Loci communes (Latin; literally “commonplaces,” i.e. “finding places,” “key references,” corresponding to the Greek tópoi) were a universal method of scholarly classification developed within the educational movement of Humanism that contributed to replacing the formal logic nurtured in scholasticism with a new kind of practical dialectics. Called by Philipp Melanchthon the “Urbilder und Normen aller Dinge” (“archetypes and norms of all things”), they were used to classify texts …