An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Julie Park (Visiting Research Fellow 2021; Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University):
Line-Making as Life Writing: Eighteenth-Century Commonplace Books
Abstract:
The commonplace book, since at least the Renaissance, is a type of notebook kept by individuals that compiles excerpts from other sources. These excerpts are organized according to theme, and compiled during the course of the notebook owner’s daily life. By the eighteenth century the commonplace book was increasingly designed to accommodate individual information retrieval habits. They were also beginning to be used for various practical purposes—rather than the memorization of textual passages as was customary in the Renaissance—such as storing information related to the practices of daily life, including cookery, medical school instruction and meteorological observations.
The different formats that these commonplace book owners used to organize and store information and preserve their ideas demonstrate the creativity with which paper notebooks could be used to create flexible repositories for personally meaningful instruction and information that was readily retrievable. To that end, the classical concept of the commonplace as a storage space did not find its material realization only in the codex. The storage capacities of space were found in the features of the paper sheet itself, and used for highly individualized purposes in the eighteenth century.
The ability to make individual decisions about how to organize space on the page hinged on the strategic drawing of lines. These lines effected the disposition and organization of information and turned the two-dimensional properties of paper into storage and retrieval spaces. Lines and the need to make or fill them inside commonplace books arose during the course of living. In this way, information and archival management was practiced by literate subjects throughout the eighteenth century as a consequence of being alive.
Biography:
Julie Park is the author of The Self and It (Stanford University Press, 2010) and editor of several collections, including most recently Getting Perspective, a special issue for Word and Image, forthcoming in 2021, and the co-edited Organic Supplements (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Her most recent monograph, My Dark Room (University of Chicago Press, 2022), takes the camera obscura as a conceptual model for understanding interiority through the designs and experiences of interior spaces in 17th- and 18th-century England. She is currently writing Writing’s Maker, a book on the materiality of life writing in the eighteenth century. She has recently organized a virtual exhibition The Interactive Book for NYU Libraries, where she is an assistant curator and faculty fellow in the Special Collections Center.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2