Petrus Ramus
Just making note of the fact that Petrus Ramus was the advisor of Theodor Zwinger and apparently influcnced Jean Bodin, about whom Ann M. Blair writes about in Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age.
I suspect these influences may impinge on my work on the history of memory and its downfall due to Ramism since the late 1500s and which impacts the history of information.
Ulisse Aldrovandi, the great Bolognese natural philosopher and collector of specimens (such as the large lizards that adorn his university library museum), wrote four hundred volumes of manuscript notes. Joachim Jungius, a German professor of mathematics, medicine, logic, and natural philosophy, was famous for having produced an estimated 150,000 pages of notes. But as Blair makes clear, the vast collections of scientific notes were not simply the mad scratchings of obsessive pedants. Commonplace notes comprised the data for internationally successful scientific works, such as Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum.
Examples of significant collections of notes.
Blair’s previous work demonstrated that the practices of literary reading and writing were central to the rise of scientific method. Focusing on the lawyer and scientist Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, she meticulously examined how Bodin collected commonplace reading notes and then stored and analyzed them as scientific evidence.
I really do need to create a historical timeline for commonplace books already.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg also did this in the late 1700's and became famous for it after his death and the publication of his Waste Books. Worth looking into who his influences may have been?