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Good morning, it’s UniScoops! We’re the newsletter that’s more essential than a screenshot of your mate’s Disney+ password.
Here’s a taste of what we’re serving today:
The Early Modern Solution to Information Overload… 🤯
PLUS: AI in Archaeology, London Cabs and Alzheimer’s, and Mathematics of Love 💌
ENGLISH
The Early Modern Solution to Information Overload… 🤯
… so what did the Early Modernists do about it?
If you’re anything like me, chances are you have a notes app full to the brim of random things you want to remember. In my case, that might be a song lyric that stayed with me, a line of a poem that I adored, or a direct quote from something a friend said that I found insightful, or amusing, or both. For Early Modern readers, commonplace books were a bit like the jumbled notes on my phone…
Commonplacing was a popular literary practice whereby readers would note down quotations from things that they had read, often organised under specific headings to make them easier to find again later. When authors in the Early Modern period began to pen some of the first recognisable English novels, these commonplace books were incredibly important. For example, some scholars argue that Montaigne (who wrote several Essais in French musing about his life) uses direct quotations from his own reading in his work, and Erasmus’ De Copia is basically a phrase book to aid writers with their written expression. We can therefore think of writing during this period as a kind of collage of ideas and phrases that might already exist.
💡 Things to consider
‘Encyclopaedic ambition’: This phrase comes from the scholar Ann Blair, who suggests that Early Modern commonplace books were precursors to modern encyclopaedias. Commonplace books often had a lot of the features we see in modern encyclopaedias, such as contents pages and alphabetized subject matter. How does this process of finding information change the process of reading? Further, has the internet now become one big commonplace book?
Picking and Choosing: William Baldwin, arguably the first English novelist, places a great deal of importance on the reader’s own judgement at the beginning of Morall Phylosophie. He writes, ‘I humblye beseche the[e] (most gentle Reader) to take in good part this simple philosophycal treatyse, & so to use it as sainct Augustine hath taught us, takyng the good, and leavyng the bad, neyther reverencying it as the gospel, neyther yet despysing it as a thing of no value’, which means readers should take what they want from his lists of quotations, and ignore what they don’t. How does this notion of choosing from a literary menu impact the way we think about writing?
Who do words belong to? As we have seen, intellectuals who practised commonplacing took the words of others, often ancient scholars, and adapted them slightly or quoted them directly in their own work. But is this work their own? Does thinking about and reflecting upon the words of others before rewriting them make them one’s own words? Who has ownership over words, and indeed ideas, in this literary practice?
🔎 Find out more
Jennifer Richards, ‘Commonplacing and Prose Writing: William Baldwin and Robert Burton’ in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
🍒 The cherry on top
🤖 AI in Archaeology: What happens when archaeology meets artificial intelligence, ancient DNA, and deep-sea robots? China is about to find out, with a new plan to send underwater robots to explore Maritime Silk Road shipwrecks and trace how early humans migrated across East Asia. A great read if you like Engineering or Archaeology.
🧠 London Cabs and Alzheimer’s: To become a London black cab driver, you have to memorise around 25,000 streets and 100,000 landmarks, and it turns out that doing so might come with a huge advantage. This article digs into the neuroscience of how cabbies grow a bigger hippocampus, and the surprising evidence that all that mental map-building may help protect against Alzheimer’s. A fascinating read if you’re interested in Psychology or Biology!
💌 Mathematics of Love: They say love isn’t an exact science, but is that really the case? In this TED talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by maths!) for finding that special someone. A must-watch if you like Maths.
👀 Keep your eyes peeled for…
Various Dates This Week:
Tuesday 10th November:
Wednesday 11th November:
Thursday 12th November:
Friday 13th November:
Monday 16th November:
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