The Renaissance Commonplace Book & Female Intellectual Rebellion

English lessons at school tended to view texts as the finished products of a single author’s genius. As a result, our analyses are largely focused on that author’s intentions; their life and and their creation. It was not until my second year at university that I became fully aware of how narrow this perspective was. When studying the Renaissance period it is necessary to understand books as material objects with a past, present and future, as products of complex and multifarious processes and people. To illustrate this idea, a book may have started as a pile of handwritten notes which were then refined, expanded and bound in a manuscript notebook, which was then edited by the author’s friend who proceeded to copy a couple of sentences into her own notebook. The author then decided to convert her manuscript into print-form, which involved liaising with a printing-house, and later the bookshops who were to sell the book to potential readers. The life-cycle did not stop here: it continued through the engagement of the readers who annotated and edited their copies to form considerably new texts. Books were and are indefinite works-in-progress: not just to be read but also used. 

When researching for my essay on this broad topic I came across manuscript commonplace books. These notebooks were of a highly practical nature and used to maximise the study and storing of knowledge. A commonplace book is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as ‘A book in which “commonplaces” or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads’. In their commonplace books, readers compiled a myriad of ‘commonplaces’, which could include sententious phrases, aphorisms, metaphors, proverbs, poetic verse and whatever they deemed worth preserving for later use. This was all organised under appropriately chosen headings, so as to enable the memorisation and easy retrieval of the knowledge when the time came for the compiler to show off her most recent reading. These carefully structured notebooks were a typical way for a renaissance student to study literature. Each commonplace book was a unique, physical manifestation of the reader’s interests, taste, habits and company. 

The more I read on the subject, however, the more I read the same jarring idea repeated again and again: women did not make commonplace books. It was based on the idea that women simply did not need to make commonplace books. Essentially, why would an idle, domesticated woman who is not allowed to attend formal education want to study classical and contemporary literature so methodically and productively? I therefore decided to question the idea in my dissertation, with the intention of including women as active participants in this gender-exclusive intellectual tradition. 

I started my research by using the OED to track the terminological history of the ‘commonplace book’. What I found was that the term was unstable over time. I therefore demonstrated that the term came to encompass a much broader range of notebooks, not just the ones obeying the strictest prescriptions. Though commonplace books were taught at schools and universities to be used in relation to classical and religious texts, over the late fifteenth-century the prescribed source content of the commonplace book became far more varied, extending across multiple fields of knowledge including law, politics, science, poetry and prose: a ‘common place’ for all material. Taking this further, I also did terminological analyses on lexical variants of the ‘commonplace book’, including ‘notebook’, ‘table book’, ‘writing book’ and ‘miscellany’. By investigating their use at the time I noticed the terms were often interchangeable, forming a spectrum of terminology in which all notebooks could fall. While these terminological categories certainly existed and were used by early modern readers, by the mid-seventeenth-century, the terminological boundaries had become very much blurred. It was in these liminal spaces that I situated the commonplace books compiled by the women I sourced. 

The sourcing process felt like following a trail. I started by using the Perdita Project website (https://web.warwick.ac.uk/english/perdita/html/) to locate manuscripts which could fall into these fluid categories. As I read more secondary literature I would also note down any manuscripts that fit my requirements, paying close attention to the footnotes. Eventually I narrowed down my sources to six women: Sarah Cowper, Lady Katherine Ranelagh, Elizabeth Lyttelton, Sarah Horsington, Ann Bowyr and Lady Anne Southwell. Some of the manuscripts could only be viewed in digital form on the archive’s website but Ranelagh’s and Bowyr’s I was able to consult myself in the Royal Society and Bodleian library archives. After writing commentaries on each manuscript, it became obvious that these young intellectuals were actively engaging with the commonplace book genre in very different ways, and to varying extents. 

Drawing up a mind map in the planning stage of my writing helped me visualise where each commonplace book fitted on the spectrum. Once I had this clear image, I grouped them into three loose categories: medical, miscellaneous and moral. By taking as case studies these six commonplace books, analysing and grouping them according to their content, I observed the dynamic relationship between these texts and the genre which they at times emulated and at others disregarded. Each category represented a different edge of the terminological spectrum and so displayed different types of digression from the genre. It became clear that these books were ultimately objects of use, and so the manuscript adapted accordingly to whatever its compiler needed, whether that be for handwriting practice, diversion or keeping a record of scientific practice. Not only did I find women engaging with the commonplace book tradition, but I also found women who were avid scientists, rhetoricians, poets and orators. Lady Ranelagh’s commonplace book, for example,  shows her to have been a central part of the scientific discussion within the Royal Society, having shared her medical commonplace book with her brother, Robert Boyle, and several other scientific colleagues.

What I concluded at the end of my dissertation was that by including women in the discussion of the commonplace book tradition we could paint a much more extensive and detailed picture of the evolution of the genre over time. This evolution has continued far past the late seventeenth-century where my research ends. We can see its remnants in the modern revision notebook and school textbook. Reflecting on the way these women were barred from a formalised education makes their intellectual rebellions all the more powerful. Their manuscripts acted as a vehicle for them to force their minds and opinions into the scholarly spheres of their male counterparts. As we move away from less binary interpretations of the world and its literature, we open ourselves up to a much more expansive vision of the way this world changed and adapted with time. I like to think that we can carry on the legacies of these great women by continuing to place ourselves in male intellectual spaces, encouraging them to adapt and change, much like the Renaissance commonplace book.