Drexelportrayed note-taking as the best kind of mine, one that would never fail to re-ward diligent work.3

eremiasDrexel (1581–1638), also a Jesuit (born in Augsburg) and a noted preacher whocomposed more than two dozen moral treatises, many of which were abundantlyreprinted. One of his last works, the Aurifodina, “The Mine of All Arts and Sci-ences, or the Habit of Excerpting,” was printed in 1638 (in 2,000 copies) andin another fourteen editions down to 1695 and spawned abridgments in Latin(1658), German (1684), and English.

Instead of imagination, Drexel recommended training the art of excerpting. Thus, he reversed the ancient rule, according to which knowledge should be entrusted to personal memory rather than to the library, and stored in the mind rather than in a closet upside down.

Drexel recommended pondering the choices of the correct subject-term (caput rei), because it is hard to foresee in the ‘present’ which ‘past’ one might search for in the ‘future’.

Manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s “Goldmine”—the frontispiece of which showed a scholar taking notes opposite miners digging for literal gold—taught students how to condense and arrange the contents of literature by headings.

I suspect Grafton translated the actual title, Aurifondina artium et scientiarum omnium excerpendi solerti, omnibus litterarum amantibus monstrata. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/11169213

Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German Jesuit Jeremias Drexel noted that in the celebrated Justus Lipsius, one can find ‘tam copiosa, and illustris eruditio’ (a so abundant and glorious erudition) because the Flemish philosopher not only read many books; he also selected and ex-cerpted the best from them.5

Excerpting requires effort and thus combats natural laziness; inhis regimen there is no reading without taking notes, which would be idleand vain, and no time wasted because every free moment can be put to usereading over one’s notes (seeA,p. 84).

Drexel emphasizesthe difficulty of image-based arts of memory and how short-lived are theirresults: “Great labor places so many images of things in this treasury ofmemory; but no amount of labor has managed to preserve them there forlong without excerpts” (A, p. 3). Instead, for Drexel excerpting is the onlysure way to retain material for the long term. Drexel insists too that, farfrom detracting from memory, note taking is the best aid to memory.

Jeremias Drexel,Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium: Excerpendi sollertia, omnibuslitterarum amantibus monstrata(Antwerp, 1638), pp. 68–69; hereafter abbreviatedA.

Spin-offs from Drexel include Kergerus,Methodus drexeliana succinctior(1658) and P. Philomusus[Johannis Jacobus Labhart],Industria excerpendi brevis, facilis, amoena(Konstanz, 1684).

the most influential may be Jeremias Drexel’sAurifodina,orThe Mine of All Arts and Sciences, or the Habit of Excerpting(1638), in fourteen editions to 1695, followed by abridgments, imitations,and responses.

Jesuit manuals such as Jeremias Drexel’s Aurifodina, subtitled The Mine of All Arts and Sciences, or the Habit of Excerpting, explained how to best take notes from reading to create commonplace books: personal notebooks of reading extracts that contained the religious, ethical, and political maxims deemed necessary to lead a good life. There were even admonitions about which texts not to read and how not to fold page corners or to mark texts with fingernail scratches.