Among natural historians, Ulisse Al-drovandi (1522–1605) left more than 400 volumes of manuscripts that attest tohis efforts at collecting and sorting a vast abundance of information. Historiansand antiquarians, like the French nobleman Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), also amassed abundant notes.50

Ulisse Aldrovandi, the great Bolognese natural philosopher and collector of specimens (such as the large lizards that adorn his university library museum), wrote four hundred volumes of manuscript notes. Joachim Jungius, a German professor of mathematics, medicine, logic, and natural philosophy, was famous for having produced an estimated 150,000 pages of notes. But as Blair makes clear, the vast collections of scientific notes were not simply the mad scratchings of obsessive pedants. Commonplace notes comprised the data for internationally successful scientific works, such as Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum.