Reading strategies for coping with information overload ca. 1550-1700.

The "multitude of books" was a subject of wonder and anxiety for authors who reflected on the scholarly condition in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. In the preface to his massive project of cataloguing all known books in the Bibliotheca univeralis (1545) Conrad Gesner complained of that "confusing and harmful abundance of books," a problem which he called on kings and princes and the learned to solve.1 By 1685 the situation seemed absolutely dire to Adrien Baillet, who warned: We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not.2 In this way Baillet claimed to have warded off barbarity itself with his collection of judgments on the learned in his nine-volume (and still only half-completed) Jugemens des scavans. The perception of an overabundance of books fueled the production of many more books, often especially large ones, designed to remedy the problem-from new genres like the universal bibliography and the book review to new (or not-so-new) contributions to well-established genres, including the florilegium, the dictionary, and the encyclopedic compilation. Along with the alphabetical index these latter genres originated in the thirteenth century in response to similar pressures of overload, which were elegantly articulated for example in Vincent of Beauvais's preface to his four-volume Speculum maius (1255): Since the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in summary order some flowers selected according to my talents from all the authors I was able to read.3 The premise of this study is that the experience of overabundance not only fostered the diffusion and development of various aids to learning or "reference genres"4 but also affected the way scholars worked, from reading and taking notes to composing books of their own. What I propose here is a preliminary survey of some of the methods of reading and note-taking deployed by early modern scholars under the pressures of too many books and too few resources, notably of time, memory or money. Many of the methods for managing an abundance of texts have remained identifiable in one form or another from antiquity to the present day: they typically involve selecting, sorting, and storing, carried out in various combinations and with various motives and technologies. Similarly, many of the practical expedients I will mention here, from selective reading to the use of abbreviations or of notes taken by someone else, are neither new nor unique to the period in which I have chosen to study them. As we learn more, thanks to a growing wave of recent literature, about "reading for action" (as opposed to spiritual contemplation or leisure and entertainment), we will be able to assess more fully the existence of both long continuities and variations in time and place in the transmission of methods of scholary study and their associated shortcuts, from antiquity to the early modern period and beyond.5 My purpose is not to revisit claims for a reading revolution, or even a reading evolution.6 Indeed the "before" picture of any claim for changing reading practices in the early modern period would have to be complicated by the existence from the thirteenth century already not only of indexes and reference genres but also of features of textual lay-out that facilitated consultation: running heads at the tops of the pages of scholastic manuscripts, subdivisions of the text, into books, chapters, questions, distinctions, objections, often numbered and generally highlighted in some way on the page (e. …