Matthew Daniel Eddy, <i>Media and the Mind: Art, Science and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830</i>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. 512. ISBN 978-0-226-18386-2. $65.00 (cloth).

How does our understanding of Enlightenment science change if we shift attention from published texts by celebrated philosophes to the notes taken by their students?How can these 'material and visual artifacts' be read, and what do they reveal that would otherwise remain invisible?Matthew Daniel Eddy offers an ambitious study of how Scottish students processed, organized, represented and disseminated knowledge between 1700 and 1830.At the core of Media and the Mind is the claim that notebooks were not passive repositories but thinking tools, indispensable to ordering knowledge and forming rational argument.Eddy analyses dozens of manuscripts produced by male and female students, mostly from middling merchant families, professionals and artisans, whose diverse educational trajectories converged in annotation practices.What unites these cases is the mechanics of work: the material acts of writing, compiling and arranging notes.These were not disembodied forms of knowledge but situated artefacts, made in time and space: 'the skills of reasoning were learned over time within the lives of individuals who were doing things with their minds and bodies in, around, and through notebooks on a daily basis' (p.30).Trained as a historian of science, Eddy shows how notetaking, notekeeping and annotating were central to building evidence and ordering the mind: in short, to making knowledge.Crucially, these were not solitary exercises but part of broader 'notekeeping communities' spanning homes, schools, universities and academies.By reconstructing these practices, Media and the Mind seeks to contribute to what Eddy calls 'Scotland's popular Enlightenment', shedding light on the intellectual and social contexts of students who were neither elite nor destined for fame.The research is grounded in extensive archival work and is supported by a rich bibliography exceeding sixty pages.Methodologically, the book participates in the material turn inaugurated by historians of books and print, while also engaging with historians of science on the rise of modern notions of objectivity, probability and observation, and with anthropologists who treat notes as a form of 'thinking through making'.Tim Ingold's notion of 'wayfaring' -'a dynamic process of learning or enacting the skills required to make the various components that add up to a singular artifact' (p.13) -is especially pertinent.The notebooks appear here as 'dynamic artifacts' -'paper machines', in Markus Krajewski's phrase -enabling cognitive processing and functioning as powerful media technologies.Eddy frames his argument around Locke's metaphor of the tabula rasa, understood both as the mind as blank page and as a reference to 'the material culture of foliation, inscription and codection ' (p.31).The effect is to propose an alternative history of the Enlightenment,