Information overload is not a wholly unprecedented phenomenon. Memory and oral testimony (individual or group) only reigned supreme until the invention of writing created an additional and potentially conflicting source of data about past events. In that respect, the introduction of printing by movable type to fifteenth-century Europe was a still more disruptive innovation. Thereafter, books and other printed media proliferated in ever greater numbers; hence the depressing familiarity of Leibniz’s complaint towards the end of the seventeenth century about ‘that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing’.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (painting by Christoph Bernhard Francke)

Like many of us, Leibniz also had a problem with finding things that he knew he had written down somewhere: ‘I forget it almost entirely within a few months and rather than searching for it amid a chaos of jottings that I do not have the leisure to arrange and mark with headings, I am obliged to do the work all over again.’ As these two quotations suggest, the wide-ranging new book by Richard Yeo from which they are taken addresses questions of more than purely specialist interest.

Yeo is here concerned with an earlier stage of the intellectual project that was the subject of his previous work on the pioneering Cyclopaedia (1728) of Ephraim Chambers, who sought to digest and present for general readers a mass of information about the arts and sciences. By then the time was long past when such knowledge could safely be assumed to have been encompassed in books, let alone the surviving works of the ‘ancients’. Renaissance humanists had cultivated the art of memory by copying down the choicer fruits of their reading in ‘commonplace’ books, alphabetically arranged under more or less conventional headings. But the new philosophers of the seventeenth century used a variety of notebooks in different formats to record, retrieve, and manipulate data derived from their own experiments and observations, often professing more interest in the book of nature than the books of men.

The transition from reliance on individual memory prompted by commonplace books to notes as primary stores of information accessible to others besides the original note-taker turns out to have been a far more complex and interesting process than the bare title of Yeo’s book might suggest. While primarily concerned with seventeenth-century England, this is by no means a narrowly Anglocentric study; nor could it be so, given the cosmopolitan nature of the early modern Republic of Letters. Thus René Descartes, Isaac and Méric Casaubon, Michel de Montaigne, Petrus Ramus, Joseph Scaliger, and (as we have already seen) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz all appear as significant figures at various points in Yeo’s account, together with many less familiar Continental pedagogues and scholars, such as Daniel Morhauf and Vincent Placcius. A separate chapter is devoted to the Cambridge-educated Anglo-German émigré intellectual entrepreneur Samuel Hartlib, who from his London base acquired a strong personal following of like-minded millenarian enthusiasts for a new and reformed philosophy which might restore the prelapsarian knowledge lost by Adam and Eve, thereby advancing the much-anticipated Second Coming of Christ, as foretold in the Book of Daniel. Yeo’s chronological range is no less extensive, embracing Aristotle, Hippocrates, Cicero, Augustine, and Petrarch as well as Darwin, Freud, Huxley, Weber, and Whewell.

Such breadth of reference is necessary in order to reconstruct the intellectual milieu of early modern English virtuosi, with particular reference to their note-taking and memory training, then to trace the various information management strategies developed in response to Francis Bacon’s call for a new natural history that privileged things, not words. These tasks are handled in the first three and following four chapters respectively. The latter focus on important individual figures – most notably Hartlib, Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Robert Hooke – whose precepts and practice can be explored in some depth from their surviving personal papers. To oversimplify, Yeo discerns a growing sophistication of approach, from Hartlib’s somewhat indiscriminate encouragement of data harvesting and organisation (most notably by means of the ‘Arca Studiorum’, Thomas Harrison’s projected but never built mechanical indexing device), to the concern of Boyle’s assistant Hooke for an ordered institutional repository of information, so as ‘to abridge the infinitie of individual experience … and to remedie the complaint of vita brevis, ars longa’. In between, we learn much about the reasons for the disorder in which Boyle left his own ‘loose notes’, together with the meticulous empirical note-taking techniques developed and publicised by ‘that great master of order, Mr Locke’.

The author, Richard Yeo, at the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ at Stowe, England. This temple features statues of some of the figures discussed in his book, such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.

My one major reservation about Yeo’s approach doubtless reflects my own preoccupations. For while individual early modern lawyers pop up occasionally in these pages, whether as note-takers or commentators on note-taking, the general significance of ‘scribal publication’ of legal material and the buoyant trade in legal manuscripts around and about London’s inns of court receives no attention. This omission seems particularly unfortunate in view of Barbara Shapiro’s various intriguing suggestions about conceptual and social links between the common-law world and the proto-scientists. Not only did many common lawyers share the keen natural historical interests of Matthew Hale, John Hoskyns, and Roger North, but it may be that the continued development of rules of evidence in the courts of Westminster Hall had some influence on emerging criteria of experimental or scientific proof adopted by the virtuosi of the Royal Society.  

Despite a formidably erudite bibliography citing titles in five European languages, Yeo’s work should not be thought of as accessible only to experts in the history of the book, the cultural history of information, or the history of early modern science: three fields of contemporary scholarship to which its author justifiably lays claim. While self-evidently writing a learned as distinct from a popular history, Yeo’s prose is always clear and to the point, often lively and blessedly free of jargon or arcane esoterica, even if some readers may blink at ‘art (in the sense of techne)’. Anyone who has struggled to devise and maintain their own system of working notes is likely to find much of interest in these pages; the conceptual and practical difficulties of handling information which our distant predecessors encountered inevitably encourage reflection on one’s own practices.

This is the latest in a succession of distinguished contributions by Australian scholars to the international history of science and of ideas. It should be a source of national pride that such important intellectual work, deriving its ample justification simply from the advancement of knowledge, is being carried out in Australian universities. So how unfortunate that the publisher, having produced a very handsome book about notes, did not place its notes at the foot of each page where they belong.