Research Article| August 01 1997 Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought Ann Moss,Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xvi + 345 pp. Terence Cave Terence Cave St. John's College, Oxford University, OXl 3JP Oxford, Great Britain Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (3): 337–340. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Terence Cave; Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought. Rhetorica 1 August 1997; 15 (3): 337–340. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.3.337 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 337 habille d heureuses formules une érudition sans faille. Il intéressera les historiens de la rhétorique et de la philosophie. Mais au-delà du cercle des antiquisants, la démonstration a un enjeu plus large. Car le genus acutum des Stoïciens a eu une importante postérité : il est une des sources vives de toutes les théories de l'« acutezza » et offre des éléments pour mieux comprendre le Cortegiano de Castiglione, YAgudeza de Graciân ou encore le Witz de Freud. Ainsi est soulevé un important problème de l'histoire de la rhétorique. Laurent Pernot Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xvi + 345 pp. The importance of the Renaissance commonplace-book and the theory that underpins it has been acknowledged since the pioneering work of Robert Bolgar and others and reiterated by numerous Renaissance special­ ists ever since. Essential to the theory and practice of imitatio, it impinges on the history not only of rhetoric and dialectic but also of theology, law, and medicine. This book provides us at last with a meticulously detailed account of the origins, flowering, and decline of the commonplace-book in early modern Europe. Ann Moss's approach is broadly chronological. After a lucid, nononsense exposition of the ancient senses of topos and locus (communis) and their permutations in medieval dialectic and rhetoric, she provides a sur­ vey of medieval florilèges and compilations and then proceeds to the early humanist methods of pedagogy which may be regarded as the immediate forerunners of the Renaissance commonplace-book (Rudolph Agricola plays a major role here). Thereafter, the survey moves systematically through the different texts and contexts in which the commonplace method flourished from Erasmus' De copia to the late seventeenth century, when changing cultural practices already prefigure its demise. At each point in the history, individual writers and texts remain firmly in the fore­ ground: many of these are little known, and one of the virtues of Ann Moss's study is that, by refusing to sacrifice them to the big names, it redraws the map of humanist pedagogical practice. One can therefore take one's pick of the many choice items Ann Moss offers: Thomas of Ireland's hugely successful Manipulus florum, John Foxe's do-it-yourself compendium for budding religious controversialists, or the kaleidoscopic 338 RHETORICA Cannochiale aristotélico of 1654, designed by the aptly-named Emmanuele Tesauro to generate witty metaphors and conceits, and already trawled by Umberto Eco. This description might suggest a mere historical repertory, a kind of florilège of florilèges. The sequence is in fact much more subtle than that. Ann Moss is always sensitive to confessional or pedagogical differences, and more generally to the cultural and material history of these books. There are also constant overlaps in the narrative, with cross-references backwards and forwards that indicate the changing fortunes of a single text over several generations and connect different strands to create a mul­ tiple, three-dimensional picture. Thus, through the proliferation of particular texts, one discerns the groundswell of shifting methods and practices, the changes in organiza­ tion (topical, thematic, rhetorical, alphabetical, and so forth), the invention of increasingly efficient indexes and other retrieval systems. At the heart of these is the shift from a manuscript culture to a print culture, which leads first to a rapid increase in the production and use of commonplacebooks , and eventually to a kind of implosion, where the wealth of materi­ als available in print makes it virtually impossible to devise a comprehen­ sive compendium. Indeed, Moss points out the implied analogy between the commonplace-book and "moveable type, capable of both setting a page of text in an apparently immutable form and of rearranging all the elements of that page into other patterns for other meanings" (p. 252); with characteristic prudence, she mentions this analogy only when it finally becomes explicit in one of her later texts, Jean Oudart's Méthode des orateurs of 1668. Yet from the first page of the preface she deploys a running anal­ ogy which would not have been available even twenty years ago...