1 00:00:00,810 --> 00:00:15,520 George. Hello, everyone. 2 00:00:16,740 --> 00:00:23,490 Thanks for coming back for lecture three of the series in the Scholars Workshop Amanuensis in Early Modern Europe. 3 00:00:24,300 --> 00:00:28,740 So last time I talked about the factors fostering the invisibility of amanuensis, 4 00:00:28,740 --> 00:00:34,980 but also emphasised that they surface in print more than one might expect in a new variant on an old trope. 5 00:00:35,370 --> 00:00:39,900 A theft of my manuscript by a servant pushed me to publish in haste against my better judgement, 6 00:00:40,530 --> 00:00:44,760 or in pointing to amanuensis as responsible for errors or other in falsities. 7 00:00:45,360 --> 00:00:52,080 And I argued that these rhetorical manoeuvres performed a servant function that helped to allay the anxiety of publication for authors, 8 00:00:52,590 --> 00:00:56,040 and it needn't have had a direct relationship to the production of any specific work. 9 00:00:57,020 --> 00:01:05,059 But those ploys were effective because of a reality that authors and readers understood that much scholarly and authorial work depended on amanuensis, 10 00:01:05,060 --> 00:01:09,230 who made many kinds of contributions. And today, a focus on manuscript sources, 11 00:01:09,630 --> 00:01:13,430 correspondence and working papers to investigate what we can learn about the 12 00:01:13,430 --> 00:01:17,120 work that Amanuensis actually did and the personal relationships involved. 13 00:01:17,750 --> 00:01:22,430 While the servant function suggests an antagonistic relationship between the principal and the amanuensis, 14 00:01:22,700 --> 00:01:27,200 there are many signs of productive and even friendly collaboration in the manuscripts. 15 00:01:28,170 --> 00:01:36,060 So as I suggested in my closing example last time, even work that was considered mechanical by copying was also intellectual. 16 00:01:36,690 --> 00:01:40,979 And today I'll add that the same activity like scribing or making an alphabetical 17 00:01:40,980 --> 00:01:45,600 index could be described or perceived as mechanical and drudgery in one context, 18 00:01:45,930 --> 00:01:51,660 but also appreciated in another context as admirable scholarly activity requiring intelligence and judgement. 19 00:01:52,410 --> 00:01:58,680 For example, Tony Grafton has shown how in some letters Josephs Gallagher complained of being asked to index 20 00:01:58,680 --> 00:02:02,910 the massive corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions prepared by his friend Yanis Grutter, 21 00:02:03,420 --> 00:02:07,710 saying that indexing was a job for printer's workmen, not a scholar. 22 00:02:08,780 --> 00:02:12,260 And Gallagher refused to put his name on a work he had done as a drudge. 23 00:02:12,740 --> 00:02:16,400 But he also called the index, even in the same work, the soul of the work. 24 00:02:17,030 --> 00:02:17,780 So in this case, 25 00:02:17,780 --> 00:02:25,309 the same person articulated different views of the same work even more readily than when two people are involved in a collaborative relationship, 26 00:02:25,310 --> 00:02:26,750 they can have different perception of it. 27 00:02:27,020 --> 00:02:31,910 The principal who delegated the work might perceive it or portrayed as mechanical when seeking to minimise it, 28 00:02:32,300 --> 00:02:38,770 while the person doing the work would be more inclined to appreciate its intellectual difficulty and the principal might also describe it as such, 29 00:02:38,780 --> 00:02:47,480 for example, when seeking the favour of his helper. The word mechanical has many meanings, both as an actress category and a historical one. 30 00:02:47,960 --> 00:02:55,730 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, 31 00:02:55,730 --> 00:02:59,810 manual work, practical skills, and two relating to machines. 32 00:03:00,050 --> 00:03:05,090 And among these I like sense seven operating like a machine without thought routine. 33 00:03:05,960 --> 00:03:08,330 Both senses could pertain to the work of amanuensis. 34 00:03:08,330 --> 00:03:13,290 Scribing was certainly a labour of the hands which were used not only for writing but also for mixing ink. 35 00:03:13,310 --> 00:03:16,070 Cutting the quill. Scraping out mistakes, among other things. 36 00:03:16,850 --> 00:03:21,559 And I have found an excellent source, an occurrence of the word mechanical in the second sense, 37 00:03:21,560 --> 00:03:26,940 as applied to textual work in the early modern period in Juan Carmel Leibowitz. 38 00:03:26,940 --> 00:03:34,220 This advice on indexing published very strangely in a work on unintentional theology in 1664. 39 00:03:34,700 --> 00:03:43,459 In fact, he explains that because there had been a failure to deliver the manuscript to the printer, he has to fill some quires. 40 00:03:43,460 --> 00:03:49,580 And he's going to give you a little Syntagma on typography in which he talks about indexing. 41 00:03:49,940 --> 00:03:53,929 He recommends a procedure that was already well known at the time that Conrad Gessner actually 42 00:03:53,930 --> 00:03:58,610 described 200 years earlier of how to make an index copy out the items to be indexed. 43 00:03:58,760 --> 00:04:02,360 Cut these entries into separate slips of paper alphabetised the slips. 44 00:04:02,870 --> 00:04:05,870 But he called attention explicitly to the delegation of this work. 45 00:04:05,900 --> 00:04:12,140 Have this done? I say. Do not do it yourself. Indeed, this is labour mechanics and does not require you. 46 00:04:12,320 --> 00:04:19,490 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. 47 00:04:20,180 --> 00:04:21,020 So for Carmel, 48 00:04:21,020 --> 00:04:27,890 mechanical meant appropriate for delegation because requiring no special trained judgement and he applied it to the construction of an index, 49 00:04:28,160 --> 00:04:34,700 at least after the entries for the index had been selected. Notice that that part happens prior to this process, he describes. 50 00:04:35,800 --> 00:04:39,070 A lot of exciting recent historiography has soundly rejected the long, 51 00:04:39,070 --> 00:04:46,420 traditional idea that one could and should distinguish between mechanical arts focussed on practical skills and liberal ones, focussed on mental ones. 52 00:04:46,990 --> 00:04:51,220 Work in the History of Science by Pamela Smith and Pamela Long, for example, among others, 53 00:04:51,490 --> 00:04:57,880 has emphasised instead the constant interplay of well-informed judgement with know how and technique in the formation of natural knowledge. 54 00:04:58,540 --> 00:05:01,179 Similarly, in the world of textual production, Daniel Wakeman, 55 00:05:01,180 --> 00:05:07,270 studies on medieval scribes and Anthony Grafton's eyes correctors argue for a constant blurring of mechanical and intellectual. 56 00:05:07,900 --> 00:05:11,950 And today we face a new challenge to the mechanical intellectual distinction as machines, 57 00:05:11,950 --> 00:05:18,160 which are presumably by definition performing mechanical work are doing ever more things we once thought were unique to human capacities, 58 00:05:18,520 --> 00:05:22,750 including giving sensible answers to questions and also confidently asserting falsehoods, 59 00:05:23,170 --> 00:05:27,490 as GHB does after training on the mass of human utterances on the Internet. 60 00:05:28,390 --> 00:05:31,780 We just don't have an adequate vocabulary for talking about the contributions 61 00:05:32,110 --> 00:05:35,680 of either early modern amanuensis or postmodern search engines or chat bots. 62 00:05:36,070 --> 00:05:43,420 So for now, I am speaking of collaboration with as much specific nuance as the sources allow, and I welcome your suggestions and feedback. 63 00:05:44,520 --> 00:05:49,650 So in addition to these two notions of mechanical as manual or requiring no judgement, 64 00:05:49,950 --> 00:05:53,790 there was a third sense in mechanical which received some play in the 16th century, 65 00:05:53,790 --> 00:05:58,169 though I found it so far only in a Latin reference work in antiquity, 66 00:05:58,170 --> 00:06:04,950 the liberal activities of freemen were contrasted with Banaszak or illiberal ones suitable for servants or the enslaved. 67 00:06:05,470 --> 00:06:11,610 And here we have Aristotle in the context of talking about education, explaining this distinction in book eight of his politics. 68 00:06:12,300 --> 00:06:18,690 The object also which a man sets before him, makes a great difference if he does or learns anything for his own sake, 69 00:06:18,690 --> 00:06:21,900 or for the sake of his friends, or with a view to excellence. 70 00:06:22,200 --> 00:06:29,550 The action will not appear illiberal, but if done for the sake of others, the very same action will be thought, menial and servile. 71 00:06:30,850 --> 00:06:37,719 Though he does not cite this passage explicitly, Aristotle's notion of mechanical as illiberal seems to inform Theodore Fingers treatment of 72 00:06:37,720 --> 00:06:43,959 amanuensis in his grand classification of human activities in the Tatro Humanae Vitae three edition, 73 00:06:43,960 --> 00:06:51,190 successively enlarged in his volume on the mechanical arts, Springer discusses activities considered mechanical since the Middle Ages, 74 00:06:51,190 --> 00:06:58,810 like cooking, textile, making architecture along with some new ones like typography that fit easily into the category of practical arts. 75 00:06:59,560 --> 00:07:09,340 But Singer closes this volume with a category a book on vicarious mechanical arts activities performed on behalf of others and at their command. 76 00:07:09,340 --> 00:07:14,110 In other words, mechanical in the sense of Aristotle's illiberal or Banaszak. 77 00:07:15,110 --> 00:07:23,540 Swingers subdivided these activities into activities performed vicariously with the body versus those performed vicariously with the mind. 78 00:07:24,080 --> 00:07:28,550 So here we are with a very elaborate chart. All of Singer's stuff are pretty elaborate. 79 00:07:28,910 --> 00:07:34,900 We're doing the carries with the mind. And it's divided into different kinds. 80 00:07:34,910 --> 00:07:36,190 So here we are at the top. 81 00:07:36,460 --> 00:07:42,400 The various things you can do vicariously with the mind include speaking for another, writing for another, keeping accounts, 82 00:07:42,400 --> 00:07:50,980 administering things, exploring mourning, as in the women in antiquity whom one would hire to attend funerals and cry for others. 83 00:07:51,890 --> 00:07:56,780 And so and you can see other things we can do for others, including taking punishment and so forth. 84 00:07:58,820 --> 00:08:07,760 And here, then inside the mechanical, vicarious operating activities, we find writers, amanuensis and scribes. 85 00:08:08,630 --> 00:08:13,460 So here they're mechanical, not because they're using the hand, but because they are vicarious. 86 00:08:14,470 --> 00:08:24,160 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 87 00:08:24,850 --> 00:08:29,390 in a giant sequel to its finger though Lawrence use via link magnum theatre mi vita, 88 00:08:29,440 --> 00:08:33,610 which was in print down to 1707 and five editions in the 17th century. 89 00:08:33,610 --> 00:08:41,590 So it is certainly in circulation and I'd be delighted to learn about other occurrences of this use of mechanical. 90 00:08:42,280 --> 00:08:47,259 So the emphasis on work for Higher and Singer highlights a feature of the amanuensis which cannot be changed. 91 00:08:47,260 --> 00:08:54,010 However much brainpower the amanuensis deployed or was acknowledged to deploy, the intellectual work was still performed for the sake of another, 92 00:08:54,490 --> 00:08:59,170 and the only way out of that illiberal category is defined by Aristotle is through friendship. 93 00:09:00,020 --> 00:09:06,020 And even if no one explicitly had this distinction in mind, this Aristotelian distinction I'm reminding you of. 94 00:09:06,830 --> 00:09:13,820 It's fascinating that friendship is a major theme in the interactions between principals and amanuensis. 95 00:09:14,600 --> 00:09:18,079 In his secretary, which is basically a letter writing. 96 00:09:18,080 --> 00:09:26,720 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. 97 00:09:27,530 --> 00:09:28,969 He specifies a few pages later. 98 00:09:28,970 --> 00:09:34,420 He has mind, a friendship without any lewdness, a protestation which suggests that a lewd friendship was also a possibility, 99 00:09:34,430 --> 00:09:37,880 as Alan Stewart has pointed out in his study on the early modern closet. 100 00:09:39,110 --> 00:09:43,589 Principals also deployed the language of friendship. Now and then we'll see that in lecture five, 101 00:09:43,590 --> 00:09:49,640 our client you'll name and his family consistently referred to Tony as long standing amanuensis as a dear friend. 102 00:09:50,420 --> 00:09:55,960 Others use the term sparingly to soften the formal condition of the amanuensis as a servant independent. 103 00:09:56,600 --> 00:10:04,160 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. 104 00:10:05,190 --> 00:10:09,900 Erasmus wrote after this interruption, In our time together, we shall be more dear to each other. 105 00:10:10,260 --> 00:10:14,430 There will be less work for you. And it's my intention now to receive you as a friend. 106 00:10:14,550 --> 00:10:20,450 And you will find me considerably more generous. So this is clearly something that he thought Cezanne would like. 107 00:10:20,900 --> 00:10:25,940 Erasmus was promising a shift in the relationship, treating it like a friend, giving him less work and more money. 108 00:10:26,750 --> 00:10:31,580 But Susanna dithered about returning. Erasmus died in the meantime. So the promise was never put to the test. 109 00:10:32,390 --> 00:10:35,480 The language of friendship is, of course, complex and variable by context. 110 00:10:35,480 --> 00:10:39,680 As Peter Burke has pointed out, it often applied to family members and patrons too, in this period. 111 00:10:40,160 --> 00:10:44,629 But the Aristotelian notion that an action performed for a friend was a fundamentally different 112 00:10:44,630 --> 00:10:49,580 one than one performed out of obligation of repay strikes me as worth investigating further. 113 00:10:51,220 --> 00:10:57,250 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, 114 00:10:59,350 --> 00:11:01,479 known as the Prince of Humanists in his day and sense, 115 00:11:01,480 --> 00:11:07,960 who masterminded a huge number of publications, some 221st editions, a good number of which were the object of multiple editions. 116 00:11:08,470 --> 00:11:18,460 And Erasmus carried on an extensive correspondence 3141 letters from especially to him survive from involving 666 correspondents, 117 00:11:18,670 --> 00:11:20,290 of which seven were women. 118 00:11:20,980 --> 00:11:28,090 His novels also includes a few autographed manuscript materials, including working copies of books annotated by both Erasmus and in many senses. 119 00:11:28,870 --> 00:11:34,540 And this scholarship on Erasmus is wonderfully vast, too. And it even includes a study of Erasmus, his amanuensis La Familia. 120 00:11:34,540 --> 00:11:38,050 The Erasmus published more than 50 years ago by France VLA, 121 00:11:38,830 --> 00:11:47,500 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, 122 00:11:47,500 --> 00:11:50,560 published in 1958 for servant pupils. 123 00:11:51,420 --> 00:11:55,979 Allen designated with his term 29 men who surface in erasmus's correspondence 124 00:11:55,980 --> 00:11:59,370 and two others who were recommended to Erasmus for the role but didn't hold it. 125 00:12:00,060 --> 00:12:05,430 And servant pupil is Alan's category term a nicely polyvalent one for a varied and loosely defined role. 126 00:12:06,240 --> 00:12:09,600 Erasmus formed an unusual household as an Augustinian canon, 127 00:12:09,600 --> 00:12:14,190 an ordained priest who was allowed to leave his monastery but remained a cleric and celibate. 128 00:12:15,550 --> 00:12:20,379 So if we go back to this chart of how who he employed, 129 00:12:20,380 --> 00:12:26,320 when we can see that in the early 1490s Erasmus lived rather precariously, mainly from tutoring. 130 00:12:26,330 --> 00:12:31,570 And during this period Erasmus took in adolescent pupils who paid to board with him and be instructed by him. 131 00:12:32,480 --> 00:12:37,610 Erasmus's claim to one unhappy parent that he never asked the boy to copy anything suggests exactly the opposite. 132 00:12:38,150 --> 00:12:41,809 Of course, copying was also viewed as a central part of humanist education, 133 00:12:41,810 --> 00:12:45,500 valuable for retaining a text and memory, as well as for practising handwriting. 134 00:12:45,650 --> 00:12:50,049 As Erasmus advocated in his pedagogical works by 1558, Erasmus. 135 00:12:50,050 --> 00:12:55,370 His reputation spread widely. His revenue was boosted by pensions and gifts and income from his publication, 136 00:12:55,370 --> 00:13:00,590 mainly in the form of copies of his books, which he could sell or give away in expectation of counter gifts. 137 00:13:01,250 --> 00:13:05,490 And at this point, Erasmus started to hire young men to serve his family and amanuensis. 138 00:13:05,510 --> 00:13:07,100 They were typically about 20 years old. 139 00:13:07,100 --> 00:13:13,820 Recent university graduates, often from Leuven, where Erasmus, his former teacher, Conrad MacLean, is identified, promising prospects. 140 00:13:14,800 --> 00:13:18,640 Erasmus paid them in room and board, plus a yearly salary of 20 to 25 florins. 141 00:13:18,640 --> 00:13:20,680 But he also view them as pupils, for example, 142 00:13:20,680 --> 00:13:26,020 praising their progress or critiquing their shortcomings and learned skills such as elegant Latin composition. 143 00:13:27,100 --> 00:13:31,820 These helpers provide a service not only in the study but also, quote, in the bedchamber and at the table. 144 00:13:32,110 --> 00:13:37,780 As Erasmus observed in 1915 30 to 1 correspondent and this was the case even after 1522, 145 00:13:38,020 --> 00:13:43,750 when Erasmus hired a female housekeeper, Margareta Beslan, to manage many of the domestic aspects of the household. 146 00:13:44,200 --> 00:13:50,980 Though Erasmus called Margarita, quote, ugly, lazy, loquacious, voracious and abusive, he also employed her for 13 years. 147 00:13:52,800 --> 00:13:57,030 The roughly 50 occurrences of amanuensis in Erasmus's correspondence offer a good 148 00:13:57,030 --> 00:14:01,380 introduction to the variety of causal casual references to Amanuensis in his circle. 149 00:14:02,040 --> 00:14:05,580 The most common mention of Amanuensis is to signal their use as a messenger. 150 00:14:05,970 --> 00:14:10,920 The amanuensis will be delivering or have has delivered to or from the correspondent a letter, 151 00:14:11,190 --> 00:14:15,180 a financial receipt, a book, wine or information to be conveyed orally. 152 00:14:15,960 --> 00:14:19,650 Almost as common are mentions of the amanuensis his role in scribing the letter. 153 00:14:20,040 --> 00:14:25,469 Sometimes this is simply noted in the sign off pear amanuensis or the mention is accompanied 154 00:14:25,470 --> 00:14:31,560 by an apology in a fan letter to Erasmus of 1522 from a Benedictine monastery in Tyrol. 155 00:14:31,920 --> 00:14:39,150 The educator Leonard Miller, notes that his amanuensis has written in German script but in the Latin language, 156 00:14:39,240 --> 00:14:44,040 so he's revealing the limited skills of his helper. Perhaps not a fellow monk, but a servant in the monastery. 157 00:14:47,650 --> 00:14:50,920 Some letters offer reasons for relying on Secretary Gillam, 158 00:14:50,920 --> 00:14:58,389 but writing to Erasmus in 1518 and Erasmus writing to Pietro Benbow in 1530 each explained they wanted to spare their correspondent. 159 00:14:58,390 --> 00:15:00,460 Their bad handwriting echoed Rafia. 160 00:15:01,570 --> 00:15:07,060 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. 161 00:15:07,630 --> 00:15:12,250 Curiously, Erasmus complained in one letter of the poor handwriting of a correspondence amanuensis, 162 00:15:12,640 --> 00:15:16,330 but he likely did so to shield the correspondent from direct criticism for an error. 163 00:15:16,720 --> 00:15:22,450 He was writing to No Obeida, a critic from the Sorbonne, at a time when Erasmus was still hoping to mollify him. 164 00:15:22,510 --> 00:15:25,120 So we get the blaming, the amanuensis. 165 00:15:25,120 --> 00:15:30,130 In that case, bad handwriting of the man who writes this, which is highly unlikely because they were hired to have good handwriting. 166 00:15:31,000 --> 00:15:34,270 Other letters mention illness, which we've encountered in previous lectures. 167 00:15:34,270 --> 00:15:36,610 So for example, here from 1534, 168 00:15:36,610 --> 00:15:42,339 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, 169 00:15:42,340 --> 00:15:48,669 said the letters that Erasmus is now sharing with his good friend Boniface Amer above and at the bottom in a more rapid hand, 170 00:15:48,670 --> 00:15:56,160 but by the same person, I'm convinced, Coosa adds a postscript in his own voice and explained to Amasa, 171 00:15:56,170 --> 00:15:59,920 whom he knew himself, that Erasmus was suffering from gout and couldn't write in his own hand. 172 00:16:01,370 --> 00:16:05,059 So that's this. So we can see Erasmus's signing in whose signature? 173 00:16:05,060 --> 00:16:11,780 We see the apology for not being able to write, and then a signoff by the secretary. 174 00:16:12,080 --> 00:16:19,879 Yours truly. And here, as in many cases, we see the amanuensis providing the address which is on the Verso, 175 00:16:19,880 --> 00:16:22,910 the letter which is then folded and sealed and delivered. 176 00:16:24,790 --> 00:16:34,449 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. 177 00:16:34,450 --> 00:16:39,730 And the address is by the amanuensis. Okay. 178 00:16:40,180 --> 00:16:46,810 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. 179 00:16:47,470 --> 00:16:52,360 And I've pondered why relying on on the menu in to write a letter was actually a time saving technique. 180 00:16:52,660 --> 00:16:59,290 Maybe dictation was faster than composing oneself, because, as the early Christian authors Jerome and Ambrose had each noted, 181 00:16:59,650 --> 00:17:05,680 the amanuensis waiting would egg the writer on and therefore dictating a letter meant none of the dithering that might have occurred otherwise, 182 00:17:05,690 --> 00:17:13,209 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, 183 00:17:13,210 --> 00:17:15,250 which would definitely spare the principal's time. 184 00:17:16,260 --> 00:17:22,410 Although an amanuensis could make a copy of an outgoing letter for archiving purposes, this was not a regular practice among scholars. 185 00:17:23,340 --> 00:17:30,520 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. 186 00:17:31,060 --> 00:17:37,300 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. 187 00:17:37,480 --> 00:17:43,810 And partly because I have many letters to reply to. And therefore I am compelled to compose off the cuff, even sometimes to dictate. 188 00:17:45,490 --> 00:17:49,840 In other sets of scholarly letters, these kinds of casual references to Amanuensis are common. 189 00:17:49,840 --> 00:17:56,829 Two and one line that occurs in other collections of letters is to apologise for a delay in writing for lack of an amanuensis. 190 00:17:56,830 --> 00:18:02,139 And presumably this excuse would not seem plausible coming from Erasmus because his correspondence were well 191 00:18:02,140 --> 00:18:08,380 aware that Erasmus was someone exceptionally busy with letter writing and also well-served by multiple helpers. 192 00:18:09,010 --> 00:18:15,360 So here we have a letter by one Levinas Harmonious, a Carthusian admirer who's gushing in. 193 00:18:15,370 --> 00:18:21,459 I am. I have spared you. Some of the quote is even longer about receiving an autographed letter from Erasmus. 194 00:18:21,460 --> 00:18:26,350 To think that you counted the friendship of this poor creature so highly that you reply to my letter in your own hand, 195 00:18:27,100 --> 00:18:31,650 you would have done me enough honour if you had communicated your feelings toward me to a secretary or some other way. 196 00:18:31,660 --> 00:18:34,870 For all I wanted was to be assured that you did not resent my friendly intervention. 197 00:18:35,170 --> 00:18:38,350 Please, Erasmus, do not imagine that I underestimate this honour. 198 00:18:39,270 --> 00:18:42,780 And I wonder here if his subtext might be, Please write more often. 199 00:18:43,110 --> 00:18:49,849 And it should be no bother. Just have an amanuensis. Do it. More explicitly passive aggressive was Yohannes. 200 00:18:49,850 --> 00:18:55,610 KUKLA was an anti Lutheran polemicist who hoped to involve Erasmus in more disputes with the Lutherans, 201 00:18:56,030 --> 00:19:02,450 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. 202 00:19:03,080 --> 00:19:05,270 You have in your house several young people in servants, 203 00:19:05,270 --> 00:19:10,730 perfectly capable of defending Your Honour against attackers of that ilk without your nation wasting one hour on them. 204 00:19:11,060 --> 00:19:14,150 Your screen is telling us you can set them straight, prettily, 205 00:19:14,390 --> 00:19:18,290 or if you'd rather we could publish something under the name of your cook to defend Your Honour. 206 00:19:18,290 --> 00:19:23,659 And to condemn them to splendid ridicule. In fact, Erasmus did not, as far as I know, 207 00:19:23,660 --> 00:19:27,649 at least engage in a polemical practice that I will discuss next time of having an 208 00:19:27,650 --> 00:19:31,610 amanuensis write or publish a response to his critics as quickly as suggested here. 209 00:19:31,940 --> 00:19:38,110 And I don't suppose Erasmus much appreciated being told by others to take on more work because he had multiple amanuensis. 210 00:19:38,120 --> 00:19:40,820 But we can see his correspondence doing that. 211 00:19:42,130 --> 00:19:49,600 Erasmus accompanied his practice of letter writing with advice about orthography in on the right way of speaking Latin and Greek. 212 00:19:49,930 --> 00:19:54,310 He advocated the mastery of good handwriting. So it's a dialogue, Leo says. 213 00:19:54,790 --> 00:20:00,249 Nowadays, the art of printing has led to the situation that some scholars do not write down anything at all for. 214 00:20:00,250 --> 00:20:04,690 If they decide to commit any of their Luc operations to paper, they write so beautiful beautifully. 215 00:20:04,690 --> 00:20:10,360 They cannot themselves read what they've written and require a secretary to read it and decipher what they cannot decipher themselves. 216 00:20:11,430 --> 00:20:15,900 To be brief, a letter that is a product of someone else's fingers hardly deserves the name. 217 00:20:16,110 --> 00:20:21,390 For Secretaries Port a great deal of their own. If you dictate verbatim, then it's goodbye to your privacy. 218 00:20:21,720 --> 00:20:26,760 And so you disguise some things and suppress others in order to avoid having an unwanted confidante. 219 00:20:27,330 --> 00:20:31,410 A man's handwriting, like his voice, has a special individual quality. 220 00:20:32,640 --> 00:20:36,180 So fascinating ruminations here by Erasmus on the impact of printing. 221 00:20:36,810 --> 00:20:40,590 As Collet-Serra has pointed out in her history of handwriting across the millennia, 222 00:20:40,920 --> 00:20:45,570 printing liberated handwriting from its association with the drudgery of making multiple copies of a text, 223 00:20:45,690 --> 00:20:47,970 something that surely you would delegate whenever possible. 224 00:20:48,360 --> 00:20:52,950 So that handwriting became instead a mark of personal attention, of authentic private communication. 225 00:20:53,730 --> 00:20:58,290 It's fascinating also to have Erasmus's opinion that printing caused handwriting to deteriorate 226 00:20:58,860 --> 00:21:02,610 once handwriting became a means of personal communication practised by many more people. 227 00:21:02,940 --> 00:21:07,830 Individual hands easily deviated from the rigid and time consuming norms of scribal handwriting. 228 00:21:08,130 --> 00:21:11,610 So much so, he says, that scholars couldn't even read their own writing. 229 00:21:12,120 --> 00:21:19,020 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. 230 00:21:19,290 --> 00:21:20,910 More on Boozer in a later lecture. 231 00:21:22,110 --> 00:21:29,220 So the amanuensis was valued not only for his ability to write legibly and elegantly, but also apparently to read crabbed hands. 232 00:21:30,650 --> 00:21:33,670 These human values of photography spread beyond the scholarly world. 233 00:21:33,680 --> 00:21:39,709 James de Bell has studied a corpus of some 10,000 English letters between 15, 12 and 1635. 234 00:21:39,710 --> 00:21:44,690 And he notes a growing expectation during this period of writing in one's own hand to family, 235 00:21:44,690 --> 00:21:49,400 friends and associates, which is detectable from practice and from apologies for failing to do so. 236 00:21:49,850 --> 00:21:54,110 Scribes were preferred for more formal letters relating to government, law or business. 237 00:21:54,380 --> 00:22:00,710 Letters to the monarch were typically scribal, therefore, except for those writing from special positions of favour or intimacy. 238 00:22:01,430 --> 00:22:07,820 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. 239 00:22:08,180 --> 00:22:13,730 In Erasmus's letter of 1535 to Pope Paul, the third was indeed described by Jacob Barkhuizen. 240 00:22:14,540 --> 00:22:21,769 Erasmus also remarked in a note to his friend Boff that rulers do not like to wrestle with the inconvenience of deciphering handwriting. 241 00:22:21,770 --> 00:22:27,260 But he had nonetheless written to a cardinal in his own hand because he had no amanuensis available at the time. 242 00:22:29,010 --> 00:22:35,520 In Erasmus's correspondence. There are some instances of blaming the amanuensis in a pattern we've encountered in print. 243 00:22:35,880 --> 00:22:38,580 But Erasmus offers more nuance about errors of his own. 244 00:22:39,090 --> 00:22:45,530 In a letter to Martin Boozer, Erasmus addressed complaints about a collection of Erasmus letters that he'd recently published, 245 00:22:45,540 --> 00:22:50,100 and he explained that the printer had been pressuring him for material. So he offered a packet of letters. 246 00:22:50,400 --> 00:22:56,730 But despite his best effort to remove potentially offending passages before they went to print, some remained, quote, 247 00:22:57,000 --> 00:23:02,820 whether because they escaped me or through the inattention of the amanuensis and copying some letters instead of others. 248 00:23:03,390 --> 00:23:05,550 But here he's sharing the blame with you many senses. 249 00:23:06,060 --> 00:23:10,890 And we also find Erasmus forestalling criticism of the amanuensis who had just completed the letter. 250 00:23:11,190 --> 00:23:15,990 He closed the letter he dictated to his Polish friend Pyotr Tyminski with a piece. 251 00:23:16,320 --> 00:23:21,780 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. 252 00:23:22,170 --> 00:23:29,000 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. 253 00:23:29,790 --> 00:23:34,620 So he's exonerating the scribe while blaming the haste of another one of the people on whom he replied, The Courier. 254 00:23:34,890 --> 00:23:41,010 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. 255 00:23:42,570 --> 00:23:46,469 In a few instances, Erasmus invokes the risk of overworking his amanuensis. 256 00:23:46,470 --> 00:23:52,200 When he explained that, he decided to print a response to critics rather than circulating manuscript copies. 257 00:23:54,180 --> 00:23:55,310 No. Okay. 258 00:23:56,520 --> 00:24:05,100 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, 259 00:24:05,370 --> 00:24:12,360 Alfonso Manrique, that he did not have enough amanuensis to make multiple copies that were needed to respond to his Spanish critics. 260 00:24:12,380 --> 00:24:16,320 So, quote, Instead of many secretaries, I employed just one printer. 261 00:24:17,010 --> 00:24:21,660 In the second letter, he adds that, quote, My amanuensis has always had way too much business. 262 00:24:22,020 --> 00:24:28,650 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. 263 00:24:29,700 --> 00:24:34,920 He's talking here about a 200 page book, and the idea of making multiple copies by hand doesn't seem very reasonable. 264 00:24:35,490 --> 00:24:41,310 However, when he makes a similar claim about a 20 page polemic against the Lutheran and Dorf, 265 00:24:41,910 --> 00:24:48,840 which Erasmus says he decided to print in 1530, quote, so as not to exhaust my secretaries, it seems more plausible. 266 00:24:49,260 --> 00:24:54,060 But in these cases, in any case, the nuances are presented as part of his communicative arsenal. 267 00:24:54,420 --> 00:24:58,469 Even if the printing press prevailed, nor was Erasmus alone in this awareness. 268 00:24:58,470 --> 00:25:03,450 He noted that one of his tenacious enemies, Edward Lee, was skilled at drumming up interest in his work. 269 00:25:03,480 --> 00:25:09,600 There was a wretched quality by writing, quote, some 600 letters for which purpose he had several amanuensis. 270 00:25:10,320 --> 00:25:18,240 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. 271 00:25:18,780 --> 00:25:23,220 Erasmus, by contrast, portrays himself as sensitive to not overworking his helpers. 272 00:25:24,000 --> 00:25:31,650 So like many other aspects of scholarly life, the presence or absence of amanuensis could be spun to suit many different points. 273 00:25:33,650 --> 00:25:41,090 Finally, Erasmus's correspondence highlights a type of letter about the qualities expected of amanuensis, the letter of recommendation. 274 00:25:41,870 --> 00:25:45,709 Erasmus wrote such letters himself, one of the many ones who sought to move on from his household. 275 00:25:45,710 --> 00:25:51,680 Typically after 3 to 5 years for the priesthood or an ecclesiastical position or in service to a courtier diplomat. 276 00:25:52,280 --> 00:25:58,460 Conversely, Erasmus received many such letters by people he knew and others he did not recommending a young man for his service. 277 00:25:59,270 --> 00:26:05,420 For example, a nobleman and expert wrote to Erasmus to recommend the young man in the household of Georg Retirer, a scholar in Augsburg. 278 00:26:06,610 --> 00:26:12,490 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. 279 00:26:13,750 --> 00:26:16,830 There is an Augsburg at the moment, the servant of every timer. 280 00:26:16,840 --> 00:26:21,639 He is the assistant teacher of noble children. He is zealous of good morals, alertness and what is essential. 281 00:26:21,640 --> 00:26:28,360 And teachers, faithful, discreet, very willing to endure his labours and the anger of his master, humble as well, 282 00:26:28,360 --> 00:26:32,770 and sees, since he is not yet 20 years old, he would be easily predisposed to obey your commands. 283 00:26:33,800 --> 00:26:36,790 Since there was no follow up. We don't know anything else about the young men, 284 00:26:36,800 --> 00:26:43,190 but we can see what Erasmus was expected to value a strong work ethic, good morals, good Latin loyalty and obedience. 285 00:26:43,910 --> 00:26:46,280 We can well imagine that Erasmus was not easy to live with, 286 00:26:46,310 --> 00:26:50,750 given his frequent complaints about his health, his fussiness, about housing and food and drink. 287 00:26:50,900 --> 00:26:55,010 Only French wine agreed with him, for example, but also his intellectual requirements, 288 00:26:55,010 --> 00:26:59,600 and hence the importance of specifying that this good candidate could endure the anger of the master. 289 00:27:00,910 --> 00:27:06,700 On the contrary, when Claudius was being considered for a position was deemed unacceptable by Erasmus's scouts 290 00:27:07,210 --> 00:27:11,660 because the young man being confident in his abilities has formed an exaggerated opinion of himself. 291 00:27:12,070 --> 00:27:18,310 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. 292 00:27:18,910 --> 00:27:25,840 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. 293 00:27:26,290 --> 00:27:31,449 In other words, someone only keen to reap the educational and reputational rewards of working for Erasmus 294 00:27:31,450 --> 00:27:35,440 without a true love of learning and of service to the great man was not a good choice. 295 00:27:36,690 --> 00:27:39,030 Loyalty was a prime importance in any context, 296 00:27:39,030 --> 00:27:44,730 but even more so during this period of bitter religious tension between Catholic and Protestant and within each of those camps. 297 00:27:45,300 --> 00:27:50,490 Erasmus was, of course, the object of withering criticism from reformers whose camp he refused to join, 298 00:27:50,490 --> 00:27:55,290 but also from conservative Catholics who blamed him for encouraging reforms that had inspired Luther. 299 00:27:56,130 --> 00:28:01,530 Just as reformers vetted their own pupil servants for religious correctness, so too did Erasmus. 300 00:28:01,530 --> 00:28:05,370 Erasmus worried that a member of his household could turn Protestant or that a mole 301 00:28:05,370 --> 00:28:08,910 could be planted in his household by enemies to cast aspersions on his lifestyle. 302 00:28:09,330 --> 00:28:12,630 Or that a careless souvent would cause a letter to fall into the wrong hands. 303 00:28:12,990 --> 00:28:18,330 Erasmus regularly reminded corresponds to seal their letters and to use only trusted messengers to deliver them. 304 00:28:20,140 --> 00:28:25,750 Erasmus offers one model for recruiting. Amanuensis is a Catholic cleric, celibate and with no interest in marriage. 305 00:28:26,080 --> 00:28:29,590 But there were other models, notably through the rise of marriage among scholars. 306 00:28:29,890 --> 00:28:32,709 Gadi el Ghazi has explained that already in the 15th century, 307 00:28:32,710 --> 00:28:37,000 the traditional prohibition against marriage for scholars and officials at universities was eroding. 308 00:28:37,540 --> 00:28:42,190 Though celibacy was reinstated in English universities from the mid 16th until the 19th century. 309 00:28:42,400 --> 00:28:49,120 So we're talking about the continent. And this development, of course, was further reinforced when the reformers themselves embraced marriage. 310 00:28:49,330 --> 00:28:56,560 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. 311 00:28:57,010 --> 00:28:59,710 And that set a norm for Protestant ministers to marry. 312 00:29:01,490 --> 00:29:08,900 The case of Heinrich Bullinger offers a nice counterpart to that of Erasmus when he was killed in 1531 in the second KAPELL War. 313 00:29:09,230 --> 00:29:15,680 Bullinger was named certainly successor as Ante stays in Zurich and leader of the Swiss Reformed Church for 44 years. 314 00:29:15,710 --> 00:29:24,260 Bullinger was a powerhouse of textual activities. 12,000 letters survive to and especially from some 1000 correspondents spread across Europe. 315 00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:32,300 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. 316 00:29:32,780 --> 00:29:37,700 And I'm very grateful to Reinhard Boardman, who headed that project for many years for his guidance through this material. 317 00:29:38,420 --> 00:29:44,780 I hope they find funding before donating. They have a website. Given Bullinger a central position in the Reformation. 318 00:29:44,780 --> 00:29:49,010 The letters serve to circulate debates in theology, church politics and news more generally. 319 00:29:49,490 --> 00:29:55,370 Bolinger selected from his letters item for further distribution in manuscript newsletters, of which he had multiple copies made. 320 00:29:55,730 --> 00:30:02,330 He also kept copies of outgoing letters. If they broach delicate topics, theological ones in particular with people he didn't know, 321 00:30:02,510 --> 00:30:06,639 lest they make false claims about what he'd written and as minister in his work. 322 00:30:06,640 --> 00:30:13,550 GROSS Mr. Bullinger preached and published vast numbers of sermons and works of religious commentary and exhortation in Latin and German. 323 00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:20,600 He also composed works of history about the Reformation, about the history of Switzerland and the city of Zurich, 324 00:30:21,230 --> 00:30:27,950 which he withheld from publication so as not to disrupt the tenuous peace formed around among competing religious factions. 325 00:30:28,340 --> 00:30:31,970 So these works of history were only printed in the 18th century, 326 00:30:32,330 --> 00:30:38,510 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, 327 00:30:38,840 --> 00:30:44,660 even if they could be shared publicly only later. And Bullinger commissioned a Stern Schreiber, a calligrapher, 328 00:30:44,810 --> 00:30:52,610 to make a beautiful presentation copy of the Turin or Conic of 1600 pages, which he then donated to the Ghost Master in 1574. 329 00:30:53,120 --> 00:30:59,480 The text was both composed and fair, copied on a tight schedule, so the transcriber was limited in how shine he could make it. 330 00:30:59,750 --> 00:31:08,570 His name was Israel Staley, and what I can show you are some of his best examples of the beauty, the calligraphy he did. 331 00:31:09,350 --> 00:31:14,000 Unfortunately, I don't have a digital version to show of this Torino clinic. 332 00:31:14,870 --> 00:31:17,990 So here is a man whom you hire for exceptional manuscripts, 333 00:31:18,200 --> 00:31:22,160 who's also famous for scribing a book on bird hunting with beautiful coloured images of feathers. 334 00:31:23,250 --> 00:31:27,600 Bollinger relied on a range of more ordinary helpers most of the time. 335 00:31:28,380 --> 00:31:32,390 He married young at age 25. Let's see. 336 00:31:33,530 --> 00:31:39,680 I don't have another one. Okay. Whereas Lutherans only had hesitated to marry when they were 40 years old when they did so, 337 00:31:39,950 --> 00:31:44,100 his marriage to marriage to honour at least Revealer was apparently a happy one. 338 00:31:44,120 --> 00:31:49,880 I'm just going to move forward. I do have a list here of his 11 children, nine of whom made it to adulthood. 339 00:31:51,020 --> 00:31:58,099 In addition, the household included a foster son, Rudolph Walter, whose father had died at the end, 340 00:31:58,100 --> 00:32:02,180 who was already a student of Berliners and was 13 when he became an orphan. 341 00:32:02,640 --> 00:32:07,800 Josiah Similar, who lived with bullying her as an adolescent while one of willing her sons lived with a similar family. 342 00:32:07,820 --> 00:32:11,990 That kind of adolescent trading and in due course similar married one of his daughters. 343 00:32:12,470 --> 00:32:16,670 So Bulaga was well provided with young people to do the mounds of copying he needed. 344 00:32:16,670 --> 00:32:24,500 And these are the boys or young men whose hands have been identified in his papers, his son Heinrich, his pastor son Rudolph Walter, 345 00:32:24,680 --> 00:32:30,620 his sons in law Ludwig Laverty and Joseph Similar, a schoolmaster housing the church administrator Wolfgang Heller. 346 00:32:31,250 --> 00:32:37,159 His reliance on his son is mentioned in a 1544 letter to Yohannes, a Lascaux in Poland, 347 00:32:37,160 --> 00:32:41,810 to whom Bullinger was sending a copy of a letter likely on theological point that he had written to someone else. 348 00:32:42,500 --> 00:32:46,520 I send you a copy of my letter to the Abbots so that if there is some error by his negligence, 349 00:32:46,520 --> 00:32:50,180 it can be corrected by you on this copy made by my son, Heinrich. 350 00:32:50,930 --> 00:32:53,690 So maybe he's apologising for error by mentioning as his son. 351 00:32:53,690 --> 00:32:59,930 Maybe he's proudly pointing out that his son, who I think was around ten years old at the time, was making this copy. 352 00:33:00,140 --> 00:33:06,560 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. 353 00:33:08,790 --> 00:33:12,510 In building this correspondence, we also find the presence of another kind of helper, 354 00:33:12,810 --> 00:33:18,330 Christian whole culture, who first appears in 1533 requesting to board and building his house, 355 00:33:18,630 --> 00:33:25,680 quote among your domestics and hopes to be counted even among his common solace, i.e. eating at the same table as Bullinger. 356 00:33:26,190 --> 00:33:32,819 He promises to be obedient and diligent in improving his learning and writing, and we have some manuscripts of his, including likely student notes. 357 00:33:32,820 --> 00:33:36,750 In this case, this likely came to pass, and ten years later, 358 00:33:36,970 --> 00:33:42,990 Holzer has finished his studies and is a schoolteacher in Stoneham, Heine, which is about a day's travel away from Zurich. 359 00:33:43,170 --> 00:33:49,709 And he writes a dozen letters or so to Bullinger before the edition stops in 1549, seeking advice about his affairs, 360 00:33:49,710 --> 00:33:53,370 for example, whether to marry, sending him news with an emphasis on church politics. 361 00:33:53,670 --> 00:33:58,140 And he mentions the things you gave me to copy, promising to send them soon. 362 00:33:58,560 --> 00:34:02,220 So here is perhaps one of those things given to copy. 363 00:34:03,090 --> 00:34:11,970 Basically a pretty anodyne manuscript which whole culture then was Bullinger was sending away for copying things that were not urgent, 364 00:34:12,540 --> 00:34:20,130 and a whole culture would return them weeks later, who Holzer consistently called Bullinger pater dearest or most revered father. 365 00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:23,310 I suppose this was owing to his position as minister and on Titus, 366 00:34:23,820 --> 00:34:30,000 but Holzer had also been a member of his household and continued to display the loyalty to his former paterfamilias. 367 00:34:34,300 --> 00:34:38,020 So I want to dip into one more corpus of letters to pull out a few more telling passages. 368 00:34:38,050 --> 00:34:42,550 Samuel Hartley arrived in England at age 28 as a refugee from the outbreak of war in Poland. 369 00:34:42,940 --> 00:34:49,809 Married and settled in London in 1630, where he cultivated a vast network of local and distant correspondents to hasten the circulation 370 00:34:49,810 --> 00:34:54,190 of useful knowledge and the attainment of the beckoning ideal of social and moral reformation. 371 00:34:54,490 --> 00:34:56,890 He did a great deal of copying himself for his own use. 372 00:34:57,160 --> 00:35:03,760 Mark Greengrass estimates about a third of a million words and he employed scribes to copy works to send to others. 373 00:35:03,970 --> 00:35:10,660 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. 374 00:35:11,110 --> 00:35:17,080 His friends in Central Europe in particular regularly complained about the lack of amanuensis who could do the copying. 375 00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:21,250 Partly this was a matter of funds, as John Johnstone wrote, for example. 376 00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:30,800 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. 377 00:35:31,040 --> 00:35:37,220 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, 378 00:35:37,460 --> 00:35:39,890 and in part because everything is dear here and let us know. 379 00:35:39,890 --> 00:35:45,530 Poland and our wives loudly complain that everything spent on books or the writing of books is a waste of money. 380 00:35:46,730 --> 00:35:50,900 So in this case, the domestic setting proved a hindrance rather than a help in getting work done. 381 00:35:50,930 --> 00:35:55,670 Given the competition for resources between the needs of the family and Johnston's wish to hire, too many winces. 382 00:35:56,330 --> 00:35:59,090 In one case, Hartley evidently gave some funds for the purpose, 383 00:35:59,090 --> 00:36:04,160 prompting his correspondent to thank him and say that he would send him the stuff very soon. 384 00:36:04,670 --> 00:36:09,049 And I have lost my page 11. Even though I had specially counted all the pages. 385 00:36:09,050 --> 00:36:19,040 But I found it. So. Hartley complained himself about the so he promises to give the work as soon as possible, 386 00:36:19,040 --> 00:36:26,119 since you have paid for the amanuensis and hardly complained about the costs incurred and in particular contrasting his 387 00:36:26,120 --> 00:36:32,480 situation enviously with that of Malcolm X in a minim living in a friary in Paris who could write a huge correspondence, 388 00:36:32,750 --> 00:36:36,510 the whole cloister maintain the charges and the desiderata. 389 00:36:36,530 --> 00:36:43,280 His mind is knowing more about how fellow friars or servants in the friary could contribute to the textual production of someone like Mersenne. 390 00:36:43,700 --> 00:36:49,670 But of course those interactions are oral and in person, and I have not found a way to enter that world. 391 00:36:52,990 --> 00:36:57,069 Interestingly, Hartley's correspondents from Central Europe also reported a problem that money alone 392 00:36:57,070 --> 00:37:01,030 couldn't fix the difficulty of finding the menu and source of suitable quality. 393 00:37:01,540 --> 00:37:05,500 One of them commented that the students at the local gymnasium were not up to the work he needed done. 394 00:37:05,800 --> 00:37:08,890 Another explained that the greatest difficulty will be in finding someone who can 395 00:37:08,950 --> 00:37:14,290 transcribe the work because it cannot be done by a common or vulgar vernacular amanuensis. 396 00:37:14,800 --> 00:37:18,490 We need someone who knows Latin. And he was running ragged and just couldn't do it himself. 397 00:37:19,620 --> 00:37:28,559 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. 398 00:37:28,560 --> 00:37:34,080 Suggs. So there was clearly more to being a competent amanuensis, the mechanically copying words one did not understand. 399 00:37:34,590 --> 00:37:37,470 These potential principals are looking for trained judgement, 400 00:37:37,770 --> 00:37:44,730 which would indeed be most helpful in deciphering crab handwriting or understanding a complicated Latin manuscript in order to copy it correctly. 401 00:37:45,390 --> 00:37:49,500 These reports from Central Europe are a reminder that vernacular literacy rates were low in this period. 402 00:37:49,500 --> 00:37:56,600 Even in England, 40% of Englishmen could sign their names in the obligatory protestation of 1640 142 and Latin literacy much lower still, 403 00:37:56,610 --> 00:37:59,010 although I am not aware of statistics on that. 404 00:37:59,890 --> 00:38:06,250 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. 405 00:38:07,030 --> 00:38:09,939 I'd like to know if you could find a young man moderately instructed in letters, 406 00:38:09,940 --> 00:38:14,590 a student of medicine, poor, modest and good who could help in my writing and copying. 407 00:38:14,800 --> 00:38:19,660 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. 408 00:38:21,070 --> 00:38:27,640 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. 409 00:38:28,150 --> 00:38:36,270 Let's return to the Erasmus material now and look at some of their work which displays the perception and intellect suggested by Suggs. 410 00:38:37,210 --> 00:38:41,380 So I'm going to be talking about the adages, which is a singularly complicated work. 411 00:38:42,910 --> 00:38:54,100 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. 412 00:38:55,900 --> 00:39:00,700 This is a working document. The the notes do not match the later printed edition. 413 00:39:01,300 --> 00:39:09,250 So there is probably another version which may well have been printed from and therefore marked up and discarded in the printing process. 414 00:39:09,850 --> 00:39:11,829 So we're missing the final stage of preparation, 415 00:39:11,830 --> 00:39:17,350 but these volumes are fascinating for giving us some evidence of how Erasmus worked with his amanuensis of the time. 416 00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:21,990 Nicholas Conyers. So we're talking about 1523. 417 00:39:22,560 --> 00:39:27,540 This is a BSB copy. This copy with annotations is in private hands. 418 00:39:27,540 --> 00:39:33,570 So I'm using images from the Sotheby's sales catalogue of November 1990, 419 00:39:33,960 --> 00:39:41,370 and you can see that this one is inscribed by Connie, who says It is mine through the generosity of my teacher, 420 00:39:41,370 --> 00:39:47,040 my preceptor, Erasmus of Rotterdam, which also shows that the amanuensis perceived the principal as a teacher, 421 00:39:47,580 --> 00:39:51,240 not just the principal perceiving the amanuensis as a pupil. 422 00:39:52,110 --> 00:39:59,459 The next edition is at the Vatican and I've got a digitisation from a microfilm, which is not fantastic quality, but good enough. 423 00:39:59,460 --> 00:40:03,210 And we can see that it too was a gift from Erasmus to Nicholas Conyers. 424 00:40:04,840 --> 00:40:09,549 Who is Nicolaus Copernicus. He was a young man at the time, a graduate of Levin, 425 00:40:09,550 --> 00:40:15,010 who served in amanuensis as an amanuensis for five years and then moved on to 426 00:40:15,010 --> 00:40:21,549 become a he was ordained and then he became rector of the Guildhall in 1532, 427 00:40:21,550 --> 00:40:24,550 then vicar of the old church in Amsterdam and St Nicholas's church. 428 00:40:24,550 --> 00:40:27,670 And so this portrait is thanks to his position at the beginning of. 429 00:40:29,810 --> 00:40:35,190 So let us see. Now, first of all, this is sort of an example of inside the innards of the adages. 430 00:40:35,210 --> 00:40:41,540 It's a supremely complicated text which originated as a modest sized quarto entitled Coke Zero in 1500, 431 00:40:41,540 --> 00:40:44,420 and then took the form in which it became famous in 1508, 432 00:40:44,690 --> 00:40:50,629 a hefty folio with thousands of adages and two indexes, the entities are sorted into thousands. 433 00:40:50,630 --> 00:40:53,930 The millions hundreds can Torii and then count it off. 434 00:40:54,200 --> 00:40:58,280 So you can see here the counting off of the last two digits. 435 00:40:59,450 --> 00:41:03,499 Each adage is a saying from ancient culture in Latin or Greek, 436 00:41:03,500 --> 00:41:07,489 with a commentary by Erasmus explaining the origins and meaning of the expression generally offering 437 00:41:07,490 --> 00:41:12,860 example of its use and substantial edits were made in each new edition by adding new adages, 438 00:41:13,280 --> 00:41:14,659 typically at the end of the text, 439 00:41:14,660 --> 00:41:20,960 without disturbing the existing numbering of the adages and adding new material to existing adages, lengthening the treatment. 440 00:41:21,650 --> 00:41:26,330 The adages were intentionally raised miscellaneous early to heighten the pleasure of variety for the reader. 441 00:41:26,810 --> 00:41:28,100 One can detect some patterns. 442 00:41:28,100 --> 00:41:35,510 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. 443 00:41:35,750 --> 00:41:40,250 McKay slowly labours of Hercules and war is sweet to those who have not tried it. 444 00:41:40,430 --> 00:41:47,570 One for each of the four Killian's one can also notice some clusters of related adages, for example, stemming from the Iliad. 445 00:41:47,600 --> 00:41:53,239 There'll be a string of them or referencing salt. So there's a little bit of free association going on in the ordering. 446 00:41:53,240 --> 00:41:57,080 But basically the only way you can find your way around this text is through the indexes. 447 00:41:57,880 --> 00:42:04,570 So managing such a massive tax in an orbit arranged in 4151 by the end, 448 00:42:04,570 --> 00:42:10,420 little sections arbitrarily organised was obviously tremendously challenging and we see no 449 00:42:11,470 --> 00:42:17,170 no evidence of slips being classified and certainly no opportunity for word searching. 450 00:42:18,230 --> 00:42:21,670 So what did we see on the menu when he is doing here? 451 00:42:22,310 --> 00:42:26,430 He is correcting a very cute typographical error. 452 00:42:26,450 --> 00:42:30,410 Instead of OMB column, it should be umbilical. And he corrects that twice. 453 00:42:32,660 --> 00:42:37,790 Here we see a nice case of the two handwriting's at the upper left. 454 00:42:37,790 --> 00:42:41,749 We have conscious and then Erasmus is following right on. 455 00:42:41,750 --> 00:42:47,659 So here we have a clear sense of succession that Converse wrote that first bit first and then in 456 00:42:47,660 --> 00:42:55,310 both are sentences that then appear in print in 1526 with some modifications and then in 1528. 457 00:42:56,910 --> 00:43:02,130 Mostly though, the additions are either in erasmus's hand or in can't use his hand. 458 00:43:02,310 --> 00:43:07,830 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. 459 00:43:08,640 --> 00:43:18,090 Now, on our first lecture, we had a little exhibit and showcased this copy which belonged to Erasmus of S.A. Deafness, 460 00:43:18,090 --> 00:43:24,840 a feast day or banquet of the philosophers. And as per notes, inside the volume. 461 00:43:26,140 --> 00:43:29,560 Darren How do they do that? There we go. P.S. Alan, 462 00:43:29,770 --> 00:43:33,759 the man who's portrayed I showed who worked so hard on the correspondence of Erasmus 463 00:43:33,760 --> 00:43:40,210 and much else explains that a passage on the margin of page 124 was ripped out. 464 00:43:40,480 --> 00:43:45,280 He thinks probably sometime in the 18th century and now is found in the AVC Library of Amsterdam. 465 00:43:45,700 --> 00:43:50,439 And they provided a tracing of it using the technology of the time. 466 00:43:50,440 --> 00:43:59,799 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. 467 00:43:59,800 --> 00:44:02,400 I did not find an X libraries in his hand. 468 00:44:02,410 --> 00:44:09,730 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. 469 00:44:11,170 --> 00:44:19,420 So in the 1526 Vatican volume, we have some slips of paper tipped into the back. 470 00:44:19,720 --> 00:44:26,620 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, 471 00:44:27,100 --> 00:44:36,579 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 472 00:44:36,580 --> 00:44:45,970 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. 473 00:44:46,890 --> 00:44:58,350 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, 474 00:44:58,350 --> 00:45:03,840 which he mentions as his source. Sadly, I did not hit the jackpot. 475 00:45:04,470 --> 00:45:13,140 It seems like Erasmus is really going for words and weird words like the word kaka beso for cackle as in partridges. 476 00:45:14,280 --> 00:45:17,640 So I will continue to work on it. But it doesn't. 477 00:45:17,650 --> 00:45:23,140 He doesn't show any interest in authors cited nothing else, and he does not show any flagging of passages. 478 00:45:23,610 --> 00:45:30,450 So I'm not seeing this book as the source for what John Grant has counted as three 479 00:45:30,450 --> 00:45:36,570 editions of Anthony as to the first Kili ad in the edition of the ages of 1528. 480 00:45:37,170 --> 00:45:41,280 We have, of course, the 1526 Volume Annotated. 481 00:45:41,580 --> 00:45:45,660 It wasn't the only way he made editions. As you know, it's not the final version. 482 00:45:46,170 --> 00:45:50,530 And perhaps this book was not the only evidence he had. Who knows, anyway. 483 00:45:50,820 --> 00:45:57,390 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. 484 00:45:59,280 --> 00:46:06,450 So I'd like to now point out how we see Kansas are going to focus on Kansas. 485 00:46:06,450 --> 00:46:11,760 His voice here, his voice. He's using the first person he is saying. 486 00:46:12,000 --> 00:46:17,190 So, first of all, you can see how it works. We're ending one kili, one century and we're entering another one. 487 00:46:17,190 --> 00:46:21,150 So you see most pages have, you know, three or four addresses like this one does. 488 00:46:21,660 --> 00:46:26,210 And so at the top one, we've got Erasmus inserting a passage at the end. 489 00:46:26,220 --> 00:46:34,020 It's classic, usually put it at the end, not always. And then in the bottom we see the amanuensis making an addition. 490 00:46:34,380 --> 00:46:37,620 So hear the voice of the amanuensis is that of Erasmus. 491 00:46:37,620 --> 00:46:39,780 He's presumably taking this under dictation. 492 00:46:40,290 --> 00:46:48,020 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. 493 00:46:48,060 --> 00:46:55,830 For Poirot, that is the sentence. He is adding a philological discussion of whether the word pirate actually occurs 494 00:46:56,100 --> 00:47:01,560 in Plutarch or whether it's scribal error or whether Prince should be pirate. 495 00:47:02,690 --> 00:47:07,010 So that is kind of us using AI as Erasmus. 496 00:47:07,880 --> 00:47:16,070 However, we have this very cool passage where I think we have can use using AI as conscious and he says So speak here, 497 00:47:16,310 --> 00:47:20,270 so to speak Speaker as they relate to reality. I suspect that this is reported elsewhere. 498 00:47:20,660 --> 00:47:24,350 And what Conyers is doing is flagging a duplication. Yes, indeed. 499 00:47:24,620 --> 00:47:29,960 There are two different translations of the same Greek expression both reasonable. 500 00:47:30,290 --> 00:47:36,619 Each with a different commentary. Both reasonable. Made by Erasmus at a previous in one of those previous editions. 501 00:47:36,620 --> 00:47:43,220 And he evidently never noticed there are thousands of these, after all, and he can clearly spin them out at a rapid pace. 502 00:47:44,410 --> 00:47:48,790 So notice I just want you to see what the previous adages is. 503 00:47:48,790 --> 00:47:54,010 Honan misses this year's harvest. So what we're going to have as a result of colonies is observation. 504 00:47:54,640 --> 00:47:58,570 It's going to set in motion a revision which enters into 1538. 505 00:47:58,570 --> 00:48:06,310 So first of all, he's going to remove that second occurrence of the coming to right specific momentum. 506 00:48:06,550 --> 00:48:11,650 And instead, because you can't have a whole the whole numbering system depends on having the right number. 507 00:48:11,860 --> 00:48:18,550 He inserts Glaucus mesa area habitat in Murray. Glaucus has eaten grass and leaves in the sea, which basically means he went crazy. 508 00:48:19,180 --> 00:48:23,170 Trying to understand these outages is yeah. Delicate. 509 00:48:23,890 --> 00:48:31,720 So. But then where did Glaucus mesa come from? It was moved from another part of this addition. 510 00:48:32,170 --> 00:48:37,030 And so in this say we see Erasmus annotating saying V Day, look here, 511 00:48:37,390 --> 00:48:46,270 remove this and put it in another place and instead put in the per pay per ribbon adage quote transgresses, 512 00:48:46,270 --> 00:48:49,510 quote transgresses, which is new in this edition. 513 00:48:49,840 --> 00:48:55,090 So I do not know exactly why Erasmus decided to move glaucus to fill the slot 514 00:48:55,420 --> 00:49:00,069 left by the duplicate decisiveness and put in in the old location of glaucus. 515 00:49:00,070 --> 00:49:07,780 This new quote transgresses, but that's what he did. So canny is set in motion a multiple rearrangement of adages. 516 00:49:09,050 --> 00:49:13,790 And then we could wonder, how did Kansas realise there was a duplicate? So in this case it wasn't that hard. 517 00:49:14,240 --> 00:49:19,220 The index of 1523 lists both of the sea surface appearances right next to each other. 518 00:49:19,670 --> 00:49:23,150 So just going through the index, you might notice there probably is a problem here. 519 00:49:25,260 --> 00:49:31,350 And here. Then it's corrected in the following edition, just one appearance on the basis of this adage. 520 00:49:31,980 --> 00:49:37,260 But there's another repetition that county is flags. This one is as easy as rain can fall. 521 00:49:38,130 --> 00:49:44,610 And here you can see him also saying refer to the as mentioned elsewhere and crossing it out. 522 00:49:44,880 --> 00:49:51,870 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. 523 00:49:52,680 --> 00:49:56,009 And what's going to happen here is the duplicates removed. 524 00:49:56,010 --> 00:50:00,420 And a new adage also added for the first time comes in to replace it. 525 00:50:01,290 --> 00:50:07,890 So everything else is left unchanged. And here, though, the index did not list both. 526 00:50:08,250 --> 00:50:09,840 So at the very least, 527 00:50:09,900 --> 00:50:17,070 Canute must have remembered that it had previously occurred at least enough to look it up and see the other occurrence in the index. 528 00:50:17,310 --> 00:50:25,530 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. 529 00:50:26,310 --> 00:50:34,410 So now let's turn to the indexes. This is the first Alvin Edition, the first major edition of The Adages. 530 00:50:34,950 --> 00:50:39,300 And Erasmus himself was clearly engaged in making the indexes. 531 00:50:39,690 --> 00:50:45,210 It appeared right away, right on the verse of the title page, [INAUDIBLE] bulk indexes 50 pages worth. 532 00:50:45,510 --> 00:50:50,010 The first is an alphabetical list of the adages, and you can see that it's alphabetised medieval style. 533 00:50:50,250 --> 00:50:55,950 A Before B, a before C, and within each of those, just in the order in which they appear in the text. 534 00:50:56,520 --> 00:51:02,250 So it's only alphabetised to the first two letters. This globalisation will get improved over time. 535 00:51:02,880 --> 00:51:10,980 Then we have Erasmus's own blurb to the reader talking about the next index, which is an index by subject matter, 536 00:51:10,980 --> 00:51:16,170 a thematic index in which all the entities that belong together in some way are reduced to one place. 537 00:51:16,710 --> 00:51:20,610 Remember that what pertains to liberality is treated at the same time as things pertaining to avarice, 538 00:51:20,850 --> 00:51:26,430 under the heading avarice, and similarly in instances of the same kind. So he's reminding you to look under synonyms. 539 00:51:26,610 --> 00:51:33,099 Right. He doesn't do cross-referencing. So this is what the second commonplace index looks like. 540 00:51:33,100 --> 00:51:37,240 These are the headings you can see that they're jumble. They're about 250 plus of them. 541 00:51:37,840 --> 00:51:43,149 And the you know some you notice that pairs as commonplace as you know riches 542 00:51:43,150 --> 00:51:46,900 and riches and poverty tests eternity criticised or praised attention in law, 543 00:51:47,200 --> 00:51:49,420 but otherwise, frankly, it is a jumble. 544 00:51:50,370 --> 00:51:58,400 Then that same jumbled list in the same order is repeated with a list of the adages that belong with that heading. 545 00:51:59,290 --> 00:52:04,480 Okay. And so that's where we get riches. And then these are all the adages which Erasmus feels belong there. 546 00:52:05,050 --> 00:52:09,400 So this is a very authorial act of indexing. There's nothing mechanical about this. 547 00:52:10,390 --> 00:52:14,720 And now we're going to look at the annotations in the Vatican volume of 1526. 548 00:52:15,460 --> 00:52:19,600 And there is quite a division of labour here. So this is the first index, alphabetical. 549 00:52:19,630 --> 00:52:26,980 It has obviously graduated from the a before be routine. And Conyers is predominantly the one making annotations here. 550 00:52:27,340 --> 00:52:31,479 He is adding things that have been forgotten. He is rearranging things. 551 00:52:31,480 --> 00:52:34,840 You can see all the little marks, you know, call marks. 552 00:52:34,840 --> 00:52:41,409 The three little dots are called up here, added just to be added and getting the opposition improved. 553 00:52:41,410 --> 00:52:46,150 There are still problems. There are still adjectives that are missing. There's still things in strange order. 554 00:52:46,420 --> 00:52:51,760 We can see one case here of Erasmus intervening to add an adage in the alphabetical listing. 555 00:52:52,840 --> 00:53:03,010 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. 556 00:53:03,610 --> 00:53:07,810 And what he's doing is adding new headings which then appear in print. 557 00:53:07,960 --> 00:53:08,890 As you can see here, 558 00:53:08,890 --> 00:53:17,740 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. 559 00:53:18,340 --> 00:53:23,050 He also has added headings that don't end up in print, so at some point they got axed. 560 00:53:23,680 --> 00:53:30,580 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. 561 00:53:31,430 --> 00:53:35,630 And so this is what the headings look like as you move forward in time. 562 00:53:35,990 --> 00:53:42,710 And there were indeed many headings added for 1528 that we watched happening in the 1526. 563 00:53:43,720 --> 00:53:51,450 So these just get tacked on to the end of the jumbled list. And then he is going to add adages under the heading. 564 00:53:51,450 --> 00:53:54,990 So here we see him adding outages to headings that already exist. 565 00:53:55,830 --> 00:53:58,920 And he actually creates a duplicate in one of these cases. 566 00:53:58,920 --> 00:54:04,380 But the duplicate is caught before it goes to print. And I would think Conyers is the man for that job. 567 00:54:05,630 --> 00:54:10,970 And finally, just to point out how where he adds something, how that jumble is created, 568 00:54:10,970 --> 00:54:16,730 the jumble inside the proper list inside in a commonplace heading is just where it lands. 569 00:54:16,970 --> 00:54:23,270 So when a word is at the bottom of the column, it ends up in that position in column, in the print next time. 570 00:54:24,650 --> 00:54:32,620 So thank you for bearing with this. I would just like to close by returning to Erasmus correspondence and Erasmus 571 00:54:32,630 --> 00:54:36,970 is explicit there about some things he delegates when he cites to his helpers. 572 00:54:36,980 --> 00:54:43,590 So he complains that the criticisms by the Spanish scholar Diego Lopez Zuniga are petty of his. 573 00:54:43,970 --> 00:54:45,620 Zuniga is complaining about Erasmus. 574 00:54:45,710 --> 00:54:52,820 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. 575 00:54:53,150 --> 00:54:56,660 But suppose I were at fault either through a lapse of memory or a slip of the pen. 576 00:54:56,930 --> 00:55:03,800 Why should Zuniga congratulate himself on criticising a service that is often performed for me by my secretaries and amanuensis? 577 00:55:04,130 --> 00:55:08,550 And the error in question involved, citing Acts eight seven as Acts 77. 578 00:55:09,200 --> 00:55:13,880 So he clearly sees his amanuensis as dealing with some of those little detailed things. 579 00:55:14,630 --> 00:55:20,330 So I'll just close by saying that sagacious amanuensis like Aeneas and Kooser took dictation and did a lot of copying, 580 00:55:20,690 --> 00:55:23,839 but they did so with intellectual commitment and capacities developed through study 581 00:55:23,840 --> 00:55:26,960 at university and the experience of working with Erasmus and others in his house. 582 00:55:27,650 --> 00:55:32,959 He relied on his amanuensis to manage that massive, messy text, like the editors and countless sources, 583 00:55:32,960 --> 00:55:37,850 tracking down references, flagging repetitions, drawing up and improving indexes, correcting typos. 584 00:55:38,240 --> 00:55:43,760 The work may seem mechanical when viewed at a distance, and the doing of it likely felt like drudgery at times. 585 00:55:44,060 --> 00:55:47,930 But it was always also intellectual and skilled. Thank you.