Notebooks and note-taking have topical interest today, because people wonder how the appearance of new media technologies has influenced our old pen-and-paper practices. Richard Yeo s book shows us how some of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution adapted "their" practices to the new needs of empirical inquiry. Specifically, "Notebooks and English Virtuosi" explores the note-taking practices of scientific virtuosi in early modern England. It interprets the extensive notes and notebooks of John Locke and other leading ...
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Notebooks and note-taking have topical interest today, because people wonder how the appearance of new media technologies has influenced our old pen-and-paper practices. Richard Yeo s book shows us how some of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution adapted "their" practices to the new needs of empirical inquiry. Specifically, "Notebooks and English Virtuosi" explores the note-taking practices of scientific virtuosi in early modern England. It interprets the extensive notes and notebooks of John Locke and other leading members of the Royal Society of London, as well as several other significant figures inside and outside England, all of whom kept and reflected on notebooks. These figures, including Samuel Hartlib, John Evelyn, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, and their network of friends and correspondents, drew upon Renaissance practices of excerpting from texts to build storehouses of material in personal notebooks (usually commonplace books). However, they also adjusted this method of note-taking and its rationale. Yeo considers their reflections on the best use of memory, notebooks, and other records in the collection and analysis of the empirical information sought by the early Royal Society. Francis Bacon was a crucial mentor: his call for the accumulation of data in natural histories as a basis for scientific explanations demanded a new kind of note-taking."
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