Students of English literature are now likely to take courses which question the designation “literature,” with its implicit assumptions of elite culture and a hierarchy of accepted genres, and to use terms such as “writing,” “discourse,” or “culture.” When we broaden the categories of what we consider worthy of study, we gain a more accurate picture of the past, and we realize that women have always engaged with its material record, as readers and writers. One non-canonical form of writing that has garnered recent scholarly interest is the commonplace book, in its purest form a collection of humanist-inspired extracts from classical writers arranged under topic headings. Initially a Latin tool used by schoolboys to organize their reading and to generate their own writing, its influence on patterns of thought and the structuring of knowledge among the educated of Western Europe was profound, as Ann Moss, Earle Havens, and others have demonstrated.