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Drexel's Aurifodina
Jeremias Drexel's 1607 Gold Mine of All Arts and Sciences — a Jesuit treatise on the art of excerpting that reads, four centuries later, as an uncannily precise manual for the cognitive demands of AI collaboration.
Aurifodina Artium et Scientiarum Omnium ("The Gold Mine of All Arts and Sciences"), published in 1607 by the Jesuit scholar Jeremias Drexel, is a treatise on the art of excerpting — of extracting value from the flood of printed books through disciplined note-taking, organization, and reflective use. Drexel's instructions are detailed, practical, and grounded in a sophisticated understanding of how intellectual judgment operates under conditions of abundance. Read before excerpting. Do not excerpt mechanically but with attention to your purposes. Organize your excerpts under headings that reflect your own priorities, not the structure of the source text. Return to your compiled excerpts regularly to discover connections that the original sources, read in isolation, would never have revealed. Ann Blair's research treats Drexel's treatise as a representative example of the sophisticated curatorial literature the early modern period produced — literature that, Blair argues, is the conceptual ancestor of what AI-era practitioners are now improvising.
