Christoph Just Udenius and the German ars excerpendi around 1700: On the Flourishing and Disappearance of a Pedagogical Genre

On the face of it, the history of excerpting appears to be a history of the distant, scholarly past. Excerpting is commonly seen as essentially a learned practice tied to bookish forms of knowledge production and thus, from the perspective of modernity, outdated. It fits this picture that the surge in research on note taking of the last three decades was largely driven by scholarship on learned authors in Renaissance Europe. 1 To be sure, this important research paved the way for studies that go beyond learned forms of knowledge production in the sixteenth century. They show, for instance, how conceptualizations and practices of note-taking that owed much to Renaissance humanism shaped the "New Science" of the seventeenth century or art historical knowledge in the eighteenth century. They also demonstrate that these selfsame note-taking practices also shaped the way in which first-hand observations were recorded. 2 Still others brought the note-taking of Early Modern people to the fore who were not learned members of the respublica literaria. 3 Considerably less research has been conducted on excerpting in the sciences and the humanities in later periods, let alone excerpting in literature and the arts. 4 By contrast, this themed issue starts from the assumption that excerpting has been practiced throughout modernity and is practiced to the present day in different areas of text and art production. Rather than seeing excerpting as an essentially premodern learned practice that ended in the eighteenth century, we consider the eighteenth century as pivotal for a history of modern excerpting that is still ongoing. The contributions brought together in this issue constitute a starting point for a history of excerpting in this vein in the longue durØe perspective. They center on a scholar or an artist whose excerpting is instructive for the history of excerpting more generally or, in the case of plagiarism, a practice as well as a legal concept the histories of which are intimately connected to changing practices and conceptualizations of excerpting. It is clear, however, that even collectively, these studies cannot begin to exhaust the topic but, rather, constitute only a first set of probes into a history of excerpting understood not as a premodern but a modern phenomenon that warrants a concerted research effort.In what follows, we will first propose a definition of excerpting that covers all stages of the excerpting process rather than centering on the writing of excerpts 1 an overview from a systems theory perspective of the history of excerpting from antiquity up to the eighteenth century (on 5 -137) and in an appendix (on 139 -425) offers Italian translations of six texts on the history of excerpting by

Section: A Very Short History Of Excerptingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Towards a History of Excerpting in Modernity

Décultot¹,

Krämer²,

Zedelmaier³

2020

Thinking with Excerpts: John Locke (1632–1704) and his Notebooks

Yeo

2020

In his “Méthode nouvelle,” an anonymous article in the Bibliothèque universelle of 1686, John Locke described his way of collecting excerpts in notebooks and retrieving relevant entries. The well‐known practice of entering textual passages in commonplace books sits uneasily with Locke's criticism of received opinion and authority. Is it possible that he used any of these notes to think with? I suggest that the conditions for this were provided by Locke's interactions with some of his notes, including those which recorded observations, testimonies and experiments. As well as labelling excerpts and other notes with topical Titles, Locke sometimes added precise bibliographical citations, transferred material across notebooks, interpolated his own signed reflections and queries, and (eventually) dated entries.

Reading versus Seeing? Winckelmann's Excerpting Practice and the Genealogy of Art History

Décultot

2020

From his arrival in Italy in 1755, Winckelmann's work is infused throughout by a fundamental antinomy: reading versus seeing. This antinomy possesses for him a decidedly epistemological significance: it allows him to present himself as the father of a discipline deserving of its name, i.e., the history of art. In Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), he claims to break with a long tradition of art discourse which had been primarily supported by ancient texts, basing his book instead on the direct observation of the artworks. The aim of this paper is to critically examine this antinomy. How does seeing relate to reading in his working method? What relationship does art history, in the empirical dimension Winckelmann wanted to give it, have to book knowledge? Winckelmann's excerpts collection provides valuable answers to these questions. Following an old scholarly tradition, Winckelmann used to write down passages of his readings, constituting a vast handwritten library of excerpts which never left him. The result of this intense excerpting practice consists in some 7,500 pages, which allow to better define the share of empirical observation and book‐based knowledge in his approach to ancient art.