Many participants in 2201 saw the “commonplace book” as an opportunity to explore those literary moments that most resonated with them as well as the materiality of premodern text itself. Drawing on a rich tradition of personal reading and scholarship, the commonplace book is a paradoxical artifact: it encodes texts that treat both the sacred and the profane, the mundane and the profound, the private and the public.
Senior Leighanna Gregorek shares with us a beautiful commonplace book, where she energetically explores premodern mise en page, marginalia, rubrication, script, and palimpsest. She describes the creation of a commonplace book as an exercise in reading and meaning-making:
[The commonplace book] gave me time to reflect back on what we read this semester and work through it a little more closely and figure out why certain things meant something to me and why some things didn’t.
In the gallery below, we have included Leighanna’s own words about her work and creative process!
This is my signature page. I took one of the larger pieces of marginalia from one of the earliest bundles and sketched it out to the best of my ability and then added some medieval-like lettering at the top. One of the reasons I love medieval marginalia so much is that I’ve always thought I was terrible at drawing but maybe I just draw in a medieval style. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself.
In the same way that I assumed no monastery would have dirty jokes, I also assumed that literature from the 14th century would be chaste and polite. I certainly never considered that there might be female narrators (or even speaking characters) in most 14th century writing. […] I still can’t determine whether or not Chaucer was writing from a place of empathy for her or not.
I chose this part of Julian of Norwich where she compares creation to a hazelnut. I was most interested in including Julian of Norwich because I’m fascinated by the idea of Anchorites. To most of us the idea of being walled up in a room sounds like something from a Poe story but, as I thought about it more and as I could hear all the noises from the neighbors and had to log into work at a certain time, I thought it actually sounded really nice. Maybe Anchorites, like quarantine, speaks to my introversion and desire to be left alone to read.
I decided to do this one a little differently because of the nature of the content. In the biblical version of the story of Abraham and Isaac, we don’t get a lot of details about what happened when Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed. In this play, we get a sense for how this author envisioned the conversation between father and son. […] It felt very horror movie to me and so I decided to treat Isaac’s very last line in that section as a refrain across the page, like it was perhaps echoing before the screen faded to black.
I had never written a sonnet before and, since I’ve never taken a Shakespeare course, I wasn’t even entirely sure what a sonnet was. I chose to include it because it’s likely the only sonnet I will ever write and I was proud of it. […] Something I learned about the sonnet, and limiting games/rules in general, is that when given very strict guidelines for something, it forces creativity to take unexpected paths.
I pulled this quote from The Blazing World because it read to me a little like something you’d see on a throw pillow at Bed, Bath & Beyond. I also liked it because it’s very much the opposite of Capellanus’s “a new love puts to flight an old one.”
What really struck me about The Rape of the Lock was the familiar tone of it. Having spent the last few years being Extremely Online™ this sort of male tone about something like sexual assault (or likening the cutting of hair to sexual assault) was not new to me. However, Pope’s poem is quite clever. I decided to highlight the words which, taken by themselves, can read a little bit of a different, if clumsy, way.
The last piece I chose to include was a portion of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. I wrote it the way I did and chose to include it because, to me, it reads like a bit from a haunted house story. Because Equiano incorporated many genres into his writing, I thought it fitting to pull something that read a bit like a modern genre. I felt like this could be the note left in the haunted house by the uncle who has gone missing.
Leighanna Gregorek is in her final year of undergrad, majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. She’s looking forward to continuing her education in a graduate program and hopes to write professionally and teach one day in the future. In her free time, she enjoys reading, DIY bookbinding, knitting, watching and talking about horror movies, and writing.
