In the Scholars Workshop

Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship
The hidden hands behind historys great scholarly works

The hidden hands behind historys great scholarly works

For centuries, many of the worlds most influential thinkers routinely relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholars Workshop introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as solitary as we tend to think.

Ann Blair traces how the learned have relied on helpers since antiquity, discussing how and when these amanuenses became visible in manuscript and occasionally in print and explaining why they were uniquely positioned to shape the posthumous legacy of their principal. Taking an in-depth look at the later Renaissance, she reconstructs the private lives and academic pursuits of leading fi