Harvard history professor Ann Blair will discuss “In the Workshop of the Mind: The Role of Amaneunses in Early Modern Europe” on Thursday as part of the Oregon Rare Books Initiative lecture series.

The lecture will take place May 15 at 4 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room.

Blair’s talk will focus on scholarly collaboration in the early modern period. While writing her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, Blair said she realized the massive reference books she was studying were not written by a single author and instead relied on the work of many unnamed individuals. Intrigued by the “hidden hands” behind these texts, Blair sought to understand this forgotten labor.

Her talk will focus on the people who assisted authors and scholars by taking notes and dictation, copying and correcting to help put together larger texts. Blair was able to find glimpses of these individuals in existing manuscripts, letters and some mentions in print. In going beyond text analysis, she was able to reconstruct human relationships and delve into past lives.

“By looking at past intellectual work we can realize that the problems and anxieties we experience today are not necessarily as unique in our time as we might think,” Blair notes. “Viewing our own assumptions and practices in a historical context can help us appreciate our role in a long chain of the transmission, transformation and creation of knowledge.”

‒By Chloe Huckins, UO Public Affairs Communications intern