Remembering and Forgetting by Means of Subject Headings: A Contribution to the History of Knowledge Organization

Over the last thirty years, much historical research has focused on the early modern practice of note-taking and the compilation of commonplace-books. Actors' choices of headings, however, is a still poorly investigated theme, especially given the fact that such choices were crucial for the organisation of access to information when knowledge was stored in external repositories. In this article, I analyse how early modern scholars addressed this technical problem and tried to tackle it. By means of mostly seventeenth-century sources I show that scholars formulated both theoretical and practical rules to create working indexing systems as tools to discriminate between remembering and forgetting. My hypothesis is that the novelty in the choice of subject headings for early modern commonplace-books and filing cabinets lay in the fact that subject headings became a choice. This paved the way to an epochmaking transition from universal topics to a universal index upon all authors.