1 00:00:00,830 --> 00:00:17,530 George. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Richard. 2 00:00:17,530 --> 00:00:20,229 I've known the immense privilege of being both of these. 3 00:00:20,230 --> 00:00:24,880 Want to bring you the chair of the board of Electors to the local readership and bibliography. 4 00:00:25,390 --> 00:00:29,799 And it's under these auspices that I welcome you here to the Scripps Frank Lecture 5 00:00:29,800 --> 00:00:34,540 Theatre in the Western Library of the Berkeley in libraries this evening. 6 00:00:35,480 --> 00:00:43,330 Before I go any further, I would like to express my great thanks to my fellow electors for their diligence and hard work. 7 00:00:44,110 --> 00:00:47,680 It's such a pleasure to be on that committee with and. 8 00:00:49,520 --> 00:00:54,530 These lectures are being recorded for release on the library's podcast channel. 9 00:00:54,560 --> 00:00:58,520 Ladies and gentlemen. And this first lecture is also being livestreamed. 10 00:00:59,150 --> 00:01:04,090 So I have great pleasure and welcome welcoming those of you watching in Chelmsford or Chilly. 11 00:01:05,940 --> 00:01:07,319 Before I go any further, 12 00:01:07,320 --> 00:01:14,790 I would like to invite you all to join the lectures this year's reader and myself from a traditional Biblio libation in Black Hole. 13 00:01:14,820 --> 00:01:21,140 After the lecture, sadly, those of you in Chile or Chelmsford will have to take care of this element yourselves. 14 00:01:22,480 --> 00:01:26,560 There is also a small display books, including one annotated by Erasmus. 15 00:01:26,830 --> 00:01:34,290 And again, those of you in Chelmsford or Chile will have to find your own books in this annotated by Erasmus for this part of the. 16 00:01:36,260 --> 00:01:40,490 Before we move on to the specifics of this evening's lecture and lecture, 17 00:01:40,910 --> 00:01:45,260 allow me to explain a little of the background and history to the long lectures. 18 00:01:46,410 --> 00:01:49,440 James Park while Harry is looking down this. 19 00:01:50,550 --> 00:01:54,240 Was a lawyer and book collector who lived in Oxford on his retirement. 20 00:01:54,240 --> 00:01:59,750 In addition. You not only collected books in a serious way, but also studied them closely. 21 00:02:00,050 --> 00:02:04,190 Publishing his research on early ebook illustration in Spain in 1925. 22 00:02:05,240 --> 00:02:14,229 Over 100 of his best looks. Medieval manuscripts were bequeathed to the body on his death in 1948, 23 00:02:14,230 --> 00:02:20,620 and the library subsequently purchased another 60 manuscripts and many early printed books from his executors. 24 00:02:21,490 --> 00:02:26,500 Sidney Diamond, then on the staff of the lobby and published a scholarly catalogue of medieval manuscripts. 25 00:02:26,950 --> 00:02:36,279 Then involving in 1971, in addition to this great generosity to the Bobby Drake piano line also left the bequest to establish a 26 00:02:36,280 --> 00:02:42,490 series of lectures and bibliography to be delivered by invitation by leading scholars working in the field. 27 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:44,009 To this end, 28 00:02:44,010 --> 00:02:50,910 the university established a board of directors to review the state of scholarship and to invite the leading proponents to hold the readership. 29 00:02:51,900 --> 00:02:58,470 Is this the one that I've tried since 2013 that has invited the current region to deliver this year's lectures? 30 00:02:59,680 --> 00:03:03,250 The lectures have more than fulfilled the expectations of their benefactor. 31 00:03:03,940 --> 00:03:09,489 The lectures have made a substantial contribution to the field, the bibliography, and is published interpretation. 32 00:03:09,490 --> 00:03:15,520 A high proportion of the lectures have been published and many of these have become heavily cited works of scholarship. 33 00:03:15,770 --> 00:03:19,480 Another few are known internationally as groundbreaking in the field. 34 00:03:21,010 --> 00:03:26,770 Lectures were first delivered in 1952 to 3 by O'Neill care where he didn't bibliography the University of 35 00:03:26,770 --> 00:03:33,370 Oxford and published by AUP in 1960 as the English manuscripts in the century after the Norman Conquest. 36 00:03:34,240 --> 00:03:40,090 Since then, many distinguished readers have delivered lectures which have produced scholarship of an endearing quality. 37 00:03:41,150 --> 00:03:48,800 Walter Gregg in 1954 to 5 published his of some aspects and problems of London publishing between 1515 and 1650. 38 00:03:49,220 --> 00:03:54,380 Threats and violence soon after gave his published bibliography and textual criticism. 39 00:03:54,980 --> 00:04:00,889 Jonathan Alexander published Medieval Illuminators and their methods of work from in 1993. 40 00:04:00,890 --> 00:04:03,890 From his 1982 to 3 Wiles. 41 00:04:04,310 --> 00:04:12,049 Elizabeth Eisenstein delivered hers on Grub Street to broad aspects of the French cosmopolitan press from the age of Louis, 42 00:04:12,050 --> 00:04:17,860 the 14th to the French Revolution. David McKittrick said 1999 to 2000. 43 00:04:17,870 --> 00:04:27,280 But even that has set in print the fortunes of an idea circa 1453 1800 published as print manuscripts in the search for order. 44 00:04:27,460 --> 00:04:38,020 In 2003. 2015 Tesla Weber gave the Liles as public reading, and his books were Matchstick Ideals from Practice in England, and the most recent reader, 45 00:04:38,030 --> 00:04:45,439 Professor Susan Rankin, delivered hers with musical accompaniment on English liturgical books and musical notations. 46 00:04:45,440 --> 00:04:55,470 900 to 1150. Last year. I read that this year more than lived up to the standards of eminence set by the best of her predecessors. 47 00:04:56,040 --> 00:05:03,810 She's held a series of distinguished chairs at Harvard, including the Henry Chancery Professorship of History, and is currently the Carl H. 48 00:05:03,890 --> 00:05:11,490 Pforzheim University professor, a post closely associated with the Harvard University Library and the domain of knowledge. 49 00:05:12,470 --> 00:05:16,490 I'm glad I was educated at Harvard University of Cambridge and at Princeton, 50 00:05:16,700 --> 00:05:21,890 where she was only the second graduate student attending a dissertation at Princeton. 51 00:05:22,070 --> 00:05:26,780 John Bolton became the basis of a first book published in 1996. 52 00:05:27,260 --> 00:05:31,370 She is full of this with an acclaimed series of publications which I have established 53 00:05:31,580 --> 00:05:36,320 as being in the front rank of scholars working on the place of knowledge in the world. 54 00:05:37,320 --> 00:05:41,340 The topics range from organisations of knowledge and the Cambridge Companion 55 00:05:41,340 --> 00:05:45,420 to Renaissance Philosophy to studies of note taking in Renaissance humour. 56 00:05:45,450 --> 00:05:52,650 Most recently in the late Intellectual History Review, she's published on disciplinary cultures and archives. 57 00:05:54,270 --> 00:06:01,950 In her graduate dissertation, The Teacher of Nature, John Bowden, released on science reporting by Princeton University Press in 1997. 58 00:06:03,020 --> 00:06:08,900 She made a compelling case for the notion of information overload not being unique to our digital era. 59 00:06:09,080 --> 00:06:12,440 In her superb monograph published by Yale in 2010. 60 00:06:12,800 --> 00:06:16,610 Too Much to know managing scholarly information before the modern age. 61 00:06:17,540 --> 00:06:23,330 So good that it appears on many reading lists for history courses around the world, including the University of Manchester. 62 00:06:23,570 --> 00:06:26,900 A fact which prompted my elder daughter to run off with my copy. 63 00:06:29,310 --> 00:06:36,610 I still haven't got it back. Most recently she edited with Paul Do Good and Your Sylvia Going and Teddy Grafton, 64 00:06:36,790 --> 00:06:46,180 the major new reference work information historical companion published by Princeton in 2021, to which he was also a contributor. 65 00:06:47,850 --> 00:06:53,190 And he is also a celebrated teacher for which he has been lauded as much as for her research. 66 00:06:53,670 --> 00:06:57,730 She has received the Everett Mendelson Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2014. 67 00:06:57,960 --> 00:07:01,740 On the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize for 2018. 68 00:07:02,340 --> 00:07:05,370 For students for whom Global Soup was an advisor, 69 00:07:05,550 --> 00:07:12,570 won the Coopers Prize for Outstanding Senior Thesis Prize and herself won when the student of the college. 70 00:07:13,980 --> 00:07:16,920 She was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. 71 00:07:16,950 --> 00:07:25,980 She too was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2009 and was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. 72 00:07:26,370 --> 00:07:30,090 She currently serves on the board of the Journal of the History of Ideas. 73 00:07:30,690 --> 00:07:39,630 Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Professor Ambler for the first of her lectures for 2023 on in the Scholars Workshop. 74 00:07:39,870 --> 00:07:53,989 Amanuensis in your. Thank you, Richard, for that very generous introduction. 75 00:07:53,990 --> 00:07:56,080 And to all the electors for their confidence in me, 76 00:07:56,090 --> 00:08:02,900 it's a really great pleasure and honour to be here and I'm grateful to the team at the Bodleian and the Centre for the history of the book, 77 00:08:03,620 --> 00:08:07,729 for their careful planning and friendly support, in particular Lucy Bailey, Georgia. 78 00:08:07,730 --> 00:08:13,850 Benning and Alexander Franklin. And warm thanks to everyone who has come today in person or online. 79 00:08:14,240 --> 00:08:17,660 And I look forward to receiving feedback in person or by email. 80 00:08:18,470 --> 00:08:23,270 So my aim in these lectures is to contribute to bibliography and book history by focusing on some of 81 00:08:23,270 --> 00:08:28,820 the lesser known figures involved in making manuscripts and printed books in early modern Europe. 82 00:08:29,450 --> 00:08:34,009 I hope that studying amanuensis more on that term in a sec can help us learn 83 00:08:34,010 --> 00:08:39,110 more about three different areas one scholarly practices and working methods. 84 00:08:39,620 --> 00:08:44,120 What kinds of work did a amanuensis do and with what impact for them, 85 00:08:44,330 --> 00:08:48,050 for the scholars with whom they worked and for the texts that resulted from that work. 86 00:08:48,650 --> 00:08:55,460 And although my basic point is it amanuensis were everywhere a regular feature of scholarship for a very long time. 87 00:08:55,910 --> 00:08:59,360 There were also reasons to avoid amanuensis, which I'd like to mention here. 88 00:08:59,360 --> 00:09:05,480 For example, when working with ideas and texts that had to be kept strictly private for fear of prosecution. 89 00:09:05,870 --> 00:09:11,270 As Martin also points out in his book, Precarious Vision, recently translated as Knowledge Lost. 90 00:09:12,490 --> 00:09:15,430 To attribution, blame and credit. 91 00:09:15,940 --> 00:09:22,540 How does looking for clues about amanuensis change our perspective on the claims made in manuscripts and printed books about their origins? 92 00:09:23,350 --> 00:09:28,389 Art historians have long been attentive to this question and aware of the role that assistance played in the artist's 93 00:09:28,390 --> 00:09:35,290 workshop in carrying out certain parts of a painting either with creative leeway or following precise instructions, 94 00:09:35,590 --> 00:09:39,579 and sometimes according to an explicit contract with the commissioner, which might call, 95 00:09:39,580 --> 00:09:43,750 for example, for the named artist to do the face and hands at the very least. 96 00:09:44,320 --> 00:09:51,560 So I am interested in parallels then with text production. And thirdly, about the lives of the little people in intellectual history. 97 00:09:52,130 --> 00:09:56,930 Amanuensis are one category among many figures who played crucial roles in knowledge making, 98 00:09:57,200 --> 00:10:02,090 but have remained on the sidelines of formal attributions and acknowledgements both at the time and since. 99 00:10:02,810 --> 00:10:08,930 A seminal article for this angle is Steve Chapin's 1898 1989, The Invisible Technician, 100 00:10:09,380 --> 00:10:15,710 which points out that multiple people were needed to make, manage and manipulate the instruments used in experiments at the Royal Society. 101 00:10:16,130 --> 00:10:19,370 But these people were routinely left out of account of those experiments. 102 00:10:20,430 --> 00:10:26,070 Since then, historians of science have done great work identifying many contributors to natural knowledge, including artisans, 103 00:10:26,250 --> 00:10:32,130 women, servants or enslaved people whose empirical and practical knowledge was included in natural histories. 104 00:10:33,050 --> 00:10:40,010 And then historians of cross-cultural encounters have likewise emphasised the crucial role of go betweens, whether informal or professional, 105 00:10:40,310 --> 00:10:46,190 who variously served as interpreters, translators, agents, unofficial diplomats, local guides or informants. 106 00:10:46,970 --> 00:10:51,890 And recent work in book history has also fleshed out the many roles performed inside the print shop, 107 00:10:52,730 --> 00:10:58,140 from the correctors to the golfers who delivered the printed sheets to them and might be the printer's daughter. 108 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:05,060 As in the case of plotter plotters daughter carrying proof in her father's shop that Anthony Grafton ferreted out from a marginal annotation. 109 00:11:05,360 --> 00:11:12,689 In his culture of corrections in Renaissance Europe. So my focus is on a particularly ubiquitous player in cult textual cultures, 110 00:11:12,690 --> 00:11:17,100 not only in early modern Europe, but throughout many times in places prior to the advent of the computer. 111 00:11:17,490 --> 00:11:23,190 The people who are the closest assistance of scholars typically identified by their role in writing for another, 112 00:11:23,460 --> 00:11:27,540 whether by copying, taking dictation or composing among other tasks. 113 00:11:28,450 --> 00:11:34,929 And in this first lecture, I'd like to offer a long historical perspective by looking back to ancient and medieval terms and patterns, 114 00:11:34,930 --> 00:11:38,620 and then looking forward to the modern period and our own digital age. 115 00:11:38,620 --> 00:11:42,100 And then I'll settle into my principal focus for the rest of the lectures, 116 00:11:42,460 --> 00:11:46,960 which will be the 16th century, a.k.a. Northern Renaissance and Reformation. 117 00:11:47,980 --> 00:11:55,480 So in the first part, I'll examine the semantic field around the term I've chosen amanuensis, which is hardly a household word today. 118 00:11:56,350 --> 00:12:02,230 The term at root designates a hand servant Aminu as opposed, for example, to a footman. 119 00:12:02,670 --> 00:12:12,309 Now Latin is considered synonymous with the Greek. Paul Cleaver follows from pokéballs at hand and follows carrying so pocket follows occurs mostly 120 00:12:12,310 --> 00:12:18,730 in documentary papyri and can be used either for an important royal official or for a slave. 121 00:12:19,330 --> 00:12:26,320 This is a reminder that the enslaved in Greco-Roman antiquity could be educated precisely in order to perform a variety of text based roles. 122 00:12:26,680 --> 00:12:33,729 Reading aloud from texts written in Scripture or continuo, writing under dictation or by selective note, 123 00:12:33,730 --> 00:12:43,540 taking on wax tablets or making a more durable copy of a text on a papyrus roll, or teaching, reading and writing to children, both free and unfree. 124 00:12:43,840 --> 00:12:48,760 And classicists are doing exciting new work in this area. Among them, Joseph Haley at Columbia. 125 00:12:51,180 --> 00:12:58,620 Suetonius is apparently the only Roman author to have used the term amanuensis and just twice in his lives of the 12 Caesars. 126 00:12:59,250 --> 00:13:03,630 In the first passage, Suetonius says of Nero that in preparing a campaign, 127 00:13:03,930 --> 00:13:11,580 Nero would levy from the city tribes a stated number of slaves to serve as soldiers, not even exempting the paymasters and amanuensis. 128 00:13:12,450 --> 00:13:18,150 So is he adding even because those in these latter two occupations were presumed to be less well suited to military activities? 129 00:13:19,360 --> 00:13:25,360 Secondly, Suetonius ascribed to the Emperor Titus many physical and intellectual skills, including this curious one. 130 00:13:25,660 --> 00:13:29,559 I have heard from many sources that Titus used also to write shorthand with 131 00:13:29,560 --> 00:13:33,730 great speed and was amused himself by playful contests with his many senses. 132 00:13:34,210 --> 00:13:39,790 Also that he could imitate any handwriting that he had ever seen, and often declared he might have been the prince of forgers. 133 00:13:40,830 --> 00:13:46,700 So we learned that ancient amanuensis were skilled in writing fast, including in shorthand and in multiple styles of handwriting. 134 00:13:47,920 --> 00:13:55,840 The other ancient occurrences of the word are administrative. For example, in the legal sentencing of the second century jurist Julius Paulus, 135 00:13:55,840 --> 00:14:00,670 and this excerpt seems to be corrupt and incomplete and is a bit obscure. 136 00:14:01,030 --> 00:14:09,280 These are few references, basically, but amanuensis surfaces regularly in English translations of ancient texts because the 137 00:14:09,280 --> 00:14:13,560 concept is much more widespread in Roman antiquity than the particular word itself. 138 00:14:13,570 --> 00:14:18,490 And this is a distinction I vividly remember from reading Neil Kenny's first book on Curiosity. 139 00:14:19,270 --> 00:14:26,260 So Romans used other words to designate their hand servants that have been well translated into English as amanuensis. 140 00:14:26,410 --> 00:14:34,340 For example, one of Marshall's epigrams, untitled in antiquity, acquired this one in English translation, at least by the 19th century. 141 00:14:34,360 --> 00:14:43,900 On the death of his amanuensis, Demetrius. In it, Marshall lamented the early death of, quote, that faithful hand ela minus feeder of my studies. 142 00:14:44,230 --> 00:14:51,940 And the poem reveals the deceased was enslaved while in martial service for four years at age 15 and many murdered on his deathbed. 143 00:14:53,470 --> 00:14:57,340 The most famous amanuensis of antiquity was Marcus Tullius tiro. 144 00:14:58,340 --> 00:15:02,990 Who worked for another Marcus Tullius Cicero, from whom he received his name. 145 00:15:03,020 --> 00:15:03,860 Men and women. 146 00:15:04,520 --> 00:15:11,839 Tyrell was likely raised as an educated slave in Cicero's household and was a constant presence in managing Cicero's letters and affairs, 147 00:15:11,840 --> 00:15:16,700 starting in at least 54 BCE when he was first mentioned and he played a crucial role 148 00:15:16,700 --> 00:15:21,380 in preserving and editing Cicero's writings after the latter's assassination in 43. 149 00:15:22,230 --> 00:15:28,260 Cicero refers to tiro as Scribe Mills and hails him once as the canon of my writings. 150 00:15:28,500 --> 00:15:32,820 Perhaps in the sense of model or guide, or perhaps in the meaning of severe critic. 151 00:15:33,790 --> 00:15:37,480 Most mentions of tarot by other Roman authors called him Cicero's Freedman. 152 00:15:38,050 --> 00:15:45,160 He was many minted in 53 BCE, probably when he was in his late twenties and continued to work for Cicero as a freedmen. 153 00:15:45,790 --> 00:15:50,709 But all this, Julius introduces an additional descriptor in his attic knights calling Tiberius 154 00:15:50,710 --> 00:15:55,330 Cicero's a Utah illiterates to yoram and aid in the cultivation of his studies. 155 00:15:56,500 --> 00:16:01,899 A more common term is notorious, which Pliny the Younger used to describe the person at his uncle's side, 156 00:16:01,900 --> 00:16:07,210 poised with scroll and wax tablet in hand in order to read or take notes as plenty required. 157 00:16:07,510 --> 00:16:11,050 We don't know if this notorious was free or enslaved. Either was possible. 158 00:16:11,960 --> 00:16:19,160 Library use is another frequently used term for the role, notably in an account which has had a long life as a trope of the great man. 159 00:16:19,610 --> 00:16:27,050 Pliny the Elder praised Julius Caesar in his natural history for, quote, the most outstanding instance of innate mental vigour. 160 00:16:27,410 --> 00:16:31,310 He used to write or read and dictate or listen simultaneously, 161 00:16:31,700 --> 00:16:39,830 and to dictate to his library four letters at once on his important affairs, or, if otherwise, unoccupied, seven letters at once. 162 00:16:41,270 --> 00:16:44,960 So I'd like to follow this trope of dictating to many at once for a bit, 163 00:16:45,290 --> 00:16:51,560 because it involves public mention of any antis, which is a fairly rare occurrence and in quite different contexts. 164 00:16:52,690 --> 00:16:56,020 Pliny's claim about Caesar caught the attention of Francis Bacon, 165 00:16:56,350 --> 00:16:59,620 who lists it as the first example in his advancement of learning and the 166 00:16:59,620 --> 00:17:04,000 chapter of some cities of human nature out of the faithful reports of history. 167 00:17:04,300 --> 00:17:07,870 And he just gave it much greater circulation as a sign of the great leader. 168 00:17:09,350 --> 00:17:16,550 Napoleon in particular, commissioned an image of Caesar dictating to multiple scribes for the Palazzo Quirinale in Rome, 169 00:17:16,760 --> 00:17:20,150 which he planned to make the seat of his empire, though he never actually inhabited it. 170 00:17:21,630 --> 00:17:27,810 And Napoleon was later depicted himself dictating to multiple amanuensis in this case posthumously. 171 00:17:28,950 --> 00:17:33,540 Interestingly, the same ability to dictate text to more than one scribe at once was also reported. 172 00:17:33,610 --> 00:17:36,670 Religious greats of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. 173 00:17:37,200 --> 00:17:39,030 And I'd love to hear about other cases from you. 174 00:17:39,630 --> 00:17:46,440 In these cases, it's the scribes themselves who reported this ability, which also, of course, was interpreted as a sign of special divine inspiration. 175 00:17:47,910 --> 00:17:54,330 Finally, there's a third strand of this trope which first surfaces, to my knowledge, in a letter of politician or Topeka dilemma, 176 00:17:54,330 --> 00:18:03,840 Mandela extolling the amazing feats of intelligence and memory of one Fabio Orsini, an 11 year old in the noble Orsini family in Rome, circa 1488. 177 00:18:04,470 --> 00:18:12,750 Young Fabio performed in front of Positano and others, first reciting verse of his own competition composition, then turning the verse into prose. 178 00:18:13,200 --> 00:18:20,940 And the display culminated in the boy dictating extemporaneously five letters on five different topics that Ciano had selected, 179 00:18:21,180 --> 00:18:26,220 some of them ridiculous for, the piano explains, so that the boy could not possibly have prepared this in advance. 180 00:18:27,240 --> 00:18:31,590 Five libraries were found with styluses and tablets to take down what he dictated, 181 00:18:31,920 --> 00:18:35,489 and the boy proceeded to dictate on the first topic to the first amanuensis. 182 00:18:35,490 --> 00:18:38,430 Then, while that one was writing, moved on to the next and so forth, 183 00:18:38,430 --> 00:18:46,080 through all five and around and around until he produced five different letters, quote, without anything appearing discordant or disjointed. 184 00:18:47,320 --> 00:18:56,110 This account was still circulating. 300 years later, shorn of its humanist sources among stories of child prodigies collected in Nathaniel, 185 00:18:56,120 --> 00:19:05,290 when Langley's wonders of the little world with printings down to 1791, along with another example of a 14 year old Dutch boy doing the same in 1631. 186 00:19:06,650 --> 00:19:14,390 In the 18th century. The gentleman, philosopher Abraham Tucker, cited Caesar's ability as evidence that we should all cultivate such mental agility. 187 00:19:15,050 --> 00:19:20,170 So Apache Napoleon's view, viewing it as a sign of exceptional greatness, dictated too many at once, 188 00:19:20,180 --> 00:19:25,220 also appeared by then as an ability that anyone could cultivate, which might not be so special after all. 189 00:19:26,580 --> 00:19:31,830 So this excuse is into the trope of dictating to many at once offers a quick preview of some of the complexities ahead. 190 00:19:32,430 --> 00:19:35,820 Taking dictation is the iconic activity of the amanuensis. 191 00:19:36,150 --> 00:19:39,180 And it's certainly a task that amanuensis actually performed. 192 00:19:39,720 --> 00:19:47,459 But proper public mentions of amanuensis, e.g. in print or in paintings, were not focussed on the amanuensis themselves or their activities, 193 00:19:47,460 --> 00:19:53,160 but instead designed to support some other purpose, typically to boost the reputation of the principal for whom they worked. 194 00:19:53,580 --> 00:19:57,360 And this emphasis is true whether the story was initiated by the principal, 195 00:19:57,630 --> 00:20:04,530 by a third party like Pliny telling it of Caesar or by the amanuensis themselves, in the case of Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena. 196 00:20:05,370 --> 00:20:09,839 So a recurring theme of these lectures will be to examine the factors that encourage the efface ment 197 00:20:09,840 --> 00:20:15,510 or self-effacement of amanuensis and why and when they do surface in public media occasionally. 198 00:20:16,630 --> 00:20:24,040 Furthermore, the trope of dictating to so many to many also illustrates the large range of circumstances in which people served as amanuensis. 199 00:20:24,070 --> 00:20:30,310 We have the five library young adults at least this deployed to display the prowess of a child, 200 00:20:30,760 --> 00:20:33,910 a very special child for both his skills and his high social rank. 201 00:20:34,540 --> 00:20:40,180 But the Fabio Orsini story, with its reversal of the usual dynamic of young in service of their elders, 202 00:20:40,510 --> 00:20:44,920 foreshadows other cases I'll discuss of surprising departures from what we expect. 203 00:20:45,700 --> 00:20:49,510 In the example of Catherine of Siena, as a reminder that women are part of my study, too, 204 00:20:49,720 --> 00:20:55,150 as they navigated the gender hierarchies of their context, whether as principals or as amanuensis. 205 00:20:57,050 --> 00:21:01,990 But before we venture further into examples, I'd like to spend a bit more time on the thorny problems of terminology. 206 00:21:02,000 --> 00:21:08,060 Just now you noticed maybe that I used the term principle to designate the person relying on the services of the amanuensis. 207 00:21:08,780 --> 00:21:14,149 I'm trying it as an alternative to master, which carries different connotations depending on the dyad involved. 208 00:21:14,150 --> 00:21:17,630 Master, pupil, master, servant, master, slave, among others. 209 00:21:18,350 --> 00:21:20,360 I'll be interested in your feedback about principal. 210 00:21:20,690 --> 00:21:25,700 I borrowed the term from Harvard administrative emails addressing principals and their assistants. 211 00:21:26,150 --> 00:21:29,720 So a principal is anyone who relies on an assistant in the org chart. 212 00:21:30,860 --> 00:21:34,519 Maybe some good can begotten of the explosion of corp speak my institution, 213 00:21:34,520 --> 00:21:40,070 at least where we regularly hear from people reaching out to loop us in to some recent learnings. 214 00:21:41,420 --> 00:21:45,260 And I'm also responding to the broader impulse quite strong in American academic settings 215 00:21:45,260 --> 00:21:49,040 at the moment to remove words closely associated with the American practice of slavery. 216 00:21:49,610 --> 00:21:55,550 So principals are the scholars I'll be talking about who are relying on the help of others to speed up or to carry out their work. 217 00:21:56,980 --> 00:22:02,320 As for amanuensis, we can now conclude the term was actually uncommon in classical Latin, although the role was not. 218 00:22:02,800 --> 00:22:05,620 Romans used a cluster of other terms instead. 219 00:22:06,850 --> 00:22:15,880 And a few more I haven't mentioned yet include except for from IX keeper, for one who snatches words out of the air from speech to bellow to Belarus, 220 00:22:16,420 --> 00:22:23,820 and then various terms that referred not to the activities performed by the amanuensis, but rather to their status tiro known as Cicero's librettos. 221 00:22:24,160 --> 00:22:27,340 They could also be called ministry, family or fairly. 222 00:22:28,610 --> 00:22:36,290 In the Middle Ages. The role existed, too, and among the terms used to describe it, notorious subscribe to our predominant the predominant ones. 223 00:22:36,290 --> 00:22:40,639 But in addition, in the setting of religious orders, there was a new term acquaintances. 224 00:22:40,640 --> 00:22:46,940 Best known assistant was Reginald, a fellow Dominican whom he and others called acquaintances Scorpius or companion, 225 00:22:47,720 --> 00:22:52,850 and Catherine of Siena at first dictated her letters to female scribes, but as she gained an reputation, 226 00:22:53,090 --> 00:22:57,110 she shifted to relying on male scribes for letters and her major work via logo. 227 00:22:57,680 --> 00:23:02,990 One hypothesis that historians have emitted to explain this shift, which isn't discussed in the primary sources, 228 00:23:03,380 --> 00:23:06,500 is that the male scribes were perceived to lend greater authority to her texts. 229 00:23:07,190 --> 00:23:12,260 In any case, most crucial to her success in gaining authority as a female mystic was the support of a male confessor. 230 00:23:12,770 --> 00:23:17,300 A confessor approval was important to assert the divine origin of any visionary male or female, 231 00:23:17,540 --> 00:23:22,160 but especially necessary for women who were presumed to be more vulnerable to being misled by false visions. 232 00:23:23,060 --> 00:23:26,380 Catherine worked with two confessors in succession. 233 00:23:29,390 --> 00:23:33,560 And the second of these, Raymond of Capua, was a leader in the Dominican order, 234 00:23:33,980 --> 00:23:39,020 also occasionally served as a scribe, and then wrote her biography, which was very instrumental to her canonisation. 235 00:23:39,500 --> 00:23:43,880 Catherine referred to her followers as her familia, as sons and daughters in Christ, 236 00:23:44,120 --> 00:23:46,970 and addressed Raymond as her very loving and dearest father in Christ. 237 00:23:47,330 --> 00:23:54,230 And this depiction really shows how the saint is really a vessel, a conduit for the divine message into the scribe. 238 00:23:54,770 --> 00:23:58,700 So she is neither. She's just hearing and speaking rather than writing. 239 00:24:00,410 --> 00:24:03,640 To pursue this excursion into terminology amanuensis. 240 00:24:03,650 --> 00:24:08,150 Not being a classical term or medieval term is a term put into use by the humanists, 241 00:24:08,150 --> 00:24:15,770 and mostly after 1500 it remained a Latin term, but also moved unchanged into vernaculars, especially German and English. 242 00:24:16,400 --> 00:24:23,660 The OED gives 1619 the first occurrence in English and offers, as an early example, a passage in Robert Burton's Anatomy of melancholy. 243 00:24:24,550 --> 00:24:31,630 I should have revised, corrected and amended this tract, but I had not, as I said, that happy leisure, no amanuensis or assistance. 244 00:24:31,900 --> 00:24:38,560 I have no such benefactors as that noble and Brosius was to origin, allowing him six or seven amanuensis to write his dictates. 245 00:24:39,070 --> 00:24:46,000 I must, for that course, do my business myself and was enforced to publish it as it was first written in an extemporaneous style. 246 00:24:47,020 --> 00:24:50,229 We can see the word is italicised along with other clearly Latin terms. 247 00:24:50,230 --> 00:24:55,240 So Burton may not view it as a properly English word, and he offers a synonym in case the reader doesn't know it. 248 00:24:55,660 --> 00:25:00,940 But in any case, there are certainly later occurrences confirming that the term passed fully into English in the 17th century. 249 00:25:01,870 --> 00:25:07,540 But let's attend briefly to the content of the quotation while we have it. This point is that he had no help from anyone, 250 00:25:07,540 --> 00:25:12,460 and he mentions this by way of explaining why his work was not revised and corrected as it might have been. 251 00:25:12,790 --> 00:25:17,140 This is a kind of humility trope designed to elicit a forgiving attitude to the by the reader. 252 00:25:17,170 --> 00:25:19,120 In other words, it kept at your benevolence. 253 00:25:19,120 --> 00:25:25,450 High burden also circulates to make that point a nice example of what he views as the ideal working conditions. 254 00:25:26,170 --> 00:25:29,649 He's referring to a passage in the ecclesiastical history of U.S. bias, 255 00:25:29,650 --> 00:25:35,440 describing how Origin the theologian and church father was supported by a wealthy convert, Ambrose of Alexandria. 256 00:25:36,010 --> 00:25:39,160 When Origin dictated this would have been third century of the common era, 257 00:25:39,580 --> 00:25:46,750 there were ready at hand seven shorthand writers who relieved each other at six times and as many copyists as well as girls skilled in penmanship. 258 00:25:47,410 --> 00:25:54,370 So origin dictated too many not at once, but rather in turn after wearing out successive acceptors on this account, 259 00:25:54,370 --> 00:25:59,200 Origins team involved a careful division of labour between those taking shorthand notes from dictation, 260 00:25:59,470 --> 00:26:04,810 those making and revising longhand copies, the copyist and the girl skilled in penmanship, 261 00:26:04,810 --> 00:26:10,300 presumably to make beautiful presentation copies for the Commissioner Ambrose or other grandees. 262 00:26:11,320 --> 00:26:14,440 It's impossible to know if Robert Burton really had no help, as he asserts. 263 00:26:14,470 --> 00:26:19,960 Certainly drafting, letting alone, let alone making a clean copy of Anatomy of Melancholy would have been a huge task. 264 00:26:20,170 --> 00:26:23,350 And maybe he did indeed write it only once, as his apology suggests. 265 00:26:23,770 --> 00:26:28,690 We do know of one autograph manuscript of Burton's of a Latin comedy he wrote for a performance in 1617. 266 00:26:29,830 --> 00:26:36,280 And we know of other 17th century figures who wrote long manuscripts in their own hand, Joseph Gallagher and Isaac Newton, among them, for example. 267 00:26:37,940 --> 00:26:41,299 The entry of amanuensis into German resembles a trajectory in English. 268 00:26:41,300 --> 00:26:45,170 Occurrences of amanuensis in German texts starts in the early 17th century, 269 00:26:45,170 --> 00:26:51,590 whereas treated as a Latin word printed in Roman rather than gothic font but is all too integrated into German dictionaries both in the early, 270 00:26:51,590 --> 00:26:52,850 modern and modern periods. 271 00:26:53,240 --> 00:27:00,290 And these examples of usage here show that the term could designate a scribe, whether of an individual scholar, Martin Butcher. 272 00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:05,320 This is an example I'll be talking about in lecture five. Or of a prince or other ruler here. 273 00:27:05,330 --> 00:27:09,719 Prince Christian of Anholt. In French and Italian. 274 00:27:09,720 --> 00:27:12,300 By contrast, amanuensis did not enter the vernacular. 275 00:27:12,420 --> 00:27:17,340 The equivalent term instead was secretary and variance, which of course also existed in German and English. 276 00:27:17,610 --> 00:27:20,610 So please bear with me for one more term analogical excursions. 277 00:27:20,630 --> 00:27:26,460 Why do I not use the term secretary? In short, because that term opens up a range of contexts I won't address. 278 00:27:26,940 --> 00:27:31,410 Secretary, for example, designates high ranking officers of government both early modern and modern. 279 00:27:31,680 --> 00:27:34,049 The French society Algeria found in the 14th century. 280 00:27:34,050 --> 00:27:40,020 But Charles the fifth or American secretaries of state today and far from engaging in what we would consider secretarial work, 281 00:27:40,230 --> 00:27:46,710 these Capital F secretaries relied instead on sub secretaries, some of them with official titles and further layers of secretarial help beneath them. 282 00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:56,250 In his 2026 letter, Nicholas Shapira examines how small secretaries formed part of the political power structures in early modern France, 283 00:27:56,610 --> 00:28:01,710 operating outside the official bureaucracy in the service of French nobles and officials of various kinds. 284 00:28:02,010 --> 00:28:04,800 His point is that although they never appear in the official bureaucracy, 285 00:28:04,980 --> 00:28:08,760 these private secretaries were crucially important to the success of their principles. 286 00:28:10,030 --> 00:28:17,620 And for the early modern English context, which is on any topic, is the best studied of any place and in which I hardly dare to venture. 287 00:28:18,190 --> 00:28:22,840 We have a wonderful range of excellent studies, a few offered here that I've relied on particularly. 288 00:28:23,590 --> 00:28:28,360 The upshot of this reading for me is that by the Mid-16th century, secretary was a career path. 289 00:28:28,660 --> 00:28:34,840 As English aristocrats hired well-educated men to serve in both general and specialist secretarial capacities. 290 00:28:35,260 --> 00:28:40,510 The chief counsellors to the monarchs, like the Cecil's, relied on teams of three or four men, most of them gentlemen, 291 00:28:40,510 --> 00:28:44,980 almost all educated at university or an end of court to manage their public and private affairs. 292 00:28:45,490 --> 00:28:49,450 The most successful of these amanuensis parlayed their experience and contacts into 293 00:28:49,450 --> 00:28:53,440 careers that culminated in positions in Parliament or the royal administration. 294 00:28:53,980 --> 00:28:58,660 And the career path of the Secretary could lead to great success, but was also highly insecure. 295 00:28:59,110 --> 00:29:03,280 Remaining in position was dependent not only on the pleasure and continued life of the principal, 296 00:29:03,280 --> 00:29:07,030 but also in the latter successful navigation of the fraught and variable political landscape. 297 00:29:07,690 --> 00:29:15,160 When Robert Devereux secondarily Essex, was executed in 1601 for instigating the unsuccessful rebellion, so too was the secretary, Henry Cuffe. 298 00:29:15,550 --> 00:29:20,980 Though Cuffe managed to be spared being quoted until after his death, quote, for favours sake and to learning. 299 00:29:22,180 --> 00:29:25,989 Given the conception of the most intimate, intimate servants as extensions of their principle, 300 00:29:25,990 --> 00:29:30,070 they were easily implicated with the latter's fortunes, both in rising and in falling. 301 00:29:31,520 --> 00:29:38,090 So there are many parallels between the secretaries of these kinds of political players and the Amanuensis and Scully household that are my focus. 302 00:29:38,330 --> 00:29:41,930 These relationships combined hierarchy with personal and physical closeness. 303 00:29:42,110 --> 00:29:47,450 Private secretaries and amanuensis often lived in the principal's house, likely spent most of each day at his company. 304 00:29:47,900 --> 00:29:51,620 The financial arrangements varied widely also and are often hard to trace. 305 00:29:51,620 --> 00:29:58,309 Secretaries and amanuensis typically receive room and board and some combination of regular pay and or gratifications by the principal who might, 306 00:29:58,310 --> 00:30:02,120 for example, share with a favourite helper a portion of a gift he'd received. 307 00:30:02,510 --> 00:30:07,480 They could also collect gratifications from third parties for services they'd rendered on behalf of the principal, 308 00:30:07,910 --> 00:30:11,210 all within view of the principal, at least in the case of honest players. 309 00:30:13,000 --> 00:30:18,459 Paul Dover and others have argued that the term secretary derived from classical art and secretariat for a secreted, 310 00:30:18,460 --> 00:30:25,840 secreted, secluded or secret place, emerged in the 15th century in Italian context to designate a new social reality brought 311 00:30:25,840 --> 00:30:30,790 about by the rise of diplomatic relations among the many polities of the Italian peninsula. 312 00:30:31,420 --> 00:30:37,059 Dover has studied the explosion of correspondence and other paperwork generated by the activities of diplomats who resided 313 00:30:37,060 --> 00:30:42,220 in foreign cities and sent back regular reports on what they learned there about cultural and political dynamics. 314 00:30:42,940 --> 00:30:49,000 This is a lovely depiction of a, you know, everyone crowded around with a Vigo Gonzaga. 315 00:30:49,660 --> 00:30:56,709 Secretaries made possible the mountains of paper generated letters and records to be sent and received, often ciphers to keep them secret. 316 00:30:56,710 --> 00:30:59,830 And then, of course, deciphered, stored and stored, sorted. 317 00:31:00,460 --> 00:31:06,790 Composing letters, in some cases only from brief instructions by the principal was so closely associated with the role of the secretary. 318 00:31:06,790 --> 00:31:14,589 By the late 16th century, the term secretary also designated a kind of book, the letter writing manual, and by the 18th century, 319 00:31:14,590 --> 00:31:20,290 also a piece of furniture comprising a writing surface and drawers for composing and storing those letters. 320 00:31:21,190 --> 00:31:26,049 So amanuensis on a country is not as policy as it almost always designates a person. 321 00:31:26,050 --> 00:31:31,600 I do have one case of Francis Bacon using the term amanuensis as a kind of book a guidebook. 322 00:31:32,850 --> 00:31:37,770 So we're dealing with a complicated semantic field, which is blurry around the edges and varies by language. 323 00:31:38,430 --> 00:31:46,020 If the scholarly amanuensis of the concept and after the terms used in my early modern focus are many, including ones we've seen already, 324 00:31:46,440 --> 00:31:54,030 but a few new ones calligraphers domestic use or in the words of the student who served as a scribe and hope to share the principles table. 325 00:31:54,300 --> 00:31:55,950 Come and sell this or. Convict or. 326 00:31:57,110 --> 00:32:03,320 As this latter case suggests, some who played the role of amanuensis also held other statuses in the life of the principal. 327 00:32:03,740 --> 00:32:10,850 For example, as living students or former students, or as members of his family, wife and children most often, but others possibly too. 328 00:32:11,330 --> 00:32:16,310 And I will include some examples of these amanuensis plus in the lectures ahead. 329 00:32:17,950 --> 00:32:25,989 So I'll shift now to my second part, using a few modern examples to help us define what distinctive about early modern early modern is. 330 00:32:25,990 --> 00:32:33,040 And I have this is less evocative than earlier appellations such as Renaissance and Reformation, which it has replaced. 331 00:32:33,460 --> 00:32:38,400 But the expression helpfully contributes to the notion that early modern of the kind of modern connecting it to later centuries, 332 00:32:38,410 --> 00:32:42,100 though of course the period is crucially indebted to earlier ones and the 333 00:32:42,100 --> 00:32:47,679 history of agencies is one of long continuities into a myriad modern contexts, 334 00:32:47,680 --> 00:32:52,909 down to quite recent times. So let's pick up the thread of the most iconic reliance on in the menu. 335 00:32:52,910 --> 00:33:00,160 Once is composing by dictation. This was the norm in antiquity and remained a common practice in medieval and early modern times, 336 00:33:00,430 --> 00:33:06,520 alongside the rise of autobiography or writing in one's own hand, which was first documented starting in the 13th century. 337 00:33:07,120 --> 00:33:11,829 But there are also many excellent examples of composing by dictation in the 19th and 20th centuries, 338 00:33:11,830 --> 00:33:15,370 which can illustrate a few significant social and technical changes. 339 00:33:16,610 --> 00:33:21,080 So this portrait of gutter dictating to his secretary John by Johann Georg Schmelzer. 340 00:33:21,410 --> 00:33:26,090 Positions the two to match their roles in writing good to fully faces the viewer reader. 341 00:33:26,420 --> 00:33:30,319 Well, we can only get a hint of John's features as he has his back to us with a slight turn, 342 00:33:30,320 --> 00:33:35,990 reminding us that he too is an individual but supported subordinated in this activity to go to his instructions. 343 00:33:36,590 --> 00:33:39,829 John was not a particularly significant servant among the many that good to 344 00:33:39,830 --> 00:33:44,750 employed and who be generally all called Karl regardless of their given name. 345 00:33:46,070 --> 00:33:51,500 A real Karl. Karl Stallman, by contrast with a servant most often mentioned in good desirable. 346 00:33:52,660 --> 00:33:55,239 Googoo is well aware of the hazards of his method of writing, 347 00:33:55,240 --> 00:34:00,100 and he wrote an essay on the kinds of error which could result from mishearing during dictation. 348 00:34:00,370 --> 00:34:03,520 Misreading of handwriting or error in typesetting. 349 00:34:04,240 --> 00:34:07,479 And he also faced an unexpected hazard from composing by dictation. 350 00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:15,879 One of his novels, Wilhelm Meisters van der Yard of 1829, turned out shorter than expected at the printers because Gerta had changed the menu once. 351 00:34:15,880 --> 00:34:20,440 He's midway through the composition and the new scribe handwriting was larger than the first one, 352 00:34:20,710 --> 00:34:27,130 throwing off good his estimate of the length of what he'd written. This anecdote is reported by Johann Petter Akerman. 353 00:34:27,430 --> 00:34:34,569 Good, his best known amanuensis who was tasked with fixing the problem by weaving in unrelated aphorisms into the ending of the 354 00:34:34,570 --> 00:34:41,170 novel from a pile of assorted papers that good to gave him with results that have puzzled readers at the time and since. 355 00:34:42,220 --> 00:34:45,670 Good to address the contemporary criticism for this ending by claiming that the novel was, 356 00:34:45,670 --> 00:34:48,820 quote, a vehicle for bringing significant things into the world. 357 00:34:49,390 --> 00:34:53,860 But Ackerman tells the story in his conversations with Gertrude during the last ten years of his life, 358 00:34:54,160 --> 00:34:58,840 published a few years after his death, and Akerman also published on Goodreads instruction. 359 00:34:58,840 --> 00:35:02,100 Unlike these conversations, the latter is not the last in a shifting. 360 00:35:02,560 --> 00:35:08,380 And this is another powerful role of the amanuensis, especially one in place at or near the time of death of the principal. 361 00:35:08,620 --> 00:35:13,660 The amanuensis, as curator of the principles of is the topic of my fifth lecture. 362 00:35:14,630 --> 00:35:16,970 Ackerman's reputation as Recorder of Good. 363 00:35:16,970 --> 00:35:22,670 His life became so iconic that the dissident East German songwriter Wolf Biermann, composed a ballad with the punch line. 364 00:35:22,940 --> 00:35:30,400 The Stasi is mine. Ackerman. Between the late 19th and the mid 20th century, 365 00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:36,790 separate developments in technology and social patterns changed the default model for composition by dictation and Henry James. 366 00:35:37,040 --> 00:35:39,400 Its behaviour happens to track it nicely. 367 00:35:39,640 --> 00:35:49,510 He composed by dictation first to a male steno typist, William McAlpine, using a Remington typewriter, which James acquired in 1897. 368 00:35:50,290 --> 00:35:55,840 And starting in 1901, though, James employed women who operated that typewriter. 369 00:35:56,560 --> 00:35:58,930 Mary Wells then Theodore and quit. 370 00:35:59,470 --> 00:36:06,520 James commented of his male stenographer, He's too damned expensive and always has been in to place, taking in my life and my economy. 371 00:36:06,850 --> 00:36:11,980 I can get a highly competent little woman for half or less full blown young men at a greater abatement. 372 00:36:13,260 --> 00:36:17,610 Women would always have been cheaper to hire, but by 1900 they were also highly competent. 373 00:36:17,970 --> 00:36:21,120 The growth of secondary education for girls was an important prerequisite. 374 00:36:21,360 --> 00:36:22,860 More than the typewriter itself, 375 00:36:23,490 --> 00:36:31,230 Delfino Gardner explains that the typewriter was not feminised initially when Remington first marketed its typewriter in 1874. 376 00:36:31,530 --> 00:36:36,990 It was adopted by male clerks and secretaries, but production really took off between 1890 and 1910, 377 00:36:37,260 --> 00:36:43,460 precisely when office staffing started to change from predominantly male to mixed gender to predominantly female, 378 00:36:43,470 --> 00:36:47,580 but 1940 largely for the same financial reasons that Henry James articulated. 379 00:36:48,660 --> 00:36:54,240 The feminisation of office work applied to stenography too, which is speedier than typing for taking dictation and more portable. 380 00:36:55,170 --> 00:37:00,070 We have accounts of and by the young women and one male secretary who worked for Winston Churchill. 381 00:37:00,090 --> 00:37:05,850 They tell of taking dictation in all kinds of situations while riding in cars or trains or while he was taking a bath. 382 00:37:06,060 --> 00:37:13,330 And she would listen from outside the bathroom door. The life of the secretary has changed dramatically, both technologically and socially. 383 00:37:13,600 --> 00:37:21,549 The Dictaphone was trademarked in 1907, and its gradual uptake in the following decades allowed typists to operate in pools separate from 384 00:37:21,550 --> 00:37:25,840 the person dictating breaking the physical proximity that until then was built into dictation. 385 00:37:27,250 --> 00:37:29,950 And then came the computer in 1990, 386 00:37:29,950 --> 00:37:35,380 Drag and Dictate was an early speech recognition software which needed to be trained by the user and even so introduced errors, 387 00:37:35,410 --> 00:37:39,070 not typos or simple oral misunderstandings of one word for another, 388 00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:43,629 but spectacular misunderstandings in which words would be broken up or combined in surprising 389 00:37:43,630 --> 00:37:49,150 ways as the software tried to map a word like Aristotelian ism onto a known vocabulary. 390 00:37:49,150 --> 00:37:53,950 And I wish I had saved some of these things, the host, of course, corrected in my notes. 391 00:37:55,400 --> 00:38:02,960 Early years of use of word processors continue to evolve amanuensis in some cases and outside in the display cases. 392 00:38:02,990 --> 00:38:07,700 We have the case of this novel by the British author Lynne Deighton. 393 00:38:08,830 --> 00:38:13,300 Which is the first long form book to be composed by a word processor. 394 00:38:13,960 --> 00:38:17,200 Here is the machine in his office. 395 00:38:18,120 --> 00:38:22,200 And the way it worked with a human operating it. 396 00:38:23,260 --> 00:38:30,190 And an unusual photo thanks to Matthew Kirschenbaum of Eleanor Henley, who handled the machine. 397 00:38:30,670 --> 00:38:32,979 So we see here that there's a new technology, 398 00:38:32,980 --> 00:38:40,320 but socially it's integrated into the format of dictating to a secretary or of the secretary handling the typewriter, 399 00:38:40,330 --> 00:38:44,230 as I think she's got the Selectric typewriters, which she's working on in that photo. 400 00:38:45,170 --> 00:38:50,450 The way technology changed faster than social arrangements seems an excellent demonstration of a fascinating point that 401 00:38:50,450 --> 00:38:56,690 Geoffrey Nunberg made in 1996 about how much harder it is to imagine a new social arrangement than new technology. 402 00:38:57,080 --> 00:39:03,470 He noted how in this 1953 image of life in the year 2000, the author anticipated too much technological change. 403 00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:08,000 Our couches haven't changed much, actually, in the last, whatever, 70 years. 404 00:39:08,390 --> 00:39:10,490 And on the contrary, not enough social change. 405 00:39:10,910 --> 00:39:18,470 Talking about the housewife's daily cleaning seems like something from the past, even if social patterns are generally resistant to change. 406 00:39:18,740 --> 00:39:24,920 Many factors conspired in the end to end the long tradition of relying on amanuensis in addition to technical 407 00:39:24,920 --> 00:39:29,270 and cultural ones such as the rise of personal computers and the instruction of children in their use. 408 00:39:29,420 --> 00:39:36,320 Financial ones, of course, have been powerful the constant drive to cut costs around employment, especially in places with high labour costs. 409 00:39:38,370 --> 00:39:41,519 Wendell Berry's essay explained that he would not buy a computer because he could 410 00:39:41,520 --> 00:39:45,839 rely on his type wife to type up his work and to be his best critic in the process, 411 00:39:45,840 --> 00:39:51,990 he added, has proven very long lived on the Internet, eliciting not only predictable criticism of the gender dynamics he described, 412 00:39:52,230 --> 00:39:59,040 but also support for the hostility he professes against computers by pollsters who are, of course, posting their comments on digital platforms. 413 00:39:59,430 --> 00:40:04,500 So we are well aware of the many hazards of our highly digitised world, but few of us succeed in opting out of it. 414 00:40:05,870 --> 00:40:07,880 Barry may still acknowledge his wife for typing, 415 00:40:08,120 --> 00:40:14,690 but we can trace the rise and fall of that trope and acknowledgements by asking Google Ingram to search its stock of digitised books, 416 00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:18,140 including those still in copyright, which can only be viewed in snippets. 417 00:40:18,740 --> 00:40:27,410 So why? For typing peaks around 1975 and now has subsided back down to the low level of occurrence characteristic of a 1920s. 418 00:40:28,510 --> 00:40:33,970 Instead, we encounter different kinds of developments of hardware and software, usually when they're new. 419 00:40:34,480 --> 00:40:38,110 So back to Bomber. How do we know about his use of a computer? 420 00:40:38,440 --> 00:40:44,169 It's because in his acknowledgements Deighton Thanks IBM for the magnetic tape Selectric typewriter, 421 00:40:44,170 --> 00:40:52,420 which he used and the tech support that helped him use it in the person of none other than Jack Menzel, who's who was president of IBM at the time. 422 00:40:53,140 --> 00:41:00,100 So presumably composing a long but manuscript on the The Machine was a first, as Dayton claims, and caught the attention of the company president. 423 00:41:00,430 --> 00:41:03,190 Or maybe there was a personal connection between the two. I don't know. 424 00:41:03,730 --> 00:41:08,350 Certainly the rest of us who need regular help from I.T. experts to set up a computer or 425 00:41:08,350 --> 00:41:13,329 manage the damage caused by upgrades or rescue files from loss turn to an institution, 426 00:41:13,330 --> 00:41:18,040 perhaps pay for it privately or turn to one's tech savvy offspring, if possible. 427 00:41:18,910 --> 00:41:24,520 So these are the kinds of helpers who don't often figure in acknowledgements even today, but without whom a book wouldn't get done. 428 00:41:25,120 --> 00:41:32,620 But there is this very interesting acknowledgement in Zadie Smith in W novel, 429 00:41:32,890 --> 00:41:36,490 thanking the software freedom, which blocks internet access for a chunk of time. 430 00:41:36,490 --> 00:41:43,890 And it still exists also. Of course, as of last December, we have chatbots that can write competent English prose from a prompt, 431 00:41:44,190 --> 00:41:46,500 even if the informational content is not reliable. 432 00:41:47,320 --> 00:41:53,760 They're filling another role that at Amanuensis Long Played have computers and various software programs become our Amanuensis. 433 00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:58,470 Marcus Krajewski drew attention to this implication in the two meanings the German word Diener, 434 00:41:58,680 --> 00:42:01,950 which designates both a human servant and a computer server. 435 00:42:03,070 --> 00:42:07,750 To some extent. Then my project fits a pattern of examining what was once a widespread practice, 436 00:42:07,750 --> 00:42:13,330 relying on a human amanuensis precisely after it's no longer common and thus comes to seem interesting. 437 00:42:15,130 --> 00:42:20,170 The main circumstances today in which human amanuensis play a crucial role along side hardware and 438 00:42:20,170 --> 00:42:24,850 software are cases of disability or illness kinds that prevent the direct use of digital tools. 439 00:42:25,420 --> 00:42:32,440 The author of Bed Metre, for example, Blind from a Young Age, wrote in 2009 about the difficulties of working in the New York Public Library with an 440 00:42:32,440 --> 00:42:36,310 amanuensis who needed to read aloud from the library catalogue to aid him in his research. 441 00:42:36,520 --> 00:42:43,420 But at the time, there was no good place to do that. Disability and illness motivated the use of the many senses in the early modern period as well. 442 00:42:43,720 --> 00:42:45,640 Milton's worsening eyesight comes to mind. 443 00:42:45,820 --> 00:42:53,890 Thomas Hobbs developed a shaking palsy, probably due to Parkinson's disease, even at the age of 60, and even that composed for another 20 years. 444 00:42:54,370 --> 00:43:00,340 Through the hand of another, he relied on his baker, James Weldon, who had a clear but clear hand but little education. 445 00:43:00,790 --> 00:43:05,590 So Hobbs had to hire someone else to go over the Latin and then warned the printer to take special care with it. 446 00:43:05,800 --> 00:43:07,210 As Noel Malcolm has detailed. 447 00:43:08,760 --> 00:43:15,330 Furthermore, reliance and amanuensis due to illness was considered acceptable to acknowledge explicitly in print even in the early modern period, 448 00:43:15,600 --> 00:43:21,960 although it's not mentioned consistently, for example, and this is a passage in a book that's outside of the display as well. 449 00:43:22,350 --> 00:43:28,770 Robert Boyle mentioned a distemper in his eyes in the pair text to three works he published between 1659 and 61. 450 00:43:29,400 --> 00:43:35,850 In each case, he invoked this circumstance to apologise for not having so much as read over the manuscript before sending it to the printer. 451 00:43:36,690 --> 00:43:40,080 So in his new experiment is touching the air, he offered this interesting detail. 452 00:43:40,650 --> 00:43:45,750 Besides all this, the distemper in my eyes forbidding me not only to write myself so much as one experiment, 453 00:43:45,750 --> 00:43:51,090 but even to read over myself what I dictated to others. I cannot but fear that besides the author's mistakes, 454 00:43:51,090 --> 00:43:57,450 this edition may be blemished by many that may be properly imputed to a very unskilful writer whom I was oftentimes by haste, 455 00:43:57,570 --> 00:44:01,799 reduced against my custom to employ, and may have escaped the diligence of that learned friend. 456 00:44:01,800 --> 00:44:08,130 That does me the favour to oversee the press, especially there being the distance of two days journey betwixt between it and me. 457 00:44:09,720 --> 00:44:15,270 So Boyle engages here in two layers of self-justification by emphasising first these forced to rely on others for health reasons, 458 00:44:15,270 --> 00:44:20,010 and secondly, that due to pressures of time, he had to work with an unskilled rider against his custom. 459 00:44:20,880 --> 00:44:23,520 Boyle maintained a long habit of composing by dictation. 460 00:44:23,610 --> 00:44:31,110 Michael Hunter has identified some 13 long serving amanuensis by their handwriting in both papers and more than a dozen other occasional scribes. 461 00:44:31,740 --> 00:44:36,690 He's also observed that Boyle was uniquely prone to anxious and defensive textual statements like this one. 462 00:44:37,110 --> 00:44:41,580 But we'll also see his pattern of blaming an amanuensis for errors in other authors. 463 00:44:42,680 --> 00:44:47,870 And this pattern is, of course, the exact opposite of the refrain we are used to seeing in acknowledgements today, 464 00:44:48,110 --> 00:44:53,600 in which the author concludes a list of people thanked by taking responsibility for errors rather than pinning the blame elsewhere. 465 00:44:54,860 --> 00:44:59,420 Francoise Vacca has studied the history acknowledgements, among other trappings of our academic genres. 466 00:44:59,930 --> 00:45:05,540 And although articulations of thanks can be found long before and I'll discuss them in lecture four, 467 00:45:05,840 --> 00:45:11,510 she identified the late 19th century as the time when the first acknowledgements appeared in her corpus of French academic writing. 468 00:45:12,110 --> 00:45:15,830 At that time, they consisted of a brief paragraph thanking academic mentors. 469 00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:22,400 Acknowledgements then increased the number gradually, but remained sporadic until they became standard after 1945, 470 00:45:22,400 --> 00:45:26,360 which is also the moment at which Vacca noticed the first acknowledgement of a wife. 471 00:45:27,780 --> 00:45:32,430 If we ask Google for Ingram all errors are my own. 472 00:45:33,240 --> 00:45:36,900 We see a for a spike forming in late seventies two still climbing. 473 00:45:37,410 --> 00:45:44,340 And here are a couple early examples. I thought it was interesting that in 1973 the expression is viewed as a familiar prefatory formula, 474 00:45:44,580 --> 00:45:49,110 useful for pupils who use it when attempting to articulate a teacher's position without full success. 475 00:45:50,310 --> 00:45:57,060 So modern patterns of acknowledgement here's another couple are quite different from the early modern practices of pinning blame on amanuensis. 476 00:45:57,570 --> 00:46:03,480 And today we are so often our own amanuensis that the errors of the amanuensis are indeed our own. 477 00:46:07,090 --> 00:46:12,190 So I hope that the various examples I presented today from ancient Rome to the recent past, 478 00:46:12,190 --> 00:46:16,690 form a convincing argument for a long continuities in the reliance on amanuensis. 479 00:46:17,470 --> 00:46:23,000 I'll focus in the next lectures on the early modern period, especially the 16th century, and to outline the themes ahead. 480 00:46:23,020 --> 00:46:25,780 I'd like to talk a bit about the image I chose for the publicity. 481 00:46:26,850 --> 00:46:33,570 This depiction of a principal end of the menu when six working together is the only image I know of to have been commissioned by the amanuensis. 482 00:46:33,930 --> 00:46:38,669 Granted, almost 20 years after the end of the relationship, the caption explains, 483 00:46:38,670 --> 00:46:45,300 it depicts on the left G de Barracuda, an Ojibwa amanuensis of Erasmus at age 26, in 1530. 484 00:46:45,510 --> 00:46:49,229 And on the right. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the great humanist. 485 00:46:49,230 --> 00:46:52,080 At the height of his fame at age 70. 486 00:46:52,230 --> 00:46:59,730 In 1530, the year in which Koos entered Erasmus household, the computer copied computation of ages off by modern life. 487 00:46:59,730 --> 00:47:06,990 Erasmus is considered to have died at age 70 in 1536, so would have been 6465 and Koos at 2425. 488 00:47:07,500 --> 00:47:14,880 No matter. The point is that the older, super famous scholar and the young man are working together in a remarkably egalitarian depiction. 489 00:47:15,240 --> 00:47:19,890 Erasmus is wearing fur, which is a sign of wealth, perhaps also of sensitivity to the cold. 490 00:47:20,130 --> 00:47:24,480 While Cusa is not, but both are wearing hats and sitting on chairs of the same height. 491 00:47:24,780 --> 00:47:28,020 Though Erasmus as Chair is a bit fancier. It has a cushion and a broader back. 492 00:47:29,010 --> 00:47:35,170 The location of the scene is likely Freiburg, where one of the houses where Erasmus lived still stands to involve fish. 493 00:47:35,190 --> 00:47:40,169 The other one is now a shopping passage. So after living in Basel for 15 years, he, Rasmus, 494 00:47:40,170 --> 00:47:47,310 had moved to Catholic Freiburg when Basel converted to went over to the Reformation in 1529 and Erasmus was worried about staying there. 495 00:47:47,550 --> 00:47:54,030 But then he returned to Basel in 1530 435 in a move that could have helped to manage. 496 00:47:55,410 --> 00:48:00,870 So I'm not aware of any other depiction of principal and amanuensis working together in the 16th century, 497 00:48:00,870 --> 00:48:06,960 but a composition that comes to mind that might have been an inspiration for Suzanne's depiction, especially with that flower in the middle. 498 00:48:08,220 --> 00:48:13,470 It originated in Brazil, where Kooser maintained strong ties with published in 1542. 499 00:48:13,620 --> 00:48:18,840 That's ten years before the effigy. The actual painting we're looking at. 500 00:48:20,280 --> 00:48:23,969 But I'd like also to show you some other depictions of amanuensis I've encountered. 501 00:48:23,970 --> 00:48:30,910 These come from the 17th century. This one, Degas after was the work of Thomas Bike, who loved to satirised alchemists. 502 00:48:30,930 --> 00:48:36,750 He has a whole series of works called The Alchemist. And you can see some alchemical bits in this painting, too. 503 00:48:37,410 --> 00:48:42,330 And he's satirising the learned man here by showing a complete mess of papers and books. 504 00:48:42,630 --> 00:48:46,200 And a helper circled in red, not well, visible. 505 00:48:46,380 --> 00:48:54,270 He's not wearing a hat. He's sitting lower than the principal on a stool where the principal is in a chair armchair with a hat. 506 00:48:54,840 --> 00:48:58,830 And I think this painting helps us appreciate how different in tone Cézanne's image is. 507 00:49:00,350 --> 00:49:07,430 I'm aware of one painting here of principal and student or nuances, which is also favourable to both in tone. 508 00:49:07,820 --> 00:49:12,440 But I have not managed to find any context for it and I'd be grateful for any suggestions of how to move forward. 509 00:49:12,740 --> 00:49:17,149 Maybe the clerical collar is distinctive. Given the patterns I've encountered elsewhere, 510 00:49:17,150 --> 00:49:23,210 I'm inclined to think that the young man here is a relative of the principal or of the person who commissioned the painting. 511 00:49:24,890 --> 00:49:29,390 The only other depictions of Erasmus at work are the many portrait portraits 512 00:49:29,390 --> 00:49:33,740 that Erasmus commissioned of Hans Holbein as gifts for friends and patrons. 513 00:49:34,010 --> 00:49:37,520 In some cases, when Erasmus was invited to visit somewhere but didn't want to go, 514 00:49:37,700 --> 00:49:43,970 he sent the painting instead and Holbein kept a model on hand so he could make a portrait, even in Erasmus's absence. 515 00:49:44,480 --> 00:49:48,770 And these depict Erasmus reading or writing or thinking in the company of some books. 516 00:49:49,250 --> 00:49:52,310 Books he owned. As in the portraits of ordinary, educated people. 517 00:49:52,490 --> 00:49:58,610 But books he'd written. These portraits, of course, were idealised in order to convey a persona rather than a real person. 518 00:49:58,970 --> 00:50:03,680 And I think we should have. Likely just as much of an idealisation. 519 00:50:05,390 --> 00:50:13,580 According to an 18th century treatise on the region, a French county code that house and otherwise featured a fresco version of the same scene. 520 00:50:14,210 --> 00:50:19,790 So the remediation of the wall painting now lost into a woodcut, was crucial to his transmission. 521 00:50:20,150 --> 00:50:24,650 It's the first two full opening illustrations in a 25 page pamphlet. 522 00:50:24,680 --> 00:50:29,630 So here, just to remind us of just how many Erasmus depictions there are. 523 00:50:30,770 --> 00:50:34,310 This pamphlet then is Quinn's counterpart, basically. 524 00:50:36,490 --> 00:50:40,390 And what is it doing? He is celebrating a big moment in his life. 525 00:50:40,600 --> 00:50:48,490 In 1552 AD, he had just published this first big book of his on the history of Burgundy. 526 00:50:48,970 --> 00:50:56,620 He was also running a humanist school in those of LA, which even attracted a few songs from Basel families who'd been associated with Erasmus, 527 00:50:56,620 --> 00:50:59,890 and thus he worked with them while he was in Erasmus's employ. 528 00:51:00,700 --> 00:51:08,560 And you can see in the Burgundy book he has a little symbol for himself coming, inspired by Matthew. 529 00:51:09,130 --> 00:51:18,280 He's got a medallion portrait of himself. And these are reproduced in the pamphlet here, the figure, a pamphlet where he reproduces his own portrait. 530 00:51:18,280 --> 00:51:27,580 And then the first full page opening in this pamphlet is are painting is followed by other good ones, like his hometown of Nasiriyah, 531 00:51:27,910 --> 00:51:35,740 which he will reprint in his opera, Omnia, a 5063, along with detail showing where his house is and his library. 532 00:51:36,250 --> 00:51:37,120 Very interestingly, 533 00:51:37,120 --> 00:51:45,310 he does not reprint his picture of himself with Erasmus as he decided in 1563 that he doesn't want to portray himself in that subservient position. 534 00:51:45,820 --> 00:51:50,770 I don't know. I'm kind of surprised. He has many poems praising Erasmus still in the opera Omnia. 535 00:51:52,510 --> 00:51:57,850 So both the ability and the willingness of Cezanne to depict his work as the man who once is in print are quite unusual. 536 00:51:58,930 --> 00:52:02,049 And he he then goes on. 537 00:52:02,050 --> 00:52:12,129 He's clearly preparing a further edition of this pamphlet because the copy of University of Basel contains the printed version larded with manuscript, 538 00:52:12,130 --> 00:52:16,590 annotations and things, even from prints tipped in. 539 00:52:16,600 --> 00:52:22,120 These are further poems, poems of Praise Erasmus Poem of Praise of learning, poems in praise of Cezanne, 540 00:52:22,870 --> 00:52:27,610 which presumably he's collected in order to make a second edition of this pamphlet, which of course, never happens. 541 00:52:30,390 --> 00:52:35,700 So the road ahead, obviously, cuisine has given us this beautiful depiction. 542 00:52:36,670 --> 00:52:45,230 Very unusual of him at work with Erasmus. When are in anyone's he's visible and when are they invisible? 543 00:52:45,290 --> 00:52:50,749 I will be talking about the many factors that conspire to minimise the visibility of AMANUENSIS, 544 00:52:50,750 --> 00:52:54,680 but I'm also going to argue that they're more visible in the 16th century than in prior periods, 545 00:52:55,490 --> 00:52:58,610 and in particular because they're going to be mentioned in print in order to serve 546 00:52:58,610 --> 00:53:03,380 a variety of rhetorical purposes that I bundled together as the servant function. 547 00:53:03,620 --> 00:53:05,840 What is the function of the servant in a book? 548 00:53:05,960 --> 00:53:11,870 Why you talk about them and basically just take the blame for errors is certainly one big purpose of the servant function. 549 00:53:12,790 --> 00:53:17,919 Next Tuesday in lecture three, I'll focus on the kinds of works that amanuensis performed. 550 00:53:17,920 --> 00:53:23,050 Cézanne's image represents the iconic activity of taking dictation, which of course is a two person activity. 551 00:53:23,380 --> 00:53:26,860 Kwan is also positioned near the open bookcases in this image, 552 00:53:26,860 --> 00:53:32,470 and perhaps that symbolises the fact that he was managing or Evans's books, that he would go fetch books. 553 00:53:33,250 --> 00:53:37,180 And certainly Amanuensis were responsible for people's libraries, for buying books, 554 00:53:37,960 --> 00:53:42,400 for ordering, you know, arranging them and finding things in them and so forth. 555 00:53:43,220 --> 00:53:43,850 More generally, 556 00:53:43,850 --> 00:53:50,480 amanuensis often did work that the principal could have done himself and delegated it in order to save time or because of illness, as we've seen. 557 00:53:51,260 --> 00:53:56,810 But they could also contribute skills that the principal lacked, such as being able to write legibly or beautifully, 558 00:53:57,170 --> 00:54:01,520 or knowing unusual languages, or how to draw or to make mathematical tables. 559 00:54:02,420 --> 00:54:11,240 And I argue that even tasks that we consider or the the principles considered mechanical and this term was used at the time largely as a pejorative, 560 00:54:11,720 --> 00:54:15,740 always also required a fully intellectual engagement from those who performed them. 561 00:54:16,250 --> 00:54:20,360 So the third lecture is about the difference in perspective between principal and amanuensis. 562 00:54:22,330 --> 00:54:23,170 In the fourth lecture, 563 00:54:23,170 --> 00:54:29,920 I'll ponder the attributions of texts and pair texts in light of cases in which what's presented in print at the time was unreliable. 564 00:54:30,370 --> 00:54:37,270 In some cases, amanuensis were deprived of credit. But I've also found cases of the reverse where they were given undue credit. 565 00:54:37,540 --> 00:54:44,780 And we can talk about why that might be. And in the last lecture emphasise the role that Amanuensis played in shaping the legacy of their principles. 566 00:54:45,170 --> 00:54:49,040 Erasmus's legacy was so massive that Koosman was only a bit player in that transmission. 567 00:54:49,340 --> 00:54:54,260 But by outliving Erasmus and seeking to commemorate him from his unusual perspective, 568 00:54:54,440 --> 00:55:00,880 Susanna contributes a novel depiction of the great man that blends expressions of loyalty with a strong sense of cuisine. 569 00:55:00,920 --> 00:55:07,230 His own achievements. So many thanks for being here today and I look forward to the lectures ahead. 570 00:55:07,370 --> 00:55:09,270 I even ended early. Oh, amazing.