Thanks to Mike Pincombe, Fred Schurink, and colleagues at the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Bologna, 2011, for advice and guidance.

1 Walter J. Ong, SJ, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 60.

² Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), v.

³ Lady Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), xxxviii, xl.

⁴ Ann Blair, ‘Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1500–1700’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64.1 (2003): 11–28.

⁵ William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 148.

⁶ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 102–3.

⁷ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 107. See Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings 2, De Copia/De Ratione Studii, trans. Betty I. Knott, ed. Craig R. Thomson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 638, 644. On the collection of sayings in sixteenth-century educational writings in England see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 3.

⁸ John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: or, The Grammar Schoole (London, 1612), sig. 2B2^v.

⁹ Ong argues that the ‘doctrine’ of the places, though ‘applied to poetry, too … was developed mostly for prose use’, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, 35. See also Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 135–75. On the relationship between commonplacing and drama see: Paul Hammond, ‘The Play of Quotation and Commonplace in King Lear’, in Lynette Hunter, ed., Toward a Definition of Topos: Approaches to Analogical Reasoning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 78–129; Peter Mack, ‘Rhetoric, Ethics, and Reading in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies, 19 (2005): 1–21; Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

¹⁰ Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, 38–41.

¹¹ Sherman, Used Books, 131.

¹² Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, 77–8.

¹³ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 213.

¹⁴ On this see especially Mack, ‘Rhetoric, Ethics, and Reading’, 17–18, 1.

¹⁵ Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, repr. 2002), 11.

¹⁶ William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, contaynyng the sayinges of the wyse (London, 1547). All citations are to this edition unless otherwise stated. This book was first printed in 1547. Thereafter there were twenty-four editions by 1610, including Thomas Palfreyman’s pirated edition. Morall Phylosophie was undoubtedly one of the most successful vernacular printed books in sixteenth-century England.

¹⁷ On some of Baldwin’s possible sources, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Governour and Antonio de Guevara’s The Golden Boke, see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 165. See also the introduction to Baldwin, 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); Curt C. Bühler, ‘A Survival from the Middle Ages: William Baldwin’s Use of the Dictes and Sayings’, Speculum, 23 (1948): 76–80; and D. T. Starnes, ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the “Sayings of the Philosophers”’, Texas University Studies in English, 13 (1933): 5–35 (13–17).

¹⁸ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, v.

¹⁹ Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books, 207–8.

²⁰ Erasmus, Parallels/Parabolae sive similia, trans. R. A. B. Mynors. In Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 131.

²¹ Plutarch, The Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Dent, 1911), 43; cited in David Colclough, ‘Parrhesia: The Rhetoric of Free Speech in Early Modern England’, Rhetorica, 17 (1999): 177–212 (191).

²² Erasmus, Parallels, 131–4. For discussion of this analogy see Colclough, ‘Parrhesia’, 190–4.

²³ Erasmus, Parabolae, sive similtudines (London, 1587), sig. A3^r.

²⁴ John N. King notes that ‘Anthony à Wood’s claim that [Baldwin] supplicated for the M.A. degree from Oxford University carries no authority’, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 359. For recent discussions of Wonderful News see Mike Pincombe, ‘Truth, Lies, and Fiction in William Baldwin’s Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III’, Reformation, 15 (2010): 3–22; also Anne Overell and Scott C. Lucas, ‘Whose Wonderful News? Italian Satire and William Baldwin’s Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paule the III’, Renaissance Studies, 26.2 (2012): 180–96.

²⁵ Francis Meres, Witt’s Academy: A Treasurie of Goulden Sentences, Similes and Examples (London, 1636), sig. A2^v.

²⁶ I am quoting from Thomas Palfreyman, A Treatyce of Morall Philosophy (London, 1557), sig. A4^v. On Baldwin and Palfreyman see R. W. Maslen, ‘William Baldwin and the Politics of Pseudo-Philosophy in Tudor Prose Fiction’, Studies in Philology, 97 (2000): 29–60 (33–5). Baldwin objected to Palfreyman’s reorganization of his work; see the preface to The Tretise of Morall Phylosophy … Newly perused, and augmented by William Baldwyn (London, 1556). For a quick summary of Palfreyman’s changes across several editions see Jill Kraye’s entry on Thomas Palfreyman in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) <http://www.oxforddnb.com> accessed 2 August 2011.

²⁷ Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 142–9, 175–95; Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature and Reading in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73 (2010): 453–69, esp. 453–7.

²⁸ I am grateful to Mike Pincombe for this example. See Richard Taverner, The Garden of Wisdom (London, 1539), E5^v–E6^r.

²⁹ Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), II. 107–8.

³⁰ On the reworking of some of Baldwin’s advice in prose writing later in the century, notably Lyly’s Euphues, see Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 166–7.

³¹ William Baldwin, Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. and intro. William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988), xxi.

³² King, English Reformation Literature, 388.

³³ King, English Reformation Literature, 388.

³⁴ Baldwin, Beware the Cat, xxv. Robert Maslen suggests there is a close link between Baldwin’s treatise and the anonymous Image of Idlenesse, and persuasively argues that Baldwin is the likely author of the Image, see Maslen, ‘William Baldwin’.

³⁵ Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 84–5, 99. See also Sharpe, ‘Uncommonplaces? Sir William Drake’s Reading Notes’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, ed., The Reader Revealed (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2001), 59–65.

³⁶ Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 318, n. 1, cited in Crane, Framing Authority, 61. See also Fred Schurink’s study of one schoolboy’s pedestrian use of Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum in ‘An Elizabethan Grammar School Exercise Book’, Bodleian Library Record, 18.2 (2003): 174–96 (182–3).

³⁷ See above, n. 9.

³⁸ Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Reading Bodies’, in Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 215–43 (220).

³⁹ Thomas Elyot, The Bankette of Sapience (London, 1539), sig. A3^r.

⁴⁰ Stefano Guazzo, The civile conversation of M. Stephen Guazzo, written first in Italian, diuided into foure bookes, the first three translated out of French by G[eorge] pettie….. the fourth[is] now translated out of Italian into English by Barth[olomew] Young (London, 1586), fol. 4, 181^v.

⁴¹ For discussion of this see Jennifer Richards, ‘Male Friendship and Counsel in Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pythias’, in Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 293–308.

⁴² For discussion of this see Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 1.

⁴³ Mary Ann Lund, Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 126–7.

⁴⁴ Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115.

⁴⁵ Grant Williams, ‘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 (67, 79).

⁴⁶ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Falulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), 1. 17, 4. 38. All citations are to this edition. Translations of Latin quotations are from volume 4.

⁴⁷ Williams, ‘Textual Crudities’, 81.

⁴⁸ Williams, ‘Textual Crudities’, 68.