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