ABSTRACT
As new evidence for the interaction between humanism and science in the Renaissance, this chapter traces the use among natural philosophical authors of a quintessentially humanist method of reading and storing information-through the commonplace book. In tracing how Bodin used his sources and how his work was used in turn by its readers one can follow traditional natural philosophy in the making through a seemingly unending cycle of textual selection and assessment which the method of commonplaces can usefully illuminate. The cycle of textual natural philosophy, processed through the commonplace book, thus continues unabated well into the seventeenth century. In the 1610s, for example, Alsted and Keckermann discuss the best ways to keep commonplace books. The debate between what one might hastily call humanist and neo-scholastic visions of the commonplace book only reinforces the argument for the fundamental role of the method in the practice of traditional natural philosophy in this period.
