ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the different ways in which meaning can be attributed to commonplace, both as a broad cultural phenomenon and as a feature of particular texts. It then considers some of the ways in which commonplace materials function in one such text which belongs neither to the realm of pedagogy, nor to that of the faculty disciplines (theology, law, medicine), nor again to that of poetry or rhetoric, but to the in-between domain of a fictional discourse where instances of doxa emerge tantalizingly, as if pointing towards some ultimate truth, only to disappear again before they have had time to establish themselves. In tracing the sedimentation of classical topoi in medieval Latin culture and their transmission thence to early modern and modern European culture, Curtius was concerned solely with a phenomenon of literary history. One can confidently say that Rabelais's fictions and Montaigne's Essais are in their different ways transformations of the commonplace-book.
