We are studying the impact of commonplace books on the ordering of knowledge in medieval times and Renaissance. Given that it is not very easy to come across a commonplace book unless you visit one of the better libraries, we suggest that you buy the collection of George Berkeley’s works edited by Professor Michael Ayers. This edition contains Berkeley’s commonplace notebooks.
The following articles might be of interest to those who want to know more about this field:
Richard Yeo: “Managing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe,” Minerva 40 (2002): 304-14
Adrian Johns: “History, Science and the History of the Book: The Making of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England,” Publishing History 30 (1991): 5-30
Ann Blair: “Humanist Methods in natural Philosophy: The Comonplace Book” Journal of History of Ideas 53 (1992): 541-51
Ann Moss: “The Politica of Justius Lipsius and the Commonplace Book” Journal of History of Ideas 59 (1998): 421-36
Stephen ColClough: “Recovering the reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience” Publishing History 44 (1998): 5-37
G G Meynell: “John Locke’s Method Common-Placing as seen in his draft and his medical Notebooks, Bodleian MSS Locke d. 9, f. 21, and f.23” The Seventeenth Century 8 (1993): 245-67
G G Meynell: “A Database for John Locke’s Medical Notebooks and Medical Reading” Medical History 42 (1997): 473-86.
Richard Yeo: “John Locke’s ‘Of Study’ (1677): Interpreting an Unpublished Essay” Locke Studies 3 (2003): 147-65.
Lotte Mulligan: “Robert Hooke’s ‘Memoranda’: Memory and Natural History” Annals of Science 49 (1992)
Richard Yeo: “Reading and Encyclopaedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730-1850” Isis 82 (1991): 24-49
History of Ideas 