George. Hello, everyone.
Thanks for coming back for lecture three of the series in the Scholars Workshop Amanuensis in Early Modern Europe.
So last time I talked about the factors fostering the invisibility of amanuensis,
but also emphasised that they surface in print more than one might expect in a new variant on an old trope.
A theft of my manuscript by a servant pushed me to publish in haste against my better judgement,
or in pointing to amanuensis as responsible for errors or other in falsities.
And I argued that these rhetorical manoeuvres performed a servant function that helped to allay the anxiety of publication for authors,
and it needn't have had a direct relationship to the production of any specific work.
But those ploys were effective because of a reality that authors and readers understood that much scholarly and authorial work depended on amanuensis,
who made many kinds of contributions. And today, a focus on manuscript sources,
correspondence and working papers to investigate what we can learn about the
work that Amanuensis actually did and the personal relationships involved.
While the servant function suggests an antagonistic relationship between the principal and the amanuensis,
there are many signs of productive and even friendly collaboration in the manuscripts.
So as I suggested in my closing example last time, even work that was considered mechanical by copying was also intellectual.
And today I'll add that the same activity like scribing or making an alphabetical
index could be described or perceived as mechanical and drudgery in one context,
but also appreciated in another context as admirable scholarly activity requiring intelligence and judgement.
For example, Tony Grafton has shown how in some letters Josephs Gallagher complained of being asked to index
the massive corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions prepared by his friend Yanis Grutter,
saying that indexing was a job for printer's workmen, not a scholar.
And Gallagher refused to put his name on a work he had done as a drudge.
But he also called the index, even in the same work, the soul of the work.
So in this case,
the same person articulated different views of the same work even more readily than when two people are involved in a collaborative relationship,
they can have different perception of it.
The principal who delegated the work might perceive it or portrayed as mechanical when seeking to minimise it,
while the person doing the work would be more inclined to appreciate its intellectual difficulty and the principal might also describe it as such,
for example, when seeking the favour of his helper. The word mechanical has many meanings, both as an actress category and a historical one.
So here's an excerpt from the OED identifies the 15th century as the origin of two big clusters of meanings one concerned with crafts,
manual work, practical skills, and two relating to machines.
And among these I like sense seven operating like a machine without thought routine.
Both senses could pertain to the work of amanuensis.
Scribing was certainly a labour of the hands which were used not only for writing but also for mixing ink.
Cutting the quill. Scraping out mistakes, among other things.
And I have found an excellent source, an occurrence of the word mechanical in the second sense,
as applied to textual work in the early modern period in Juan Carmel Leibowitz.
This advice on indexing published very strangely in a work on unintentional theology in 1664.
In fact, he explains that because there had been a failure to deliver the manuscript to the printer, he has to fill some quires.
And he's going to give you a little Syntagma on typography in which he talks about indexing.
He recommends a procedure that was already well known at the time that Conrad Gessner actually
described 200 years earlier of how to make an index copy out the items to be indexed.
Cut these entries into separate slips of paper alphabetised the slips.
But he called attention explicitly to the delegation of this work.
Have this done? I say. Do not do it yourself. Indeed, this is labour mechanics and does not require you.
It's enough to direct others to do it. And in particular, he speaks of bringing along four or six servants or friends for the task.
So for Carmel,
mechanical meant appropriate for delegation because requiring no special trained judgement and he applied it to the construction of an index,
at least after the entries for the index had been selected. Notice that that part happens prior to this process, he describes.
A lot of exciting recent historiography has soundly rejected the long,
traditional idea that one could and should distinguish between mechanical arts focussed on practical skills and liberal ones, focussed on mental ones.
Work in the History of Science by Pamela Smith and Pamela Long, for example, among others,
has emphasised instead the constant interplay of well-informed judgement with know how and technique in the formation of natural knowledge.
Similarly, in the world of textual production, Daniel Wakeman,
studies on medieval scribes and Anthony Grafton's eyes correctors argue for a constant blurring of mechanical and intellectual.
And today we face a new challenge to the mechanical intellectual distinction as machines,
which are presumably by definition performing mechanical work are doing ever more things we once thought were unique to human capacities,
including giving sensible answers to questions and also confidently asserting falsehoods,
as GHB does after training on the mass of human utterances on the Internet.
We just don't have an adequate vocabulary for talking about the contributions
of either early modern amanuensis or postmodern search engines or chat bots.
So for now, I am speaking of collaboration with as much specific nuance as the sources allow, and I welcome your suggestions and feedback.
So in addition to these two notions of mechanical as manual or requiring no judgement,
there was a third sense in mechanical which received some play in the 16th century,
though I found it so far only in a Latin reference work in antiquity,
the liberal activities of freemen were contrasted with Banaszak or illiberal ones suitable for servants or the enslaved.
And here we have Aristotle in the context of talking about education, explaining this distinction in book eight of his politics.
The object also which a man sets before him, makes a great difference if he does or learns anything for his own sake,
or for the sake of his friends, or with a view to excellence.
The action will not appear illiberal, but if done for the sake of others, the very same action will be thought, menial and servile.
Though he does not cite this passage explicitly, Aristotle's notion of mechanical as illiberal seems to inform Theodore Fingers treatment of
amanuensis in his grand classification of human activities in the Tatro Humanae Vitae three edition,
successively enlarged in his volume on the mechanical arts, Springer discusses activities considered mechanical since the Middle Ages,
like cooking, textile, making architecture along with some new ones like typography that fit easily into the category of practical arts.
But Singer closes this volume with a category a book on vicarious mechanical arts activities performed on behalf of others and at their command.
In other words, mechanical in the sense of Aristotle's illiberal or Banaszak.
Swingers subdivided these activities into activities performed vicariously with the body versus those performed vicariously with the mind.
So here we are with a very elaborate chart. All of Singer's stuff are pretty elaborate.
We're doing the carries with the mind. And it's divided into different kinds.
So here we are at the top.
The various things you can do vicariously with the mind include speaking for another, writing for another, keeping accounts,
administering things, exploring mourning, as in the women in antiquity whom one would hire to attend funerals and cry for others.
And so and you can see other things we can do for others, including taking punishment and so forth.
And here, then inside the mechanical, vicarious operating activities, we find writers, amanuensis and scribes.
So here they're mechanical, not because they're using the hand, but because they are vicarious.
I don't know how broadly this notion was diffused, but I can say that this whole passage was lifted and alphabetised under M for mechanical
in a giant sequel to its finger though Lawrence use via link magnum theatre mi vita,
which was in print down to 1707 and five editions in the 17th century.
So it is certainly in circulation and I'd be delighted to learn about other occurrences of this use of mechanical.
So the emphasis on work for Higher and Singer highlights a feature of the amanuensis which cannot be changed.
However much brainpower the amanuensis deployed or was acknowledged to deploy, the intellectual work was still performed for the sake of another,
and the only way out of that illiberal category is defined by Aristotle is through friendship.
And even if no one explicitly had this distinction in mind, this Aristotelian distinction I'm reminding you of.
It's fascinating that friendship is a major theme in the interactions between principals and amanuensis.
In his secretary, which is basically a letter writing.
Manuel Angel Day notes the dual status when he defines a secretary as being in one condition, a servant and being in a second respect as a friend.
He specifies a few pages later.
He has mind, a friendship without any lewdness, a protestation which suggests that a lewd friendship was also a possibility,
as Alan Stewart has pointed out in his study on the early modern closet.
Principals also deployed the language of friendship. Now and then we'll see that in lecture five,
our client you'll name and his family consistently referred to Tony as long standing amanuensis as a dear friend.
Others use the term sparingly to soften the formal condition of the amanuensis as a servant independent.
For example, when Gessner was trying to lure Jill back Suzanne back into service after the young man had left for a clerical position in his hometown.
Erasmus wrote after this interruption, In our time together, we shall be more dear to each other.
There will be less work for you. And it's my intention now to receive you as a friend.
And you will find me considerably more generous. So this is clearly something that he thought Cezanne would like.
Erasmus was promising a shift in the relationship, treating it like a friend, giving him less work and more money.
But Susanna dithered about returning. Erasmus died in the meantime. So the promise was never put to the test.
The language of friendship is, of course, complex and variable by context.
As Peter Burke has pointed out, it often applied to family members and patrons too, in this period.
But the Aristotelian notion that an action performed for a friend was a fundamentally different
one than one performed out of obligation of repay strikes me as worth investigating further.
So to delve into the work that amanuensis did, I'll tap into the rich away of sources we have from the life of Desiderius Erasmus,
known as the Prince of Humanists in his day and sense,
who masterminded a huge number of publications, some 221st editions, a good number of which were the object of multiple editions.
And Erasmus carried on an extensive correspondence 3141 letters from especially to him survive from involving 666 correspondents,
of which seven were women.
His novels also includes a few autographed manuscript materials, including working copies of books annotated by both Erasmus and in many senses.
And this scholarship on Erasmus is wonderfully vast, too. And it even includes a study of Erasmus, his amanuensis La Familia.
The Erasmus published more than 50 years ago by France VLA,
and the array of explains there that he was led to the topic by an entry in the index to PSA Allan's 11 volume edition of Erasmus Letters,
published in 1958 for servant pupils.
Allen designated with his term 29 men who surface in erasmus's correspondence
and two others who were recommended to Erasmus for the role but didn't hold it.
And servant pupil is Alan's category term a nicely polyvalent one for a varied and loosely defined role.
Erasmus formed an unusual household as an Augustinian canon,
an ordained priest who was allowed to leave his monastery but remained a cleric and celibate.
So if we go back to this chart of how who he employed,
when we can see that in the early 1490s Erasmus lived rather precariously, mainly from tutoring.
And during this period Erasmus took in adolescent pupils who paid to board with him and be instructed by him.
Erasmus's claim to one unhappy parent that he never asked the boy to copy anything suggests exactly the opposite.
Of course, copying was also viewed as a central part of humanist education,
valuable for retaining a text and memory, as well as for practising handwriting.
As Erasmus advocated in his pedagogical works by 1558, Erasmus.
His reputation spread widely. His revenue was boosted by pensions and gifts and income from his publication,
mainly in the form of copies of his books, which he could sell or give away in expectation of counter gifts.
And at this point, Erasmus started to hire young men to serve his family and amanuensis.
They were typically about 20 years old.
Recent university graduates, often from Leuven, where Erasmus, his former teacher, Conrad MacLean, is identified, promising prospects.
Erasmus paid them in room and board, plus a yearly salary of 20 to 25 florins.
But he also view them as pupils, for example,
praising their progress or critiquing their shortcomings and learned skills such as elegant Latin composition.
These helpers provide a service not only in the study but also, quote, in the bedchamber and at the table.
As Erasmus observed in 1915 30 to 1 correspondent and this was the case even after 1522,
when Erasmus hired a female housekeeper, Margareta Beslan, to manage many of the domestic aspects of the household.
Though Erasmus called Margarita, quote, ugly, lazy, loquacious, voracious and abusive, he also employed her for 13 years.
The roughly 50 occurrences of amanuensis in Erasmus's correspondence offer a good
introduction to the variety of causal casual references to Amanuensis in his circle.
The most common mention of Amanuensis is to signal their use as a messenger.
The amanuensis will be delivering or have has delivered to or from the correspondent a letter,
a financial receipt, a book, wine or information to be conveyed orally.
Almost as common are mentions of the amanuensis his role in scribing the letter.
Sometimes this is simply noted in the sign off pear amanuensis or the mention is accompanied
by an apology in a fan letter to Erasmus of 1522 from a Benedictine monastery in Tyrol.
The educator Leonard Miller, notes that his amanuensis has written in German script but in the Latin language,
so he's revealing the limited skills of his helper. Perhaps not a fellow monk, but a servant in the monastery.
Some letters offer reasons for relying on Secretary Gillam,
but writing to Erasmus in 1518 and Erasmus writing to Pietro Benbow in 1530 each explained they wanted to spare their correspondent.
Their bad handwriting echoed Rafia.
Indeed, Erasmus's handwriting isn't as easy to read as that of his menu and sees, but nonetheless, in most cases, he wrote in his own hand.
Curiously, Erasmus complained in one letter of the poor handwriting of a correspondence amanuensis,
but he likely did so to shield the correspondent from direct criticism for an error.
He was writing to No Obeida, a critic from the Sorbonne, at a time when Erasmus was still hoping to mollify him.
So we get the blaming, the amanuensis.
In that case, bad handwriting of the man who writes this, which is highly unlikely because they were hired to have good handwriting.
Other letters mention illness, which we've encountered in previous lectures.
So for example, here from 1534,
we have a letter in the hand of Jean Barkhuizen consisting at the top of a copy of a letter that Erasmus had written to,
said the letters that Erasmus is now sharing with his good friend Boniface Amer above and at the bottom in a more rapid hand,
but by the same person, I'm convinced, Coosa adds a postscript in his own voice and explained to Amasa,
whom he knew himself, that Erasmus was suffering from gout and couldn't write in his own hand.
So that's this. So we can see Erasmus's signing in whose signature?
We see the apology for not being able to write, and then a signoff by the secretary.
Yours truly. And here, as in many cases, we see the amanuensis providing the address which is on the Verso,
the letter which is then folded and sealed and delivered.
And we can see other examples of here a case of a completely autograph letter with autograph address, and another time where the letter is autograph.
And the address is by the amanuensis. Okay.
In just one case, Rasmus mentions dictating to an amanuensis because of the pressure of such a great heap of labours, in other words, to save time.
And I've pondered why relying on on the menu in to write a letter was actually a time saving technique.
Maybe dictation was faster than composing oneself, because, as the early Christian authors Jerome and Ambrose had each noted,
the amanuensis waiting would egg the writer on and therefore dictating a letter meant none of the dithering that might have occurred otherwise,
or perhaps less of the rewriting too. In addition, of course, skilled of anyone sees could compose a letter directly from just a few instructions,
which would definitely spare the principal's time.
Although an amanuensis could make a copy of an outgoing letter for archiving purposes, this was not a regular practice among scholars.
As opposed to officials who might have done this more often. Erasmus explained in a preface to the publication of some of his letters in 1536.
For several years, I have not bothered to keep a copy of my own letters, partly because I did not have enough secretaries to write out everything.
And partly because I have many letters to reply to. And therefore I am compelled to compose off the cuff, even sometimes to dictate.
In other sets of scholarly letters, these kinds of casual references to Amanuensis are common.
Two and one line that occurs in other collections of letters is to apologise for a delay in writing for lack of an amanuensis.
And presumably this excuse would not seem plausible coming from Erasmus because his correspondence were well
aware that Erasmus was someone exceptionally busy with letter writing and also well-served by multiple helpers.
So here we have a letter by one Levinas Harmonious, a Carthusian admirer who's gushing in.
I am. I have spared you. Some of the quote is even longer about receiving an autographed letter from Erasmus.
To think that you counted the friendship of this poor creature so highly that you reply to my letter in your own hand,
you would have done me enough honour if you had communicated your feelings toward me to a secretary or some other way.
For all I wanted was to be assured that you did not resent my friendly intervention.
Please, Erasmus, do not imagine that I underestimate this honour.
And I wonder here if his subtext might be, Please write more often.
And it should be no bother. Just have an amanuensis. Do it. More explicitly passive aggressive was Yohannes.
KUKLA was an anti Lutheran polemicist who hoped to involve Erasmus in more disputes with the Lutherans,
and he did so by enjoining Erasmus not to apply, replied to his Lutheran critics directly, but by using a member of his household as a mouthpiece.
You have in your house several young people in servants,
perfectly capable of defending Your Honour against attackers of that ilk without your nation wasting one hour on them.
Your screen is telling us you can set them straight, prettily,
or if you'd rather we could publish something under the name of your cook to defend Your Honour.
And to condemn them to splendid ridicule. In fact, Erasmus did not, as far as I know,
at least engage in a polemical practice that I will discuss next time of having an
amanuensis write or publish a response to his critics as quickly as suggested here.
And I don't suppose Erasmus much appreciated being told by others to take on more work because he had multiple amanuensis.
But we can see his correspondence doing that.
Erasmus accompanied his practice of letter writing with advice about orthography in on the right way of speaking Latin and Greek.
He advocated the mastery of good handwriting. So it's a dialogue, Leo says.
Nowadays, the art of printing has led to the situation that some scholars do not write down anything at all for.
If they decide to commit any of their Luc operations to paper, they write so beautiful beautifully.
They cannot themselves read what they've written and require a secretary to read it and decipher what they cannot decipher themselves.
To be brief, a letter that is a product of someone else's fingers hardly deserves the name.
For Secretaries Port a great deal of their own. If you dictate verbatim, then it's goodbye to your privacy.
And so you disguise some things and suppress others in order to avoid having an unwanted confidante.
A man's handwriting, like his voice, has a special individual quality.
So fascinating ruminations here by Erasmus on the impact of printing.
As Collet-Serra has pointed out in her history of handwriting across the millennia,
printing liberated handwriting from its association with the drudgery of making multiple copies of a text,
something that surely you would delegate whenever possible.
So that handwriting became instead a mark of personal attention, of authentic private communication.
It's fascinating also to have Erasmus's opinion that printing caused handwriting to deteriorate
once handwriting became a means of personal communication practised by many more people.
Individual hands easily deviated from the rigid and time consuming norms of scribal handwriting.
So much so, he says, that scholars couldn't even read their own writing.
And Erasmus may have in mind the Strasbourg reformer Martin Boozer, of whom this was said at the time and with whom he had recently corresponded.
More on Boozer in a later lecture.
So the amanuensis was valued not only for his ability to write legibly and elegantly, but also apparently to read crabbed hands.
These human values of photography spread beyond the scholarly world.
James de Bell has studied a corpus of some 10,000 English letters between 15, 12 and 1635.
And he notes a growing expectation during this period of writing in one's own hand to family,
friends and associates, which is detectable from practice and from apologies for failing to do so.
Scribes were preferred for more formal letters relating to government, law or business.
Letters to the monarch were typically scribal, therefore, except for those writing from special positions of favour or intimacy.
Erasmus wrote a number of letters to kings and popes, but only one of them survives a manuscript to see whether Daybell's observation applies.
In Erasmus's letter of 1535 to Pope Paul, the third was indeed described by Jacob Barkhuizen.
Erasmus also remarked in a note to his friend Boff that rulers do not like to wrestle with the inconvenience of deciphering handwriting.
But he had nonetheless written to a cardinal in his own hand because he had no amanuensis available at the time.
In Erasmus's correspondence. There are some instances of blaming the amanuensis in a pattern we've encountered in print.
But Erasmus offers more nuance about errors of his own.
In a letter to Martin Boozer, Erasmus addressed complaints about a collection of Erasmus letters that he'd recently published,
and he explained that the printer had been pressuring him for material. So he offered a packet of letters.
But despite his best effort to remove potentially offending passages before they went to print, some remained, quote,
whether because they escaped me or through the inattention of the amanuensis and copying some letters instead of others.
But here he's sharing the blame with you many senses.
And we also find Erasmus forestalling criticism of the amanuensis who had just completed the letter.
He closed the letter he dictated to his Polish friend Pyotr Tyminski with a piece.
Please pardon that this letter is written in another's hand for gout has so affected my right hand I could not even sign my name.
And also if my secretary's handwriting is rather careless. The reason is that the courier was in a hurry and there was not time to copy the letter.
So he's exonerating the scribe while blaming the haste of another one of the people on whom he replied, The Courier.
And of course, you'd be accusing the one scribing the letter. And the piece was also directly aware of this, courtesy of Erasmus toward him.
In a few instances, Erasmus invokes the risk of overworking his amanuensis.
When he explained that, he decided to print a response to critics rather than circulating manuscript copies.
No. Okay.
Erasmus explains this in two dedicatory epistles to his apologia addressed to some Spanish monks in 15, 28 and 29, addressed to the same man,
Alfonso Manrique, that he did not have enough amanuensis to make multiple copies that were needed to respond to his Spanish critics.
So, quote, Instead of many secretaries, I employed just one printer.
In the second letter, he adds that, quote, My amanuensis has always had way too much business.
So he turned to a printer to make the copies, and the printer could make 2000 copies faster than the amanuensis could make two handwritten ones.
He's talking here about a 200 page book, and the idea of making multiple copies by hand doesn't seem very reasonable.
However, when he makes a similar claim about a 20 page polemic against the Lutheran and Dorf,
which Erasmus says he decided to print in 1530, quote, so as not to exhaust my secretaries, it seems more plausible.
But in these cases, in any case, the nuances are presented as part of his communicative arsenal.
Even if the printing press prevailed, nor was Erasmus alone in this awareness.
He noted that one of his tenacious enemies, Edward Lee, was skilled at drumming up interest in his work.
There was a wretched quality by writing, quote, some 600 letters for which purpose he had several amanuensis.
And in that case, using several amanuensis to carry out a letter campaign was just another sign of Lee's lack of proper scholarly virtues.
Erasmus, by contrast, portrays himself as sensitive to not overworking his helpers.
So like many other aspects of scholarly life, the presence or absence of amanuensis could be spun to suit many different points.
Finally, Erasmus's correspondence highlights a type of letter about the qualities expected of amanuensis, the letter of recommendation.
Erasmus wrote such letters himself, one of the many ones who sought to move on from his household.
Typically after 3 to 5 years for the priesthood or an ecclesiastical position or in service to a courtier diplomat.
Conversely, Erasmus received many such letters by people he knew and others he did not recommending a young man for his service.
For example, a nobleman and expert wrote to Erasmus to recommend the young man in the household of Georg Retirer, a scholar in Augsburg.
It was reported to me by one of our servants that you have need of a secretary at the moment, since you do not have your usual number.
There is an Augsburg at the moment, the servant of every timer.
He is the assistant teacher of noble children. He is zealous of good morals, alertness and what is essential.
And teachers, faithful, discreet, very willing to endure his labours and the anger of his master, humble as well,
and sees, since he is not yet 20 years old, he would be easily predisposed to obey your commands.
Since there was no follow up. We don't know anything else about the young men,
but we can see what Erasmus was expected to value a strong work ethic, good morals, good Latin loyalty and obedience.
We can well imagine that Erasmus was not easy to live with,
given his frequent complaints about his health, his fussiness, about housing and food and drink.
Only French wine agreed with him, for example, but also his intellectual requirements,
and hence the importance of specifying that this good candidate could endure the anger of the master.
On the contrary, when Claudius was being considered for a position was deemed unacceptable by Erasmus's scouts
because the young man being confident in his abilities has formed an exaggerated opinion of himself.
Elated by the possibility of entering Erasmus's household, he's eager to accelerate his studies as soon as he can and as best he can.
But I do not think we should in any way permit that anyone be designated by you for a confidential function who is not motivated by lofty incentives.
In other words, someone only keen to reap the educational and reputational rewards of working for Erasmus
without a true love of learning and of service to the great man was not a good choice.
Loyalty was a prime importance in any context,
but even more so during this period of bitter religious tension between Catholic and Protestant and within each of those camps.
Erasmus was, of course, the object of withering criticism from reformers whose camp he refused to join,
but also from conservative Catholics who blamed him for encouraging reforms that had inspired Luther.
Just as reformers vetted their own pupil servants for religious correctness, so too did Erasmus.
Erasmus worried that a member of his household could turn Protestant or that a mole
could be planted in his household by enemies to cast aspersions on his lifestyle.
Or that a careless souvent would cause a letter to fall into the wrong hands.
Erasmus regularly reminded corresponds to seal their letters and to use only trusted messengers to deliver them.
Erasmus offers one model for recruiting. Amanuensis is a Catholic cleric, celibate and with no interest in marriage.
But there were other models, notably through the rise of marriage among scholars.
Gadi el Ghazi has explained that already in the 15th century,
the traditional prohibition against marriage for scholars and officials at universities was eroding.
Though celibacy was reinstated in English universities from the mid 16th until the 19th century.
So we're talking about the continent. And this development, of course, was further reinforced when the reformers themselves embraced marriage.
Luther married in 1525, Caterina from Bora, who was part of a group of nuns whom Luther had helped escape from their convent two years earlier.
And that set a norm for Protestant ministers to marry.
The case of Heinrich Bullinger offers a nice counterpart to that of Erasmus when he was killed in 1531 in the second KAPELL War.
Bullinger was named certainly successor as Ante stays in Zurich and leader of the Swiss Reformed Church for 44 years.
Bullinger was a powerhouse of textual activities. 12,000 letters survive to and especially from some 1000 correspondents spread across Europe.
That's almost four times the size of Erasmus's correspondence. It's so large that the editing project has stalled after 19 volumes in the year 1547.
And I'm very grateful to Reinhard Boardman, who headed that project for many years for his guidance through this material.
I hope they find funding before donating. They have a website. Given Bullinger a central position in the Reformation.
The letters serve to circulate debates in theology, church politics and news more generally.
Bolinger selected from his letters item for further distribution in manuscript newsletters, of which he had multiple copies made.
He also kept copies of outgoing letters. If they broach delicate topics, theological ones in particular with people he didn't know,
lest they make false claims about what he'd written and as minister in his work.
GROSS Mr. Bullinger preached and published vast numbers of sermons and works of religious commentary and exhortation in Latin and German.
He also composed works of history about the Reformation, about the history of Switzerland and the city of Zurich,
which he withheld from publication so as not to disrupt the tenuous peace formed around among competing religious factions.
So these works of history were only printed in the 18th century,
but the manuscripts were meant to be valued as a precious record of a time of great significance in the founding of a new religion,
even if they could be shared publicly only later. And Bullinger commissioned a Stern Schreiber, a calligrapher,
to make a beautiful presentation copy of the Turin or Conic of 1600 pages, which he then donated to the Ghost Master in 1574.
The text was both composed and fair, copied on a tight schedule, so the transcriber was limited in how shine he could make it.
His name was Israel Staley, and what I can show you are some of his best examples of the beauty, the calligraphy he did.
Unfortunately, I don't have a digital version to show of this Torino clinic.
So here is a man whom you hire for exceptional manuscripts,
who's also famous for scribing a book on bird hunting with beautiful coloured images of feathers.
Bollinger relied on a range of more ordinary helpers most of the time.
He married young at age 25. Let's see.
I don't have another one. Okay. Whereas Lutherans only had hesitated to marry when they were 40 years old when they did so,
his marriage to marriage to honour at least Revealer was apparently a happy one.
I'm just going to move forward. I do have a list here of his 11 children, nine of whom made it to adulthood.
In addition, the household included a foster son, Rudolph Walter, whose father had died at the end,
who was already a student of Berliners and was 13 when he became an orphan.
Josiah Similar, who lived with bullying her as an adolescent while one of willing her sons lived with a similar family.
That kind of adolescent trading and in due course similar married one of his daughters.
So Bulaga was well provided with young people to do the mounds of copying he needed.
And these are the boys or young men whose hands have been identified in his papers, his son Heinrich, his pastor son Rudolph Walter,
his sons in law Ludwig Laverty and Joseph Similar, a schoolmaster housing the church administrator Wolfgang Heller.
His reliance on his son is mentioned in a 1544 letter to Yohannes, a Lascaux in Poland,
to whom Bullinger was sending a copy of a letter likely on theological point that he had written to someone else.
I send you a copy of my letter to the Abbots so that if there is some error by his negligence,
it can be corrected by you on this copy made by my son, Heinrich.
So maybe he's apologising for error by mentioning as his son.
Maybe he's proudly pointing out that his son, who I think was around ten years old at the time, was making this copy.
Of course, a well-educated child could offer many of the benefits with none of the security risks or financial costs of an adult amanuensis.
In building this correspondence, we also find the presence of another kind of helper,
Christian whole culture, who first appears in 1533 requesting to board and building his house,
quote among your domestics and hopes to be counted even among his common solace, i.e. eating at the same table as Bullinger.
He promises to be obedient and diligent in improving his learning and writing, and we have some manuscripts of his, including likely student notes.
In this case, this likely came to pass, and ten years later,
Holzer has finished his studies and is a schoolteacher in Stoneham, Heine, which is about a day's travel away from Zurich.
And he writes a dozen letters or so to Bullinger before the edition stops in 1549, seeking advice about his affairs,
for example, whether to marry, sending him news with an emphasis on church politics.
And he mentions the things you gave me to copy, promising to send them soon.
So here is perhaps one of those things given to copy.
Basically a pretty anodyne manuscript which whole culture then was Bullinger was sending away for copying things that were not urgent,
and a whole culture would return them weeks later, who Holzer consistently called Bullinger pater dearest or most revered father.
I suppose this was owing to his position as minister and on Titus,
but Holzer had also been a member of his household and continued to display the loyalty to his former paterfamilias.
So I want to dip into one more corpus of letters to pull out a few more telling passages.
Samuel Hartley arrived in England at age 28 as a refugee from the outbreak of war in Poland.
Married and settled in London in 1630, where he cultivated a vast network of local and distant correspondents to hasten the circulation
of useful knowledge and the attainment of the beckoning ideal of social and moral reformation.
He did a great deal of copying himself for his own use.
Mark Greengrass estimates about a third of a million words and he employed scribes to copy works to send to others.
Ten or 11 different undescribed hands have been identified in his papers and he also turned to friends to send him copies of materials to friends.
His friends in Central Europe in particular regularly complained about the lack of amanuensis who could do the copying.
Partly this was a matter of funds, as John Johnstone wrote, for example.
In this lovely quote surface by Daniel Magashi. As regards the amanuensis, though, I could wish I had no need of any or might supply them myself.
Yet I see this to be impossible, in part because, as it is, I must somewhat neglect my medical practice on account of the work,
and in part because everything is dear here and let us know.
Poland and our wives loudly complain that everything spent on books or the writing of books is a waste of money.
So in this case, the domestic setting proved a hindrance rather than a help in getting work done.
Given the competition for resources between the needs of the family and Johnston's wish to hire, too many winces.
In one case, Hartley evidently gave some funds for the purpose,
prompting his correspondent to thank him and say that he would send him the stuff very soon.
And I have lost my page 11. Even though I had specially counted all the pages.
But I found it. So. Hartley complained himself about the so he promises to give the work as soon as possible,
since you have paid for the amanuensis and hardly complained about the costs incurred and in particular contrasting his
situation enviously with that of Malcolm X in a minim living in a friary in Paris who could write a huge correspondence,
the whole cloister maintain the charges and the desiderata.
His mind is knowing more about how fellow friars or servants in the friary could contribute to the textual production of someone like Mersenne.
But of course those interactions are oral and in person, and I have not found a way to enter that world.
Interestingly, Hartley's correspondents from Central Europe also reported a problem that money alone
couldn't fix the difficulty of finding the menu and source of suitable quality.
One of them commented that the students at the local gymnasium were not up to the work he needed done.
Another explained that the greatest difficulty will be in finding someone who can
transcribe the work because it cannot be done by a common or vulgar vernacular amanuensis.
We need someone who knows Latin. And he was running ragged and just couldn't do it himself.
And of so funny, as Kozak wrote, to complain that many things remain to be copied and all by me because I lack a sagacious amanuensis.
Suggs. So there was clearly more to being a competent amanuensis, the mechanically copying words one did not understand.
These potential principals are looking for trained judgement,
which would indeed be most helpful in deciphering crab handwriting or understanding a complicated Latin manuscript in order to copy it correctly.
These reports from Central Europe are a reminder that vernacular literacy rates were low in this period.
Even in England, 40% of Englishmen could sign their names in the obligatory protestation of 1640 142 and Latin literacy much lower still,
although I am not aware of statistics on that.
And even in a centre of learning like Zurich, Conrad Gessner was casting about for a good helper when he wrote its finger in the year of his death.
I'd like to know if you could find a young man moderately instructed in letters,
a student of medicine, poor, modest and good who could help in my writing and copying.
He could attend one or the other public lecture and would live and board with me. The more learned he is, the more he could help.
Erasmus truly managed to hire the best amanuensis of all, given the appeal of his reputation and his good living conditions and nice big house.
Let's return to the Erasmus material now and look at some of their work which displays the perception and intellect suggested by Suggs.
So I'm going to be talking about the adages, which is a singularly complicated work.
We have the IT copies two annotated copies of the editions of the editors of 15, 23 and 26, each of them preparing the following edition.
This is a working document. The the notes do not match the later printed edition.
So there is probably another version which may well have been printed from and therefore marked up and discarded in the printing process.
So we're missing the final stage of preparation,
but these volumes are fascinating for giving us some evidence of how Erasmus worked with his amanuensis of the time.
Nicholas Conyers. So we're talking about 1523.
This is a BSB copy. This copy with annotations is in private hands.
So I'm using images from the Sotheby's sales catalogue of November 1990,
and you can see that this one is inscribed by Connie, who says It is mine through the generosity of my teacher,
my preceptor, Erasmus of Rotterdam, which also shows that the amanuensis perceived the principal as a teacher,
not just the principal perceiving the amanuensis as a pupil.
The next edition is at the Vatican and I've got a digitisation from a microfilm, which is not fantastic quality, but good enough.
And we can see that it too was a gift from Erasmus to Nicholas Conyers.
Who is Nicolaus Copernicus. He was a young man at the time, a graduate of Levin,
who served in amanuensis as an amanuensis for five years and then moved on to
become a he was ordained and then he became rector of the Guildhall in 1532,
then vicar of the old church in Amsterdam and St Nicholas's church.
And so this portrait is thanks to his position at the beginning of.
So let us see. Now, first of all, this is sort of an example of inside the innards of the adages.
It's a supremely complicated text which originated as a modest sized quarto entitled Coke Zero in 1500,
and then took the form in which it became famous in 1508,
a hefty folio with thousands of adages and two indexes, the entities are sorted into thousands.
The millions hundreds can Torii and then count it off.
So you can see here the counting off of the last two digits.
Each adage is a saying from ancient culture in Latin or Greek,
with a commentary by Erasmus explaining the origins and meaning of the expression generally offering
example of its use and substantial edits were made in each new edition by adding new adages,
typically at the end of the text,
without disturbing the existing numbering of the adages and adding new material to existing adages, lengthening the treatment.
The adages were intentionally raised miscellaneous early to heighten the pleasure of variety for the reader.
One can detect some patterns.
To be sure, the first adage in each Killy ad is especially long and significant, and these are the most famous ones between friends all in common.
McKay slowly labours of Hercules and war is sweet to those who have not tried it.
One for each of the four Killian's one can also notice some clusters of related adages, for example, stemming from the Iliad.
There'll be a string of them or referencing salt. So there's a little bit of free association going on in the ordering.
But basically the only way you can find your way around this text is through the indexes.
So managing such a massive tax in an orbit arranged in 4151 by the end,
little sections arbitrarily organised was obviously tremendously challenging and we see no
no evidence of slips being classified and certainly no opportunity for word searching.
So what did we see on the menu when he is doing here?
He is correcting a very cute typographical error.
Instead of OMB column, it should be umbilical. And he corrects that twice.
Here we see a nice case of the two handwriting's at the upper left.
We have conscious and then Erasmus is following right on.
So here we have a clear sense of succession that Converse wrote that first bit first and then in
both are sentences that then appear in print in 1526 with some modifications and then in 1528.
Mostly though, the additions are either in erasmus's hand or in can't use his hand.
They're made in the margins and they're also made on slips that are keyed to passages in the text where they should be made.
Now, on our first lecture, we had a little exhibit and showcased this copy which belonged to Erasmus of S.A. Deafness,
a feast day or banquet of the philosophers. And as per notes, inside the volume.
Darren How do they do that? There we go. P.S. Alan,
the man who's portrayed I showed who worked so hard on the correspondence of Erasmus
and much else explains that a passage on the margin of page 124 was ripped out.
He thinks probably sometime in the 18th century and now is found in the AVC Library of Amsterdam.
And they provided a tracing of it using the technology of the time.
This is February 1921. So with that knowledge, so it's on Alan's the authority of Alan that I'm saying that this belonged to Erasmus.
I did not find an X libraries in his hand.
I do think the handwriting match is well enough, although most of it's in Greek and I'm less keen on deciding Greek handwriting.
So in the 1526 Vatican volume, we have some slips of paper tipped into the back.
And you can see here there are 29 at all. The top left one is in the hand of an amanuensis, most of them are in erasmus's hand,
and five of the 25 nine refer to Athanasius that is making an addition into an existing adage by referencing someone cited in Athanasius because
that's this is big source for otherwise lost works for sentences like this from callimachus and so forth that Erasmus wants to stick in.
So I was very hopeful that I would find in the Bodleian Erasmus copy sons of him selecting the passages from books eight and 13,
which he mentions as his source. Sadly, I did not hit the jackpot.
It seems like Erasmus is really going for words and weird words like the word kaka beso for cackle as in partridges.
So I will continue to work on it. But it doesn't.
He doesn't show any interest in authors cited nothing else, and he does not show any flagging of passages.
So I'm not seeing this book as the source for what John Grant has counted as three
editions of Anthony as to the first Kili ad in the edition of the ages of 1528.
We have, of course, the 1526 Volume Annotated.
It wasn't the only way he made editions. As you know, it's not the final version.
And perhaps this book was not the only evidence he had. Who knows, anyway.
So I was a little, little disappointed. But it's still a very, very lovely volume that you have here, and it merits more attention.
So I'd like to now point out how we see Kansas are going to focus on Kansas.
His voice here, his voice. He's using the first person he is saying.
So, first of all, you can see how it works. We're ending one kili, one century and we're entering another one.
So you see most pages have, you know, three or four addresses like this one does.
And so at the top one, we've got Erasmus inserting a passage at the end.
It's classic, usually put it at the end, not always. And then in the bottom we see the amanuensis making an addition.
So hear the voice of the amanuensis is that of Erasmus.
He's presumably taking this under dictation.
I don't know whether we should impute to an heir of the library's amanuensis that Plutarch and his bank would have sages, writes Prerna.
For Poirot, that is the sentence. He is adding a philological discussion of whether the word pirate actually occurs
in Plutarch or whether it's scribal error or whether Prince should be pirate.
So that is kind of us using AI as Erasmus.
However, we have this very cool passage where I think we have can use using AI as conscious and he says So speak here,
so to speak Speaker as they relate to reality. I suspect that this is reported elsewhere.
And what Conyers is doing is flagging a duplication. Yes, indeed.
There are two different translations of the same Greek expression both reasonable.
Each with a different commentary. Both reasonable. Made by Erasmus at a previous in one of those previous editions.
And he evidently never noticed there are thousands of these, after all, and he can clearly spin them out at a rapid pace.
So notice I just want you to see what the previous adages is.
Honan misses this year's harvest. So what we're going to have as a result of colonies is observation.
It's going to set in motion a revision which enters into 1538.
So first of all, he's going to remove that second occurrence of the coming to right specific momentum.
And instead, because you can't have a whole the whole numbering system depends on having the right number.
He inserts Glaucus mesa area habitat in Murray. Glaucus has eaten grass and leaves in the sea, which basically means he went crazy.
Trying to understand these outages is yeah. Delicate.
So. But then where did Glaucus mesa come from? It was moved from another part of this addition.
And so in this say we see Erasmus annotating saying V Day, look here,
remove this and put it in another place and instead put in the per pay per ribbon adage quote transgresses,
quote transgresses, which is new in this edition.
So I do not know exactly why Erasmus decided to move glaucus to fill the slot
left by the duplicate decisiveness and put in in the old location of glaucus.
This new quote transgresses, but that's what he did. So canny is set in motion a multiple rearrangement of adages.
And then we could wonder, how did Kansas realise there was a duplicate? So in this case it wasn't that hard.
The index of 1523 lists both of the sea surface appearances right next to each other.
So just going through the index, you might notice there probably is a problem here.
And here. Then it's corrected in the following edition, just one appearance on the basis of this adage.
But there's another repetition that county is flags. This one is as easy as rain can fall.
And here you can see him also saying refer to the as mentioned elsewhere and crossing it out.
And here is the second occurrence of it. And so in both cases, they don't merge the text, they just drop one of them.
And what's going to happen here is the duplicates removed.
And a new adage also added for the first time comes in to replace it.
So everything else is left unchanged. And here, though, the index did not list both.
So at the very least,
Canute must have remembered that it had previously occurred at least enough to look it up and see the other occurrence in the index.
So you can see the importance of the index for managing this huge stock of stuff, which is constantly sort of shifting and moving around.
So now let's turn to the indexes. This is the first Alvin Edition, the first major edition of The Adages.
And Erasmus himself was clearly engaged in making the indexes.
It appeared right away, right on the verse of the title page, [INAUDIBLE] bulk indexes 50 pages worth.
The first is an alphabetical list of the adages, and you can see that it's alphabetised medieval style.
A Before B, a before C, and within each of those, just in the order in which they appear in the text.
So it's only alphabetised to the first two letters. This globalisation will get improved over time.
Then we have Erasmus's own blurb to the reader talking about the next index, which is an index by subject matter,
a thematic index in which all the entities that belong together in some way are reduced to one place.
Remember that what pertains to liberality is treated at the same time as things pertaining to avarice,
under the heading avarice, and similarly in instances of the same kind. So he's reminding you to look under synonyms.
Right. He doesn't do cross-referencing. So this is what the second commonplace index looks like.
These are the headings you can see that they're jumble. They're about 250 plus of them.
And the you know some you notice that pairs as commonplace as you know riches
and riches and poverty tests eternity criticised or praised attention in law,
but otherwise, frankly, it is a jumble.
Then that same jumbled list in the same order is repeated with a list of the adages that belong with that heading.
Okay. And so that's where we get riches. And then these are all the adages which Erasmus feels belong there.
So this is a very authorial act of indexing. There's nothing mechanical about this.
And now we're going to look at the annotations in the Vatican volume of 1526.
And there is quite a division of labour here. So this is the first index, alphabetical.
It has obviously graduated from the a before be routine. And Conyers is predominantly the one making annotations here.
He is adding things that have been forgotten. He is rearranging things.
You can see all the little marks, you know, call marks.
The three little dots are called up here, added just to be added and getting the opposition improved.
There are still problems. There are still adjectives that are missing. There's still things in strange order.
We can see one case here of Erasmus intervening to add an adage in the alphabetical listing.
But mostly this is Conti is his work. Here is the second jumbled list of complex headings and here you mostly see erasmus's additions.
And what he's doing is adding new headings which then appear in print.
As you can see here,
excerpted from the next and he has added them in the margins and then [INAUDIBLE] have to do the work of putting the edges to match that new heading.
He also has added headings that don't end up in print, so at some point they got axed.
By whom? I don't know. And when you don't have a print guide to what the handwriting is, I'm very grateful to Bill Barker to help me read that stuff.
And so this is what the headings look like as you move forward in time.
And there were indeed many headings added for 1528 that we watched happening in the 1526.
So these just get tacked on to the end of the jumbled list. And then he is going to add adages under the heading.
So here we see him adding outages to headings that already exist.
And he actually creates a duplicate in one of these cases.
But the duplicate is caught before it goes to print. And I would think Conyers is the man for that job.
And finally, just to point out how where he adds something, how that jumble is created,
the jumble inside the proper list inside in a commonplace heading is just where it lands.
So when a word is at the bottom of the column, it ends up in that position in column, in the print next time.
So thank you for bearing with this. I would just like to close by returning to Erasmus correspondence and Erasmus
is explicit there about some things he delegates when he cites to his helpers.
So he complains that the criticisms by the Spanish scholar Diego Lopez Zuniga are petty of his.
Zuniga is complaining about Erasmus.
Zuniga stirs up a storm over a wrongly numbered chapter caused perhaps by the carelessness of the printers, for this is how most errors arise.
But suppose I were at fault either through a lapse of memory or a slip of the pen.
Why should Zuniga congratulate himself on criticising a service that is often performed for me by my secretaries and amanuensis?
And the error in question involved, citing Acts eight seven as Acts 77.
So he clearly sees his amanuensis as dealing with some of those little detailed things.
So I'll just close by saying that sagacious amanuensis like Aeneas and Kooser took dictation and did a lot of copying,
but they did so with intellectual commitment and capacities developed through study
at university and the experience of working with Erasmus and others in his house.
He relied on his amanuensis to manage that massive, messy text, like the editors and countless sources,
tracking down references, flagging repetitions, drawing up and improving indexes, correcting typos.
The work may seem mechanical when viewed at a distance, and the doing of it likely felt like drudgery at times.
But it was always also intellectual and skilled. Thank you.