Lodovico Antonio Muratori e il problema del metodo tra XVI e XVIII secolo

LODOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI AND THE QUESTION OF METHOD BETWEEN THE SIXTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. Materiality has recently entered the field of intellectual history. As a result, historians have been paying more attention to working methods and practices, such as note-taking. In this article, I argue that the practice of note-taking (ars excerpendi) championed by the Italian scholar Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750) allows us to shed light on those parts in his Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto (Reflections on Good Taste, 1708) that he devoted to developing the correct method of teaching and learning. This ars excerpendi, placed at the very core of his project of cultural reformation, is closely linked to his criticism towards ‘artificial memory’. By reading Muratori’s notebooks, in which he put his art of reading and selecting excerpts into practice, this article aims to provide a picture of the authors to whom, alongside Descartes and Bacon, he had implicitly referred while dealing with the method of teaching and learning. His notes reveal Muratori’s interest in a wide range of sixteenth-century authors. This suggests a connection between his methodological thinking and the tradition which, moving from the sixteenth-century debates on methodus and passing through Johann Heinrich Alsted’s encyclopaedic project, arrives at Bacon and Descartes.