Guest Notebook: Roland Allen on the Birth of the Notebook

How the humble notebook greased the wheels of learning and literature

The common-place book of Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Sir Thomas Browne, begun in the 1770s, in which father Thomas lists the books Elizabeth has read aloud to him at night. Erasmus did not approve of education for women, but surviving common-place books and other notebooks reveal women pursuing learning privately and within the family.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began as an Augustinian monk in Holland and later became a priest, taught, studied, networked, travelled, and above all published throughout Europe, translating the Church Fathers and collecting classical proverbs and adages. His schoolbooks and religious handbooks sold in huge numbers—perhaps one in ten of all books printed in the 1530s.

One of his top sellers was 1512’s De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia (“On the Foundations of the Abundant Style”), now usually known as De Copia—in which he gave his readers a guide to composition and rhetoric. Writing for teachers and students, he showed how to create convincing arguments using the arts of copia, or abundance. Students were to gather written examples representing variety of expression and subject matter that would help them to present their arguments—whether in debate, from the pulpit, or in a courtroom—in novel and persuasive ways.