y prédisposer, Brillat-Savarin est-il devenu de nos jours, et grâce à la seule Physiologie du goût, une référence majeure et un représentant incontournable du bon goût français en matière de gastronomie ? Une étude des modalités discursives et du dispositif énonciatif mis en place dans son texte permet de comprendre comment – et d’évaluer dans quelle mesure – l’œuvre a pu idéalement s’inscrire dans un discours de l’universalité française grâce au développement d’une fiction de complicité avec le lecteur et à l’instauration pragmatique d’une relation didactique fondée sur un rapport ambigu à la référence scientifique, entre scientificité et pseudo-science.

For more than four centuries, cultural preferences, literary values, critical contexts, and personal tastes have governed readers’ responses to Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early private readers often considered these poems in light of the religious, political, and humanist values by which they lived. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth- century readers, such as stationers and editors, balanced their personal literary preferences against the imagined or actual interests of the literate public to whom they marketed carefully curated editions of the sonnets, often successfully. Whether public or private, however, many disparate sonnet interpretations from the sonnets’ first two centuries in print have been overlooked by modern sonnet scholarship, with its emphasis on narrative and amorous readings of the 1609 sequence. First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reintroduces many early readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets, arguing that studying the priorities and interpretations of these previous readers expands the modern critical applications of these poems, thereby affording them numerous future applications. This volume draws upon book history, manuscript studies, and editorial theory to recover four lost critical approaches to the sonnets, highlighting early readers’ interests in Shakespeare’s classical adaptations, political applicability, religious themes, and rhetorical skill during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Download link contains individual chapter abstracts.

Villani Stefano, “Raccolte di aforismi. Gli Avvertimenti di Alessandro Amidei come plagio e riscrittura di alcune massime di Francesco Guicciardini, Giovan Francesco Lottini e Francesco Sansovino,” in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore – Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, serie 5, 9/1 (2017), pp. 127-149

On January 3, 1661 a certain Amidei Alessandro offered to the king of England Charles II a manuscript collection of political aphorisms, that is currently preserved at the Library of Clarke, University of California at Los Angeles. He presented himself as the author of the maxims, which in reality were copied from a printed collection of aphorisms by Guicciardini, Lottini and Sansovino edited by the latter under the title Propositioni, overo Considerationi in materia di cose di Stato in 1583 and republished multiple times in the following decades. A singular figure with a shifting and elusive identity, Amidei was an Italian Jew who moved to England in 1656. As an audacious plagiarist, Amidei took full advantage of the flexibility of the manuscript form, recomposing the maxims to serve his own aims. This case study helps us to understand this creative reuse of aphoristic matter as a common practice of the Baroque age.

U članku se objavljuju prva povijesna i književnopovijesna analiza te transliteracija kasnosrednjovjekovnoga teksta ot er(u)s(o)l(i)ma i groba b(o)žiê čt(enie) koji je zapisan u Vinodolskom zborniku (Zagreb: Arhiv HAZU, sign. III a 15). Posrijedi je jedini zasad poznati hrvatski srednjovjekovni itinerar po Svetoj zemlji, koji je vjerojatno bio sastavljen na temelju nepoznata latinskoga ili romanskoga teksta. Obrazlaže se hipoteza prema kojoj hrvatskoglagoljski itinerar nije bio zamišljen kao praktičan hodočasnički vodič, nego kao poučan tekst namijenjen učvršćivanju »kolektivnoga pamćenja« o Svetoj zemlji kao prostoru na koji kršćani imaju isključivo pravo. Osim toga, iznosi se hipoteza da je hrvatskoglagoljski itinerar mogao biti namijenjen razmatranju povijesti Spasenja u obliku virtualnoga hodočašća.

[The article presents the first edition and literary and historical analysis of a text »ot er(u)s(o)l(i)ma i groba b(o)žiê čt(enie)« [The Reading on Jerusalem and God's Sepulchre] which is preserved in a late medieval Glagolitic codex known as the Vinodol miscellany (Zagreb: Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, sign. III a 15). The text is identified as a member of the genre of medieval itineraria and it is the only known medieval itinerary around the Holy Land written in the Croatian language. While the direct source of the Croatian texts has not been found, a few idiosyncratic toponyms point to the conclusion that the Croatian writer was using a Latin or a Romance source. The itinerary scripts the pilgrimage from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Hebron, where the creation of Adam was to be commemorated, and I argue that the pilgrims' progression through the sites could have been envisaged as the commemoration of the history of salvation in reverse order. Given that the text barely mentions the existing Muslim presence in the Holy Land, it can be concluded that it was unlikely to be used as a practical guide for a real pilgrimage. A further support for this conclusion comes from the introduction of the itinerary in a codex between various texts which were written for the purpose of religious instruction. I argue that the Croatian itinerary could have been written as an instructive text which was meant to promote the Western construct of the Holy Land as a sacred area to which the Christians have the exclusive right. Furthermore, I suggest that the itinerary could have been primarily used as a script for a meditative religious devotion in the form of a virtual pilgrimage.]

Part of my long-term project on King Sebastian, this is a study and critical edition of a collection of poems and historical documents written separately (in Portuguese and in Spanish) and copied together by the same hand shortly after the battle of Ksar-el-Kébir (1578), where King Sebastian and many thousands of his subjects lost their lives, and Portugal its independence.
Notwithstanding the individual importance of several entries (previously unknown poems, invaluable historical documents on the logistic preparations for the battle), the Miscelânea has its own significance as a whole work where different components have been arranged sequentially to constitute an orderly narrative, discussing the causes, facts and consequences of the battle, all combining moral and political perspective.
In this cathartic memory of the traumatic events of 1575-1583, the center piece is La lamentable pérdida del rey don Sebastián y del reino de Portugal. I attributed this long poem to Jerónimo Corte-Real and studied the reasons for its being neglected (along with the whole codex) for centuries: Corte-Real, a most respected poet and fidalgo in his days, writes as part of Phillip II strategy to justify his taking over the Portuguese kingdom in 1580, an attitude that Portuguese nationalists considered disloyal.
http://livrariaonline.bnportugal.gov.pt/Issue.aspx?i=322229

Earle Havens' beautifully arranged and illustrated survey of the history of commonplace books was produced in conjunction with a 2001 exhibition at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Commonplace Books is accompanied by an edition of Of Common Places, or Memorial Books, a seventeenth-century manuscript apology and prescriptive manual on the keeping of "useful" commonplace books.

Pela diversidade aos níveis do conteúdo, géneros e autores Miscelânea Pereira de Foios está para além de um cancioneiro. Sendo uma compilação de referência para a compreensão da história da poesia peninsular quinhentista, possibilita paralelamente uma leitura das circunstâncias da política ibérica do século XVI.
«A Miscelânea Pereira de Foios, inteiramente com-posta por fragmentos de autoria alheia, sem reelaboração, está mais próxima dos cancioneiros e dos «livros copiadores» de cartas e documentos, frequentemente unidos por uma mão copista comum, e sobretudo pelo gosto e necessidades do colecionador, que justapõe, segundo diferentes critérios, obras dos autores mais díspares. Como num cancioneiro e num livro copiador, observam-se certas continuidades no que diz respeito aos géneros (séries de sonetos ou de glosas), conteúdos (tiradas de poemas espirituais ou pastoris, grupos de cartas sobre a mesma pessoa ou assunto) ou aos autores.»
Com edição crítica, introdução e notas de José Miguel Martínez Torrejón e textos latinos editados e traduzidos por Inês de Ornellas e Castro e Maria do Rosário Laureano Santos.

This article proposes that in Song China, as opposed to early modern England, user publication or the publication of texts by readers quickly adjusted to the print medium. It does so on the basis of an examination of the publishing history of Wang Mingqing’s 王明清 (1127-after 1214) serially published notebook, Huizhu lu 揮麈錄 (Waving the duster) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and an analysis of how manuscript and print texts were used and discussed throughout it. The article aims to contribute towards a better understanding of the relationship between print and manuscript at a time when printing had just become a medium for the dissemination of a wide variety of types of knowledge and particularly of twelfth-century perceptions of this relationship. Wang Mingqing’s notebook further illustrates that in notebooks literati collected and published manuscript and print texts of value to them, including those related to recent dynastic history. The display of textual connoisseurship was one of several ways in which growing numbers of men expressed their aspiration for literati status in notebooks from the twelfth century onwards.

This dissertation focuses on a textual and contextual analysis of two previously unstudied sets of pseudo-historical narratives produced and reproduced in miscellanies and fascicles throughout the “post-classical” period of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. These texts are the Bahrü’l-Mükâşefe (The Sea of Mutual Revelations) and the Hikâyet-i Zuhûr-ı Âl-i ‘Osmân (The Story of the Rise of the House of ‘Osmân), and respectively they deal with an imagined future Ottoman sultanic geneaology and a largely legendary Ottoman imperial past, and as such they—as well as their antecedent texts, the Papasnâme and the Menâkıb-ı Mahmûd Paşa—can be read as related to the perennial historiographical questions of the “decline” and “rise” of the Ottoman Empire. The aim of the study is to examine some widely held “post-classical” perceptions, convictions, aspirations, and anxieties concerning the empire and its past, present, and future as they developed in the context of the changes and transformations that began to occur from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. As such, the study will be less of an empirically and positivistically based analysis of data than an examination of cultural history and mentalities in relation to how the aforementioned perceptions, convictions, aspirations, and anxieties came to be translated into the Ottoman popular imagination and social memory in the post-classical period of the Ottoman imperial history.

The materials available to the fan bricoleur vary, as fashions in art and media technologies develop, and creative spaces are now largely digital rather than physical, but practices remain strikingly the same from paper to screen. Commonplace books were compiled in private, domestic spaces, but were also performative – left out to impress visitors with their owners' erudition, or given to friends and lovers to cement private and public bonds. In the digital era, these activities are similarly practiced in publically accessible online spaces. A complex history of women's responses to culture is recorded in these texts.

This paper is concerned with the uses of ancient sources in devotional love emblems, focusing on two collections in particular: Otto van veen’s Amoris divini emblemata, and the little-studied, but more often reprinted Flammulae amoris by Michel Hoyer. It argues that the use of quotations should not be taken as intertextual allusions to coherent, ‘original’ contexts, but instead points to the expedience of commonplace authorities for reaching a trans-confessional readership.

Edición crítica y anotada de una miscelánea aragonesa, publicada por vez primera en 1650, cuya singularidad permite analizar de modo global las peculiaridades, circunstancias y evolución de buena parte de la narrativa del Barroco en su conjunto, y cuenta con una extensa introducción (257 pp.). Reseñas de Jeremy Robbins, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool), 82 (2005), pp. 115-116 y Alberto del Río Nogueras, Analecta malacitana, XXV, 1 (2002), pp. 332-334.

The main reason behind the compilation of (multiple-text manuscripts) MTMs by Mudéjares and Moriscos was the need to provide access to a basic knowledge of Islam to as many people as possible and to preserve it in spite of increasingly harsh conditions. However, functions and readers were not the same, which is the reason why I suggest a typology of Mudéjar and Morisco MTMs in two groups: on the one hand, a collection of chapters and/or small fragments copied from various works from either an earlier or a contemporaneous date; and on the other hand, the MTMs that ceased to have this miscellaneous character and began to be perceived-and therefore transmitted-as unitary manuscripts: at some point, both the copyist and the reader inevitably ended up thinking that all the texts contained in the codex were actually part of a single unit, in such a way that these MTMs started being copied and used as a unitary volume.

The preface of the 1600 anthology Belvedere introduces its collected excerpts as ‘most learned, grave, and wittie sentences; each line being a severall sentence, and none exceeding two lines at the uttermost’. For something to stand out from its context, it must be a lesson worth learning, expressed with a gravity that acquires through its compression the tang of wit. What marks out a commonplace, winning it a place in the anthology, is a question of form as well as content. A sentence recommends itself not only through the message it communicates, but also the tone in which it is framed: hence the importance of condensation, alliteration, and epigrammatic bite. It is not enough that a statement be true for it to be collected; it must sound true too. This paper will look closely at Belvedere to think about this tension between the form and the content of a commonplace, according to which its truth-value lies not just in what it says, but how it says it. The tension is especially pronounced when multiple sentences jostle under headings: ‘overcrowding’, as Erasmus warned, ‘prevents them from letting their light shine’. In the clutter of often indistinguishable, often contradictory commonplaces, what makes one stand out from the rest is likely to be some particularity of its form.

One formal feature that seems to mark out a thought as collectible, especially for this anthology, is rhyme. The sound of rhyme can make a pithy thought glow with a kind of magic authority, illuminating the consonance between the truth of the thought and the artfulness of its expression. In this paper, I will think about rhyme as the point where the interests of the commonplace book and of the poet intersect with one another. Rhyming couplets might have been especially attractive to early modern collectors, as moments in a poem where language can sound peculiarly truthful. I want to develop this thought in relation to two poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, both of which are well represented in Belvedere, and both of which are interested in the vexed relationship between the content and the form of truth. Reading these poems in the light of the anthology, and vice versa, allows us to think further about what in poetry might be said to be true, and how that truth might look different when it appears in the context of the collection.

Around 1530, at the peak of the Spanish imperial dominance of a large part of western Europe and the Americas, a Hebrew professor in the then leading humanist university of Alcalá de Henares wondered deep down in his heart about what to do. Born as a Jew in Spain and converted (as a “Converso”) around the fateful year of 1492, when Jews were banned from legally living in the Iberian kingdoms, he had been summoned in 1530 by the powerful ideological police, the infamous Spanish Inquisition, to act as an expert witness in the ongoing trial of a “Judaizer”--a legally Christian person who was accused of practising Judaism clandestinely. He turned up before the Inquisition as a witness. But in his more intimate life, this Hebrew professor, known by his Christian name of Alfonso de Zamora, managed to write down a shot guideline for Conversos being brought before the ecclesiastical tribunal. He cautiously wrote it in the reserved language of the Hebrews among his private personal notes. In the course of his career of more than forty years, Alfonso de Zamora, the paramount Hebrew Christian in early modern Spain, faced the Inquisition and individual inquisitors more than once. In my talk, we will explore together how relevant his experience is for our own modern struggles: how Alfonso faced discrimination, issues of identity, self-definition, and belongingness. In the process, I hope we will all be inspired by the complex personality of early modern Converso Hebraist Alfonso de Zamora.

“Combing the Annals of Barbarians” is the central chapter in my book, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010). The phrase “Annals of Barbarians” is from Erasmus, who mentions it as one of the important categories of books that might be mined for vital information. The chapter is a close study of Milton’s commonplace Book, and particularly its “Index Politicus,” the largest of three sections of this manuscript.  It places Milton’s commonplacing methods in the context of his contemporaries, and explores what these notes reveal about his rhetorical methods.