CHAPTER 10.
LOCI COMMUNES
Sixteenth century Europe gave birth to a profound and far-reaching transformation in the relationship
between the individual and what Montaigne calls the "déjà dit" --
the treasury of cultural knowledge
preserved in written or oral tradition. The art of printing left its origins in the incunabula and set forth to
revolutionize thinking in a host of disciplines. It undermined the authority of Aristotle and assisted the
recovery and ascendency of Plato, Plotinus and Hermes Trismegistus, among other thinkers of the ancient
world whose thought had been eclipsed for many centuries. The authority of the written word, inscribed
in an alien Latin tongue to be read and interpreted by the priest, began to give way before the impulse for
vernacular comprehension which placed the communicant's own knowledge and perspective at the center
of an expanding universe of subjectivity. In England the century began with no Bibles in English and
ended with at least five independent translations-- Tyndale's (1525, 1530) The Great Bible (1539), The
Genevan (1560), The Bishop's (1568), and the Rheims Catholic New Testament (1582). On the continent,
Martin Luther attacked Papal authority in a series of inflammatory but skillful tracts which forever
shattered the unity of Christendom. Copernicus published his devastating exposé of the theocracy, De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium
(1543), which argued in compelling mathematical detail for a
heliocentric model of the solar system; during the same century, Tycho Brahe began systematically
assembling a collection of resources for the testing and correction of astronomical theories at his
observatory Uraniborg -- the first such collection made since Alexandria (E. Britannica 1911 IV, 377).
But the creation of the modern subject was far from complete in Elizabethan England. As Marion
Trousdale has shown in Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians,
the Elizabethan mind still functioned in
grooves which are alien to a modern reader. The typical English library, especially among the educated
aristocracy, was still comprised largely of books written in Latin and, to a lesser but still surprising extent,
Greek and Hebrew. The well-preserved collection of 2800 volumes from the library of de Vere's friend
and cousin Lord John Lumley is probably typical for the Elizabethan period: 88% of the books are in
Latin, Greek and Hebrew; only 12% are in any vernacular, and only 6% in English (Jayne & Johnson 11).
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