In the spring of 2023, around the time I was reading Nancy Yousef’s Aesthetic Commonplace, the Keats-Shelley Association of America announced a “digital initiative” to globally group-source “a public commonplace book of Romantic readers” (K-SAA 2023a). The first volume of these “constellations” linking authors, source materials, readers, and reading practices centuries apart has since been published (K-SAA 2023b). A compelling historical perspective to be drawn from that work is the long, multipart shift in the practice of keeping a commonplace book in middle modernity, from the near-exclusive preserve of Enlightenment gentlemen scholars writing in Latin to a nineteenth-century vernacular practice (household or personal) available to “everyone” (K-SAA 2023c).
That history of material culture describes one arc in which the commonplace becomes ordinary in social space. Another way to trace the same trajectory, Yousef’s way, is philosophical rather than sociological and, not coincidentally, less reliable to build...
