Commonplacing

‘The practice of commonplacing - a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading - colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition, and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.’ …

‘For Donne, apparently unrelated scraps from the world were always forming new wholes. Commonplacing was a way to assess material those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.’

Super-Infinite: the Transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell (2022)