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Passages of Interest:

1. “If it is harder for the modern reader to find Moore’s book as accessible as did the author’s contemporaries, it is nonetheless possible to recapture many aspects of the eighteenth-century cultures shared by Moore and her original audience. The friends and family members with whom Moore shared her book would have known the full cast of characters represented in the book … They would have understood the jests, the sly allusions, and the biblical citations.” (2)

Even though Moore’s close companions definitely would have more immediately and intimately understood this text than even an expert scholar could hope to, I think it’s important to remember that there is still some element to the book (and to any text, really) whose meaning can only be accessed by the creator. I think this is especially true for more “personal” texts, like diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, and the like, which makes me feel all the more weird for having access to Moore’s book.

2. “School settings were an arena for the exchange and copying of manuscript writings … [and] evening gatherings provided a forum for reading aloud from poetry or prose manuscripts.” (37)

I’m trying to think of what the modern day equivalent or corollary may be to these social writing swaps. I will often send a friend a link (via Facebook, or maybe email) to a video/article/post I stumble upon and find interesting. Or I may share a piece of writing – typically something for a class that I’d like to get feedback on – in an email or as a hard copy. My digital exchanges of texts far outnumber the in-person physical ones, though, and while I suppose that my Facebook chat logs or archived emails offer a (very cluttered) database of these shared pieces, it’s certainly a less thoughtful and centralized collection than Moore and her peers were likely to have.

3. “Thus the range of political opinions expressed in More’s commonplace book, and authors of those opinions, ranged from extreme patriotism to extreme loyalism.” (38)

This is pretty fascinating to me, perhaps just because I am so used to reading texts (both primary and secondary sources) that tend to ardently tout and express an argument from a single point of view. If other perspectives are mentioned, it is often just to a rhetorical end. So, the fact that Moore’s commonplace book features the heterogenous perspectives of her peers appeals to me, since it’s pretty often in life that I have to come to terms with the diverse opinions of my own companions.

Works Cited:

Moore, Milcah Martha, Catherine L Blecki, and Karin A Wulf. 1997. Milcah Martha Moore’s Book. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press.