2011 Reports

A paper archive of everything written: Ulisse Aldrovandi's Pandechion Epistemonicon

Kramer, Fabian

The ongoing discussions on the effects that the use of humanist reading and note taking practices, notably commonplacing, had on the composition of scholarly texts in the late Renaissance have transformed the way we think about the history of natural history and other early modern learned activities that relied on the respective "paper technologies", to use Anke te Heesen's term. Te Heesen stresses the importance of the materiality of paper: together with the special tools that typically go with it, she argues, paper can perform certain tasks that other materials are unable to perform. It thus came to be intimately bound to note taking in two senses – taking note of as well as taking notes on something.