Notebooks, Recollection, and External Memory: Some Early Modern English Ideas and Practices

Abstract

In his Introduction to the history of science (1927–1948), George Sarton (1884– 1956) reflected on his research habits and tools of trade over a long life as a bibliographer and historian. He made special mention of his books and as- sociated notes. This apparatus, as he called it, seemed “insignificant compared with the library, yet from my own point of view, it is the central thing, and the library but a gigantic annex to it”.2 He was sure every scholar would appreciate this. My aim in this chapter is to examine Sarton’s claim in the light of some recent work in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind, before discuss- ing early modern European ideas about the relationships between memory, note-taking, and external repositories of information and knowledge. In this way, I confront the obvious question about the notion of a ‘forgetting machine’ – namely, given the well-known weakness and fragility of natural memory, why would anyone want one of these? By looking at the role of notebooks we can think about practices that allow one to forget and later retrieve, or recollect, what has been forgotten – either by consulting a stable record, such as a book or document, or by recollection from natural memory triggered by an external prompt, such as an image or note.