George. So hello everyone.
Thanks for coming to Lecture two in this series on Amanuensis and Early Modern Europe.
So on Tuesday I emphasised the long duration of the practice of relying on amanuensis for many kinds of textual help.
Most iconically for taking dictation.
The term existed in antiquity, but entered common usage in the Renaissance, first in Latin, then in English and German.
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
addressing the political and diplomatic contexts in which it's most commonly used.
So I prefer a menu and this, but I will use Secretary from time to time.
I also introduced the term principle borrowing from current corporate lingo in the US.
May it be useful for something to designate the person employing the amanuensis.
Typically, once these were young men, recent university graduates paid in room and board and occasional gifts.
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.
Today. And in the following lectures, I'll shift my focus to the early modern period,
especially the early, early modern period, roughly the 16th century, down to 1650 or so.
To ponder what was distinctive about it for the history of Amanuensis.
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.
And despite many forces favouring their invisibility, amanuensis become more visible than to facilitating their study.
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,
domestics and vernacular forms of those terms, including expressions like a man in my service.
So it's helpful to consult the literature on servants about broad trends, even though hen,
servants or amanuensis are barely mentioned there as this specific category.
Any early modern household that could afford their upkeep would employ servants,
given the many onerous tasks to be performed both indoors and outdoors.
The 16th century was generally a period of growth in population, in prosperity, also in inequality, and also in the presence of servants.
In one well-documented English parish, Rumford, located in what is now Greater London and which was then a diversified agricultural area in 1562,
83% of the households with three or more people included the servants,
which the average the mean number of servants was 2.3, ranging from one in the smaller homes to seven,
and the largest servants comprised 20% of the total population in Romford in that year, roughly equally distributed between young men and young women.
And they would enter service between the ages of ten and 20,
and they left when they married and established their own household, typically in their mid-twenties.
This is life cycle service. A broader study estimates that 40% of all children became servants as adolescents in the 16th century.
This pattern of placing adolescents in other families was common across north western Europe.
Though interestingly, I learned that not in Italy, where it was regarded as a dereliction of child rearing.
Putting up with your own teenagers rather than someone else's.
During these years, young people left home, gained experience and skills, and formed lasting social bonds.
Many married within their cohort of servants in the area, and years later,
their wills included bequests to former fellow servants and former employers.
When it is possible to trace the activities of the former servants, we can measure the impact of the skills they acquired.
Almost half of the men entered the same line of work as the head of the household in which they had served.
The servant can be hard to distinguish from others in similar positions of dependency,
such as apprentices contracted to learn a trade while living and serving the master's home, relatives placed in service within their extended family.
And in the case of academic families, students who boarded with their teacher.
The children in the household would also be positioned on the spectrum during the relevant phase of life.
They, too, were expected to help with household tasks to learn alongside students who boarded and even adult family members
could be treated like servants when they remained dependents in the household for reasons of ill health,
disability, or lack of marriage prospects. Wives were considered dependents, too.
In early modern European household, but unlike children and servants, they played a role in controlling property.
Women could sue their husbands for squandering their dowry, for example,
and they held special authority within the household, in particular in supervising and training servants and children.
On the one hand, a shared relationship of dependency on the partner familias could erode differences of status among the various kinds of dependents.
Everyone owed the part of familias loyalty, obedience in their demeanour and diligence, honesty and discretion in their work.
On the other hand, the experience of dependency was contingent on many variables,
including positive and negative emotional interactions and social standing.
So student boarders of a higher standing, the teacher warranted special deference and adolescents of high standing sent to
other great houses hoped to receive more personal attention than regular servants.
For example, one well-born young man, Robert Plumpton, anticipating the completion of his legal studies at the Inner Temple,
requested help from his mother in 1536 to become a household servant of Sir William Gascoigne of Goccs Corp.,
requesting specifically not to be only his servants,
but of his household and attending unto him for else he would do as other Lords do knows, not half their servants.
Given his level of education, this young graduate likely aspired to be something like an amanuensis or a valet,
as he put it, not only a servant, but attending onto him.
That proximity to the patch of familias was a crucial marker of prestige throughout the household.
And this criterion elevated wives to the foremost position among the dependents, then position those with most direct access to him over all others.
The children he favoured due to their abilities, their age, their sex.
And those well-born adolescents placed in the household to gain training for adulthood.
By the same logic, then the amanuensis held a choice position among the servants, given his regular and direct access to the principal.
Furthermore, the social status of the principal beyond the household resounded on all the members inside it.
Hence the appeal to servants of upholding and even exaggerating their principal status in order to improve their own.
By the same token. The historiography on servants in the early modern period has documented a shift between the 16th and 18th centuries,
resulting in the formation of increasingly rigid social hierarchies over time,
including the stiffening of boundaries between journeymen and masters in trades governed by guilds.
For example, the practice of placing well-born youth in other households ceased in England after the Civil War in the mid 17th century.
In the 18th century, then service was more often a lifelong occupation entered into by young people from lower and lower middle social orders.
They were less likely to move up and out of their status.
Servants were also ranked in more elaborate higher hierarchies within the household upper and lower liveried and
not with a pay scale corresponding to status and with the possibility of promotion within and between households.
Given the level of education generally expected of amanuensis, they may have been somewhat shielded from this trend towards social stratification.
But even in the 16th century, there's evidence of status anxiety, as Arnold calls it, around the position of secretary,
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.
I don't think we can even try to measure the numerical growth of secretaries or scholarly amanuensis.
But it's reasonable to assume that they became more numerous,
along with the general increase in the number of servants which had to do with increasing wealth.
I'll emphasise in any case that the experience of the amanuensis was highly variable and dependent on each specific context.
This was true for all servants, of course, but especially so for many.
Wences, whose activity centred around a personal relationship with the principal.
A relationship both intimate and hierarchical. So now the general invisibility of nuances, even though they worked for people,
scholars who wrote abundantly in manuscript and in print, scholarly amanuensis are generally hard to see.
Servants in general were expected to work behind the scenes and were ignored as individuals in both early modern and modern periods.
I mentioned last time that good technologies serve as Carl regardless of their real names in the early 1800s and 19.
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,
because it's very hard for me to remember their names.
This passage is part of a rumination on memory more generally, and Montaigne's point was that he had a bad memory for names,
but the example he offers suggests that knowing his servants names was not a high priority for him,
even while he remembered where they were from and what they did around the house.
Sarah Maza has argued that the servant was expected to work very hard and be completely loyal to their employer
employer for ethical reasons because it was their role rather than to fulfil part in a monetary transaction.
She offers examples where service reputation was ruthlessly sacrificed to protect that of the master.
For example, in a case where an innkeeper had cheated customers by diluting their wine,
the servant girl was blamed so the master could be deemed innocent,
even when the parties to the legal case were aware that an innocent servant had been wrongly accused.
No concern for the servant or redress of their reputation was mentioned in the documents.
These connotations of diligence, loyalty and sacrifice are all present in the 20th century term and concept of the domestique in road bicycle racing.
An expert rider who works solely for the benefit of their team and team leader without seeking to gain standing for themselves,
although some domestique have later become champions on their own account.
The sociologist Erving Goffman offered the servant as the classic example of the non-person,
which he defines as someone present during an interaction,
but who is neither performer nor audience so that the interaction proceeds in their presence as if they were not present.
Steven Chapin coined the term invisible technicians. After observing that accounts of experiments performed at the Royal Society and
elsewhere in the late 17th century focussed on the new instruments involved air pumps,
for example, and various principals who devised and witnessed the experiment.
Royal Society members or their guests in particular.
The verbal and iconographic depictions, though, left out those crucial to the performance of the experiments.
The servants who manipulated the instruments, drawing on special skills,
experience physical strength, for example, for pumping out the air in the chamber of the instrument.
Robert Boyle. One of Chapin's main examples relied on multiple assistants in his laboratory, 2 to 6 of them at a time.
But Boyle's published accounts of work in his laboratory generally omitted
mention of assistance by using passives or an undefined first person plural.
As in we pumped for the pump being set to work.
Or occasionally he mentions one of them as he that managed the pump.
In a similar vein, the iconography of experiments in printed books in the 17th and 18th centuries
often depicted putti or disembodied hands holding or turning instruments,
or sometimes people with no faces. In these cases, a principal composed an account of the experiment that permitted or effaced the print,
the presence, and contributed contribution of the assistant. In keeping with this idea that servants are non persons.
But the principals were not the only ones effacing their helpers. In some cases, amanuensis efface themselves.
The Vittoria family offers a prime example of this pattern made visible by the work of Rafael Mohan and other experts on Victoria.
So Pure a Votary was a major Florentine humanist responsible for editions of Salus, Varro, Cato scholars Euripides and Aristotle, among others.
Victoria's papers survive thanks to the role that his descendants had in preserving them, notably his son Jacopo and grandson Francesco Battery.
There is a Francesco Vittoria whose portrait is available, but that's the father of Piero.
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.
So both Jacopo and Francesco, son and grandson, received a strong humanist education and were involved,
along with students of Pierre Rotary, in preparing the editions that he published, in particular several manuscripts among Pierre.
His papers were written in the hand of Jacopo, as scholars have identified by the handwriting at Piero's death in 1585.
One of his former students, Leonardo Salvatore, delivered and then published a funeral oration for which he got information about Pierre,
his life from a swiftly composed biography left in manuscript by Oppo's grandson, Francesco.
Among the many compliments that Francesco paid his grandfather in this manuscript.
Instructional senor. He praised the famous humanist for working alone.
His efforts in his studies were very great because up to two years ago when he was 85 years old,
he got up many hours before the day and everything he wrote was always collected with his own effort.
And as someone who is most precise in things, he never found anyone as diligent as he was.
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.
Having been, as was written of Alvaro, a polygraph. It's a marvel that he never had help from anyone.
Something that has not been the case in other great men of letters, for they had, as is known,
many to help them seek, while they themselves made no other efforts than to arrange things.
And we see many instances of this. Only two copy things before they were published.
He sometimes kept a scribe, and this was necessary for him because his hand trembled and his handwriting was not understood except with difficulty.
This indisposition gave him an impediment, but it was not noticeable.
Nor did he feel it except for this and for drinking, and that he had to hold the glass with both hands.
So here we have someone speaking with the authority of an intimate,
the grandson denying precisely the role that he and his father had both played in working with Pietro.
The one who knows firsthand about Pirro's method of working prefers to claim that Pietro never had to help from anyone.
This is not surprising, given the ethos of protecting and advancing the reputation of the party,
familias and the learned family, which applied to all his dependents, whether family members or servants.
The purpose of the funeral oration, for which this biography was composed, only further prioritised this goal.
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.
But why should relying on the help of others reduce poverty status?
Francesco Self-effacement is evidence of ambivalence in this milieu toward a scholar having help from others.
On Francesco's account, Vittoria Admirable, admirable, because he did everything himself, even at the cost of his sleep.
Whereas other humanist assistance to gather and copy things and just have the effort of arranging them.
This anti amanuensis sentiment is not often articulated as explicitly as in this case.
After all, articulating it involves putting everyone else down who did rely on helpers.
And of course, it's also quite untrue, as in this one as Francesco and other former students of the Tory well knew.
We have, for example, a letter by one of these students, Girolamo May, reminiscing, too, with another student,
Bartolomeo Barba Diary about their work together, preparing editions which battery published of S-Class,
Euripides and Apollonius of Rhodes in particular.
Piero Batory himself even thanked students in print for their great help in, quote, finding things he was looking for.
So interestingly,
the actual funeral oration that salvia delivered in public did not pick up the no amanuensis theme from Francesco's manuscript instruction.
Also worth noting that some kind of help even, well, a picture of someone who required none.
Francesco identified a kind of help that did not mar that image.
After a work was finished, Pierre would hire ascribe to copy things before they were published.
I interpret this as making a fair copy for the printer. And this is a virtuous act.
An additional expense made for the purpose of minimising errors at the print shop and eliciting the best quality production,
which was clearly a high priority for a humanist.
But to reduce the stigma of even this virtuous reliance on a scribe to make a clean copy, Francesco also reduced the physical handicap.
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.
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.
And even then he only did so because of a tremor in his hands.
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.
The great humanist who worked alone. In a similar example brought to my attention by Margaret Reserve, Pope Pius the second,
entrusted the manuscript of his commentaries, a kind of memoir to the humanist John Antonio Campana, so he could correct them.
The manuscript, which survives in the Vatican library, shows a mix of hands, including autographed parts by Pius,
overlaid with corrections by component, including five elegant poems that Paterno had composed and inserted.
Evidently with Pierce's approval. Nevertheless, when Campana wrote to a cardinal, probably not long after his death in 1464,
he explained, Pius gave the commentaries to be to be corrected.
I did not correct them.
Who would amend something which so far from needing to be improved, would only provoke someone audacious to imitate the greatest eloquence.
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
and even inserting bits of his own composition into the work published under the name of the Pope.
Instead, he extolled the Pope's natural eloquence and claimed that it alone had brought the work to its final form.
So the notion exemplified in these cases that a scholar is all the greater
for working alone complicates the interpretation of claims made at the time,
and since that a given scholar never relied on amanuensis.
Certainly some scholars did work alone, especially at some point in their life and on certain projects.
But statements to that effect, including the scholar's own, weren't being treated with caution,
given the appeal of making such claims, whether about oneself or someone one wished to portray as admirable.
And I've found people, for example, have closed some is Hartlaub saying he did all his correspondence alone.
And on the other hand,
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.
So we have contradictory evidence about one great man.
Clearly, it can be spun to support the position that you're trying to push.
Self-effacement is not specific to the religious or hierarchical values of the
early modern period in multiple authorship and the myth of the solitary genius,
Jack Dillinger highlights the impact of editors on many modern English language authors from Pound's heavy
editing of T.S. Eliot to the experience of American novelists like Fitzgerald Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe,
who all worked with Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's sons.
Perkins prompted major revisions, which were likely crucial to the success of the novels involved,
including, for example, the characterisation of the eponymous hero of The Great Gatsby.
But Perkins consistently downplayed his contributions and instructed aspiring editors to do the same.
Indeed, self-effacement is crucial to successful employment in this line of work.
Salinger notes that authors often thank editors in their acknowledgements,
but would likely shun an editor who really sought credit for his or her contributions.
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
people who have the greatest knowledge of the author's failings and needs for assistance.
Like Modern editors, early modern amanuensis, despite knowing best how much they'd contributed, typically did not draw attention to that work.
A further factor that likely contributed to obscuring the work of many mentees.
In general, though perhaps not in the battery case,
was the reluctance of the former amanuensis to draw attention to their humble beginnings once they had achieved some standing.
Francesco Vittoria might have felt that his own status as a respected humanist recently acquired, given his youth,
would not be enhanced by reminiscing about his period of dependency to another scholar, even his grandfather.
But of course, human. His family pedigree was born favourably.
But still, humble beginnings were more generally an occasion for mockery by one's enemies than a point of pride.
So Thomas Wolsey was mocked for being the son of a butcher throughout his rise through
successful secretarial positions to the level of Lord Chancellor and Petrus Ramos in France,
as I'll discuss later for his peasant origins. So I wonder about the several authors and scholars, major figures in early modern England,
such as John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whom we know to have served as secretaries.
To what extent they discussed in print or in public that aspect of their experience.
The French poet Jochem Gibney, who served as a in the entourage of the more prestigious relative, the Cardinal Jean de Ballet in Rome,
made allusions to his time in the service, which have come to light through the attentive analysis of Olivier.
On Miller's reading of two passages in Jubilee's Regrets,
the poet discreetly indicated unhappiness about his status due to disappointing financial rewards and limited access to jail,
despite his family connection. But it isn't anything explicit.
Of course. So in some there are multiple forces that tended to hide the presence and contributions of amanuensis.
The general assumption that servants could be treated as non persons,
that a scholar working alone was more praiseworthy than one who relied on helpers and the awareness on the part of helpers
themselves that self-effacement in favour of anger advising the principal was more beneficial than seeking a share of the credit.
So when I started this project, I titled it Hidden Helpers. But I find myself moving away from that title now,
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.
Although in many ways he's generally renaming the shadow, they are more visible in the early modern period than in previous ones.
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.
So at first a very basic material factor is the increased survival of personal papers,
which enables the historian to see hands of amanuensis intermingled or not with those of the principal in these collections of manuscripts.
And paper. Here was the crucial ingredient. The combination of durability and cheapness, at least relative to parchment,
made it easy to accumulate working papers and notes, which once would have been taken on temporary surfaces like wax tablets.
Paper had been available north of the Alps since the early 14th century.
But the spread of printing after the 15th century prompted paper mills to proliferate, to supply the presses.
So the paper became more abundant and less expensive also for the purposes of handwriting.
And once the notes were saved on paper, the scholars themselves, their students,
family members could appreciate their value and in some cases ensured their survival.
And I'll talk about the topic of personal archives in Lecture five.
Secondly, another kind of source that survives in abundance is correspondence letters for which the early Man Republic
of Letters is named include plenty of private discussion of amanuensis as principals sought to hire them,
complained about them, recommended them to others, and casually referred to their presence in scribing and helping to deliver and receive letters.
So this kind of correspondence spread awareness of amanuensis as a common feature of the life of scholars and authors in their own time,
and also to historians. These letters, too, on paper, were saved and often collected in the early modern period,
especially when one of the correspondence was well known at the time. But not always.
And thirdly, then most surprising to me has been seeing how often Amanuensis appeared in print fleetingly, of course, and usually without being named.
And I bundle their kinds of appearances as the servant function as a complement to focussed author function.
It took different forms, but basically worked by addressing the misdeeds of the servant,
the amanuensis, to explain problems in the text that the reader might notice.
I argue that by relieving the author of Responsibility for Mistakes,
the ploy helped to allay the new acute level of anxiety brought on by publishing on the vast new scale the printing involved.
Of course, publication existed before print,
as Daniel Hobbins has emphasised in a book of that title publication before print and authors from the ancient
and medieval period also manifested anxieties about the potential for an unfavourable reception of their work.
But printing greatly raised the stakes of publication by producing and distributing a book on a much wider scale.
From the beginning,
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,
which were all made upfront before a single copy was available for sale and hoping
to sell more than the bare minimum to break even in order to make a profit.
If you suddenly decided you had a bestseller on your hand and you didn't have enough copies to sell,
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.
So the printer needs to sell copies. The author, however, has a slightly different motive.
The author hopes for a favourable reception. The two goals are not perfectly aligned.
So for a scholarly author, I would say printing was attractive. Of course, this is how you diffuse your reputation across space and time,
but also frightening in that to a Europe wide book trade centred on fairs in Frankfurt,
in Leipzig, and with Latin as a learned lingua franca,
the learned book could reach readers in faraway places and could stay available for generations into the future.
So the risk of an unfavourable reception far beyond the control of the author,
was heightened and the context of confessional conflict in the 16th century, which is basically underlying all of my examples,
further raised the stakes of a negative perception since they were constant tensions
and shifting distributions of power not only between the main rival confessions,
but also within each of them factions within Catholic and many Protestant churches as they vied for power.
So authors who miscalculated the impact of their book could face devastating consequences,
hence the virtues of the servant function to relieve the author of some of this anxiety and responsibility.
In its elaborate version, a thieving servant is responsible for the author rushing into print.
If it hadn't been for the servant selling or threatening to sell an unauthorised manuscript to a printer,
the author would have had more time to perfect it.
Given the circumstances, the author asks the reader to excuse the failings that resulted from a hasty publication.
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,
students, family or patron. It's also something that could actually happen.
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,
and from which the third edition of Forbes 95, published by Married Gulnaz, his so-called adoptive daughter, was printed.
Mostly Montana works by adding things to each successive edition of the essays,
but in this case, he removed something in the Bordeaux copy by crossing out this passage.
Now because it seems very close to our own. I intended to take this passage from its author,
having once taken the trouble to say very aptly what I knew about the comparison of our armour with Roman armour.
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,
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.
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.
And of course, the men in service, as far as we know, didn't publish it or make a profit from it.
So I, you know, I'm inclined to take this fairly much at face value is an episode that occurred in some form.
At other occasions I might be more sceptical.
Erasmus, for example, complained in a to the reader in 1515 that his epigrams had been published without his authorisation.
Quote, Some servant, I suspect, filched them and sold them to the printers.
But since the printer involved, Rosebud was one Erasmus continued to work with.
This does not strike me as entirely convincing. So here it's perhaps more of a ploy.
And theft was also something that an anxious principal could worry about happening, even in the absence of any misdeed.
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,
is complaining that he remembers an occasion where he had lost a manuscript that he was much concerned for,
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.
And in effect, the book was in a while after privately brought back.
So I found it laid in a buy place where I had before as fruitlessly as carefully sought it.
So what's going on here? Boyle is claiming that someone stole the manuscript.
A servant stole the manuscript and then thought better of it and brought it back to the right place.
So he found it later. Doesn't seem a whole lot more plausible that Boyle just lost track of manuscript,
didn't look closely enough in what clearly was a very messy workspace.
That is, of course, the interpretation of Michael Hunter, who who studies this, among other pair texts.
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.
And, you know. Yes.
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.
Errors in judgement are at issue for Conrad Gessner when he's writing his gigantic Biblioteca Universalis in 1545 with about 1500 words,
which is an alphabetised bibliography of authors.
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.
But this occurred mainly in the first letter of the alphabet when I relied on the work of Amanuensis.
In the rest, I would not want to be briefer.
So clearly he's feeling defensive about how is too big and the work was indeed the object of an arrangement.
Ten years later, Gessner is actually echoing the apology of a medieval polygraph.
Vincent of Beauvais, who in its 13th century speculum, Miers, explained in his prologue,
Some things in this work, especially on the deeds of martyrs and confessors,
were not as fully abbreviated as I would have liked, because, given my commitment to too many other studies,
I abbreviated things not in my own hand, but mostly through the hands of notary insofar as I could.
Nonetheless, it is no less true that an excessively abbreviated narration is less pleasing to the reader or the listener.
So here he's apologising for being too long. And interestingly,
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.
So the point, the beauty of this servant function is that it is versatile.
It can be used against whichever kind of criticism you most fear and wish to forestall.
Whether the text is too long or too short is the fault of the amanuensis.
Most commonly amanuensis are blamed for scribal errors. This move occurs in printed errata lists.
So these is a new kind of pair text. Come on with printing happens at the back of the book.
Typically a list of errors to please correct in your copy in address to the reader.
So here we have Erasmus's translation of Garza's Greek grammar, ending with a list of errata, but prefaced with a little blurb.
Robin to the reader this in Latin remember we know that basically Erasmus wrote or someone in his entourage wrote these.
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.
And here they are. So that's very clear on who did that.
Interestingly, Erasmus is more willing to take the blame when writing in his own voice in a polemical text,
responding here to the accusations of the conservative Catholic No Al-Bayda, where he introduced the errata this way.
He said, We have listed here the errors due to the printers or the amanuensis,
or finally to a slip of my own pen so that one who wishes to could easily amend their codex.
Erasmus used his own voice. Also in one of his last works, the Ecclesiastes is a giant sermon, a preaching manual of 1535,
where a short list of erotic is accompanied by a to the reader with a complex assessment of responsibility.
Many authors like to blame their errors on the work of the printers,
but I frankly admit that almost all the errors in this work must be attributed either to my amanuensis or to myself.
It is true I was present during the printing, but because of my poor health I was unable to make a final revision,
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.
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.
But when I had the leisure to read over some of the printed pages, I discovered several places that had slipped through my revision.
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.
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.
Quite unusually, it includes explicit thanks to the corrector at the printers Sigismund Galerius,
whom Erasmus also thanked in print in 1529, remembered in his will and designated as one of the team.
He would like to prepare the opera Omnia, which actually happened after his death.
But then, of course, he is listing some errors that Kallenius had not caught. And of course, he's reducing his poor health.
We've seen this in this case, perhaps not a ploy. He died a few months later.
As far as I can tell, the servant function is an innovation of the 16th century.
Anxiety around publication certainly predated printing, but not this kind of attempt to alleviate it.
And so I'm going to offer a few comparisons with the ancient case.
I see signs of anxiety about publication even before printing in the act of making a text public,
sharing it with others so that you lose control of it.
In the arts, Poetica famously Horus warns one who might want to write verses without knowing how to.
If ever you do write anything, let it enter the ears of some crucial microbes and your father's and my own.
And then put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year.
When you have not published, you can destroy the word once sent forth.
Can never come back. This is probably not music to a publisher's ear.
Wait nine years before publishing things.
Another example I would suggest is the story that Virgil, on his deathbed and in instructions left to his executors,
called for the destruction of the need and achievement, impatiently waited by Augustus, among others, in which Virgil had spent 11 years composing.
This story was much repeated in antiquity and surfaces again among the humanists.
Why is that? Various interpretations have been advanced that take the claim seriously.
Virgil was a perfectionist, couldn't bear the prospect of others controlling its edition,
or that he would just seem to the work for Slavish as toward Augustus.
Not very likely, or on the contrary, for stealthily attacking him for it.
I propose instead that the story which is so here in the standards in your Torah,
in a little resi floated by Virgil himself and or others in his circle,
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.
It gave Virgil plausible deniability for any failings that others might find there.
Surely Virgil would have remedied them if only he had had the time to do so.
So thank goodness August sets in to prevent this destruction.
It's hard to show absence of a pattern like blaming the amanuensis.
But some examples from Cicero's correspondence suggest that he avoided doing so even when he might have.
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,
and Cicero replies, What letter of mine it is you describe as unduly choleric?
I cannot back out. But if, as you write, the letter was badly expressed, you may be sure I never wrote it.
So he's denying responsibility for it, but he's not pinning the blame on anybody else.
Cicero disowns the whole letter instead.
And then more tellingly, I'd say in this controversy that erupted in 49 BCE near the end of his term as provincial governor.
Cicero was accused of altering account books retroactively. And we can infer from Cicero's reply to a correspondent that the latter had
suggested that Cicero secretary had altered the accounts rather than himself.
And Cicero is indignant in response.
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.
And if my diligence. Because you suppose that in regard to so important to duty,
my secretary made any entry he chose without even going through the form of reading it over to me.
So Cicero is also reiterating his complete trust in his secretary, Scribe Matos, and he doesn't name him.
But we know who it is, Tyrone.
And of course, there were likely multiple reasons why Cicero declined to take the convenient excuse being offered to him.
His confidence in Tiger's honesty, perhaps a concern for Tiger's reputation.
But Richard suggests as well, and from a few other instances, that blaming the secretary was not, in fact, considered a respectable excuse.
In this context, though, it might have lessened the blame cast on Cicero to some extent.
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.
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,
whether classical or Christians, which could be corrected with proper skills and attention.
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,
who with a lovely scrawl is dictating to his scribe, Procopius, who is using a set of wax tablets or codex form.
And then. We envision this whole.
It's inscribed all the way down, you know. Instead of turtles, it's scribes down to the present.
These are the amanuensis anonymous accumulated over centuries.
Whom the human his job is to clean up after. So in any long textual tradition, successive layers of scribes go very far down.
The best place for boasting about correcting errors was the title page, which was of course, invented by printers to lure buyers.
And many title pages claimed they offer a more correct and copious texture index, but only a few explicitly mention errors of the amanuensis.
So here's one Eric Erika's holly,
who had died more than a century earlier when his history of Swedes and Goths was published in 1615 by the humanist Yohannes Maecenas,
who highlighted his contributions on the title page, corrected of the almost innumerable errors of the amanuensis.
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.
In two other cases. I hypothesise that the claim is made in order to push a new addition when a previous one already existed.
So we have curious commentary on the left on the late antique jurist Julius Paulus,
first published posthumously in 1596 and the following edition of 1604 eight years later boasts that this most
famous and useful work has been purged of the errors which insinuated themselves to the carelessness of amanuensis,
as in by this edition, even if you already own the previous one.
In the case of a treatise against astrological conjectures by the Jesuit Alessandra de Angelis.
Two editions appeared in the same year in different cities. I suspect the first edition on the left appeared in Leo.
Certainly it's the most widely distributed now, while the second from Rome added the bonus claim of having been purged by the
author of many errors of the amanuensis and illustrated with new examples.
So these two patterns of blaming amanuensis for errors to protect the reputation of an author and of
boasting about a new and improved version of the text elicited a most unusual piece of parrot text,
the only one of its kind found so far.
It appears in a collection of ten medieval English history manuscripts published in 1650 152 by Roger Wisdom and John Selden,
who has a 57 page long introduction. It's a very large book, and the text is followed by an amanuensis to the reader.
This is actually a piece of parrot text that precedes further parrot text.
So after it comes various lessons and then glossary and index and so forth.
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.
He compared the manuscript with the manuscripts in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, otherwise known as the Parker Library.
And he proofread from the manuscript, except in the case of the Parker Library manuscript, which he couldn't access.
I mean, they wouldn't let it out of the Parker Library. And he clearly was was not able to proofread their.
So the Bodleian actually has four manuscripts that were scribed by Jennings around the same time, the 1650s.
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.
CC nowadays. And here you can see in English it's actually says compared with and so forth.
So here Jennings is scribing and someone else is doing the comparing.
Other times Jennings did the comparing. Here we see that Jennings has corrected a manuscript that was made by someone else.
Edward Yerbury. And here we see this was on display on Tuesday,
a receipt that Jennings has been paid 40 shillings for writing the history of the Monks of Glastonbury.
That is, transcribing and collating other manuscript copies of this treatise,
including one belonged to Stromness Cotton and one belonging to Richard Tick-borne.
So Jennings clearly held a high reputation in his time,
which actually endured until the following century because the antiquarian John Ross in 1716 praises
Jennings by name for copying the manuscript most skilfully and for his admirable care in the end industry.
In the ten day conscript chorus of Twizel and Selden.
His name, no doubt obscures others who helped write this was the named Amanuensis.
Perhaps there were other helpers,
but it certainly drew unusual attention to the complex scholarly work that could be signed assigned to an amanuensis.
After these many examples of pair of texts which mentions many senses,
we've seen a surreal premises deploying servant function defensively around lists,
pinning more or less blame on amanuensis and title pages that boast of purging the texts of errors of earlier amanuensis.
I'd like to close with an unusual case of Amanuensis who's named in print in the text offered by his principal.
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?
Is it mere mechanical copying or because it's performed by people is actually not.
So this is the story of Portage to T.R., whose castle is still visible in B.C. in Burgundy.
And it concerns. So Post-Truth was publishing in 1591 a book entitled On the Correct Imposition of Names.
And it's basically natural history book talking about terms for things.
And he has a whole section on stones in particular, stones that form in animals.
These would be gallstones in our thought.
And here we have from the Pharmaceutical Museum in Basel, the bizarre stone, which was thought to have wonderful properties of many kinds.
They don't have on display a stone, which is going to be discussed in this passage, which is a partridge stone.
A deficit because of pelvis is Latin for partridge,
which was a stone that formed in the body of a partridge and that you would encounter if you were eating, said Partridge.
So we're going to look at a long passage in this work where the two marginal notes signal what the
important bits are to knew concerning the penalty seats this Partridge Stone and Phillips Roberta's.
I had retired to my castle of LaSalle near the end of the summer, 1591, with Phillip Hall,
the learned jurist and great connoisseur of Greek and Latin letters who spent most of his day on his.
It is editions of Demosthenes and Isaiah's.
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.
When one day as evening was falling. Come on. My Kelly Graff was a man who came to see us exulting.
I have master, he said, looking at me.
Something that you could please add to your little book on the right imposition of names which you have given me to transcribe.
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.
In contemplating this kind of crystal delicate transparency,
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.
So it wasn't swallowed. It was formed internally. Or that it could have formed naturally in it.
I declared with surprise and doubt. Come on. What game are you playing with us?
And he blushing a bit, excused himself. With all respect, I assure you that what I declared is the truth.
If it isn't master henceforth, do not believe me. On any matter divine or human, I split.
The goat of that bird, came across the stone and removed it myself from the neck of the bird, which I then eat.
Your chaplain, who here in person this valet and all the other domestics who saw this with their own eyes.
I can bring them before you if you'd like. I agree.
Smiling. Give us this stone, I said. I believe you. You've convinced me. And I turned to there.
I'm reminded of this passage in which Elian reports that partridges in the region of Antioch even eat stones.
But we are far from Antioch. After a little discussion on this tone between myself and the very learned over there,
I enclosed it in my collection of precious stones and kept carefully with me.
Nonetheless, when some time later I was writing these lines,
it seemed to me that its red tint had completely dissipated, although its crystalline transparency remained.
But from this digression, we must return to the road. So we can't confirm this incident.
Of course, we have no other evidence of it having happened, and yet it seems unlikely to be completely fictitious.
We've got the two learned men who are having framing it.
They start off basically doing parallel play, each apparently in the same room, a study, a library.
They're exercising autumn, you know, during the summer months,
a respite from their world duties as officials of various kinds and and in bursts the calligraphers who presumably had waited till after dinner.
He's not I don't know or if he can barge in any time. I'm not clear on that.
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about him. Even having a name doesn't really help that much.
I think we get a very detailed description,
almost like the virtual witnessing that people like Peter Deer and Stephen Sharp and talk about for the Royal Society,
you know, we get the setting of the scene, we get the invocation of witnesses who could be brought to confirm.
We get the description of the stone. But, of course, the the principal is not entirely buying it necessarily.
Right. He's he's he's got some scepticism here. He nonetheless takes possession of the stone comes the this the amanuensis down.
Of course, of course I believe you and then leaves to the reader to weigh all this.
You know, the stone is decayed. It's and of course, you know, we're not in your Antioch and we don't know.
It seems unlikely. So Tia clearly is the principal here, the knowledge maker.
But from our perspective, Cuomo also contributed to the content of the text while carrying out a task which
TR likely considered merely mechanical copying over a book manuscript in progress.
Maybe it was a clean copy. Maybe it was just a copy for the press.
In fact, not all copying was considered beneath a man station.
Early modern scholars sometimes engage in describing themselves, especially when copying that,
making that first copy from a rare manuscript original, and thereby creating a copy that would have special significance in the text.
Accurate transmission. Transmission. So Poggio Bartolini, for example, of Lucretius, his own copy having been lost, but he gave it to others.
So we have copies by our people. And in a case described by Henry Wodehouse and brought to my attention by Arnold Hunt,
the English antiquarian Sir Simon's Dos reported taking extraordinary content and copying in his own hand.
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.
But Dos, his enthusiasm for the task evaporated immediately when he learned that one,
Ralph Starkey had already made copies of the text and sold them at that point,
describing was no longer an act of scholarly transmission but mere reproduction.
So Dos stopped his efforts, had the rest of the manuscript copied out by, quote, an able librarian whom he hired.
But for copying out his recently composed manuscript,
whether for further editing or for use by the printer to his decision to delegate the work to a secretary with good handwriting was,
of course, unproblematic. He also expected Como to make a reliable copy without modifications a kind of mechanical operation.
But come on, was not a machine. He understood the Latin text he was copying.
He connected to his own experience and indeed copying the passage on animal stones likely primed him to find one in his meal,
and he explicitly asked for his find to be included in the learned treatise.
When artisans and other, quote,
mechanicals were mentioned and learned works of natural philosophy for their testimony or expert opinion, they were rarely named.
But here TR named him and Como would have been well aware of this outcome.
If, as is quite possible, he wrote out the passage either under dictation or making a clean copy later on.
Presumably, Como was pleased of being named. Although we can only speculate about the broader dynamics of this relationship with TR for TR,
was this a favour happily rendered to well-liked member of the household?
Or was it a case of humouring a pesky servant? The underlying emotions are really inscrutable from such little evidence at this cultural remove.
My takeaway, though, is that scribing can only appear as mechanical from the perspective of the person commissioning the work.
The people doing the work were intellectually engaged in it drew on their judgement, skills and experience,
even if their personal contribution is rarely as visible centuries later as it was thanks to print.
In the case of Como's contribution to Jazz Learning, a treatise,
Daniel Wakelin has argued of medieval scribes that they had to pay close attention to their process and reflect
on the errors that they themselves or others were likely to commit in order to avoid or to correct those errors.
So making a copy of a text is always also a fully intellectual process, as well as an act of physical and mental discipline.
So next time we'll dig into the Erasmus corpus on that theme of mechanical versus intellectual.
Thank you.