Notions about commonplacing that had progressively evolved, in a wide variety of contexts and circumstances, over more than two thousand years, plainly remained very much available to any well-informed late seventeenth-century individual concerned about the purposes and potential of reading. Yet as we have already observed, recent literary scholarship has generally ignored this important circumstance altogether. Worse, it has even been assumed that the commonplace book was at precisely this time being dragged downwards and pushed out towards the cultural margins by supposedly irresistible forces that collectively characterised the dawning of the Enlightenment. By any standards this would be a problematic perspective on the history of note-taking. After all, the implication that commonplacing was in terminal decline by 1700 is flatly contradicted by the extraordinarily diverse ways in which commonplace books continued to be made and used, as we have already begun to see, by considerable numbers of English readers. At this stage, however, we should merely pause for a moment to ask how the broader literary and intellectual landscape forming around the turn of the eighteenth century affected the further development of arguments and ideas about the role of structured note-taking.