Matthew Daniel Eddy. Media and the Mind: Art, Science & Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 512. $65.00 (cloth).

Media and the Mind offers a welcome examination of the notebook as a site of student learning and practice.Drawing primarily on notebooks kept by Scottish students between 1700 and 1830, Eddy examines how the practices of notebook-keeping informed and reflected contemporary understandings of the relationship between writing and thinking.Eddy invokes the metaphor of the tabula rasa, and particularly its use by John Locke, to highlight the instrumental roles of the notebook as a "personalized technology" for Enlightenment audiences (5).Eddy bounds his study to Scotland (and particularly Scottish universities) between 1700 and 1830, in doing so making possible a richly collections-centered project.His research is particularly welcome in highlighting examples from Scottish collections, particularly those of Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Edinburgh City Archive, and the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh.Drilling down into particular facets of the use of notebooks, Eddy proposes an overarching thesis in which notebooks inform cognitive practice, acting as instruments through which students learned to systematize their thinking.Individual examples illuminate these instances of practice, offering glimpses into those moments in which Enlightenment writers grappled with the messy, cumbersome practice of acquiring knowledge.The book takes as its focus those categories of material, cognitive, organizational, and social practice generated by student note-keeping.The work is organized in three parts, loosely based on the metaphor of the tabula rasa.Part one, "Inside the Tabula Rasa," centers on the core skills of paper-based knowledge: writing; "codexing," or organizing into paperbased textual units; and annotating.In chapter two, "Writing," Eddy introduces the contexts in which Scottish students learned to write.He surveys the tools and practices of writing and organizing text on the page, and highlights the importance of copying, both as a means of learning to write and as a mode of formulating the relationship between writer, writing, and text.Chapter three, "Codexing," focuses on the notebook as an artifact of practice: the folding, gathering, stitching, and assembling by which a writer might draw sheets of paper into the unit of the codex.Chapter four, "Annotating," addresses the relationships inherent in marginalia.We see the margin as a notetaking space; the annotation as a moment of pedagogical engagement by a tutor or instructor; and annotations as a form of metadata, through the writer's imposition of headings or other paratextual organization.Eddy moves between the spaces and practices of writing to highlight paper's simultaneous performances within the notebook: as writing surface, as quire within organizing structure, as margin or adjacent space, both textual and social.Part two, "Around the Tabula Rasa," addresses the visual structures and spaces of the page, focusing on the ways these served to facilitate various cognitive and mnemonic