Ann Blair's "In the Scholar’s Workshop"

Ann Blair is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age and (with Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton) Information: A Short History.

Blair applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship, with the following results:

Page 99 plunges us into chapter 2 (“Invisible and visible”) and a central theme of the book: the general invisibility but occasional visibility of the “little people” on whose help authors and scholars often relied in composing texts and preparing them for publication. I focus here on examples from Renaissance Europe 1500-1650, but I expect that these patterns apply to other contexts too.

In the Renaissance the conventions of authorship in print and in iconography emphasized the author as a single name on a title page and a solitary figure working with his papers and books. Learned books often included a number of paratexts (e.g. preface, dedicatory epistle, table of contents, index) but there was no equivalent to the acknowledgments section that we expect today. In fact authors and scholars typically relied on the help of young men they hired or on live-in students or even family members to help them by taking dictation, reading, finding references, making copies of texts, among other tasks. But these amanuenses (singular: amanuensis, for “hand-servant”) remain hidden from view in the final printed product that they helped to create. The main exception to this pattern of invisibility occurred when authors sought to pin the blame on their helpers for errors or shortcomings that the reader might encounter. The author did not name the helpers, but acknowledged their existence by asking the reader to “please excuse the errors of my amanuenses.” A more elaborate version invoked a thieving servant who would seek to publish the stolen text, thus forcing the author to rush into print with his text in order to forestall a dishonest and inaccurate edition by the servant. I argue that these two tropes were an innovation of the age of print, which I call the “servant function.” Why did they originate in Renaissance Europe?

As I explain on page 99, printing was a source of anxiety for the author:

The attraction of getting one’s work into print was precisely to spread one’s reputation far across space and time, but the risk of an unfavorable reception was also heightened by the prospect of broad distribution beyond the author’s control. The context of confessional conflict in the sixteenth century further raised the stakes of a negative reception, since there were constant tensions and shifting distributions of power not only among the main rival confessions but also within each of them as factions within the Catholic and the several Protestant churches vied for power. 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.

This early modern move is the opposite of today’s acknowledgments in which authors thank those who helped by name and take responsibility for any errors as their own.

The book investigates the relationships between amanuensis and principal in other historical contexts (ch. 1) along other thematics axes too—mechanical vs intellectual work (ch. 3), attribution of authorship (ch. 4), and the management of posthumous papers (ch. 5).

Learn more about In the Scholar’s Workshop at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Too Much to Know.

--Marshal Zeringue