
Contents
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3.1 Commonplaces Englished: William Baldwin 3.1 Commonplaces Englished: William Baldwin
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3.2 Baldwin's Beware the Cat 3.2 Baldwin's Beware the Cat
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3.3 Taking Liberties: Robert Burton's Anatomy 3.3 Taking Liberties: Robert Burton's Anatomy
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Further Reading Further Reading
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3 Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton
Get accessJennifer Richards is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Newcastle University. She is the author of Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Rhetoric: The New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2007) as well as essays on sixteenth-century literature and culture in Criticism, Renaissance Quarterly, Huntington Library Quarterly, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. She has edited several collections of essays, including Early Modern Civil Discourses (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and most recently, with Fred Schurink, The Textuality and Materiality of Reading (a special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, 2010). With Professor Andrew Hadfield she is editing the works of Thomas Nashe for a new edition to be published by Oxford University Press in 2015 and she is writing a new monograph, Useful Books: Literature and Health in Early Modern England.
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Published:01 August 2013
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Abstract
This article focuses on commonplace books: collections of quotations ‘culled from authors held to be authoritative’, and organized under headings to facilitate their retrieval. Like electronic databases today, commonplace books helped Renaissance readers cope with ‘information overload’. It is argued 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. The article takes as its starting point William Baldwin's A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, contaynyng the sayinges of the wyse (1547). 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 the understanding of this rhetorical habit. A second collector, the seventeenth-century divine, Robert Burton is also considered.
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