Ann M. Blair

Note Taking as an Art of Transmission

Note taking constitutes a central but often hidden phase in the transmission of knowledge. Notes recorded from reading or experience typically contribute to one’s conversation and compositions, fromwhich others can draw in turn in their own thinking and writing, thus perpetuating a cycle of transmission and transformation of knowledge, ideas, and experiences. The transmission served by personal notes most often operates within one individual’s experience—from a moment of reading and note taking to a later moment when the notes are read and sometimes rearranged and used in articulating a thought. But personal notes can also be sharedwith others, on a limited scale with family and friends and on a wider scale through publication, notably in genres that compile useful reading notes for others. A history of note taking has significance beyond the study of individual sets of extant notes by shedding light on aspects of note taking that were widely shared, notably through being taught in schools or used in particular professional contexts. Notes can take many forms—oral, written, or electronic. At its deepest level, whatever the medium, note taking involves variations on and combinations of a few basic maneuvers, which I propose to identify as the four Ss: storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting. Human memory is the storage medium with the longest history, and it remains crucial today despite our reliance on other devices, from ink on paper to computers. The range of storage media operative in different historical contexts includes the marked stone token, the clay tablet, the knotted cord or quipu, the pa-

The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe

Eight essays by major authors who attempt to find out who read, published, or advertised what, when, and where from the European Renaissance on.

A Short Note on the History of Graph Drawing

The origins of chart graphics (e.g., bar charts and line charts) are well known [30], with the seminal event being the publication of William Playfair’s (1759-1823) The Commercial and Political Atlas in London in 1786 [26]. However, the origins of graph drawing are not well known. Although Euler (1707-1783) is credited with originating graph theory in 1736 [12],[20], graph drawings were in limited use centuries before Euler’s time. Moreover, Euler himself does not appear to have made significant use of graph visualizations. Widespread use of graph drawing did not begin until decades later, when it arose in several distinct contexts. In this short note we present a selection of very early graph drawings; note the apparent absence of graph visualization in Euler’s work; and identify some early innovators of modern graph drawing.

The Rise of Note‐Taking in Early Modern Europe

The history of note‐taking has only begun to be written. On the one hand, the basic functions of selecting, summarizing, storing and sorting information garnered from reading, listening, observing and thinking can be identified in most literate contexts in some form or other. On the other hand, Renaissance humanists emphasized with unprecedented success the virtues of stockpiling notes on large scales and for the long term, thanks to the availability of paper and a new abundance of books, but also to their ability to transmit their own keen motivation to avoid any future loss of learning. We continue to share many early modern ideals for insuring the collection and retrievability of information and have built on early modern practices that facilitate the accumulation and the organization of information, including collaborative work and the use of rearrangeable slips.

An Early Modernist’s Perspective

Historians of science can gain new insights into the material practices and intellectual trajectories of natural philosophers by attending to evidence of what they read and how. From the time of the early modern period we have sources not often extant for earlier periods, including manuscript reading notes, kept in separate notebooks or in the margins of books, and advice books on how to read. From this variety of sources we can piece together evidence (though generally not a complete picture) about the reading habits peculiar to individuals as well as those widely shared in a given cultural context, including ways of relying on the reading of others; by attending to traces of reading we can also learn more about the reception of particular scientific works. The history of reading broadens the range of questions the historian of science can pose to analyze a scientific work in its historical context.

Revisiting Renaissance Encyclopaedism

The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters.

Reflections on Technological Continuities: Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books

In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury items signaling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons, to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customised in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value. keywords: manuscripts, incunabula, handpress era, printing, Prolianus, Niclaes, Colonna missal, Lucretius, Rylands Library collection A convenient moment by which to date the emergence of book history as a distinctive subfield is the seminal article published in 1980 by Robert Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’ He identified the origins of the field from work in three different areas: the Annales School studies of early modern popular culture through surviving cheap print; the ongoing work of bibliographers and library professionals expert in the study of the books themselves with all their variability; and trends in literature focused on reader response (notably following Hans-Robert Jauss). Already then Darnton described the field as a multi-disciplinary jungle spreading far and wide with no single path through it. That description is all the more true today, after thirty-five years of remarkable growth from historical, literary, and bibliographical and bibliophilic quarters which has generated countless articles, books, and conferences, a dedicated journal, and an international learned society. The recent explosion of reference books in the field is especially striking. New trends in literature and in history (including the rise of cultural history, the material turn, and a new focus on practices) may have played a role. But I have no doubt that the biggest impetus behind the rise of book history in the last two decades comes not from academic developments, but from the broad shared experience we all have, each with differences specific to our field of activity and generation, of living through an ongoing transformation of our media landscape. The web and digital media are constantly affecting how we own, share, and store texts, how we read and take notes, write and publish. Many of our students are already unfamiliar with reading a newspaper or a scholarly journal in paper rather than electronic form, or with using a photocopier rather than a scanner. At some point the balance in experiencing books will likely shift from paper to various electronic formats too. And yet to understand these new digital tools it is often crucial to understand the media which

Authorial Strategies in Jean Bodin

This chapter identifies some general patterns of Jean Bodins decisions as a prolific author in two languages and multiple fields and genres. It then focuses on how Bodin responded to critics of his Republique by using the voices of others to respond forcefully in the vernacular and by maintaining under his own name the persona of a dignified Latin author content to accept the judgements of others. More re-editions of Bodins works were published during his lifetime than afterwards (except for the Latin Republica ) an indication that Bodins own activities helped foster interest in them. Nonetheless, Bodins name was considered a selling point, to judge from the works that invoked it after his death, such as the Consilium Ioannis Bodini and the vernacular popularization of his Theatrum in the Problemata Bodini . Keywords: Consilium Ioannis Bodini ; Jean Bodin; Problemata Bodini ; Republique ; Theatrum

Disciplinary Distinctions before the "Two Cultures"

C. P. Snows conception of “two cultures” has been readily applied to modern European and especially Anglo-American contexts and used to bemoan the negative impact of disciplinary distinctions. But in the pre-modern period, disciplinary distinctions prevailed along different fault lines. I consider two examples of the dynamics between the disciplines in medieval and early modern Europe to argue that distinctions between the disciplines can foster crucial benefits along with the tensions and obstacles to interdisciplinarity of which we are more often aware. In the medieval university the institutional and intellectual separation between philosophy and theology gave the former an important measure of protection and independence from the cultural dominance of the latter. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the long-traditional distinction between mathematical disciplines and Aristotelian physics was gradually abandoned, and distinctions akin to those Snow identified were first commented on during the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (c. 1687).

The Dedication Strategies of Conrad Gessner

The 102 dedications composed by the sixteenth-century physician and polymath Conrad Gessner between 1541 and 1565 offer a rich trove of insight into many aspects of his particular career but also into the workings of the Republic of Letters more generally. Although Gessner never benefitted from a major patronage relationship and probably received limited financial support from his dedicatees, he nonetheless managed to publish a number of major works on his initiative, including folio volumes of philology, bibliography, and especially expensive works of illustrated natural history. Crucial to Gessner’s success was his accumulation of smaller contributions in kind from a wide range of people who offered him hospitality or sent him information and specimens, manuscripts and images, which Gessner used in his publications. Gessner rewarded contributors not only by private expressions of thanks, but also in print, and especially visibly in his dedications. Gessner was also unusual in calling attention to the role of learned printers for his work, by composing dedications to them and by advertising that various of his publications were initiated by requests from printers or bequests of manuscripts by recently deceased scholars. Gessner thus used the high visibility of the printed dedication to invite further contributions from learned readers, bequests of unfinished manuscripts, and proposals from printers with which to fuel his remarkable productivity.