‘[E]VERYBODY used them.’1 So claimed Walter J. Ong, thinking of Renaissance commonplace books: collections of quotations ‘culled from authors held to be authoritative’ and organized under headings to facilitate their retrieval.2 Their ubiquity will be clear to anyone who has trawled through the manuscript collections of research libraries. Some readers stored information in different ‘collecting’ books. Lady Margaret Hoby kept a commonplace book and a pocket notebook or ‘table book’; she also recorded notes in her ‘testament’ or Bible.3 Ready-made print collections of sayings were popular too.
The reason for their ubiquity is not hard to guess. Like electronic databases today, these books were useful; they helped Renaissance readers to cope with ‘information overload’.4 Large, scholarly commonplace books like the one compiled by the lawyer Julius Caesar, with its marginal instructions of ‘vide’ or ‘see’ and accompanying page numbers, seem to anticipate the ‘relational database that works as … hypertext’.5 However, they also undoubtedly helped men and some women to find something to say, especially in written compositions; they are also, then, literary tools.
The origins of the commonplace book lie in the classroom. Desiderius Erasmus’s print publications of 1512, his educational writings De ratione studii and De copia, represent ‘something of a watershed’ in the history of the commonplace book, Ann Moss argues, because they shift ‘the emphasis from reading and memorizing’ sayings, the purpose of medieval florilegia, ‘to production’.6 Commonplacing is the method Erasmus advocates to develop an abundant style (copia) on any topic in Latin, and his De copia is little more than a ‘phrase-book’, ‘a resource for the expressive variation of any proposition’.7 One hundred years later, the provincial schoolmaster John Brinsley advises in Ludus Literarius (1612) that schoolboys should not only keep a commonplace book to manage their reading, but also use Latin print collections so they have ready to hand ‘the matter of the best Authors’. These books give readers a store of ‘the choicest sayings of the very wisest of all ages’ that they might plunder when composing ‘themes’ or preparing for disputation just ‘as it is in Divinity, Law, Physick, and whatsoever Artes’.8
These methods carry over to English literary composition too, especially of prose.9 If we want to understand English Renaissance prose and its most distinctive feature, its ‘[e]pisodic, loosely serial organization’, Ong suggests, then we need to take note not only of its authors and genres, but also of this, its most basic building block: the commonplace.10 ‘It is easy to imagine how such a method [as commonplacing]’, writes Sherman, ‘might lie behind a text such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry’ (c. 1579). It ‘would almost be possible’, he proposes, ‘to work in reverse and reconstruct entries in a commonplace book that Sidney no doubt created and used as preparation for his writing’.11 The assumption is that Sidney wrote Apology for Poetry with his commonplace book to hand, writing to headings, lifting out suitable excerpts for inclusion. The same assumption applies to other writers whose works appear little more than ‘strategically assembled’ sayings on different topics.12 ‘Disingenuous as ever’, Michel de Montaigne may deny keeping notebooks, Moss writes, but his book of Essais is ‘that most uncommon of commonplace-books’. Montaigne, she argues, transcribes quotations from his reading directly into them.13
This chapter takes up this very topic, arguing that the ‘commonplace’ is as foundational to the practice of early modern prose fiction as literary devices with a more familiar resonance: such as point of view, unreliable narrators, and heteroglossia. However, it is not the commonplace as ‘building block’ that interests me so much as its creative use to make the reader think, and thus what this tells us about the composition and reception of literary prose.14
We have come, with Moss, to value the commonplace as authoritative quotation, but as Terence Cave argued previously, Erasmus’s De copia actually offers not ‘static collections of materials’ but ‘a dynamic method’ to achieve a copious style that is ‘rooted in generative principles’; it encourages the transformation of sayings.15 It is this use that interests me, and in particular how Latin sententiae are transformed in plain English. Thus, I take as my starting point not the ubiquitous and revered school text De copia, but William Baldwin’s rushed, flawed, but very popular A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, contaynyng the sayinges of the wyse (1547).16 Flawed this work may be, but the liberties Baldwin takes with the ancient wise sayings he claims to have collected make this work an important contribution to our understanding of this rhetorical habit. Baldwin has no reverence for unmodernized antiquity; he freely adapted and reworked Greek sayings which he derived second- or even third-hand, often from English sources.17 Baldwin does this both to give advice that is prosaic and indeed rather ordinary, but also to make the reader think about what is really wise.
More broadly, I will suggest, it is the loose citation and free adaptation of sayings ‘from authors held to be authoritative’ in English that paves the way for some of the most experimental and challenging prose writing, including by Baldwin himself. Thus, I am making a case for the importance of vernacular commonplacing. As Baldwin and my second collector, discussed later in this chapter, the seventeenth-century divine, Robert Burton, understood, digesting the wise sayings of the ancients in plain English makes them ‘ours’ at the same time that it creates healthy citizens. It gives them a healthy dose of scepticism.
The ‘Ethicke’ part of philosophy, writes William Baldwin, is ‘the knowlege of preceptes of al honest maners, whiche reson acknowledgeth to belong and appertayne to mans nature’ and which are ‘necessary for the comly governance of mannes lyfe’. In his A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, Baldwin gathers and provides English translations of selected precepts from a range of ancient philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, organizing them according to the three ways in which he says this subject is usually taught: first, by counsels, laws, and precepts; secondly, by proverbs and adages; and thirdly, by parables, examples, and semblables (or analogies) (A3r–v; A5v–A6r).
Nonetheless, despite Baldwin’s ambition to share ancient wisdom with his compatriots and despite the popularity of this book, Morall Phylosophie may seem an unpromising starting point, not least because it is in ‘English’. When Erasmus describes the benefits of commonplacing in De copia he is imagining a reader who aspires to speak Latin fluently, not ‘his’ native tongue. Moreover, as Ann Moss observes, most extant manuscript and print commonplace books collect ‘Latin quotations’ from authors who are ‘regarded as exemplary in terms of linguistic usage and stylistic niceties’.18 In this respect, Baldwin’s Morall Phylosophie is one of the poor relations. The material in books like this one was ‘often of much coarser stuff than the quality quotations from good authors on offer in the Latin commonplace-book’; Baldwin and other vernacular compilers aim only to give ‘popular culture [ … ] a certain veneer’.19
Moss’s reservations are not unfounded: the sayings collected by Baldwin in Morall Phylosophie are made of coarser stuff, if we accept her conception of a commonplace as a ‘quality quotation’. Baldwin appears to play fast and loose with the adaptation of ancient sententiae; he also quite shamelessly makes some of them up. Readers may be surprised to find the following quotations attributed to Socrates in Baldwin’s second book:
Neyther flatter, nor chyde thy wyfe before straungers.
Be not proude in prosperitie, neyther disprayse in adversitie. [ … ]
Moderate thy lustes, thy tongue, and thy belly. (L5r)
One would be hard-pushed to ascribe these absolutely to Socrates. After all, Socrates was not given to moral pronouncements and he left behind no written record of his teachings. Indeed, at the end of this book Baldwin pauses to acknowledge that some readers will ‘muse why I haue attributed so many sentences to Socrates, whiche they perhaps knowe to have be[en] wrytten of other men’ (M5v). Then he offers this disarming excuse: he has followed the proverb ‘Doubtefull thynges ought to be interpreted to the best’. And then adds: ‘suche thinges as I have founde wrytten, without certaynty of any certayne authour, I have ascrybed unto hym, not onelye because they be thynges meete for hym to speake, but because they be wrytten by some of his scholers, which learned them of hym’. More provocatively, Baldwin confesses that he hoped ‘the authoritie of the speaker, myght cause the matter to be more regarded’ (M5v–6r).
We might also be puzzled by Baldwin’s account of the usefulness of the analogies that he has drawn from Erasmus’s Parabolae (1514) in the fourth book of this treatise. There is no reason to explain in detail how they might be used, he explains, ‘seyng theyr owne playnnesse declare theym so plainly, as no man maye do it playnlyer’. As proof he offers an example in his preface of one analogy taken from Erasmus’s letter to Pieter Gilles in Parabolae:
Lyke as Humlocke [hemlock] is poyson to man, so is wyne poyson to Humlocke.
What declaracion neadeth this nowe, to be better understanded, except a man phisicallye shoulde shewe the properties of wyne and Humlockes? Nowe as for the use of this in perswasion, it may be thus applyed.
Lyke as Humlocke is poyson to man, and wyne poyson to Humlocke: So is Flattery poyson to frendship, and license to be flattered, poyson unto flattery.
Loe here the exaumple that Erasmus useth, wherin is contayned great councel, great wyt, and great learnyng. Fyrste it teacheth that Humlocke is poyson, & mortall whan it is myngled with wyne … Then counsayleth he to beware of flatterye, and in shewyng what maketh flattery deadly poyson, he teacheth a remedy howe to avoyde flattery. For yf we regard not a flatterer, nor geve hym lice[n]ce to flatter us, we shall never be hurte by flatterye. (Q2v–3r)
Yet, this is hardly plain. To begin with, Baldwin’s suggestion that ‘license to be flattered’ is ‘poyson unto flattery’ does not make sense, unless he means that if one is open to being flattered then it is no longer ‘flattery’. But if this is what he means, it is contradicted a few lines later when he argues that ‘yf we regard not a flatterer, nor geve hym lice[n]ce to flatter us, we shall never be hurte by flatterye’.
Part of the problem is that Baldwin seems to have misunderstood his source. Erasmus takes this example from the essay of the moral philosopher Plutarch, ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend’, to illustrate a rather different point in his letter to Pieter Gilles, that the analogies on show in Parabolae are ‘precious stones’ drawn ‘from the inner treasure-house of the Muses’; the point in using them is to win ‘double praise’.20 In Plutarch’s essay, the wine–hemlock analogy is used to explain a particular conundrum, that parrhesia, bold or frank speech, ostensibly the opposite of flattery, can in fact be used to flatter. Flatterers, Plutarch recognizes, ‘also use a certain kind of plain and free speech [parrhesian]’.21 (The example he gives is Antony’s admonishment by his friends for his hard-hearted treatment of his smitten mistress, Cleopatra. As Plutarch observes, this chiding was in fact pleasing to Antony; it confirmed Cleopatra’s love for him and so served further to debauch him.) Erasmus explains this analogy thus: flattery is likened to a poison, hemlock; frank speech is likened to its antidote, wine; but the dangerous blending of wine and hemlock is likened to the deadliest of all poisons, i.e. flattery dressed up as frank speech. Here is Erasmus’s account of it in a modern translation:
Hemlock is poisonous to man, and wine neutralises hemlock; but if you put an admixture of wine into your hemlock, you make its venom much more immediate and quite beyond treatment, because the force and energy of the wine carries the effect of the poison more rapidly to the vital centres. Now merely to know such a rare fact in nature is surely both elegant and interesting as information. Suppose then one were to adapt this by saying that adulation poisons friendship instantly, and that what neutralises that poison is the habit of speaking one’s mind, which Greek calls parrhesia, outspokenness. Now, if you first contaminate this freedom of speech and put a touch of it into your adulation, so that you are flattering your friend most insidiously while you most give the impression of perfect frankness, the damage is by now incurable.22
Baldwin seems to be struggling to understand a crucial sentence in Erasmus’s original text: ‘verum ei rursum veneno venenum esse libertatem admonendi, quam Graeci vocant paqqgria’ (‘what neutralises that poison is the habit of speaking one’s mind, which Greek calls parrhesia, outspokenness’).23 He mistranslates libertatem admonendi, literally the liberty of admonishing (a gerund)—that is, parrhesia in Greek; licentia in Latin—as ‘license to be flattered’ (a gerundive) and in so doing, he appears to miss the main point of Erasmus’s analogy and of Plutarch’s essay, that flattery can be poisonous and difficult to detect.
And yet, it is surely odd that Baldwin should make such a mess of the hemlock and wine analogy. Baldwin, who probably never went to university, was nonetheless a reasonable Latinist: he translated the anti-papal satire Epistola de morte Pauli tertii (‘A letter on the death of Paul III’) as Wonderful News (c.1552).24 It is odd, moreover, that he should try to conceal the difficulties he has with this analogy by emphasizing its plainness: ‘seyng theyr owne playnnesse declare theym so plainly, as no man maye do it playnlyer’. Unless of course the intention is to reveal a problem: that the analogy is overly elaborate. In fact, in contrast to Plutarch and Erasmus, Baldwin offers a very simple ‘remedy’ for dealing with flatterers whatever shape they come in: just ignore them.
It is equally likely, of course, that Baldwin, working in Edward Whitchurch’s print shop at the time that he brought this work to completion, has just been careless and hasty. Yet, even if that is true we might still want to ask whether his inaccuracies actually matter. Arguably, we will always suppose that Baldwin is only offering ‘coarser stuff’ if we assume that the purpose of the commonplace book is to offer ‘quality quotations’ from recognized ancient authorities that can be lifted and reused. To be sure, this is not a presumptuous assumption. For many vernacular compilers this was their purpose. As Francis Meres, the compiler of Witt’s Academy: A Treasurie of Goulden Sentences, Similes and Examples (1598, 1634, 1636), argues in his preface: ‘he that would write or speake pithily, perspicuously and persuasively must use to have at hand in readiness … Sentences, Similitudes and Examples’.25 Later editions of Morall Phylosophie, notably Thomas Palfreyman’s pirated edition (c.1555), turn it into just this kind of resource. Palfreyman expands Baldwin’s four books into seven, adds more sentences of his own, mainly from the Bible, but also places the ‘precepts, counsailes, parables & semblables’ that he says he ‘found dysplaced’ in Baldwin ‘in the right chapter’, so that ‘man wold familiarly tell a tale’ of them.26
However, this was not the only use of the commonplace book. Recently, the utilitarian account of commonplacing has been challenged by historians of reading whose studies of manuscript collections emphasize the ‘variety of readers’. Commonplacers may be collecting quotations for reuse in their own speech or writing, some of which may be politically directed, though not all; they might also be collecting literary passages for ‘recreation’; or they may do all of these things.27 Baldwin, I would like to suggest, is different yet again: he urges his readers to think about so-called ‘wise’ sayings in order to make them wise.
The wine–hemlock analogy is only one possible piece of evidence for Baldwin’s attempt to alert the reader to problems of interpretation and even then it needs to be used with caution. But his concern with the thoughtful use of sayings is signalled unmistakably in the preface to Morall Phylosophie and once again it rests on adaptation and reinterpretation rather than exact reuse. It cannot be an accident that the first sentence of ‘The Prologue to the Reader’ is also adapted from Erasmus: on this occasion, an anecdote the latter drew from Plutarch’s life of Pericles and cited in his Apophthegmata (translated by Richard Taverner in The Garden of Wisdom (1539)).28 As Baldwin relates, Pericles persuades the governor of his ship to sail against the Peloponnesus in spite of his fear of a solar eclipse. By covering the governor’s eyes with a cloak, Pericles is able to convince him that an event which appears to be an ill omen is a natural occurrence. At least, this is the point of the anecdote as told by Erasmus. However, Baldwin’s use of it is different. Unlike Erasmus, Baldwin remains true to Plutarch’s history by affirming that Pericles’s navy was destroyed. Pericles dismisses ‘a good admonicion sent [ … ] by god’ and so sends his sailors to their deaths. Baldwin’s example is instructive in other ways that Erasmus does not note:
In lyke maner there be manye nowe a dayes, which as Pericles despysed Astronomye, despyse all other sciences: devysyng proper toyes (as he dyd) to dasshe them out of countenaunce, runnyng headlyng through Ignoraunce, into contempt of all good learnyng: Not only inventyng tryfelyng toyes, but also wrestyng the holy scriptures whiche they understand not to serve for their pyvish [peevish] purpose. For yf it chaunce them to be improued with any of the good sayinges of the auncient philosophers, which so playnly impugneth theyr vices, that they be unable by good reason to refell it, than on goeth the brasen face, and a cloke must be sought oute of Scrypture eyther to deface all Phylosophye, or els to blynde mens eyes withall (A4v).
In Baldwin’s hands, this anecdote becomes, firstly, a warning to those who condemn all good learning and, secondly, an admonition to those who manipulate the ‘holy scriptures’ to serve their turn, mainly because they feel rebuked by the advice they find in ancient moral philosophy. For Baldwin, the ‘cloke’ is a metaphor, not for superstition, but for the obscuring of pagan advice.
Most obviously, this observation underpins Baldwin’s purpose in his treatise, which is not just to offer pagan precepts that advise on governance in the broadest sense, but to recover and defend their value against those who use scripture as a ‘cloke’. He goes out of his way to emphasize that ancient moral philosophy is compatible with the Bible. In the first book he emphasizes that God is the origin of wisdom (sophia) and then traces, albeit quickly, the history of philosophy from the sons of Seth to Pythagoras and beyond. In the second book he begins by listing the precepts of Greek philosophers that reflect on ‘God’ and the ‘soul’, so that readers might ‘understand what [they] thought’ (I2v).
But there is more too. The source that Baldwin cites for this approach is St Augustine. In book II of De doctrina Christiana, Baldwin notes, Augustine argues that if ‘they whiche be called Phylosophers, specially of Plato his secte, have spoken ought that is true, and appertinent to our faythe, we ought not onely not to feare it, but also to chalenge it as our owne, from them whiche are no ryght owners therof’ (A5r). This again is an interesting adaptation. In fact, in book II of De doctrina Christiana Augustine identifies the Bible as the source of wisdom, not Plato and his sect, whose moral insights, he argues, derive from the early Christians. To claim otherwise is ‘a quite crazy idea [quod dementissimum est credere]’.29 But at the start of his preface Baldwin is worrying instead that scripture is used to obscure the wise advice of ancient philosophers. Then he invites the reader, pace Augustine, to ‘chalenge’ the precepts of the moral philosophers ‘as our owne’. For Baldwin, wisdom already belongs to us. Making wisdom ‘our owne’ means thinking about, adapting, and using precepts, and he shows us how. Baldwin’s precepts may be made of ‘coarser stuff’ or, as he puts it himself, ‘simply & rudely declared’ rather than ‘reasoned to the tryall’ (A3v). But that makes them good. Here is the final warning he gives the reader, again adapting Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana:
I humblye beseche the[e] (most gentle Reader) to take in good part this simple philosophycal treatyse, & so to use it as sainct Augustine hath taught us, takyng the good, and leavyng the bad, neyther reverencying it as the gospel, neyther yet despysing it as a thing of no value. (A6v)
What matters for Baldwin is that the counsels of Morall Phylosophie should be used carefully and thoughtfully. Not all sayings, Baldwin implies, are equally good. One needs to sift the wheat from the chaff and it is the reader’s judgement, not an authoritative original, that is the touchstone for this work’s wise use.
Baldwin’s Morall Phylosophie may disappoint scholars who have little time for vernacular impostors. Yet, many of its inaccuracies or infelicities make good sense. Most refreshing, though, is the trust Baldwin places in the reader’s judgement and in relation to this his warning not to treat all sayings with reverence. We do not need to rely on Baldwin’s preface to his commonplace book to see how seriously he valued the judging of supposedly wise counsel. It also structures, in a different way, the experience of reading his prose fiction too, notably Beware the Cat (1561; 1570; ms 1553).30 Beware the Cat was no doubt written with the help of a commonplace book, but it is also best read, I would now like to argue, with Baldwin’s directions in his treatise in mind.
This curious work, arguably ‘the first original piece of long prose fiction in English’, 31 is a first-person narration, organized as three orations; it relates the adventures of the fictional Gregory Streamer. In the first oration, Streamer recounts how he was kept awake at night by the mewing of rooftop cats and he recalls the conversation he had the next day at the fireside with fellow lodgers. Following his complaint, Streamer explains that ‘we fell in communication of cats’ and that some in that company insisted that cats ‘had understanding’ (11). The first proof of this bizarre claim is the strange story told of Grimalkin, an Irish cat who ate a whole man (and much else), and the loyalty of a ‘kitling’ who fatally wounded her owner when she heard that he had killed Grimalkin with a dart. To prove that cats really do have reason, Streamer then concocts and consumes a magical-medical potion that will purge his ears of excess humours so he can understand cat-talk. The second and third orations explain the recipe and recall his adventures. With his ears purged, Streamer gains insight into the strange laws of cats: ‘our holy law … forbiddeth us females to refuse any males not exceeding the number of ten in a night’ (47). More to the point, he also gains insight into the secrets of men and women.
On this description, Beware the Cat will seem a long way from the more sober Morall Phylosophie. In fact, both works share a concern with how wisdom is used. Its title, for instance, is another ‘made-up proverb’.32 Baldwin’s instructs the reader in his dedicatory epistle to ‘learn to Beware the Cat’ (4), and in his moral conclusion he offers some guidance: he advises the reader to ‘mind this proverb, Beware the Cat; not to tie up thy cat till thou have done, but to see that neither thine own nor the Devil’s cat (which cannot be tied up) find anything therein whereof to accuse thee to thy shame’ (54–5). As John N. King explains, the ‘special meaning’ Baldwin ‘attaches to the phrase treats the cat as a figure for Protestant conscience’.33 Quite simply, cats can see and talk about our secrets. However, this is not the only lesson this remarkable fiction teaches. It also establishes the importance of thinking about advice.
Beware the Cat is often interpreted as an anti-Catholic satire, as the world of the Catholics is revealed: the cats discover the secret lives of recusants. Even the absurd stories of this work seem to support this argument. As this text’s modern editors, William A. Ringler and Michael Flachmann suggest, the ‘general thrust’ of its ‘fictional argument’ is that ‘only a person gullible enough to believe a character as outrageous as Gregory Streamer would believe in the “unwritten verities” handed down by the “traditions” of the Church’.34 Indeed, anti-Catholicism plays heavily in this fiction. Yet, it is also concerned more broadly with gullibility, including of those who believe too readily in anti-papist slurs, and in the authority of disciplines like medicine. To establish this Baldwin pays attention to the nonsensical use of proverbs and analogies.
This fiction is full of proverbs and sayings, supposedly wise counsel. Sometimes proverbs are cited by a character to ‘prove’ a particularly wild claim. One ‘well-learned man and one of excellent judgment’, Streamer recounts, supports the case that cats are reasonable by advising that Grimalkin was likely ‘a hagat or a witch’. Many witches have taken on the likeness of a cat, he adds, offering as proof of this ‘the proverb, as true as common, that a cat hath nine lives (that is to say, a witch may take on her a cat’s body nine time)’ (16). Yet, this proverb, like the story of Grimalkin, is no ‘proof’ at all; and, moreover, this interlocutor is clearly rather free in his interpretation of it.
There are many other examples which show that good judgement is lacking. During the same conversation another of the fireside companions notes that Grimalkin is esteemed in much the same way as the ‘master’ (i.e. queen) bee, ‘at whose commandment all bees are obedient’. He then offers a second, more elaborate analogy: ‘or as the Pope hath had ere this over all Christendom, in whose cause all his clergy would not only scratch and bite, but kill and burn to powder … whomsoever they thought to think but once against him—which Pope, all things considered, devoureth more at every meal than Grimalkin did at her last supper’. Is this evidence of the work’s anti-Catholic stance? This elaborate analogy is diffused by a literal-minded Streamer who argues that, on the contrary, the Pope ‘eateth and weareth as little as any other man’; he then introduces yet another saying that provides a different perspective, commending the Pope’s easily misunderstood virtue, his liberality:
And I have heard a very proper saying in this behalf of King Henry VII: When a servant of his told him what abundance of meat he had seen at an abbot’s table, he reported him to be a great glutton; he asked if the abbot eat up all, and when he answered no, but his guests did eat the most part, ‘Ah’, quod the king, ‘thou callest him glutton for his liberality to feed thee and such other unthankful churls’. (15)
Streamer is a distinctly unreliable narrator and he is certainly naïve enough to ‘believe in the “unwritten verities” handed down by the “traditions” of the Church’. Yet, it is not clear that anti-Catholic satire is Baldwin’s only purpose, for the attacks are not entirely rational either. Just like the interlocutor who offers a rather unexpected analogy—that Grimalkin is like the master bee or a cruel, greedy pope—so the printer, or author (‘Baldwin’), provides some surprising commentary in the margins that both reveals his anti-popery with asides such as ‘Railing and slandering are the Papists’ Scriptures’ (38), but also his credulousness. For example, on the same page we find: ‘No such persuasions as miracles chiefly in helping one from grief’ (38). On another page the marginalium states ‘Cat’s grease is good for the gout’ next to Streamer’s clear admission that he has tricked ‘Thomas’: ‘after I had taken some of the grease … to make (as I made him believe) a medicine for the gout’ (27).
More broadly, this fiction teaches us by bad example how important it is to be careful and alert. As these last examples suggest, one of the ways in which Baldwin does this is by sending up the kind of reader who is eager to find some useful snippet of information or wise saying from a text, regardless of its meaning or context. The fictional Streamer is introduced to us as a medical authority; he is a divine and also a translator of an Arabic medical treatise, Cure of the Great Plague (3). But the weird potions he creates are clearly one of the jokes of this fiction. Streamer pounds and cooks various bits of animals—hare, fox, cat, and hedgehog (or ‘urchin’)—creating what ‘Baldwin’ calls in the margin ‘The intelligible diet’ (28). After its consumption, his nose oozes a pint of ‘such yellow, white, and tawny matters as I never saw before’ (28). He then makes pellets out of the ears and tongues of these animals and, he narrates, ‘I fried [them] in good olive oil and laid them hot to mine ears [ … ] and kept them thereto till nine o’ clock at night, which holp exceedingly to comfort my understanding power’ (29). Aside from the ridiculous image of this learned man with pellets of disgusting gunk in his ears, we also have ‘Baldwin’s’ absurd effort to make sense of it: ‘A good medicine for aching ears’ (29). And when Streamer reheats these ‘pillows’, lays them to his ears, ties ‘a kercher about my head’, and then goes among the servants ‘with my lozenges and trochisks in a box’, the author solemnly notes: ‘Heat augmenteth the virtue of outward plasters.’ There is another response detailed in the text and we would do well to keep it in mind. A shrewd servant tastes one of Streamer’s lozenges, ‘chewed it apace, by means whereof when the fume ascended he began to spattle and spit, saying “By God’s bones, it is a cat’s turd”’ (30).
Commonplace books, I explained at the start of this chapter, quoting Ann Moss, are collections of quotations ‘culled from authors held to be authoritative’ and organized under headings to facilitate their retrieval. This now-familiar definition has shaped the way in which these collections have been valued by historians of reading and it also reinforces the conception of the purpose of humanist education as career-orientated and pragmatic. William Drake’s commonplace book, argues Kevin Sharpe, discovers a resolutely utilitarian reader and political operator. ‘All social relationships’, writes Sharpe, like the books that Drake avidly digested, ‘were pursued for gain.’35 Historians like Sharpe have provided an alternative approach to those literary scholars who worried that commonplacing created, not savvy politicians, but unthinking subjects. Thomas Greene’s observation that the notebook method could not ‘produce sensitive understanding and creative imitation’ is echoed by Mary Crane: ‘English theorists in the sixteenth century wanted to believe that the commonplace book led to assimilation and understanding’, she argues, but ‘they were unable to describe how this actually worked.’36
However, this chapter takes note of yet another use of print commonplace books, one which understands that collected quotations are not really authoritative and that users of them are often encouraged to think about them, to challenge and rework them. The recognition of this structures so much literary prose fiction and drama.37 Thus, I value all that seems coarse or poor about the contents of Morall Phylosophie: the insinuation that Baldwin is making things up as he goes along, for example, when he ascribes quotations to Socrates simply ‘because they be thynges meete for hym to speake’ and also his advice to the reader to take ‘the good’ and leave ‘the bad’, ‘neyther reverencying it as the gospel, neyther yet despysing it as a thing of no value’.
Baldwin may be idiosyncratic, but he is not exceptional, and I want to conclude with some examples that make this clear. Many compilers explicitly encourage the absorption and transformation of the advice they collect, not least by using the same corporeal metaphor to represent this process: digestion. To ‘digest’ a book means primarily ‘to divide and dispose’ and ‘distribute’ its contents (OED 3). Thus, a well-organized commonplace book, Michael Schoenfeldt observes, is ‘a very literal form of a reader’s digest’.38 However, the metaphor of ‘digestion’ carries another meaning too: ‘rumination’. When Thomas Elyot recommends that the sentences he has collected in A bankette of sapience (1539) are ‘holsome’ only if they are ‘wel masticate, and not hastily devoured’ at the dinner table, he is advising us not only to absorb the precept, but also to debate it.39 The same is meant when a character in Stefano Guazzo’s Civil Conversation wisely observes that ‘Because a hastie sentence is a manifest note of a rash Judge, it behoveth us therefore … to chew it well in our mindes before, least it be thought to be degorged againe, as altogether raw and undigested.’40
This alimentary metaphor is useful to note not only because it shows us another way in which commonplaces might be used, but also because it suggests a different way of thinking about literary prose, as a digestion, a testing and reworking of sayings. Elyot’s educational tract, The Boke named the Governour (1531), for example, is full of quoted sayings, but not all of them are well illustrated by the examples he offers and in this way Elyot makes the reader think about them, inviting us to test the relationship between precept and example, and to relate ideal to practice.41 Guazzo’s Civil Conversation, a prose dialogue running to four books, shows its interlocutors ruminating sayings. The junior interlocutor in this dialogue, William, is suffering from melancholy, and he is slowly cured by being brought into company. This means teaching him to avoid being a ‘rash judge’ in social situations and that involves turning over, ‘chewing’, and rethinking commonplaces values and opinions.42
However, it is with my last example that we will find our clearest defence of the importance—the healthiness—of ruminating advice in the vernacular, as well as a deep-rooted and lasting scepticism of quoted authority. This is The Anatomy of Melancholy of the seventeenth-century divine, Robert Burton, and it is to his lengthy prose preface ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ that I quickly turn.
If Moss was unpersuaded by Baldwin’s contribution to the genre of the print commonplace book, then it is hard to imagine that she would be impressed by Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621–76). For the Anatomy is an unruly work. It is variously categorized as a medical work, an encyclopaedia, and also described as a sermon and Menippean satire. Indeed, so complex is its generic identity that Mary Ann Lund no doubt wisely chooses to emphasize rather this text’s ‘flexibility’, arguing that it is part of its ‘curative purpose’. Burton understands that given the complexity of the malady, then ‘the “whole physitian” needs to be both priest and doctor, so Burton’s text must vary in its aims, applying different forms of treatment to the melancholic reader’.43
However, there is another reason why we might be unimpressed. As so many scholars have noted, ‘deliberately or otherwise, Burton overwhelmed his readership with torrents of authoritative quotations’. Burton gives us quotations from authorities, lots of them, but many are contradictory and he never offers any guidance or resolution.44 In this respect, the Anatomy is best understood not in terms of medical or literary genres, but rather as a sprawling, ever-expanding commonplace book. Or, as Grant Williams puts it more kindly, as an ‘extraordinary commonplace book’. Like his ‘namesake’ in the preface, ‘the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, who dissected animals to find the seat of atra bilis’, black bile, Williams argues, so Burton dissects books to a similar end, to locate the source of melancholy, arranging textual ‘fragments [ … ] under headings corresponding to the Galenic rubric for examining diseases: symptoms, causes, and cures’.45 Of course, there is no single cause; the Anatomy is testimony to the complexity both of the malady and debate about it.
To be fair, Burton recognizes the problems. In his preface, ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, he confesses that he did not have time to organize this work properly, and that it grew ‘out of a confused company of notes’. He also admits that he wrote it ‘with as small a deliberation as I doe ordinarily speak, without all affectation of big words, fustian phrases, jingling termes, tropes’. ‘I am acqæ potor [a drinker of water]’, he confesses, ‘a loose, plaine, rude writer [ … ] I call a spade a spade [ … ] I respect matter, not words.’46 ‘My translations’, he adds, ‘are sometimes rather Paraphrases, then interpretations, non ad verbam [not word for word], but as an Author, I use more liberty, and that’s only taken, which was to my purpose: Quotations are often inserted in the Text, which make the stile more harsh [ … ] I have mingled Sacra prophanis [sacred things with profane]’ (1. 19; 4. 41–2).
The Anatomy also leads Burton to worry about the value of collecting quotations. There are too many writers, he complains, and all they do is ‘skim off the Creame of other mens Wits, pick the choyce Flowers of their tild Gardens to set out our owne sterill plots’ (1: 9). Filching from others’ works is no way to help English style or English readers. ‘Amongst so many thousand Authors’, he laments, ‘you shall scarce finde one by reading of whom you shall be any whit better’, an insight he reinforces rather cheekily with a quotation from Palingenius:
What has anyone learnt, what does he know, who reads works like that, but dreams, trifles? (1: 10; 4. 24).
It is not surprising, then, that Williams should regard the Anatomy as marking the ‘death of Renaissance humanism and the birth of the modern episteme’, that is, the rise of scientific methodology, even as it shares with us ‘an extraordinary surplus enjoyment’.47 Each new edition of the Anatomy adds more examples and quotations; Burton cannot stop himself it seems. Yet, because Williams understands the commonplace book only as a ‘digest’, 48 an orderly organization of one’s reading, he misses Burton’s preoccupation with digesting. ‘I have only this out of Macrobius to say for my selfe, Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis all mine and none mine’, he declares:
As a good hous-wife out of divers fleeces weaves one peece of Cloath, a Bee gathers Wax and Hony out of many Flowers, and makes a new bundle of all,
Floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia libant,
[As bees sip everything in flowery glades]
I have laboriously collected this Cento out of divers Writers, and that sine injuriâ [without injury], I have wronged no Authors, but given every man his owne [ … ]
The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit [It is apparent where it was taken from] (which Seneca approves), aliud tamen quàm unde sumptum sit apparet [but it appears as something different from its source], which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies, incorporate, digest, assimulate.
Burton is not simply justifying the fact that he has changed what he has read and collected. By incorporating it, he gently suggests, he may even have improved it:
Though there were many Giants of old in Physicke and Phylosophy, yet I say with Didacus Stella: A Dwarfe standing on the shoulders of a Giant may see farther than a Giant himselfe; I may likely adde, alter, and see farther than my Predecessors. (1. 11–12; 4. 26–7)
Burton’s preface is a good point on which to end because it draws together so many of the themes in this chapter and because in it he digests his own reading. Burton turns over, chews, and thinks around stock ideas. His preface is full of reversals, as he slowly leads the reader to understand that things may be seen differently. His namesake, Democritus, for example, turns out to be wisely sceptical rather than sick or mad (1. 37). Burton has a fine sense of the reversibility of judgements. The philosopher Seneca—a reassuring presence in many Renaissance commonplace books—may be admired for his sententiousness by some readers, including Burton, but he was once jeered at by others, dismissed for his ‘dicaces & ineptæ sententiæ, eruditio plebia’, his ‘facile and out-of-place sentiments, plebeian learning’ (1. 15; 4. 34). But Burton values this reversibility, for it can work in his favour too; his plebeian learning can be re-evaluated too. Burton may not be interested in quality quotations, but this is because ‘I respect matter, not words’ (1. 19). Just as in Baldwin’s treatise, so in this readers are warned they will find material that is ‘sometimes faire, sometimes foule’ (1. 18). We need to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Baldwin, William. A Treatise of Morall Philosophie by William Baldwin. Enlarged by Thomas Palfreyman. A Facsimile Reproduction of the Edition of 1620, ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967).
Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, repr. 2002).
Gowland, Angus. The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Lund, Mary Ann. Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Mack, Peter. Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Maslen, R. W. ‘William Baldwin and the Politics of Pseudo-Philosophy in Tudor Prose Fiction’, Studies in Philology, 97 (2000): 29–60.
Moss, Ann. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Ong, Walter J., SJ. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971).
Sherman, William H. Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Williams, Grant. ‘Textual Crudities in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica’, in Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, eds., Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Leg (London: Routledge, 2004), 67–82.