1 00:00:00,810 --> 00:00:15,710 George. So hello everyone. 2 00:00:15,750 --> 00:00:21,690 Thanks for coming to Lecture two in this series on Amanuensis and Early Modern Europe. 3 00:00:22,590 --> 00:00:28,680 So on Tuesday I emphasised the long duration of the practice of relying on amanuensis for many kinds of textual help. 4 00:00:29,010 --> 00:00:30,990 Most iconically for taking dictation. 5 00:00:31,650 --> 00:00:37,290 The term existed in antiquity, but entered common usage in the Renaissance, first in Latin, then in English and German. 6 00:00:37,620 --> 00:00:43,769 In French and Italian, the closest equivalent is Secretary. But I explained that I won't be using the term that much because I'm not 7 00:00:43,770 --> 00:00:48,030 addressing the political and diplomatic contexts in which it's most commonly used. 8 00:00:48,690 --> 00:00:52,380 So I prefer a menu and this, but I will use Secretary from time to time. 9 00:00:53,580 --> 00:00:58,180 I also introduced the term principle borrowing from current corporate lingo in the US. 10 00:00:58,200 --> 00:01:02,220 May it be useful for something to designate the person employing the amanuensis. 11 00:01:02,910 --> 00:01:08,310 Typically, once these were young men, recent university graduates paid in room and board and occasional gifts. 12 00:01:08,850 --> 00:01:15,270 If I'm also including in my category, members of the scholar's household who served as amanuensis while they were students or family members. 13 00:01:16,410 --> 00:01:20,520 Today. And in the following lectures, I'll shift my focus to the early modern period, 14 00:01:20,520 --> 00:01:25,770 especially the early, early modern period, roughly the 16th century, down to 1650 or so. 15 00:01:26,310 --> 00:01:29,610 To ponder what was distinctive about it for the history of Amanuensis. 16 00:01:30,240 --> 00:01:37,230 And today I'd like to make three points. There were more many senses and more settings for scholarship in early modern period than previous ones. 17 00:01:37,830 --> 00:01:45,530 And despite many forces favouring their invisibility, amanuensis become more visible than to facilitating their study. 18 00:01:47,030 --> 00:01:54,049 So my first point is it amanuensis are a kind of servant, as is clear from some of the terms by which they're also called families minister, 19 00:01:54,050 --> 00:01:59,330 domestics and vernacular forms of those terms, including expressions like a man in my service. 20 00:02:00,050 --> 00:02:03,860 So it's helpful to consult the literature on servants about broad trends, even though hen, 21 00:02:03,870 --> 00:02:07,240 servants or amanuensis are barely mentioned there as this specific category. 22 00:02:08,350 --> 00:02:12,160 Any early modern household that could afford their upkeep would employ servants, 23 00:02:12,520 --> 00:02:16,180 given the many onerous tasks to be performed both indoors and outdoors. 24 00:02:16,840 --> 00:02:25,690 The 16th century was generally a period of growth in population, in prosperity, also in inequality, and also in the presence of servants. 25 00:02:26,910 --> 00:02:36,330 In one well-documented English parish, Rumford, located in what is now Greater London and which was then a diversified agricultural area in 1562, 26 00:02:36,330 --> 00:02:39,450 83% of the households with three or more people included the servants, 27 00:02:39,990 --> 00:02:45,629 which the average the mean number of servants was 2.3, ranging from one in the smaller homes to seven, 28 00:02:45,630 --> 00:02:53,880 and the largest servants comprised 20% of the total population in Romford in that year, roughly equally distributed between young men and young women. 29 00:02:54,420 --> 00:02:57,000 And they would enter service between the ages of ten and 20, 30 00:02:57,240 --> 00:03:01,960 and they left when they married and established their own household, typically in their mid-twenties. 31 00:03:01,980 --> 00:03:09,210 This is life cycle service. A broader study estimates that 40% of all children became servants as adolescents in the 16th century. 32 00:03:09,810 --> 00:03:13,920 This pattern of placing adolescents in other families was common across north western Europe. 33 00:03:14,190 --> 00:03:18,900 Though interestingly, I learned that not in Italy, where it was regarded as a dereliction of child rearing. 34 00:03:19,440 --> 00:03:22,590 Putting up with your own teenagers rather than someone else's. 35 00:03:23,760 --> 00:03:29,160 During these years, young people left home, gained experience and skills, and formed lasting social bonds. 36 00:03:29,400 --> 00:03:33,150 Many married within their cohort of servants in the area, and years later, 37 00:03:33,150 --> 00:03:37,410 their wills included bequests to former fellow servants and former employers. 38 00:03:38,190 --> 00:03:42,870 When it is possible to trace the activities of the former servants, we can measure the impact of the skills they acquired. 39 00:03:43,200 --> 00:03:47,850 Almost half of the men entered the same line of work as the head of the household in which they had served. 40 00:03:49,270 --> 00:03:53,140 The servant can be hard to distinguish from others in similar positions of dependency, 41 00:03:53,560 --> 00:04:00,760 such as apprentices contracted to learn a trade while living and serving the master's home, relatives placed in service within their extended family. 42 00:04:01,180 --> 00:04:04,180 And in the case of academic families, students who boarded with their teacher. 43 00:04:04,900 --> 00:04:09,250 The children in the household would also be positioned on the spectrum during the relevant phase of life. 44 00:04:09,280 --> 00:04:15,429 They, too, were expected to help with household tasks to learn alongside students who boarded and even adult family members 45 00:04:15,430 --> 00:04:19,240 could be treated like servants when they remained dependents in the household for reasons of ill health, 46 00:04:19,510 --> 00:04:24,430 disability, or lack of marriage prospects. Wives were considered dependents, too. 47 00:04:24,940 --> 00:04:29,230 In early modern European household, but unlike children and servants, they played a role in controlling property. 48 00:04:29,560 --> 00:04:32,200 Women could sue their husbands for squandering their dowry, for example, 49 00:04:32,560 --> 00:04:37,450 and they held special authority within the household, in particular in supervising and training servants and children. 50 00:04:38,510 --> 00:04:44,840 On the one hand, a shared relationship of dependency on the partner familias could erode differences of status among the various kinds of dependents. 51 00:04:45,050 --> 00:04:52,040 Everyone owed the part of familias loyalty, obedience in their demeanour and diligence, honesty and discretion in their work. 52 00:04:53,080 --> 00:04:56,440 On the other hand, the experience of dependency was contingent on many variables, 53 00:04:56,440 --> 00:05:00,550 including positive and negative emotional interactions and social standing. 54 00:05:01,090 --> 00:05:08,020 So student boarders of a higher standing, the teacher warranted special deference and adolescents of high standing sent to 55 00:05:08,020 --> 00:05:11,980 other great houses hoped to receive more personal attention than regular servants. 56 00:05:13,660 --> 00:05:20,050 For example, one well-born young man, Robert Plumpton, anticipating the completion of his legal studies at the Inner Temple, 57 00:05:20,230 --> 00:05:26,020 requested help from his mother in 1536 to become a household servant of Sir William Gascoigne of Goccs Corp., 58 00:05:26,350 --> 00:05:29,260 requesting specifically not to be only his servants, 59 00:05:29,350 --> 00:05:35,050 but of his household and attending unto him for else he would do as other Lords do knows, not half their servants. 60 00:05:36,430 --> 00:05:41,410 Given his level of education, this young graduate likely aspired to be something like an amanuensis or a valet, 61 00:05:41,620 --> 00:05:44,560 as he put it, not only a servant, but attending onto him. 62 00:05:45,100 --> 00:05:49,210 That proximity to the patch of familias was a crucial marker of prestige throughout the household. 63 00:05:49,610 --> 00:05:56,500 And this criterion elevated wives to the foremost position among the dependents, then position those with most direct access to him over all others. 64 00:05:56,890 --> 00:06:01,390 The children he favoured due to their abilities, their age, their sex. 65 00:06:01,840 --> 00:06:05,590 And those well-born adolescents placed in the household to gain training for adulthood. 66 00:06:05,920 --> 00:06:12,250 By the same logic, then the amanuensis held a choice position among the servants, given his regular and direct access to the principal. 67 00:06:13,120 --> 00:06:18,160 Furthermore, the social status of the principal beyond the household resounded on all the members inside it. 68 00:06:18,400 --> 00:06:24,280 Hence the appeal to servants of upholding and even exaggerating their principal status in order to improve their own. 69 00:06:24,460 --> 00:06:32,160 By the same token. The historiography on servants in the early modern period has documented a shift between the 16th and 18th centuries, 70 00:06:32,160 --> 00:06:35,880 resulting in the formation of increasingly rigid social hierarchies over time, 71 00:06:36,390 --> 00:06:40,200 including the stiffening of boundaries between journeymen and masters in trades governed by guilds. 72 00:06:40,200 --> 00:06:46,710 For example, the practice of placing well-born youth in other households ceased in England after the Civil War in the mid 17th century. 73 00:06:47,460 --> 00:06:54,060 In the 18th century, then service was more often a lifelong occupation entered into by young people from lower and lower middle social orders. 74 00:06:54,510 --> 00:06:56,910 They were less likely to move up and out of their status. 75 00:06:57,570 --> 00:07:03,540 Servants were also ranked in more elaborate higher hierarchies within the household upper and lower liveried and 76 00:07:03,540 --> 00:07:09,900 not with a pay scale corresponding to status and with the possibility of promotion within and between households. 77 00:07:11,480 --> 00:07:17,780 Given the level of education generally expected of amanuensis, they may have been somewhat shielded from this trend towards social stratification. 78 00:07:18,260 --> 00:07:24,290 But even in the 16th century, there's evidence of status anxiety, as Arnold calls it, around the position of secretary, 79 00:07:24,620 --> 00:07:30,580 driven in part by the sense that more and more young men had just enough education to try to claim the title and the rule. 80 00:07:31,340 --> 00:07:35,840 I don't think we can even try to measure the numerical growth of secretaries or scholarly amanuensis. 81 00:07:36,140 --> 00:07:38,450 But it's reasonable to assume that they became more numerous, 82 00:07:38,660 --> 00:07:42,650 along with the general increase in the number of servants which had to do with increasing wealth. 83 00:07:43,430 --> 00:07:48,830 I'll emphasise in any case that the experience of the amanuensis was highly variable and dependent on each specific context. 84 00:07:49,190 --> 00:07:52,280 This was true for all servants, of course, but especially so for many. 85 00:07:52,280 --> 00:07:55,490 Wences, whose activity centred around a personal relationship with the principal. 86 00:07:55,880 --> 00:08:04,550 A relationship both intimate and hierarchical. So now the general invisibility of nuances, even though they worked for people, 87 00:08:04,550 --> 00:08:10,100 scholars who wrote abundantly in manuscript and in print, scholarly amanuensis are generally hard to see. 88 00:08:10,340 --> 00:08:16,400 Servants in general were expected to work behind the scenes and were ignored as individuals in both early modern and modern periods. 89 00:08:16,640 --> 00:08:24,120 I mentioned last time that good technologies serve as Carl regardless of their real names in the early 1800s and 19. 90 00:08:26,150 --> 00:08:32,720 In the late 1500s more, Tanya observed, I have to call the servants who work for me by the name of their function or the region they come from, 91 00:08:32,900 --> 00:08:34,910 because it's very hard for me to remember their names. 92 00:08:35,810 --> 00:08:41,270 This passage is part of a rumination on memory more generally, and Montaigne's point was that he had a bad memory for names, 93 00:08:41,510 --> 00:08:45,770 but the example he offers suggests that knowing his servants names was not a high priority for him, 94 00:08:46,070 --> 00:08:48,980 even while he remembered where they were from and what they did around the house. 95 00:08:50,320 --> 00:08:55,540 Sarah Maza has argued that the servant was expected to work very hard and be completely loyal to their employer 96 00:08:55,580 --> 00:09:01,930 employer for ethical reasons because it was their role rather than to fulfil part in a monetary transaction. 97 00:09:02,620 --> 00:09:07,370 She offers examples where service reputation was ruthlessly sacrificed to protect that of the master. 98 00:09:07,390 --> 00:09:11,560 For example, in a case where an innkeeper had cheated customers by diluting their wine, 99 00:09:11,800 --> 00:09:14,890 the servant girl was blamed so the master could be deemed innocent, 100 00:09:15,220 --> 00:09:19,270 even when the parties to the legal case were aware that an innocent servant had been wrongly accused. 101 00:09:19,510 --> 00:09:23,500 No concern for the servant or redress of their reputation was mentioned in the documents. 102 00:09:24,710 --> 00:09:32,690 These connotations of diligence, loyalty and sacrifice are all present in the 20th century term and concept of the domestique in road bicycle racing. 103 00:09:32,930 --> 00:09:38,630 An expert rider who works solely for the benefit of their team and team leader without seeking to gain standing for themselves, 104 00:09:38,840 --> 00:09:41,720 although some domestique have later become champions on their own account. 105 00:09:42,640 --> 00:09:47,200 The sociologist Erving Goffman offered the servant as the classic example of the non-person, 106 00:09:47,620 --> 00:09:49,960 which he defines as someone present during an interaction, 107 00:09:50,260 --> 00:09:56,380 but who is neither performer nor audience so that the interaction proceeds in their presence as if they were not present. 108 00:09:58,880 --> 00:10:04,700 Steven Chapin coined the term invisible technicians. After observing that accounts of experiments performed at the Royal Society and 109 00:10:04,700 --> 00:10:08,509 elsewhere in the late 17th century focussed on the new instruments involved air pumps, 110 00:10:08,510 --> 00:10:11,810 for example, and various principals who devised and witnessed the experiment. 111 00:10:12,110 --> 00:10:14,450 Royal Society members or their guests in particular. 112 00:10:15,290 --> 00:10:20,460 The verbal and iconographic depictions, though, left out those crucial to the performance of the experiments. 113 00:10:20,480 --> 00:10:23,389 The servants who manipulated the instruments, drawing on special skills, 114 00:10:23,390 --> 00:10:27,530 experience physical strength, for example, for pumping out the air in the chamber of the instrument. 115 00:10:28,630 --> 00:10:34,480 Robert Boyle. One of Chapin's main examples relied on multiple assistants in his laboratory, 2 to 6 of them at a time. 116 00:10:34,900 --> 00:10:37,900 But Boyle's published accounts of work in his laboratory generally omitted 117 00:10:37,900 --> 00:10:41,979 mention of assistance by using passives or an undefined first person plural. 118 00:10:41,980 --> 00:10:45,160 As in we pumped for the pump being set to work. 119 00:10:45,520 --> 00:10:48,880 Or occasionally he mentions one of them as he that managed the pump. 120 00:10:50,560 --> 00:10:54,790 In a similar vein, the iconography of experiments in printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries 121 00:10:54,790 --> 00:10:58,630 often depicted putti or disembodied hands holding or turning instruments, 122 00:10:58,930 --> 00:11:05,499 or sometimes people with no faces. In these cases, a principal composed an account of the experiment that permitted or effaced the print, 123 00:11:05,500 --> 00:11:11,140 the presence, and contributed contribution of the assistant. In keeping with this idea that servants are non persons. 124 00:11:12,950 --> 00:11:18,740 But the principals were not the only ones effacing their helpers. In some cases, amanuensis efface themselves. 125 00:11:20,160 --> 00:11:27,180 The Vittoria family offers a prime example of this pattern made visible by the work of Rafael Mohan and other experts on Victoria. 126 00:11:27,750 --> 00:11:35,100 So Pure a Votary was a major Florentine humanist responsible for editions of Salus, Varro, Cato scholars Euripides and Aristotle, among others. 127 00:11:35,910 --> 00:11:43,320 Victoria's papers survive thanks to the role that his descendants had in preserving them, notably his son Jacopo and grandson Francesco Battery. 128 00:11:43,740 --> 00:11:48,000 There is a Francesco Vittoria whose portrait is available, but that's the father of Piero. 129 00:11:48,030 --> 00:11:55,350 These two don't seem to warrant a portrait, and you can infer from that their standing relative to the people we do have portraits for. 130 00:11:57,300 --> 00:12:02,940 So both Jacopo and Francesco, son and grandson, received a strong humanist education and were involved, 131 00:12:02,940 --> 00:12:08,969 along with students of Pierre Rotary, in preparing the editions that he published, in particular several manuscripts among Pierre. 132 00:12:08,970 --> 00:12:16,260 His papers were written in the hand of Jacopo, as scholars have identified by the handwriting at Piero's death in 1585. 133 00:12:16,620 --> 00:12:24,860 One of his former students, Leonardo Salvatore, delivered and then published a funeral oration for which he got information about Pierre, 134 00:12:24,900 --> 00:12:31,290 his life from a swiftly composed biography left in manuscript by Oppo's grandson, Francesco. 135 00:12:32,650 --> 00:12:36,219 Among the many compliments that Francesco paid his grandfather in this manuscript. 136 00:12:36,220 --> 00:12:41,920 Instructional senor. He praised the famous humanist for working alone. 137 00:12:42,940 --> 00:12:46,959 His efforts in his studies were very great because up to two years ago when he was 85 years old, 138 00:12:46,960 --> 00:12:51,190 he got up many hours before the day and everything he wrote was always collected with his own effort. 139 00:12:51,580 --> 00:12:55,390 And as someone who is most precise in things, he never found anyone as diligent as he was. 140 00:12:55,570 --> 00:13:02,950 He never asked for help from anyone. And he when he wanted to find a thing, he rather deprived himself of an hour of sleep and did it by himself. 141 00:13:03,190 --> 00:13:08,560 Having been, as was written of Alvaro, a polygraph. It's a marvel that he never had help from anyone. 142 00:13:08,740 --> 00:13:12,490 Something that has not been the case in other great men of letters, for they had, as is known, 143 00:13:12,490 --> 00:13:16,299 many to help them seek, while they themselves made no other efforts than to arrange things. 144 00:13:16,300 --> 00:13:20,700 And we see many instances of this. Only two copy things before they were published. 145 00:13:20,710 --> 00:13:26,770 He sometimes kept a scribe, and this was necessary for him because his hand trembled and his handwriting was not understood except with difficulty. 146 00:13:27,250 --> 00:13:30,399 This indisposition gave him an impediment, but it was not noticeable. 147 00:13:30,400 --> 00:13:34,570 Nor did he feel it except for this and for drinking, and that he had to hold the glass with both hands. 148 00:13:35,960 --> 00:13:39,020 So here we have someone speaking with the authority of an intimate, 149 00:13:39,110 --> 00:13:44,210 the grandson denying precisely the role that he and his father had both played in working with Pietro. 150 00:13:44,780 --> 00:13:49,430 The one who knows firsthand about Pirro's method of working prefers to claim that Pietro never had to help from anyone. 151 00:13:50,270 --> 00:13:54,040 This is not surprising, given the ethos of protecting and advancing the reputation of the party, 152 00:13:54,060 --> 00:13:58,700 familias and the learned family, which applied to all his dependents, whether family members or servants. 153 00:13:59,480 --> 00:14:04,550 The purpose of the funeral oration, for which this biography was composed, only further prioritised this goal. 154 00:14:04,730 --> 00:14:12,920 So Francesco's calculus presumably is better to be the grandson of the best possible humanist than to be a bit player in a humanist of lesser merit. 155 00:14:14,190 --> 00:14:18,150 But why should relying on the help of others reduce poverty status? 156 00:14:18,570 --> 00:14:24,030 Francesco Self-effacement is evidence of ambivalence in this milieu toward a scholar having help from others. 157 00:14:24,600 --> 00:14:29,520 On Francesco's account, Vittoria Admirable, admirable, because he did everything himself, even at the cost of his sleep. 158 00:14:29,850 --> 00:14:34,500 Whereas other humanist assistance to gather and copy things and just have the effort of arranging them. 159 00:14:35,500 --> 00:14:40,020 This anti amanuensis sentiment is not often articulated as explicitly as in this case. 160 00:14:40,030 --> 00:14:43,900 After all, articulating it involves putting everyone else down who did rely on helpers. 161 00:14:44,200 --> 00:14:49,780 And of course, it's also quite untrue, as in this one as Francesco and other former students of the Tory well knew. 162 00:14:50,290 --> 00:14:56,529 We have, for example, a letter by one of these students, Girolamo May, reminiscing, too, with another student, 163 00:14:56,530 --> 00:15:01,450 Bartolomeo Barba Diary about their work together, preparing editions which battery published of S-Class, 164 00:15:01,450 --> 00:15:03,610 Euripides and Apollonius of Rhodes in particular. 165 00:15:04,180 --> 00:15:09,850 Piero Batory himself even thanked students in print for their great help in, quote, finding things he was looking for. 166 00:15:11,140 --> 00:15:12,340 So interestingly, 167 00:15:12,340 --> 00:15:20,380 the actual funeral oration that salvia delivered in public did not pick up the no amanuensis theme from Francesco's manuscript instruction. 168 00:15:21,250 --> 00:15:27,700 Also worth noting that some kind of help even, well, a picture of someone who required none. 169 00:15:27,940 --> 00:15:31,360 Francesco identified a kind of help that did not mar that image. 170 00:15:31,750 --> 00:15:35,920 After a work was finished, Pierre would hire ascribe to copy things before they were published. 171 00:15:36,160 --> 00:15:40,330 I interpret this as making a fair copy for the printer. And this is a virtuous act. 172 00:15:40,630 --> 00:15:46,150 An additional expense made for the purpose of minimising errors at the print shop and eliciting the best quality production, 173 00:15:46,150 --> 00:15:48,190 which was clearly a high priority for a humanist. 174 00:15:48,820 --> 00:15:54,970 But to reduce the stigma of even this virtuous reliance on a scribe to make a clean copy, Francesco also reduced the physical handicap. 175 00:15:55,300 --> 00:16:02,020 Pierre suffered from a tremor which made his handwriting difficult to read and required him to hold a glass with both hands in some period. 176 00:16:02,020 --> 00:16:07,330 Was a great humanist because he didn't have a menu and C's and when he did rely on one it was only to make a final copy for the printer. 177 00:16:07,480 --> 00:16:10,270 And even then he only did so because of a tremor in his hands. 178 00:16:10,570 --> 00:16:17,110 So we have two rounds of extenuating circumstances designed to ensure that the use of a scribe would not detract from the adoration due to victory. 179 00:16:17,410 --> 00:16:25,219 The great humanist who worked alone. In a similar example brought to my attention by Margaret Reserve, Pope Pius the second, 180 00:16:25,220 --> 00:16:31,760 entrusted the manuscript of his commentaries, a kind of memoir to the humanist John Antonio Campana, so he could correct them. 181 00:16:32,420 --> 00:16:37,250 The manuscript, which survives in the Vatican library, shows a mix of hands, including autographed parts by Pius, 182 00:16:37,460 --> 00:16:43,730 overlaid with corrections by component, including five elegant poems that Paterno had composed and inserted. 183 00:16:43,880 --> 00:16:52,030 Evidently with Pierce's approval. Nevertheless, when Campana wrote to a cardinal, probably not long after his death in 1464, 184 00:16:52,030 --> 00:16:55,150 he explained, Pius gave the commentaries to be to be corrected. 185 00:16:55,300 --> 00:16:56,410 I did not correct them. 186 00:16:56,530 --> 00:17:02,110 Who would amend something which so far from needing to be improved, would only provoke someone audacious to imitate the greatest eloquence. 187 00:17:02,410 --> 00:17:10,479 That prospect should deter the wise man. So Campana used the authority of his position as a first hand observer to efface his old work of correcting 188 00:17:10,480 --> 00:17:15,070 and even inserting bits of his own composition into the work published under the name of the Pope. 189 00:17:15,880 --> 00:17:20,770 Instead, he extolled the Pope's natural eloquence and claimed that it alone had brought the work to its final form. 190 00:17:22,150 --> 00:17:24,969 So the notion exemplified in these cases that a scholar is all the greater 191 00:17:24,970 --> 00:17:28,030 for working alone complicates the interpretation of claims made at the time, 192 00:17:28,030 --> 00:17:31,150 and since that a given scholar never relied on amanuensis. 193 00:17:31,540 --> 00:17:36,460 Certainly some scholars did work alone, especially at some point in their life and on certain projects. 194 00:17:36,850 --> 00:17:41,020 But statements to that effect, including the scholar's own, weren't being treated with caution, 195 00:17:41,260 --> 00:17:46,060 given the appeal of making such claims, whether about oneself or someone one wished to portray as admirable. 196 00:17:46,420 --> 00:17:52,060 And I've found people, for example, have closed some is Hartlaub saying he did all his correspondence alone. 197 00:17:52,300 --> 00:17:52,930 And on the other hand, 198 00:17:52,930 --> 00:18:01,030 Daniel more of giving him as an example that of of someone who hired a scholar to take notes for him in using his own judgement. 199 00:18:01,040 --> 00:18:04,120 So we have contradictory evidence about one great man. 200 00:18:04,540 --> 00:18:10,090 Clearly, it can be spun to support the position that you're trying to push. 201 00:18:12,170 --> 00:18:15,530 Self-effacement is not specific to the religious or hierarchical values of the 202 00:18:15,530 --> 00:18:19,729 early modern period in multiple authorship and the myth of the solitary genius, 203 00:18:19,730 --> 00:18:25,400 Jack Dillinger highlights the impact of editors on many modern English language authors from Pound's heavy 204 00:18:25,400 --> 00:18:30,860 editing of T.S. Eliot to the experience of American novelists like Fitzgerald Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe, 205 00:18:31,100 --> 00:18:34,160 who all worked with Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's sons. 206 00:18:34,820 --> 00:18:38,840 Perkins prompted major revisions, which were likely crucial to the success of the novels involved, 207 00:18:38,840 --> 00:18:42,620 including, for example, the characterisation of the eponymous hero of The Great Gatsby. 208 00:18:43,100 --> 00:18:48,410 But Perkins consistently downplayed his contributions and instructed aspiring editors to do the same. 209 00:18:49,070 --> 00:18:52,430 Indeed, self-effacement is crucial to successful employment in this line of work. 210 00:18:52,700 --> 00:18:55,520 Salinger notes that authors often thank editors in their acknowledgements, 211 00:18:55,790 --> 00:18:59,450 but would likely shun an editor who really sought credit for his or her contributions. 212 00:19:00,050 --> 00:19:06,440 As a result, Schillinger concludes, it was a peer. It would appear that the myth of the author's pre-eminence is strongly cherished by the very 213 00:19:06,440 --> 00:19:10,720 people who have the greatest knowledge of the author's failings and needs for assistance. 214 00:19:11,960 --> 00:19:17,960 Like Modern editors, early modern amanuensis, despite knowing best how much they'd contributed, typically did not draw attention to that work. 215 00:19:19,060 --> 00:19:22,900 A further factor that likely contributed to obscuring the work of many mentees. 216 00:19:22,900 --> 00:19:25,090 In general, though perhaps not in the battery case, 217 00:19:25,510 --> 00:19:30,970 was the reluctance of the former amanuensis to draw attention to their humble beginnings once they had achieved some standing. 218 00:19:31,510 --> 00:19:37,060 Francesco Vittoria might have felt that his own status as a respected humanist recently acquired, given his youth, 219 00:19:37,300 --> 00:19:41,800 would not be enhanced by reminiscing about his period of dependency to another scholar, even his grandfather. 220 00:19:42,100 --> 00:19:45,340 But of course, human. His family pedigree was born favourably. 221 00:19:45,880 --> 00:19:51,100 But still, humble beginnings were more generally an occasion for mockery by one's enemies than a point of pride. 222 00:19:51,670 --> 00:19:54,999 So Thomas Wolsey was mocked for being the son of a butcher throughout his rise through 223 00:19:55,000 --> 00:19:59,709 successful secretarial positions to the level of Lord Chancellor and Petrus Ramos in France, 224 00:19:59,710 --> 00:20:08,680 as I'll discuss later for his peasant origins. So I wonder about the several authors and scholars, major figures in early modern England, 225 00:20:09,370 --> 00:20:15,130 such as John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whom we know to have served as secretaries. 226 00:20:15,580 --> 00:20:21,190 To what extent they discussed in print or in public that aspect of their experience. 227 00:20:22,530 --> 00:20:31,560 The French poet Jochem Gibney, who served as a in the entourage of the more prestigious relative, the Cardinal Jean de Ballet in Rome, 228 00:20:32,460 --> 00:20:37,530 made allusions to his time in the service, which have come to light through the attentive analysis of Olivier. 229 00:20:37,980 --> 00:20:40,560 On Miller's reading of two passages in Jubilee's Regrets, 230 00:20:41,010 --> 00:20:48,420 the poet discreetly indicated unhappiness about his status due to disappointing financial rewards and limited access to jail, 231 00:20:48,600 --> 00:20:52,140 despite his family connection. But it isn't anything explicit. 232 00:20:52,380 --> 00:20:58,130 Of course. So in some there are multiple forces that tended to hide the presence and contributions of amanuensis. 233 00:20:58,400 --> 00:21:01,550 The general assumption that servants could be treated as non persons, 234 00:21:01,940 --> 00:21:07,099 that a scholar working alone was more praiseworthy than one who relied on helpers and the awareness on the part of helpers 235 00:21:07,100 --> 00:21:12,380 themselves that self-effacement in favour of anger advising the principal was more beneficial than seeking a share of the credit. 236 00:21:13,100 --> 00:21:18,589 So when I started this project, I titled it Hidden Helpers. But I find myself moving away from that title now, 237 00:21:18,590 --> 00:21:26,930 and I've called it in the Scholars Workshop because after looking for a amanuensis for a good while, I found them much more often than I expected to. 238 00:21:27,260 --> 00:21:32,270 Although in many ways he's generally renaming the shadow, they are more visible in the early modern period than in previous ones. 239 00:21:32,600 --> 00:21:39,620 And here I'd like to shift to that third point today to talk about reasons for the greater visibility of AMANUENSIS in the Renaissance. 240 00:21:41,560 --> 00:21:45,730 So at first a very basic material factor is the increased survival of personal papers, 241 00:21:45,730 --> 00:21:52,280 which enables the historian to see hands of amanuensis intermingled or not with those of the principal in these collections of manuscripts. 242 00:21:52,510 --> 00:21:58,719 And paper. Here was the crucial ingredient. The combination of durability and cheapness, at least relative to parchment, 243 00:21:58,720 --> 00:22:04,720 made it easy to accumulate working papers and notes, which once would have been taken on temporary surfaces like wax tablets. 244 00:22:04,930 --> 00:22:07,870 Paper had been available north of the Alps since the early 14th century. 245 00:22:08,200 --> 00:22:13,180 But the spread of printing after the 15th century prompted paper mills to proliferate, to supply the presses. 246 00:22:13,390 --> 00:22:17,620 So the paper became more abundant and less expensive also for the purposes of handwriting. 247 00:22:18,680 --> 00:22:22,249 And once the notes were saved on paper, the scholars themselves, their students, 248 00:22:22,250 --> 00:22:26,060 family members could appreciate their value and in some cases ensured their survival. 249 00:22:26,360 --> 00:22:29,390 And I'll talk about the topic of personal archives in Lecture five. 250 00:22:30,690 --> 00:22:38,459 Secondly, another kind of source that survives in abundance is correspondence letters for which the early Man Republic 251 00:22:38,460 --> 00:22:44,160 of Letters is named include plenty of private discussion of amanuensis as principals sought to hire them, 252 00:22:44,190 --> 00:22:50,790 complained about them, recommended them to others, and casually referred to their presence in scribing and helping to deliver and receive letters. 253 00:22:51,330 --> 00:22:57,600 So this kind of correspondence spread awareness of amanuensis as a common feature of the life of scholars and authors in their own time, 254 00:22:58,050 --> 00:23:04,080 and also to historians. These letters, too, on paper, were saved and often collected in the early modern period, 255 00:23:04,350 --> 00:23:07,770 especially when one of the correspondence was well known at the time. But not always. 256 00:23:09,100 --> 00:23:15,460 And thirdly, then most surprising to me has been seeing how often Amanuensis appeared in print fleetingly, of course, and usually without being named. 257 00:23:16,740 --> 00:23:24,120 And I bundle their kinds of appearances as the servant function as a complement to focussed author function. 258 00:23:24,990 --> 00:23:29,670 It took different forms, but basically worked by addressing the misdeeds of the servant, 259 00:23:29,670 --> 00:23:33,120 the amanuensis, to explain problems in the text that the reader might notice. 260 00:23:34,080 --> 00:23:37,110 I argue that by relieving the author of Responsibility for Mistakes, 261 00:23:37,290 --> 00:23:44,220 the ploy helped to allay the new acute level of anxiety brought on by publishing on the vast new scale the printing involved. 262 00:23:44,940 --> 00:23:46,980 Of course, publication existed before print, 263 00:23:47,280 --> 00:23:52,559 as Daniel Hobbins has emphasised in a book of that title publication before print and authors from the ancient 264 00:23:52,560 --> 00:23:57,650 and medieval period also manifested anxieties about the potential for an unfavourable reception of their work. 265 00:23:57,660 --> 00:24:03,360 But printing greatly raised the stakes of publication by producing and distributing a book on a much wider scale. 266 00:24:04,200 --> 00:24:05,069 From the beginning, 267 00:24:05,070 --> 00:24:16,889 the business model of printing involved making more copies than you necessarily knew you could sell in order to not only break even on your expenses, 268 00:24:16,890 --> 00:24:22,530 which were all made upfront before a single copy was available for sale and hoping 269 00:24:22,530 --> 00:24:27,090 to sell more than the bare minimum to break even in order to make a profit. 270 00:24:27,390 --> 00:24:32,310 If you suddenly decided you had a bestseller on your hand and you didn't have enough copies to sell, 271 00:24:32,310 --> 00:24:40,350 it was a complete loss because to make a second printing involves starting all over again with all the investment in paper and labour and time. 272 00:24:41,940 --> 00:24:46,830 So the printer needs to sell copies. The author, however, has a slightly different motive. 273 00:24:46,860 --> 00:24:50,820 The author hopes for a favourable reception. The two goals are not perfectly aligned. 274 00:24:51,390 --> 00:24:59,040 So for a scholarly author, I would say printing was attractive. Of course, this is how you diffuse your reputation across space and time, 275 00:24:59,340 --> 00:25:04,020 but also frightening in that to a Europe wide book trade centred on fairs in Frankfurt, 276 00:25:04,020 --> 00:25:07,680 in Leipzig, and with Latin as a learned lingua franca, 277 00:25:08,010 --> 00:25:12,810 the learned book could reach readers in faraway places and could stay available for generations into the future. 278 00:25:13,830 --> 00:25:18,510 So the risk of an unfavourable reception far beyond the control of the author, 279 00:25:18,990 --> 00:25:25,890 was heightened and the context of confessional conflict in the 16th century, which is basically underlying all of my examples, 280 00:25:26,160 --> 00:25:29,879 further raised the stakes of a negative perception since they were constant tensions 281 00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:35,220 and shifting distributions of power not only between the main rival confessions, 282 00:25:35,220 --> 00:25:40,950 but also within each of them factions within Catholic and many Protestant churches as they vied for power. 283 00:25:41,340 --> 00:25:45,780 So authors who miscalculated the impact of their book could face devastating consequences, 284 00:25:46,320 --> 00:25:51,390 hence the virtues of the servant function to relieve the author of some of this anxiety and responsibility. 285 00:25:53,000 --> 00:25:57,020 In its elaborate version, a thieving servant is responsible for the author rushing into print. 286 00:25:57,440 --> 00:26:02,150 If it hadn't been for the servant selling or threatening to sell an unauthorised manuscript to a printer, 287 00:26:02,570 --> 00:26:04,520 the author would have had more time to perfect it. 288 00:26:05,060 --> 00:26:10,520 Given the circumstances, the author asks the reader to excuse the failings that resulted from a hasty publication. 289 00:26:11,060 --> 00:26:17,480 This is, of course, a variant of the classic modesty trope of the reluctant author saying that he was pushed to publish at the insistence of friends, 290 00:26:17,480 --> 00:26:21,440 students, family or patron. It's also something that could actually happen. 291 00:26:22,380 --> 00:26:31,740 In the essays of Tension, which of course we see here the Bordeaux copy, which is the last copy printed in his lifetime, which he annotated himself, 292 00:26:32,070 --> 00:26:39,750 and from which the third edition of Forbes 95, published by Married Gulnaz, his so-called adoptive daughter, was printed. 293 00:26:41,250 --> 00:26:46,620 Mostly Montana works by adding things to each successive edition of the essays, 294 00:26:46,620 --> 00:26:51,680 but in this case, he removed something in the Bordeaux copy by crossing out this passage. 295 00:26:53,120 --> 00:26:56,779 Now because it seems very close to our own. I intended to take this passage from its author, 296 00:26:56,780 --> 00:27:01,850 having once taken the trouble to say very aptly what I knew about the comparison of our armour with Roman armour. 297 00:27:01,880 --> 00:27:09,230 This is a section on armour, but this scrap of my notes, having been stolen from me by several others with several others by a man in my service, 298 00:27:09,590 --> 00:27:15,590 I will not deprive him of the profit he hopes to make from it. Also, it would be very hard for me to chew over the same meat twice. 299 00:27:16,510 --> 00:27:23,170 So Montana saying too bad the passage is gone, comparing arms of the French in the parthians, but I'm not going to rewrite it. 300 00:27:23,680 --> 00:27:28,870 And of course, the men in service, as far as we know, didn't publish it or make a profit from it. 301 00:27:30,940 --> 00:27:37,840 So I, you know, I'm inclined to take this fairly much at face value is an episode that occurred in some form. 302 00:27:38,680 --> 00:27:40,960 At other occasions I might be more sceptical. 303 00:27:41,080 --> 00:27:47,740 Erasmus, for example, complained in a to the reader in 1515 that his epigrams had been published without his authorisation. 304 00:27:48,100 --> 00:27:51,220 Quote, Some servant, I suspect, filched them and sold them to the printers. 305 00:27:51,880 --> 00:27:56,080 But since the printer involved, Rosebud was one Erasmus continued to work with. 306 00:27:56,380 --> 00:28:00,490 This does not strike me as entirely convincing. So here it's perhaps more of a ploy. 307 00:28:01,120 --> 00:28:06,500 And theft was also something that an anxious principal could worry about happening, even in the absence of any misdeed. 308 00:28:07,540 --> 00:28:17,829 Robert Boyle, whom we encountered last time telling you about the distemper in his eyes and the poor quality scribe who no doubt made mistakes here, 309 00:28:17,830 --> 00:28:24,940 is complaining that he remembers an occasion where he had lost a manuscript that he was much concerned for, 310 00:28:25,390 --> 00:28:33,400 and he made a fuss about it in order that the plagiarist, the thieving servant, would conclude himself, unable to make the manuscript passes his own. 311 00:28:33,820 --> 00:28:37,000 And in effect, the book was in a while after privately brought back. 312 00:28:37,120 --> 00:28:41,860 So I found it laid in a buy place where I had before as fruitlessly as carefully sought it. 313 00:28:42,890 --> 00:28:46,700 So what's going on here? Boyle is claiming that someone stole the manuscript. 314 00:28:46,700 --> 00:28:49,879 A servant stole the manuscript and then thought better of it and brought it back to the right place. 315 00:28:49,880 --> 00:28:54,800 So he found it later. Doesn't seem a whole lot more plausible that Boyle just lost track of manuscript, 316 00:28:54,800 --> 00:28:58,700 didn't look closely enough in what clearly was a very messy workspace. 317 00:28:59,540 --> 00:29:05,400 That is, of course, the interpretation of Michael Hunter, who who studies this, among other pair texts. 318 00:29:05,420 --> 00:29:13,040 So here we're seeing that Boyle is worried about the untrustworthy helper so much that he sees it happening, even probably when it didn't. 319 00:29:14,330 --> 00:29:15,800 And, you know. Yes. 320 00:29:17,150 --> 00:29:24,890 A more basic form of the servant function is some version of Please excuse the errors of my amanuensis and these errors could take various forms. 321 00:29:25,250 --> 00:29:33,290 Errors in judgement are at issue for Conrad Gessner when he's writing his gigantic Biblioteca Universalis in 1545 with about 1500 words, 322 00:29:33,290 --> 00:29:35,930 which is an alphabetised bibliography of authors. 323 00:29:36,850 --> 00:29:43,720 And in this preface he explains, I won't deny that the summaries are chapters of some books or explicated more verbose than I would like. 324 00:29:44,020 --> 00:29:47,950 But this occurred mainly in the first letter of the alphabet when I relied on the work of Amanuensis. 325 00:29:48,160 --> 00:29:50,050 In the rest, I would not want to be briefer. 326 00:29:50,620 --> 00:29:56,160 So clearly he's feeling defensive about how is too big and the work was indeed the object of an arrangement. 327 00:29:56,170 --> 00:30:00,819 Ten years later, Gessner is actually echoing the apology of a medieval polygraph. 328 00:30:00,820 --> 00:30:05,590 Vincent of Beauvais, who in its 13th century speculum, Miers, explained in his prologue, 329 00:30:06,070 --> 00:30:09,219 Some things in this work, especially on the deeds of martyrs and confessors, 330 00:30:09,220 --> 00:30:14,230 were not as fully abbreviated as I would have liked, because, given my commitment to too many other studies, 331 00:30:14,530 --> 00:30:20,170 I abbreviated things not in my own hand, but mostly through the hands of notary insofar as I could. 332 00:30:20,620 --> 00:30:26,290 Nonetheless, it is no less true that an excessively abbreviated narration is less pleasing to the reader or the listener. 333 00:30:27,220 --> 00:30:30,520 So here he's apologising for being too long. And interestingly, 334 00:30:30,520 --> 00:30:39,280 the French translator in the early 14th century of this passage instead hangs on to the last sentence and apologises for it being too short. 335 00:30:39,880 --> 00:30:44,890 So the point, the beauty of this servant function is that it is versatile. 336 00:30:45,490 --> 00:30:49,390 It can be used against whichever kind of criticism you most fear and wish to forestall. 337 00:30:49,570 --> 00:30:53,110 Whether the text is too long or too short is the fault of the amanuensis. 338 00:30:55,110 --> 00:31:00,689 Most commonly amanuensis are blamed for scribal errors. This move occurs in printed errata lists. 339 00:31:00,690 --> 00:31:04,649 So these is a new kind of pair text. Come on with printing happens at the back of the book. 340 00:31:04,650 --> 00:31:10,500 Typically a list of errors to please correct in your copy in address to the reader. 341 00:31:11,340 --> 00:31:17,460 So here we have Erasmus's translation of Garza's Greek grammar, ending with a list of errata, but prefaced with a little blurb. 342 00:31:17,700 --> 00:31:24,510 Robin to the reader this in Latin remember we know that basically Erasmus wrote or someone in his entourage wrote these. 343 00:31:25,450 --> 00:31:31,570 While it was in press, we gave the book to reread to a learned man from our friends who noticed several errors of the amanuensis who copied the book. 344 00:31:32,500 --> 00:31:36,760 And here they are. So that's very clear on who did that. 345 00:31:37,150 --> 00:31:42,040 Interestingly, Erasmus is more willing to take the blame when writing in his own voice in a polemical text, 346 00:31:42,040 --> 00:31:47,409 responding here to the accusations of the conservative Catholic No Al-Bayda, where he introduced the errata this way. 347 00:31:47,410 --> 00:31:51,700 He said, We have listed here the errors due to the printers or the amanuensis, 348 00:31:51,730 --> 00:31:57,010 or finally to a slip of my own pen so that one who wishes to could easily amend their codex. 349 00:31:58,400 --> 00:32:06,710 Erasmus used his own voice. Also in one of his last works, the Ecclesiastes is a giant sermon, a preaching manual of 1535, 350 00:32:06,950 --> 00:32:12,500 where a short list of erotic is accompanied by a to the reader with a complex assessment of responsibility. 351 00:32:14,430 --> 00:32:17,100 Many authors like to blame their errors on the work of the printers, 352 00:32:17,430 --> 00:32:22,320 but I frankly admit that almost all the errors in this work must be attributed either to my amanuensis or to myself. 353 00:32:22,860 --> 00:32:27,329 It is true I was present during the printing, but because of my poor health I was unable to make a final revision, 354 00:32:27,330 --> 00:32:33,510 especially since the need to correct certain pages often coincided with the hours that had to be devoted to sleep or to the care of my poor body. 355 00:32:34,260 --> 00:32:40,650 There was, however, no need for my help since that task was vigilantly carried out by Sigismund Galerius, a man of great learning and taste. 356 00:32:41,400 --> 00:32:46,530 But when I had the leisure to read over some of the printed pages, I discovered several places that had slipped through my revision. 357 00:32:47,310 --> 00:32:52,560 There's not a huge number of these. If you take into consideration the great length of the work, very few if you discount trivial errors. 358 00:32:52,890 --> 00:33:00,230 I thought I should add a note here to this effect. So we have it to the reader with an event list designed to deflect blame away from the printer. 359 00:33:00,740 --> 00:33:05,630 Quite unusually, it includes explicit thanks to the corrector at the printers Sigismund Galerius, 360 00:33:05,930 --> 00:33:11,389 whom Erasmus also thanked in print in 1529, remembered in his will and designated as one of the team. 361 00:33:11,390 --> 00:33:15,050 He would like to prepare the opera Omnia, which actually happened after his death. 362 00:33:15,440 --> 00:33:21,110 But then, of course, he is listing some errors that Kallenius had not caught. And of course, he's reducing his poor health. 363 00:33:21,140 --> 00:33:24,800 We've seen this in this case, perhaps not a ploy. He died a few months later. 364 00:33:26,660 --> 00:33:30,920 As far as I can tell, the servant function is an innovation of the 16th century. 365 00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:36,800 Anxiety around publication certainly predated printing, but not this kind of attempt to alleviate it. 366 00:33:37,670 --> 00:33:41,150 And so I'm going to offer a few comparisons with the ancient case. 367 00:33:42,640 --> 00:33:48,280 I see signs of anxiety about publication even before printing in the act of making a text public, 368 00:33:48,280 --> 00:33:50,770 sharing it with others so that you lose control of it. 369 00:33:51,310 --> 00:33:57,130 In the arts, Poetica famously Horus warns one who might want to write verses without knowing how to. 370 00:33:57,910 --> 00:34:03,220 If ever you do write anything, let it enter the ears of some crucial microbes and your father's and my own. 371 00:34:03,430 --> 00:34:07,660 And then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year. 372 00:34:08,290 --> 00:34:11,799 When you have not published, you can destroy the word once sent forth. 373 00:34:11,800 --> 00:34:15,820 Can never come back. This is probably not music to a publisher's ear. 374 00:34:15,970 --> 00:34:17,980 Wait nine years before publishing things. 375 00:34:18,850 --> 00:34:25,330 Another example I would suggest is the story that Virgil, on his deathbed and in instructions left to his executors, 376 00:34:25,540 --> 00:34:33,760 called for the destruction of the need and achievement, impatiently waited by Augustus, among others, in which Virgil had spent 11 years composing. 377 00:34:34,510 --> 00:34:38,320 This story was much repeated in antiquity and surfaces again among the humanists. 378 00:34:39,430 --> 00:34:43,720 Why is that? Various interpretations have been advanced that take the claim seriously. 379 00:34:43,780 --> 00:34:47,110 Virgil was a perfectionist, couldn't bear the prospect of others controlling its edition, 380 00:34:47,440 --> 00:34:50,590 or that he would just seem to the work for Slavish as toward Augustus. 381 00:34:50,740 --> 00:34:54,760 Not very likely, or on the contrary, for stealthily attacking him for it. 382 00:34:55,600 --> 00:35:00,249 I propose instead that the story which is so here in the standards in your Torah, 383 00:35:00,250 --> 00:35:05,049 in a little resi floated by Virgil himself and or others in his circle, 384 00:35:05,050 --> 00:35:10,870 was designed to shield the author from criticism because he did not mean to publish the text in the form in which we have it. 385 00:35:11,260 --> 00:35:15,130 It gave Virgil plausible deniability for any failings that others might find there. 386 00:35:15,190 --> 00:35:19,000 Surely Virgil would have remedied them if only he had had the time to do so. 387 00:35:20,360 --> 00:35:23,690 So thank goodness August sets in to prevent this destruction. 388 00:35:25,020 --> 00:35:28,440 It's hard to show absence of a pattern like blaming the amanuensis. 389 00:35:28,440 --> 00:35:34,470 But some examples from Cicero's correspondence suggest that he avoided doing so even when he might have. 390 00:35:34,500 --> 00:35:42,930 As analysed here by Randolph Richards. So first he's got an example of a complaint from correspondence about the tone of a previous letter, 391 00:35:43,290 --> 00:35:47,849 and Cicero replies, What letter of mine it is you describe as unduly choleric? 392 00:35:47,850 --> 00:35:53,160 I cannot back out. But if, as you write, the letter was badly expressed, you may be sure I never wrote it. 393 00:35:54,000 --> 00:35:58,230 So he's denying responsibility for it, but he's not pinning the blame on anybody else. 394 00:35:59,680 --> 00:36:01,880 Cicero disowns the whole letter instead. 395 00:36:02,470 --> 00:36:08,300 And then more tellingly, I'd say in this controversy that erupted in 49 BCE near the end of his term as provincial governor. 396 00:36:08,320 --> 00:36:16,330 Cicero was accused of altering account books retroactively. And we can infer from Cicero's reply to a correspondent that the latter had 397 00:36:16,330 --> 00:36:20,110 suggested that Cicero secretary had altered the accounts rather than himself. 398 00:36:20,500 --> 00:36:22,330 And Cicero is indignant in response. 399 00:36:22,630 --> 00:36:31,090 Your proposal that the secretary would have done this robs me of the fruit of my liberality, of my activity, even of a moderate amount of good sense. 400 00:36:31,420 --> 00:36:35,620 And if my diligence. Because you suppose that in regard to so important to duty, 401 00:36:35,620 --> 00:36:39,730 my secretary made any entry he chose without even going through the form of reading it over to me. 402 00:36:41,070 --> 00:36:47,010 So Cicero is also reiterating his complete trust in his secretary, Scribe Matos, and he doesn't name him. 403 00:36:47,010 --> 00:36:48,570 But we know who it is, Tyrone. 404 00:36:49,230 --> 00:36:54,420 And of course, there were likely multiple reasons why Cicero declined to take the convenient excuse being offered to him. 405 00:36:54,930 --> 00:36:58,560 His confidence in Tiger's honesty, perhaps a concern for Tiger's reputation. 406 00:36:59,070 --> 00:37:05,590 But Richard suggests as well, and from a few other instances, that blaming the secretary was not, in fact, considered a respectable excuse. 407 00:37:05,610 --> 00:37:09,660 In this context, though, it might have lessened the blame cast on Cicero to some extent. 408 00:37:11,510 --> 00:37:18,770 So mentioning areas of many senses was not only a defensive ploy, it could also be the opportunity to boast of one's contributions in correcting them. 409 00:37:19,370 --> 00:37:26,269 Indeed, one of the premises of the Humus project was that a long succession of past amanuensis had introduced errors in the transmission of old texts, 410 00:37:26,270 --> 00:37:30,440 whether classical or Christians, which could be corrected with proper skills and attention. 411 00:37:30,470 --> 00:37:38,240 So here we have a lovely depiction along the lines of what we saw with Catherine of Siena, the divine message, the conduit of John the Evangelist, 412 00:37:38,510 --> 00:37:46,910 who with a lovely scrawl is dictating to his scribe, Procopius, who is using a set of wax tablets or codex form. 413 00:37:47,720 --> 00:37:51,120 And then. We envision this whole. 414 00:37:51,730 --> 00:37:56,230 It's inscribed all the way down, you know. Instead of turtles, it's scribes down to the present. 415 00:37:56,240 --> 00:38:00,190 These are the amanuensis anonymous accumulated over centuries. 416 00:38:00,580 --> 00:38:09,680 Whom the human his job is to clean up after. So in any long textual tradition, successive layers of scribes go very far down. 417 00:38:10,870 --> 00:38:16,990 The best place for boasting about correcting errors was the title page, which was of course, invented by printers to lure buyers. 418 00:38:17,440 --> 00:38:24,820 And many title pages claimed they offer a more correct and copious texture index, but only a few explicitly mention errors of the amanuensis. 419 00:38:25,120 --> 00:38:26,890 So here's one Eric Erika's holly, 420 00:38:26,920 --> 00:38:34,030 who had died more than a century earlier when his history of Swedes and Goths was published in 1615 by the humanist Yohannes Maecenas, 421 00:38:34,270 --> 00:38:40,450 who highlighted his contributions on the title page, corrected of the almost innumerable errors of the amanuensis. 422 00:38:41,330 --> 00:38:49,370 He organised in six books. He provided an index and published it for the first time and then interestingly in later edition all that is dropped. 423 00:38:50,530 --> 00:38:56,050 In two other cases. I hypothesise that the claim is made in order to push a new addition when a previous one already existed. 424 00:38:56,710 --> 00:39:00,940 So we have curious commentary on the left on the late antique jurist Julius Paulus, 425 00:39:00,940 --> 00:39:08,169 first published posthumously in 1596 and the following edition of 1604 eight years later boasts that this most 426 00:39:08,170 --> 00:39:13,690 famous and useful work has been purged of the errors which insinuated themselves to the carelessness of amanuensis, 427 00:39:13,690 --> 00:39:16,570 as in by this edition, even if you already own the previous one. 428 00:39:18,520 --> 00:39:22,660 In the case of a treatise against astrological conjectures by the Jesuit Alessandra de Angelis. 429 00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:28,420 Two editions appeared in the same year in different cities. I suspect the first edition on the left appeared in Leo. 430 00:39:28,780 --> 00:39:34,809 Certainly it's the most widely distributed now, while the second from Rome added the bonus claim of having been purged by the 431 00:39:34,810 --> 00:39:39,250 author of many errors of the amanuensis and illustrated with new examples. 432 00:39:41,000 --> 00:39:45,409 So these two patterns of blaming amanuensis for errors to protect the reputation of an author and of 433 00:39:45,410 --> 00:39:50,410 boasting about a new and improved version of the text elicited a most unusual piece of parrot text, 434 00:39:50,420 --> 00:39:52,520 the only one of its kind found so far. 435 00:39:53,120 --> 00:40:07,910 It appears in a collection of ten medieval English history manuscripts published in 1650 152 by Roger Wisdom and John Selden, 436 00:40:08,120 --> 00:40:17,930 who has a 57 page long introduction. It's a very large book, and the text is followed by an amanuensis to the reader. 437 00:40:18,560 --> 00:40:22,520 This is actually a piece of parrot text that precedes further parrot text. 438 00:40:22,520 --> 00:40:28,340 So after it comes various lessons and then glossary and index and so forth. 439 00:40:29,700 --> 00:40:39,270 So in the amanuensis to the reader, we hear from the amanuensis, Ralph Jennings, who explains that he took care in consulting the original manuscript. 440 00:40:39,660 --> 00:40:45,630 He compared the manuscript with the manuscripts in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, otherwise known as the Parker Library. 441 00:40:46,410 --> 00:40:54,010 And he proofread from the manuscript, except in the case of the Parker Library manuscript, which he couldn't access. 442 00:40:54,030 --> 00:41:00,780 I mean, they wouldn't let it out of the Parker Library. And he clearly was was not able to proofread their. 443 00:41:01,740 --> 00:41:09,120 So the Bodleian actually has four manuscripts that were scribed by Jennings around the same time, the 1650s. 444 00:41:09,750 --> 00:41:19,200 Here's one of them. And you can see here the CC annotation is because this manuscript also was called aided with a copy at Corpus Christi Cambridge. 445 00:41:19,350 --> 00:41:24,930 CC nowadays. And here you can see in English it's actually says compared with and so forth. 446 00:41:25,590 --> 00:41:29,890 So here Jennings is scribing and someone else is doing the comparing. 447 00:41:29,910 --> 00:41:37,990 Other times Jennings did the comparing. Here we see that Jennings has corrected a manuscript that was made by someone else. 448 00:41:38,410 --> 00:41:45,210 Edward Yerbury. And here we see this was on display on Tuesday, 449 00:41:45,810 --> 00:41:50,970 a receipt that Jennings has been paid 40 shillings for writing the history of the Monks of Glastonbury. 450 00:41:51,240 --> 00:41:54,540 That is, transcribing and collating other manuscript copies of this treatise, 451 00:41:54,870 --> 00:41:58,560 including one belonged to Stromness Cotton and one belonging to Richard Tick-borne. 452 00:42:00,690 --> 00:42:03,629 So Jennings clearly held a high reputation in his time, 453 00:42:03,630 --> 00:42:11,310 which actually endured until the following century because the antiquarian John Ross in 1716 praises 454 00:42:11,310 --> 00:42:17,879 Jennings by name for copying the manuscript most skilfully and for his admirable care in the end industry. 455 00:42:17,880 --> 00:42:22,170 In the ten day conscript chorus of Twizel and Selden. 456 00:42:24,110 --> 00:42:28,969 His name, no doubt obscures others who helped write this was the named Amanuensis. 457 00:42:28,970 --> 00:42:30,980 Perhaps there were other helpers, 458 00:42:31,430 --> 00:42:37,130 but it certainly drew unusual attention to the complex scholarly work that could be signed assigned to an amanuensis. 459 00:42:39,130 --> 00:42:42,940 After these many examples of pair of texts which mentions many senses, 460 00:42:42,940 --> 00:42:47,590 we've seen a surreal premises deploying servant function defensively around lists, 461 00:42:47,830 --> 00:42:54,400 pinning more or less blame on amanuensis and title pages that boast of purging the texts of errors of earlier amanuensis. 462 00:42:54,910 --> 00:43:00,730 I'd like to close with an unusual case of Amanuensis who's named in print in the text offered by his principal. 463 00:43:01,360 --> 00:43:07,630 And this example will nicely set up the theme of the next lecture about how do we want to think about the work of many senses? 464 00:43:08,050 --> 00:43:14,440 Is it mere mechanical copying or because it's performed by people is actually not. 465 00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:22,510 So this is the story of Portage to T.R., whose castle is still visible in B.C. in Burgundy. 466 00:43:25,860 --> 00:43:34,050 And it concerns. So Post-Truth was publishing in 1591 a book entitled On the Correct Imposition of Names. 467 00:43:34,470 --> 00:43:38,040 And it's basically natural history book talking about terms for things. 468 00:43:38,040 --> 00:43:44,490 And he has a whole section on stones in particular, stones that form in animals. 469 00:43:44,940 --> 00:43:46,739 These would be gallstones in our thought. 470 00:43:46,740 --> 00:43:55,140 And here we have from the Pharmaceutical Museum in Basel, the bizarre stone, which was thought to have wonderful properties of many kinds. 471 00:43:56,100 --> 00:44:02,700 They don't have on display a stone, which is going to be discussed in this passage, which is a partridge stone. 472 00:44:02,700 --> 00:44:06,149 A deficit because of pelvis is Latin for partridge, 473 00:44:06,150 --> 00:44:11,460 which was a stone that formed in the body of a partridge and that you would encounter if you were eating, said Partridge. 474 00:44:12,390 --> 00:44:20,040 So we're going to look at a long passage in this work where the two marginal notes signal what the 475 00:44:20,370 --> 00:44:27,680 important bits are to knew concerning the penalty seats this Partridge Stone and Phillips Roberta's. 476 00:44:29,930 --> 00:44:34,549 I had retired to my castle of LaSalle near the end of the summer, 1591, with Phillip Hall, 477 00:44:34,550 --> 00:44:39,440 the learned jurist and great connoisseur of Greek and Latin letters who spent most of his day on his. 478 00:44:39,440 --> 00:44:41,540 It is editions of Demosthenes and Isaiah's. 479 00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:50,840 Well, I devoted myself to the study of Philo, and indeed we know, although it's since lost of an edition of Isaiah by Phoebe Paul Bear. 480 00:44:52,770 --> 00:44:59,700 When one day as evening was falling. Come on. My Kelly Graff was a man who came to see us exulting. 481 00:45:00,210 --> 00:45:02,160 I have master, he said, looking at me. 482 00:45:02,310 --> 00:45:08,010 Something that you could please add to your little book on the right imposition of names which you have given me to transcribe. 483 00:45:08,310 --> 00:45:15,660 Here is a parody seat which I pulled out with my own fingers from the goat of a partridge, which was served to us from the remains of your meal. 484 00:45:16,970 --> 00:45:20,060 In contemplating this kind of crystal delicate transparency, 485 00:45:20,300 --> 00:45:25,460 which was of a size and shape that made it difficult to think that it could have been swallowed by such a small bird as a partridge. 486 00:45:25,910 --> 00:45:31,010 So it wasn't swallowed. It was formed internally. Or that it could have formed naturally in it. 487 00:45:31,700 --> 00:45:35,270 I declared with surprise and doubt. Come on. What game are you playing with us? 488 00:45:35,930 --> 00:45:41,120 And he blushing a bit, excused himself. With all respect, I assure you that what I declared is the truth. 489 00:45:41,450 --> 00:45:45,979 If it isn't master henceforth, do not believe me. On any matter divine or human, I split. 490 00:45:45,980 --> 00:45:51,450 The goat of that bird, came across the stone and removed it myself from the neck of the bird, which I then eat. 491 00:45:51,980 --> 00:45:57,200 Your chaplain, who here in person this valet and all the other domestics who saw this with their own eyes. 492 00:45:57,200 --> 00:46:00,540 I can bring them before you if you'd like. I agree. 493 00:46:00,550 --> 00:46:05,730 Smiling. Give us this stone, I said. I believe you. You've convinced me. And I turned to there. 494 00:46:06,220 --> 00:46:11,560 I'm reminded of this passage in which Elian reports that partridges in the region of Antioch even eat stones. 495 00:46:11,860 --> 00:46:17,829 But we are far from Antioch. After a little discussion on this tone between myself and the very learned over there, 496 00:46:17,830 --> 00:46:21,530 I enclosed it in my collection of precious stones and kept carefully with me. 497 00:46:22,240 --> 00:46:25,020 Nonetheless, when some time later I was writing these lines, 498 00:46:25,030 --> 00:46:30,220 it seemed to me that its red tint had completely dissipated, although its crystalline transparency remained. 499 00:46:30,880 --> 00:46:37,150 But from this digression, we must return to the road. So we can't confirm this incident. 500 00:46:37,160 --> 00:46:43,100 Of course, we have no other evidence of it having happened, and yet it seems unlikely to be completely fictitious. 501 00:46:43,850 --> 00:46:46,940 We've got the two learned men who are having framing it. 502 00:46:46,970 --> 00:46:52,970 They start off basically doing parallel play, each apparently in the same room, a study, a library. 503 00:46:53,420 --> 00:46:55,910 They're exercising autumn, you know, during the summer months, 504 00:46:56,030 --> 00:47:07,690 a respite from their world duties as officials of various kinds and and in bursts the calligraphers who presumably had waited till after dinner. 505 00:47:07,700 --> 00:47:11,810 He's not I don't know or if he can barge in any time. I'm not clear on that. 506 00:47:12,860 --> 00:47:18,440 Unfortunately, I don't know anything about him. Even having a name doesn't really help that much. 507 00:47:19,430 --> 00:47:22,009 I think we get a very detailed description, 508 00:47:22,010 --> 00:47:27,920 almost like the virtual witnessing that people like Peter Deer and Stephen Sharp and talk about for the Royal Society, 509 00:47:28,250 --> 00:47:33,649 you know, we get the setting of the scene, we get the invocation of witnesses who could be brought to confirm. 510 00:47:33,650 --> 00:47:40,969 We get the description of the stone. But, of course, the the principal is not entirely buying it necessarily. 511 00:47:40,970 --> 00:47:47,810 Right. He's he's he's got some scepticism here. He nonetheless takes possession of the stone comes the this the amanuensis down. 512 00:47:47,810 --> 00:47:52,670 Of course, of course I believe you and then leaves to the reader to weigh all this. 513 00:47:52,670 --> 00:47:58,100 You know, the stone is decayed. It's and of course, you know, we're not in your Antioch and we don't know. 514 00:47:58,100 --> 00:48:03,700 It seems unlikely. So Tia clearly is the principal here, the knowledge maker. 515 00:48:04,780 --> 00:48:09,609 But from our perspective, Cuomo also contributed to the content of the text while carrying out a task which 516 00:48:09,610 --> 00:48:13,690 TR likely considered merely mechanical copying over a book manuscript in progress. 517 00:48:13,720 --> 00:48:17,230 Maybe it was a clean copy. Maybe it was just a copy for the press. 518 00:48:18,390 --> 00:48:22,020 In fact, not all copying was considered beneath a man station. 519 00:48:22,110 --> 00:48:28,110 Early modern scholars sometimes engage in describing themselves, especially when copying that, 520 00:48:28,230 --> 00:48:35,010 making that first copy from a rare manuscript original, and thereby creating a copy that would have special significance in the text. 521 00:48:35,040 --> 00:48:42,179 Accurate transmission. Transmission. So Poggio Bartolini, for example, of Lucretius, his own copy having been lost, but he gave it to others. 522 00:48:42,180 --> 00:48:48,240 So we have copies by our people. And in a case described by Henry Wodehouse and brought to my attention by Arnold Hunt, 523 00:48:48,510 --> 00:48:54,900 the English antiquarian Sir Simon's Dos reported taking extraordinary content and copying in his own hand. 524 00:48:55,020 --> 00:49:01,920 The fled to a medieval legal text from the exemplar owned by Robert Cotton, which may have been the only complete copy and was certainly very rare. 525 00:49:02,160 --> 00:49:06,540 But Dos, his enthusiasm for the task evaporated immediately when he learned that one, 526 00:49:06,540 --> 00:49:11,010 Ralph Starkey had already made copies of the text and sold them at that point, 527 00:49:11,640 --> 00:49:15,510 describing was no longer an act of scholarly transmission but mere reproduction. 528 00:49:15,840 --> 00:49:21,030 So Dos stopped his efforts, had the rest of the manuscript copied out by, quote, an able librarian whom he hired. 529 00:49:22,260 --> 00:49:24,600 But for copying out his recently composed manuscript, 530 00:49:24,840 --> 00:49:30,180 whether for further editing or for use by the printer to his decision to delegate the work to a secretary with good handwriting was, 531 00:49:30,180 --> 00:49:36,780 of course, unproblematic. He also expected Como to make a reliable copy without modifications a kind of mechanical operation. 532 00:49:37,200 --> 00:49:40,860 But come on, was not a machine. He understood the Latin text he was copying. 533 00:49:41,160 --> 00:49:47,450 He connected to his own experience and indeed copying the passage on animal stones likely primed him to find one in his meal, 534 00:49:48,060 --> 00:49:51,780 and he explicitly asked for his find to be included in the learned treatise. 535 00:49:52,530 --> 00:49:53,879 When artisans and other, quote, 536 00:49:53,880 --> 00:50:00,660 mechanicals were mentioned and learned works of natural philosophy for their testimony or expert opinion, they were rarely named. 537 00:50:01,170 --> 00:50:05,909 But here TR named him and Como would have been well aware of this outcome. 538 00:50:05,910 --> 00:50:11,670 If, as is quite possible, he wrote out the passage either under dictation or making a clean copy later on. 539 00:50:12,510 --> 00:50:19,319 Presumably, Como was pleased of being named. Although we can only speculate about the broader dynamics of this relationship with TR for TR, 540 00:50:19,320 --> 00:50:22,470 was this a favour happily rendered to well-liked member of the household? 541 00:50:23,010 --> 00:50:30,540 Or was it a case of humouring a pesky servant? The underlying emotions are really inscrutable from such little evidence at this cultural remove. 542 00:50:31,440 --> 00:50:37,110 My takeaway, though, is that scribing can only appear as mechanical from the perspective of the person commissioning the work. 543 00:50:37,470 --> 00:50:42,110 The people doing the work were intellectually engaged in it drew on their judgement, skills and experience, 544 00:50:42,420 --> 00:50:47,220 even if their personal contribution is rarely as visible centuries later as it was thanks to print. 545 00:50:47,370 --> 00:50:50,280 In the case of Como's contribution to Jazz Learning, a treatise, 546 00:50:51,000 --> 00:50:56,280 Daniel Wakelin has argued of medieval scribes that they had to pay close attention to their process and reflect 547 00:50:56,280 --> 00:51:01,620 on the errors that they themselves or others were likely to commit in order to avoid or to correct those errors. 548 00:51:01,650 --> 00:51:08,850 So making a copy of a text is always also a fully intellectual process, as well as an act of physical and mental discipline. 549 00:51:09,990 --> 00:51:15,570 So next time we'll dig into the Erasmus corpus on that theme of mechanical versus intellectual. 550 00:51:16,410 --> 00:51:16,830 Thank you.