This chapter is a case study on the Hungarian historiographer Péter
Révay (1568–1622) by discussing his method of note-taking acquired during his
years of education. In addition to three volumes of lecture notes from his time
spent at the Jesuit college of Vienna, Révay composed a commonplace book with
excerpts from his readings about moral topics at the Lutheran gymnasium of
Strasbourg. These documents attest that he received a Jesuit education harmonizing a humanist approach to dialectics with a traditional peripatetic curriculum,
while his commonplace book from Strasbourg is interpreted through the optics
of Johannes Sturm’s pedagogical ideas, focusing on paroemiology and Ciceronian
eloquence. The chapter demonstrates that the apparently aleatory structure of
the commonplace book derives from the teaching methods of Melchior Junius, Révay’s master. Finally, I argue that Cicero’s moral categories, i. e. honestum (righteous) and utile (expedient) were fundamental to Révay in his evaluation of historical examples
